CITY WANTS EROSION PROBLEMS ADDRESSED ON RECARDO DRIVE

The residents of Recardo Drive who have been having to look at the erosion in the Red Oaks subdivision won't get much relief whatever the Cape Girardeau City Council does tonight.

City Engineer Mark Lester recommends that the council refuse to accept that subdivision's detention basin from its developer, Larry McCulley.

The subdivision, which is just east of the intersection of New Madrid and Clark streets, is largely vacant and filled with weeds. The City Council approved improvement plans, including a detention basin for stormwater runoff, in August 1995.

Lester said the developer dug it out but hasn't maintained the grass in the basin well enought to prevent erosion.

Hope Eddleman, who lives on Recardo, said she looks out her back window and sees "some of the most appalling erosion I have ever seen."

Lester said the city has unsuccessfully tried to get McCulley to bring the basin up to standards. So he wants the council to make the detention basin McCulley's permanent responsibility. "The remaining stormwater improvements, although technically constructed, have yet to be completed to the city's standard of acceptance," Lester wrote in a letter to the council.

McCulley said Sunday that he did not know it was on the council's agenda. "Nobody's contacted me," he said. He said the runoff was not a problem for the residents of Recardo Drive because they sit higher than Red Oaks.

In other business, the council:

-- Will take a final vote on a special use permit for Walter Lee Jones and Kathleen Woods to erect a double-wide mobile home at 810 College Street, between Ellis and Pacific streets.

It is a neighborhood of frame and brick houses adjacent to new Highway 74.

Mayor Al Spradling said that as long as the mobile home meets the city's new requirements and there is no neighborhood opposition, he will vote to approve it.

The Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval. No one came to object at the commission's hearing.

The commission added an amendment requiring Jones and Wood to install a front porch that would make the mobile home look more like a standard house.

-- Could set a date for a hearing on a request by Melvin Barks and others for a special use permit for a car wash at the corner of Cape Rock Drive and Lexington Avenue. The Planning and Zoning Commission recommended against approval.

-- Won't deal with the request of First Assembly of God for a playground on part of what is now a residential lot in Westfield subdivision. The church has asked for another week to study its request, which opponents say would violate the subdivision's covenant.

-- Will hold a public hearing on providing water to the Twin Lakes subdivision. The council has already passed a resolution declaring it necessary but by law must hold this hearing before proceeding.

Melvin Gateley will not attend the meeting. The Fifth Ward councilman is home recovering from heart surgery and reading hundreds of get-well cards. He said he expects to attend meetings in October.

He is not entirely idle. Gateley has been working at his home compiling results from a survey he initiated on the state of the city's south side.