USE PERMITS HIT SNAG; INSUFFICIENT TIME FOR SCHOOL TRAILERS

When the school year starts Aug. 27, kindergartners at Clippard School won't have a trailer to attend class in.

Steve Del Vecchio, business manager of Cape Girardeau public schools, went before the Cape Girardeau Planning and Zoning Commission Wednesday night to apply for special use permits for temporary mobile classrooms at Clippard, Washington and Jefferson Elementary schools.

The commission recommended passage; however, the City Council must approve the permits before the schools can install the mobile units. Under city ordinances, the council can't act on the application until Sept. 2.

The council must hold a hearing first and give 15 days notice before the hearing. Short of calling a special meeting for 15 days after it gives notice, which would be no earlier than Aug. 29, the council can't act until its next regularly scheduled meeting Sept. 2.

Del Vecchio said the district might not be able to get delivery of the trailers until early September anyway. He said many school districts will be ordering them at this time of year because of higher enrollments, so the delivery date is iffy anyway.

He said the school system will find some way of housing the children before the trailers come in.

Those mobile classrooms were not the only manufactured buildings the commission recommended the council approve.

Barely a month after the Cape Girardeau City Council rejected an application for a mobile home in a residential neighborhood, the Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval of a double-wide mobile home at 810 College Street between Ellis and Pacific streets.

Walter Lee Jones and Kathleen Woods applied for a special use permit to place it in a vacant lot across the street from the new Highway 74.

The home would be the only residence on that block of College. Around its corners, frame and brick houses line the 500 blocks of Ellis and Pacific streets. Most of the neighboring homes look well kept. A few sit vacant. More renters than homeowners live on those two blocks.

Jones and Woods enclosed in their application the comments of owners of nearby properties, four of them landlords and two living in owner-occupied homes. No neighbors showed up in opposition to the mobile home at the hearing.

Commissioner Harry Rediger said he never thought he would vote for a mobile home on a residential lot. However, since the lot is small because it lost territory to the highway, "it would probably be the only improvement you could have on this lot."

He said no opposition had surfaced.

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

The only commissioner voting no was Bob Blank. "Is this opening the door to other mobile homes in residential neighborhoods?" he asked.

The last time a property-owner applied for a special use permit for a mobile home in a residential neighborhood, the commission voted against him. The City Council initially voted in favor of the application, then reversed itself when some of the applicant's neighbors came to a council meeting and objected to the mobile home.

In other actions, the commission:

-- Approved Southeast Missouri Sigma Chi Fraternity's application for a special use permit for a warehouse at 1134 N. Sprigg St. in a multiple-family residential district. The fraternity would use the wood-frame metal building for storage, building parade floats and as a gathering place. The commission voted to require that the fraternity build a 6-foot-high privacy fence near its property line with an apartment building.

City Councilman Jack Rickard owns that building. He recommended against approving it because fraternity members have broken bottles on the steps, filled its trash containers with trash and held loud parties on a sand volleyball pit on the property.

-- Approved a special use permit for the First Assembly of God church for a playground in the rear of a residential lot at 3114 Dogwood Lane. The church, at 750 N. Mount Auburn Road, bought the lot, which borders the church property. Two neighbors objected because of the noise from the playground and fears of possible runoff problems.