Tierra Contenta resident wants walls down.
Every time Alan Karp hits the intersection of Los Milagros and Casas De Milagro, he worries he'll slam into someone.
It's not that these two streets, tucked away off of Airport Road, are bustling thoroughfares. On the contrary, this
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strip of the Tierra Contenta neighborhood sees only scant traffic.
The concern for Karp is that the presence of two large property walls-one on Los Milagros, the other on Casas De Milagro-create treacherous blind turns for cars turning onto either street, he says. City code stipulates that houses at intersections can only have a three-foot high wall around them, but these walls are approximately six feet. Exceptions are sometimes made if inspectors believe a wall poses no threat to traffic.
Karp says there should be no exceptions here and has encountered so many close calls at the intersection, a two-way stop, that he complained to city officials about the walls. But nothing happened.
"I've been talking to the city about this for a year now," Karp says. "I'm at the point where it's really frustrating. It seems like they don't understand their own codes."
According to Karp, when he initially contacted the city, officials in the City Manager's Office and Public Works Department were receptive to his concerns about the walls. Karp met at the intersection with Rick Devine, a city traffic engineer, and even explained the problem to then city manager Mike Lujan at a city staff meeting.
In a Feb. 16 e-mail to Lujan from a city operations manager, Andrew Sandoval (provided to SFR by Karp), Sandoval writes that both property owners had agreed to lower their walls within 60 days. (Sandoval did not return repeated phone calls from SFR.)
Despite the e-mail, Karp says the walls have not been lowered and the turns remain as blind and as dangerous as ever.
"You still can't see if anybody's coming at all," Karp says.
Public Works Director Robert Romero says he has seen Sandoval's e-mail but that his department decided the walls did not need to be lowered after all. That decision came, he says, after an inspection and a series of tests by city traffic engineers. The walls are an exception to the city's three-foot wall rule because the corners are rounded off, allowing drivers sufficient visibility.
In this case, Romero's traffic engineers decided that painting a no-parking yellow line on the curb in front of one of the walls and two white "stop bars" at the intersection of the streets would do.
"They felt like, based on the situation, this would be fine," Romero says.
Indeed, the owner of the wall, John Jaramillo, says when he built his wall six years ago for more privacy, city inspectors told him its height of 5'11" was acceptable.
After Karp's complaint this year, Jaramillo says he was informed by city officials that he needed only to install a mirror on the wall so drivers could view oncoming cars from around the corner.
But Jaramillo says it cost him $6,000 to originally construct his wall and that he would have to tear down a portion to install the mirror, which he has yet to do. Though he's willing to work with the city, Jaramillo says he too is frustrated with all of the back and forth.
"This is ridiculous," he says. "In six years, nobody has ever said anything to me about my wall. If you ask me, this guy is just a complainer."
Robert Romero says he does not know who at the city told Jaramillo he needed a mirror for his wall. Romero, who also happens to sit on the Tierra Contenta Corporation Board of Directors, says this is the first time in four years he can remember a traffic dispute over a wall in the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Karp is not only still concerned about the safety of the intersection but also about the length of time it has taken the city to clarify the situation, not to mention all the confusion.
Says Karp: "Is it right? No. The city needs to do their job."
