LOGAN – City officials here continued to turn a deaf ear to the concerns of Cliffside residents over a proposed residential treatment facility in their neighborhood during an administrative meeting on Sept. 15.
From the outset, Chair Amanda Davis of the Logan Land Use Appeal Board made it clear that the gathering was a meeting, not a public hearing, thus denying the packed crowd of residents at Logan City Hall the right to speak on the issue.
Since July 22, city officials have been carefully maneuvering to avoid any public comment over their controversial decision to a grant conditional use permit (CUP) for a residential treatment facility in the quiet Cliffside area, a decision that has residents up in arms.
The neighbors’ objection isn’t so much with the facility itself, according to J. Brett Chambers, a local attorney with Harris, Preston & Chambers, LLC. Rather, they object to the way that their voices were unilaterally excluded from the decision-making process by Michael DeSimone, the city’s community development director.
According to court documents, DeSimone authored an Aug. 4 city memo in which he justified waiving Logan’s maximum occupancy limit of three unrelated individuals in a residential dwelling and its requirements for a public hearing prior to issuing a conditional use permit.
After hearing arguments from Chambers and attorneys for Finding Hope LLC, the appeal board members voted unanimously to endorse DeSimone’s decision, finding no evidence of that its was “… illegal, arbitrary or capricious.”
With that handwriting clearly on the wall from the outset of the meeting, Chambers expressed little surprise at the panel’s decision.
The appeal to the Land Use Board was just a step in the process, he explained. Now, Chambers plans to take the Cliffside residents’ case to the state Office of the Property Rights Ombudsman.
“If we get a positive finding from the ombudsman,” the attorney added, “then we go to First District Court.
“Sooner or later, somebody has to listen to these people.”
The property in question is located at 1257 Eastridge Drive, an existing three-level home with seven bedrooms and 3.5 baths occupying approximately 4,000 square feet.
Finding Hope LLC proposes to house up to 12 individuals suffering from a disability associated with debilitating substance use disorders, post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression there.
DeSimone made only a brief statement at the Sept. 15 meeting, during which he again cited the U.S. Fair Housing Act, the Utah Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act as justification for waiving allegedly discriminatory public debate over the proposed treatment facility.
In his Aug. 4 memo, DeSimone wrote that those laws make it “… discriminatory to take public comment and involve the public in a decision that is generally technical and inherently administrative, especially where public clamor may be motivated by ill-conceived stereotypes of the disabled or based on ignorance or prejudices.”
But Chambers argued that the city’s decision to waive local ordinances and public hearing requirements was likely less motivated by a desire to comply with state and federal laws than by threats of litigation by the treatment facility’s operators.