By JOSEPH KELLARD
Just 36 hours after members of the Fairview Avenue Residents Committee (FARC) failed to convince the Oceanside Library Board of Trustees to reconsider, workers went ahead and demolished a house the library owns behind its building.
At a July 27 meeting, the library board told FARC members that due to its contractual commitment with a demolition company, the house at 43 Fairview Ave. had to be razed as part of a large-scale project the trustees have proposed for the property. In May, after the trustees first met with the committee to discuss the fate of the property, the board agreed to a 90-day delay of the demolition. But two days after the July meeting, the demolition company arrived to tear down the house.
"I noticed a bulldozer in front of my house the first thing Friday morning," said Laskaris, a FARC member, adding that she assumed the library would wait a few weeks before demolishing the house.
"We had contracted with the demolition company quite some time ago," said Angela Iovino, president of the library board. "... So we had to go ahead with that stage of the project. There was no reason to hold up that stage."
Residents learned of the library's plans to demolish the house this spring, after the demolition company posted a note on its front door. At its June meeting, however, the library board agreed to scrap its plans to dismantle the house, which the board said needed to come down in order to expand the library's backyard garden.
Neighbors opposed the plan to demolish the house because it would create another empty lot on their street where a house had been razed and a fence installed around its property. At the time, a wooden fence already reached out to a Fairview Avenue sidewalk, surrounding the library's west-side parking lot. The library proposed to replace the house with a structure sporting a home-like facade that was at least 75 percent of the size of the original house, to be used primarily as a storage facility.
John Pupa, a FARC member, claimed that library trustees agreed at the June meeting to delay the demolition until they received both permits and residents' approval of their architectural plans for the new structure. "That changed in a month," Pupa said.
Heading into the July 27 meeting, the board said it might have plans completed for the new structure. At the meeting, the board did display a rendering of what the facade might look like, which depicted a cape-like house with dormers, but Iovino declined to go over with residents the more extensive architectural plans. "They are just too incomplete at this point," she said. "Basically, they were just for the outer shell structure, and gave an approximate size and so forth. But if we are to go ahead with the project, we have to give the architect more feedback as to what sets we need for the interior, depending on what we store there. There are too many changes that can still come up."
The cost of the new the structure is estimated to be $100,000 to $125,000, and will be entered as a capital improvement in the library's 2006-07 budget, which the community must vote to approve if it is to be erected, Iovino said, adding that the tax increase for this project "is going to be quite minor."
Pupa claimed that at the July meeting, which followed an initial story on the issue in the Herald, board members expressed concern that the community might not pass next year's budget with attention focused on the project. "By the time the budget comes up for renewal, this incident is going to be a forgotten sidebar," Pupa said skeptically. "And the budget always passes by a four-to-one margin anyway. I can't image that any publicity is going to affect the budget."
Oceanside residents passed the library's $3.5 million 2005-06 budget by a vote of 2,328 to 1,544. After the vote, Iovino was asked about projects the library had in store. While the board president alluded to a maintenance project, "in that we have to do something with the property behind the library," she said, she made no mention of the house.
"That issue wasn't even a consideration at that time," Iovino countered. "We knew we would have to take the house down because it was in such disrepair. ... The budget is prepared in January and February. But if we would have known this was a possibility, I don't think there would have been time to have put it into this year's budget. But we certainly would have tried to. It didn't come about until our brainstorming about the house afterward."
Pupa claimed that Iovino and the board had asked FARC to "take a leap of faith" and "trust them to do the right thing." He and FARC have no other choice at this point, Pupa said, but the committee remains skeptical of the board's intentions and, he added, "We kind of feel as if we're being steamrolled over here."
Pupa wrote a post-demolition letter and personally delivered copies to every Fairview Avenue resident. It reads, in part: "We hold the board members personally responsible for any loss of property values suffered by our residents at their hands, should their management prove ineffective." The letter also makes mention of reprisals. Asked to specify what these may be, Pupa said that a lawsuit is possible, and that considerably more Fairview and community residents are likely to attend library board meetings to speak out on the issue.
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