It’s enough to make a person paranoid. You may recall about a year ago, Bradley was rewriting its institutional zoning plan, and they wanted to include a part of the Uplands neighborhood in it. Specifically, they wanted to include the Pi Phi house, 1004 N. Institute Pl.:

The Uplands Residential Association said they’d rather not see precedent set for Bradley reaching across Main, especially after their track record with the Arbor District. At that time, Bradley stated they would abide by the wishes of the neighborhood association, and they did. They removed the Pi Phi House from their institutional plan.

But now, fast forward to this week’s council agenda. The institutional plan is being modified again at the request of Williams Brothers Construction because they built the new parking deck too close to the right-of-way on Main street. The only changes to the plan were supposed to be the revised setback requirement for the parking deck, a reduction in the number of parking spaces in the deck, and landscaping changes for better pedestrian access.

But guess what else was in there to be changed? On a whim, I decided to read the legal description of the institutional zone, and I’ll be darned if the Pi Phi House wasn’t added to the legal description! A suspicious person might even say it was snuck in. If this were to pass tonight as written, the Pi Phi House would be part of Bradley’s institutional plan, without any input from the neighbors, without anyone knowing about it.

I alerted my city council person and city staff of the issue, and they have taken action to remove the Pi Phi House from the legal description. Pat Landes, Director of Planning and Growth Management, said:

1. Staff reviewed the proposed ordinance scheduled for Council consideration tomorrow night and the 1004 Institute property is included in the legal; it should not be. You may recall that at one point during the previous two Bradley cases [adding Maplewood properties and cleaning up boundaries] in 2007 there had been consideration of adding the Institute property to the Official Development Plan area. You directed the removal of the property based upon input from constituents.
2. A revised ordinance will be on the Council’s desk for tomorrow night’s meeting and will be e-mailed to you as soon as drafted and reviewed.
3. The intent of communications, proposed and 20078] was clear – the Institute address was not listed in the subject matter and application, and was not included on any maps. We will be checking through all of the past ordinances to determine if the Institute address or legal was included in the legal descriptions and make any necessary adjustments.
4. I apologize on behalf of the department for not catching this error in the legal submitted.

So, the legal description was “submitted” — submitted by whom? Bradley. Ultimately Bradley. The contractor (Williams Brothers Construction) is listed as the petitioner, but Bradley would have to sign off on any requested changes to their institutional plan, and they would have had to have provided the legal description, either directly to the city or through Williams Brothers.

No doubt this will be attributed to another unintentional mistake. Just like the parking deck misplacement was just a mistake. After these two “oops” moments from Bradley, and the “mistake” by another developer on Fairoaks, the “mistake” excuse is starting to wear a little thin. It’s starting to sound like the little boy who cried wolf.