The Adrian City Commission has both an opportunity and a dilemma.
The opportunity is in the form of $100,000 that District Court Judge Laura Schaedler ordered Crimson Holdings to pay into a fund for the benefit of residents who have been affected by the noxious sulfurous smell coming from its plant on East Maumee Street.
The dilemma is that figuring out how to deploy that money in a way that is both fair and will make a difference … is easier said than done.
You might think that the simplest tactic would be for the city to just mail a check to everyone who lives in the immediate vicinity and be done with it. But then, what counts as the immediate vicinity? Invitations to a recent public forum were mailed to everyone within a half-mile radius of the plant, and that came to a few thousand addresses. Divide $100,000 among that many people, and the resulting checks won’t amount to much more than a tank of gas.
Maybe the circle could be smaller. Even though on some days people noticed that rotten-egg smell far across town, it’s undeniable that the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the factory — such as the people who live on the easternmost blocks of streets like Hunt, Butler, Church and Frank — have gotten the worst of it.
But that’s still complicated. As some city commissioners have already noted, a strategy that targets specific households would have to draw a line on the map. Somewhere, the residents of one household would be eligible and their neighbors would not. It would be hard to draw the boundary in a way that wouldn’t create unfairness along its path.
And then, since this problem has been going on for more than two years, do you make a distinction between people who have lived in the area for the entire time and people who moved in or out of the area during that time?
A further complication: As city administrator Greg Elliott noted during one commission meeting, people with air conditioning found their ability to enjoy their yards during the summer severely curtailed, but at least they could go inside and shut the windows. People without air conditioning who have to keep their windows open during the summer had no escape at all.
Then there’s the rental properties question.
People understandably bristle at the idea of any solution that broadly benefits property owners, in light of the fact that many east side property owners are landlords who don’t actually live in the area. Using the funds to pay for things that the person who gets the tax bill normally chips in for — like sidewalks — would benefit property owners, but not necessarily residents.
At the same time, it would be unfair to implement a solution that only benefits homeowners and leaves renters out of it. Renters have been affected by the problem too. (And since rental properties are subject to some taxes that owner-occupied homes are not, you could legitimately argue that renters are actually responsible for more property taxes than homeowners, albeit in the form of school taxes rather than city levies.)
Could the money be used for some other kind of civic improvement in the area, one that would benefit everyone living in the neighborhood? That’s a nice idea, and one we could get behind — but the question is, what?
Normally in this space, if we discuss a problem, we like to propose a solution. In this case we don’t have one. There’s no easy or obvious answer.
One thing we should note is that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Crimson Holdings by a handful of area residents, acting on behalf of themselves and their neighbors. They are represented by Dubin Law, a firm from Ann Arbor, and according to documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, that lawsuit is currently in settlement discussions.
Depending on the outcome of those talks, people in the neighborhood may have another way to get justice and be compensated for the damages they have incurred.
