This abandoned house at Bonnie Bank and Wooster is one of four in Rocky River that has area residents upset. Out front, AT&T has added several of its large Project Lightspeed boxes. A second abandoned house sits six lots away. (Photo by Larry Bennet)

High-tech upgrade adds to eyesores
By Jennifer Mitchell
Rocky River
Published June 21, 2006

A neighborhood is banding together for what seems like all the wrong reasons. Instead of a block party, as one Bonnie Bank Road resident pointed out, they’ve come together to ask for someone’s help — only they’re not sure whose.

Debi Robie is the mother of three young children and she feels stuck between a rock and a hard place. She’s right next to one abandoned home and close to a second. In addition, AT&T recently placed large metal boxes outside one house for the Project Lightspeed technology it hopes to introduce.

The boxes, taller then many of the neighborhood’s young children, have high voltage warnings and posts in front to prevent someone from running into them. Residents are among those throughout the city that said the boxes are dangerous and that they cause blind spots for drivers.

AT&T plans to place the upgrades throughout the city in an effort to provide video, faster Internet and improved voice services, but those in the Bonnie Bank neighborhood said the technology is just adding to glaring area eyesores.

The residents said they were never told of the installation. When they saw AT&T working outside the abandoned home, they thought it was underground work. Then, as if overnight, the boxes sprung up.

Because AT&T is a public utility, according to city officials, it wasn’t required to give notice.

Kevin Lynch of AT&T has said repeatedly the company is committed to working with residents, but a resolution has not yet been reached.

Robie, her husband and her neighbors, came to the City Council June 12 to let them know how dire they felt their situation had become.

Besides the AT&T boxes, one house has been empty for a year and no one has lived in the other for five. Both are in the foreclosure process. The houses are just six away from one another, at Bonnie Bank, and on Wooster. Robie, a stay-at-home mom with children ages 3, 2 and 2 months, lives right next door to one.

“The Wooster home is sort of what we considered the gateway to our street,” Robie said. “When the homeowner was there, the property was maintained immaculately. It was beautiful, and now it really makes you sad to look at the property and how it’s gone downhill in such a short amount of time.”

Originally, residents in the neighborhood took turns mowing the property but said they were told by the city to stop, because it would interfere with the process of getting the homes on the market.

“(The blight) was a way to declare it a public nuisance and a public hindrance, giving the city more leverage,” Robie said.

Other than being able to assess fines for not keeping the property up to code though, the city’s hands are all but tied.

City Law Director Andrew Bemer has tried to move the process along, but he said Cuyahoga County and the mortgage holders are essentially in charge of the process.

“The county has a program to put abandoned houses on the fast track to foreclosure,” Bemer said. The city asked for that consideration last fall, he added.

One of the Bonnie Bank houses was put on the market twice in the last five months but had to be pulled due to incomplete paperwork by the Veteran’s Administration, which holds the loan.

Bemer said he got a quick lesson in how little the city could control the process the first time the residence was taken off the market. Essentially he was told to take a ticket, there were 1,000 cases ahead of him. 

Despite the two false starts, the residence in question is expected to go back on the market this week.

Acting Council President Brian Hurtuk is looking for the city’s persistence on all such properties to pay off.

Until then, he said City Council and administration are doing what they can to help those in the Bonnie Bank neighborhood.

“The comments that the residents brought up about the AT&T project were informative,” he said. “The comments they brought up about the two houses were alarming.”

Residents there told council that one of the houses was wide open. In response, Interim Mayor Pamela Bobst sent someone out the next morning to check on both. One was discovered unlocked.

“It was locked up securely so that someone couldn’t just walk off the street,” Hurtuk said.

Bemer is trying to stay optimistic about the one residence scheduled to be put up for sale.

“Hopefully there won’t be any glitches,” Bemer said. “There will be a buyer and the property can be transferred to someone who’s responsible.”

Robie joins him in that hope. As it stands, she’s afraid to let her 3-year-old ride his bike past the edge of her driveway. She’s concerned with the danger of the new technology installed by AT&T, as well as what may be lurking about the abandoned yard.

Last year, it was a vagrant. Robie said she was told by city officials the man was harmless, but completing the simplest acts made her worry. At the time, she was pregnant and had an infant and a 2-year-old. Even unloading the children from the car made her leery, she said.

“There were times when we didn’t go out of our homes,” Robie added.

Though the house next door to Robie now stands with a blue tarp covering its damaged roof, and AT&T boxes at its front, she and her neighbors share a vision of what they want it to be.

“We’d really like to see it brought back to where it was,” she said.