Fieldstone flap

POST FALLS — A neighborhood dispute is escalating in the Fieldstone housing development, where individual homeowners are trying to stop a 208-unit apartment complex that already has been legally approved by the City of Post Falls.

Several of those homeowners have formed a group called Save Our Subdivision. They attended the Post Falls City Council meeting on Tuesday to express their concerns.

Many of them testified during the citizen comment period saying when they purchased their homes, they were never told the development would include high-density housing.

Some even said they were lied to. Fieldstone resident Suzie Graham, who is also an attorney, went so far as to say “they have been defrauded.”

Many of the homeowners are concerned that if the apartments are built, their home values will decrease.

They asked the city to reopen the permitting process to consider their concerns. Taj Wilkerson, another resident who spoke on behalf the Save Our Subdivision group, said he had 219 signatures on a petition opposing the apartment complex.

The council could not respond to their request on Tuesday because it was not publically noticed on their agenda, but city staff is preparing a response basically saying their hands are tied.

“Our legal counsel told us we have no legislative authority or legal right to reopen it,” Mayor Ron Jacobson said in an interview Friday. “If we try to reopen it, we will get sued and we will lose and we will pay with taxpayers money.” Jacobson said he can respect their position on the issue, but there is not a lot the city can do to help them at this stage.

“The city is not involved in this dispute,” he said. “We are kind of caught between a rock and hard place.”

Wilkerson said in an interview Friday that his group still feels more could have been done to notify the homeowners.

“What we are asking the city to do is justify the criteria they used in the process,” Wilkerson said, adding they are trying to get a spot on the agenda at the city council’s next meeting.

He said the city still has the responsibility to provide services to that neighborhood and the high-density apartment project is likely to tap out a lot of the services.

He said traffic will increase, crime will go up, parking will be an issue and the schools will fill up. His group wants to see how the city is planning to deal with that.

“All of these services will be tapped,” he said. “They still have an obligation to the public.”

The dispute started at a homeowners association meeting in November of 2014. Wilkerson said that is when the board announced they were going to break ground on the apartment complex.

“That’s the first time anyone had heard of it,” he said, adding many residents knew there would be multi-family housing in the area but never apartments.

Shelly Enderud, city administrator in Post Falls, said the project was initially approved by the city in 2002, and very little has changed within the plans since then.

“Our attorney said if you take the final plans and lay them over the original plans, they are almost identical,” she said, adding the public was properly notified in 2002 but there were no houses in that area at the time.

Scott Krajack, with Viking Homes, said the same thing. At the time they were seeking approval for the Planned Unit Development, all that was out there was 200-plus acres of farmland.

Krajack said the original plans for Fieldstone included single family homes, a school and a park, which have all been built.

But the original plans also included multi-family high density housing. “And that’s what we are building now,” he said, adding almost every master planned community includes high density homes.

Krajack said people could have asked them about the multi-family home element of the project and they would have explained what they were planning to do, but for the most part Viking’s sales strategy was to talk about what they were building at the time.

“We probably didn’t go through the master plan with every single buyer,” he said. “But we weren’t trying to sell multi-family at that time.”

Krajack also said as far as he knows nobody from Viking Home ever lied to any of the homeowners.

Krajack said he is not sure what the Save Our Subdivision group hopes to accomplish by protesting the construction and drumming up political pressure.

“I don’t know if they think they are going to stop it,” he said. “We already have all our permits and construction has already begun.”

Regardless, Wilkerson said his group is not ready to give up just yet.

“Do I think things will change? I don’t know,” he said. “I think the solution would be to reduce the footprint of the project and build something that everyone can live with.”