After a year of construction and months of false starts, the Milford City Council has approved a plan to bring government functions back to City Hall.
City Manager David Baird and City Clerk Terri Hudson will move from their temporary offices on Airport Road into brand-new ones in City Hall in mid-August, while the city’s planning, code enforcement and tax assessment staff will follow them about a month later, the council decided on June 22.
“I think what we came up with is a great plan,” said council member John Workman, who headed the committee responsible for bringing city business back downtown.
The two-month delay allows for offices to be set up in unused space on the ground floor of the building. The price tag for that renovation comes to an estimated $60,000.
“I feel pretty confident that we’ll be able to do the construction with that,” Baird said.
Some of the excess funding will go to pay for safety upgrades for the staff who will stay at the Vickers Public Works Complex, and for the demolition of a house across the street from City Hall that the government bought last year with plans of putting either a parking lot or a new city office on the land.
Council looking for committee volunteers
The city government is looking for help from its citizens in two ways — first to help the council write a new law, and the other to decide how to apply the existing ones.
First, the council is asking for help from local homeowners’ associations and development firms to help write a set of regulations on how those associations will be set up in new housing developments.
“If you don’t live it, you don’t know what the problems are,” council member John Workman said. “Let’s find out some of the mistakes that have been happening in others … If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right and get the input from out there.”
Three to four representatives from each side will join one council member and one planning commissioner to decide what regulations they’d like to see from the city.
The rough draft of an ordinance presented Monday night would require open space in new developments to be maintained by a homeowners’ association, and for developers to turn over control of the association to the homeowners when more than half the planned homes had been sold.
However, council members said input from the committee could drastically reshape those rules, or add new ones.
“I’m not a developer,” council member Jason Adkins said. “I don’t know what 50 percent does.”
Turning over control sooner gives homeowners more control over the state of their neighborhood, but also more responsibility for maintaining systems like storm drains and public parks.
Residents of local developments have lately started asking the council to exercise some control over the terms of homeowners’ associations in the city. Most come from the Meadows at Shawnee, which elected its first association board this month amid heated debate over what powers the association ought to have, and surprise at the cost and liability involved with maintaining a development’s open spaces and infrastructure.
Milfordians are also being asked to participate in the city’s board of adjustment, which makes the final decision on applications from property owners for exceptions from zoning codes. Until now the board has been made up of the mayor, city manager and city solicitor, but to comply with state law, the council plans to approve an ordinance replacing the city officials with three to five Milford residents familiar with the zoning codes.
Anyone interested in serving should contact the Milford city offices at 422-6616.
Cypress hall gets OK
Finally, the council voted 5-2 to approve the first phase of the Cypress Hall housing development, with Workman, Adkins, Owen Brooks, James Starling and Katrina Wilson voting yes and Steven Johnson and Michael Spillane voting no.
The first phase of the development will have 384 apartments and townhouses, with 162 single-family homes planned in the second phase, which is still in the planning stages.
“The developers don’t have plans to proceed with the design of phase two at this point,” said engineer Tim Metzner. “They want to get phase one rolling.”
The “no” votes were in favor of delaying the vote until new rules on performance bonds are put in place. Developers, including the owners of Cypress Hall, are required to buy such bonds when they start construction. The bond money is used for improvements to the development if the infrastructure — roads, sewers, drainage and so on — are below city standards when they’re turned over to the local government. The exact amount of each bond is decided case by case, but a proposed law would set them all to the same amount. What that amount would be is still up for debate.
Milford, Del. —
