Bringing Glory to the West Side
Greetings All !
This week saw two significant events in the ongoing saga of the life of this house:
1) Phase One of our application for Local Historic Landmark designation was completed:
On Tuesday, the City of Independence’s Heritage Commission approved our application! Ms. Wendy Shay of the City’s Community Development Department “lobbied our case”. She presented information about our house and our application to the Heritage Commission, who then unanimously approved our application.
There are three more steps in the process. Step Two will be a presentation to the Planning Commission on February 12th. The Planning Commission must approve a change of zoning from R-2 Residential to H-L Historic Landmark. (Interesting tidbit: At the moment, this property is zoned R-2, which apparently means “TWO family residential”.) After that, a resolution approving the declaration of the house to be a historic landmark must be read at two City Council meetings. Once it’s read at the second meeting, the Council either approves it….or not…or I suppose they could postpone it or send it back to one of the previous two governing bodies for clarification.
This means we’re looking at probably the 2nd week of March for final approval.
With this approval, our home will be added to the relatively short list of Historic Landmark properties in Independence. As of this writing, there are 25 such properties listed on the City’s website:
http://www.ci.independence.mo.us/comdev/HP_Resources_Landmark_Properties.aspx
Photos of 24 out of the 25 are shown on this other page on the City’s website:
http://www.indepmo.org/comdev/HP_WalkingTours_Landmark.aspx
2) Ms. Sandy Turner of the Independence Examiner visited us yesterday. She is the Special Projects Editor for the Examiner. She is responsible for the “Welcome Home” magazine-like section that is in each Thursday edition of the paper.
She is going to be featuring our house in the February 24th edition of the paper! A photo of the house will be on the front-cover of the “Welcome Home” section. Plus, the house will be the “main feature story” in that section that day!
We’re very excited about this! Our only let-down is that this is all happening in January, when the Christmas decorations have been put away and when the yard looks so BLAH in the dead of winter.
Gotta run!
It’s a beautiful sunny day here today and I need to get some things done.
Take care!
-= David Raasch =-