ADRIAN — Plans for a 90-foot-tall inflatable sports dome on the Adrian College campus have the college’s neighbors seeing red.

Residents of an adjacent residential neighborhood have attended the last few meetings of the Adrian City Commission and the city planning commission to voice their anger and disappointment — both with the college for its plans and with the city for the fact that they didn’t find out about the dome until it had already been approved.

“It’s going to be this huge monstrosity,” Tim Bakewell, who lives on Canterbury Street, said at the April 15 city commission meeting. “I will no longer be able to go out in my back yard and see anything but this huge dome.”

“I’m tired of Adrian College running roughshod over my neighborhood,” he added.

Residents also said they feel the city has not done enough to protect their neighborhood over the years.

“It always seems like what Adrian College wants, Adrian College gets,” Richard Blonde, also a Canterbury Street resident, said at the April 15 meeting.

And speaking at the May 6 meeting, Canterbury resident Sue Allshouse said that “our neighborhood continues to feel disrespected by the things the college has done to devalue our properties.”

One resident had an architect relative look at the plans and create renderings of what the dome would look like behind homes in the neighborhood, and the neighbors brought these renderings with them to the meetings.

The site plan review took place at the planning commission’s March 12 meeting. A notice of that meeting was published in the Daily Telegram’s classified section, but it did not mention the site plan review. City administrator Greg Elliott’s email newsletter also stated that “a proposed indoor practice facility at Adrian College” would be reviewed at the meeting. Residents noted that a relatively uncontroversial item — plans for a credit union drive-through on the site of the former Eclipse nightclub — was announced to neighbors with a mailing, because it involved a zoning variance, while the sports dome was not required to be publicized that way.

The city’s role in approving the sports dome was purely administrative — the planning commission’s role in a site plan review is simply to determine if an applicant’s plan meets the letter of the law — but neighbors said that if they had known about the proposal, they would at least have had an opportunity to ask questions and raise concerns. In addition to the view, neighbors said they were worried about water runoff and noise.

Bakewell said he feels the city did the “absolute bare minimum” where transparency is concerned.

“So much more could have been done by the city and the college to prevent the anger and frustration that we are experiencing in our neighborhood,” he said.

At the May 7 planning commission meeting, planning commission chairman Mike Jacobitz said he understands residents’ frustration.

“If this were my neighborhood, I would feel the same way that you do,” he said.

However, he added, “this was not a discretionary decision.”

“We have to compare the proposal to a set of criteria, a set of rules and regulations, and if it meets those, if the proposal meets those rules and regulations, then we have very little discretion as to whether we approve or don’t approve,” Jacobitz said. “If it meets the regulations, we are obligated to approve it.”

One issue is that the “Educational, Research and Office” zoning category, which the Adrian College campus is in, has relatively loose requirements and does not contain any height restrictions. Jacobitz said the city is currently working with a consultant to revise the zoning ordinances. Making the rules for ERO districts less open-ended, he said, could avoid similar problems in the future.

Speaking after the May 6 city commission meeting, Elliott said that it certainly is possible for the city to do more to notify residents of matters before the planning commission, but he also said printed mailings like the ones that went out about the Eclipse site are expensive and already make up a significant portion of the community development office’s budget.

Trudy McSorley, who lives on Renfrew Avenue, raised the possibility of the city closing off Canterbury Street at Stratford Avenue to prevent college traffic from cutting through the neighborhood. She noted that there is a precedent from a number of years ago, with nearby Williams Street having been converted into a dead end where it once intersected with West Maumee Street. She asked the city to work with residents to keep their neighborhood quiet and residential as much as possible.

“Will you be a voice for this neighborhood, please, that has been so violated by the actions of Adrian College?” McSorley asked.

The Adrian College office of marketing and public relations declined to comment.