City Council to consider allowing Hill Place student-apartment developers to dredge out portion of tree-protection area and an existing trail area

Please click on image to ENLARGE and read. The photo is from August 3, 2008, when we found several youngsters swimming and fishing in the Town Branch of the West Fork of the White River in the hole immediately downstream from the big culvert.
The city council agenda session Tuesday night will include include discussion of putting a revision of the PZD already approved for the Hill Place student apartments to be built on the site cleared in 2003, 2004, and 2005 for the Aspen Ridge condominium project.
Members of the Town Branch Neighborhood Association are uncertain that this change in the PZD will help reduce the flooding threat south of the Hill Place project. The value of that stream crossing is undeniable. People have walked it for decades. Wildflowers, understory vegetation used for roosting and nesting by many species of birds, and some large trees will be removed if the walkway is removed. Logically, this walkway should be listed as a future trail site, to connect the Cherokee Trail that is to pass beneath the railroad and cross the old east-west rail trestle with the trail to be builgt by the Hill Place developers along the Brooks Avenue right of way previously cleared and dredged-out through the Pinnacle Foods Inc. wetland prairie south of Hill Place and west of World Peace Wetland Prairie, an existing city nature park and turn south to connect to 12th Street. The stream crossing is important. The hole of water immediately south of the big culvert is the deepest hole for fish and for people who want to swim between Martin Luther King Boulevard and Fifteenth Street. Pinnacle Foods Inc. has offered to donate the 2 acres closest to World Peace Wetland Prairie to increase the size of WPWP.