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BY ROB ROBERTS
SUN STAFF WRITER
Controversial plans to expand a parking lot at Blue Valley High School, 6001 W. 159th St., will be withdrawn, a district official reported Tuesday.
The plans, which had been scheduled to be considered by the Board of County Commissioners next Thursday, were aimed at accomodating growth of the school's student population and alleviating overflow parking during football games, said Tom Trigg, Blue Valley deputy superintendent of administrative services.
But the plans and a request for a conditional-use permit were withdrawn after Richard and Sherry Dvorak, 6401 W. 159th St., filed a protest petition against the parking-lot expansion. The petition, had it been ruled valid, would have required a four-vote supermajority of the five-member county commission for passage of the parking-lot expansion.
The expansion would have required acquisition and bulldozing of the Blue Valley Church of the Nazarene, which lies between the high school and a rental house the Dvoraks own immediately east of their own residence.
The parking-lot plan failed to win a recommendation from the Oxford Township Zoning Board, which voted 2-2 on the issue in November. And since then, Trigg said, district officials learned of some deed restrictions on the 1.5-acre church property that may
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have made it more difficult to develop the parking lot than anticipated.
"That acre and a half is actually three different lots," he explained, "and we've discovered through a title search that at least a couple of those still potentially have the original neighborhood covenants on them. They were originally intended for single-family dwellings, so we would potentially have to go through some discussions with the (Blue Valley Riding) neighborhood group to get all that changed and waived, and the fact that they've apparently gathered enough signatures to require a supermajority tells us they're not going to be very amenable to working with us."
Richard Dvorak, happy that the buffer will remain between his property and the school parking lot to the east, said the school currently has plenty of parking for students. "If you drive by on a school day, you'll see that parking lot is about a third empty."
That's true, Trigg said. "But Blue Valley High is going to continue to grow," he added. "Just two years ago, we had as many as 1,800 kids there and did not have enough parking space, and we know that Blue Valley High is going to be that big again."
Currently, Dvorak said, the parking lot is inadequate only during four to six interdistrict football games per year. That has been the case, he said, since the district increased the seating capacity of the Blue Valley High
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football stadium and designated it as a second district stadium.
Dvorak said that thte district, instead, should have shifted interdistrict football games, which draw "a million people," to Blue Valley West. "Good golly, they've got acres and acres of unlimited parking over at West," he said.
"Blue Valley West has a district complex already for soccer, track, baseball and softball," Trigg responded. "We intentionally did not build a football stadium out at West because the cost would have been in the millions of dollars."
The only downside to the district stadium at Blue Valley High, Trigg said, is the parking situation during interdistrict football games.
"To be honest that's why we originally thought this would be a win-win-win," he said of the parking lot plan. "We thought the neighbors might appreciate not having people parking in the grass on 159th Street and in front of their houses on Friday night. It would hvae obviously been a win for us, it would have been a win for the church, which was looking to move."
Dvorak, who has one son at the high school and two more on the way, doesn't want to be a killjoy, but he said having a parking lot so close to his home wasn't a "win" for his family.
The least expensive way to accommodate overflow football crowds, he said, would be for the district provide shuttle service to
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and from nearby Blue Valley Middle School and Stanley Elementary School.
The district also will save significant money by not purchasing the church property, which it had been prepared to pay $290,000 for.
In reviewing real-estate contracts that had been contingent
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on the parking-lot approval, Dvorak said he discovered that the district had been prepared to sell 5.1 acres on the east side of the Blue Valley West campus to Blue Valley Church of the Nazarene for $90,000.
"That's approximately 18,000 bucks an acre," he said, adding that a Realtor in the area told him
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the minimum residential rate was about $40,000.
"Where can I sign up to get five acres of valuable ground for $90,000?" Dvorak said.
According to Trigg, the purchase price for the church property and the sale price for the Blue Valley West tract, were both based on appraisals.
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