Landowners feud with developer of Boblo

[N. Schultheiss]

From Sunday's Detroit News
http://detnews.com/

Landowners feud with developer of Boblo

By Gary Heinlein / The Detroit News

Three landowners who coexisted for decades with
Boblo
Island's amusement park are finding it harder to
adjust to their
new neighbor, a developer who plans to surround
them with
$125,000- to $1-million townhouses and homes.
The three property owners charge that the island's
new
developer John Oram is using water service as
leverage to get
them to give up their access to the shoreline.
The looming development cut off 75-year-old
Dorothy
Tresness' water service last summer when the
developer's
bulldozers tore up an old water line to install
new ones, so
friends supplied her from their boats, she said.
"He doesn't want half-million-dollar homes
with no boats
next to our homes with boats," said Dorothy
Guffey, a former
Dearborn resident now living in Buckley. "But I'm
not giving up
my water rights to drink his water."
Guffey, her husband and her brother and
sister-in-law,
Dennis and Donna Macy, own vacant lots, but she
said their
lots aren't useful if they can't get water
hook-ups because they
eventually want to build or sell the lots.
"We didn't buy the land as an investment," she
said. "We
bought it as a way of maintaining our memories;
now we're
(isolated from roads and water service)."
Oram's $150-million development plan envisions
Victorian
homes overlooking natural shoreline, uncluttered
by boats and
docks. Water craft would be stored at the marinas
he also
plans to build.
"He's trying to keep all boats in the
marinas," said Tina
Bassett, Detroit spokeswoman for the developer.
"To have a
bunch of docks all around the island, when you
have these
beautiful homes, just wouldn't look right."
Bassett, however, emphatically denied Guffey's
charge,
saying the few other Boblo landowners besides Oram
are
welcome to the utilities he's installing if they
pay a fair
share of the cost.
Guffey said that she has been trying to get
Oram to tell her
since last year what their share would be. She
believes he has
been delaying because he wants her to sign an
agreement to
give up her water access.
As evidence, she provided The News with a
facsimile copy
of a May 24, 1996, letter to her from Oram. Among
conditions
for receiving utility services, it states, she
must agree
to follow deed and building restrictions for Oram's development.
Carl Gibb, the mayor of Malden Township,
Ontario, which
includes the island, said Oram subsequently
"backed off" his
demand that Guffey give up her shoreline access.
He said the position of the township, which
will become
owner of all roads and utilities Oram builds on
the island, is the
same as that described by Bassett.
The mayor said with the development still in
the planning and
approval process, it has been difficult for Oram
to proportion
the utility costs for Guffey and other owners.
Gibb also said he can understand the
developer's wish for
conformity in anything the Guffeys and Macys build
on their
land.
"If you're lucky enough to have a $200,000
house
somewhere in Michigan, you wouldn't be too happy
if
somebody put up a $70,000 shack beside you," Gibb
said.
And so goes the sometimes painful transition
of the Canadian
island that middle-aged Detroiters fondly remember
for the
amusement rides it used to offer.
Just past the boundary of that mid-island
amusement park,
there always was another Boblo.
Guffey, Tresness and Guffey's brother, Dennis
Macy,
remember the other Boblo as a place where they
skinny-dipped, caught boat loads of perch, watched
animals
and played cards by lantern light.
The island they knew is fast changing because
Boblo's
amusement park faded in the 1980s, despite revival
efforts that
included a $15-million investment by AAA Michigan.
Oram, a former Ferndale businessman who now
lives in
Ontario, shelled out a reported $4.2 million for
the island at a
1994 auction held by Seattle investor-owners who
had wrested
control from partner Michael Moodenbaugh.
Moodenbaugh had tried to restore the amusement
park
before a near-fatal 1993 auto accident left him
incapacitated.
Oram's development plans seem like a godsend
to rural
Malden Township, whose tax base withered with the
demise of
the amusement park.
"It's very important," said Gibb, who lives
just two minutes
across the water in Amherstburg, Ontario. "We have
limited
development in our township. When the amusement
park
closed, it was a tremendous setback."
Imagine the boost that tax base will get from
just the 100
homes already approved -- not to mention hundreds
of
townhouses, a golf course, 2,000-slip marina and a
mid-island
commercial center also planned.
Oram owns all of the 272-acre island except
Tresness'
house; 21/2 lots nearby owned by Guffey, her
husband,
George, and Dennis and Donna Macy; and a large
estate at the
north tip of the island where a Canadian family
lives.
Tresness said the construction workers working
on Oram's
development last summer severed the amusement park
water
line that had supplied water to her house. She
said she tried all
summer to talk to Oram about it, but never could
reach him by
telephone.
Water service to the private properties on the
island had
once been provided free under an agreement worked
out with
previous amusement park owners by Guffey's family.
That arrangement ended when Moodenbaugh's
employees
cut off the service and forced Tresness to get
along without
running water in the summer of 1993.
Oram restored the service in 1994 and now has
promised to
restore it again, Tresness said by telephone from
her winter
home north of Tampa, Fla.
"Mr. Oram called before the last township
meeting," she
said. "He assured me that I would have water this
year and that
he would work with me."
At that meeting a week ago, Oram also promised
he would
provide a price for utility service to the
Guffeys, Macys and
Tresness within 30 days.
Jeff Baker, an Amherstburg lawyer representing
the Guffeys,
said he has no reason to doubt that will happen.
He said Oram
has signed "an undertaking with the township" that
utility
charges can only be "a proportional share of his
servicing cost.
"It all came to a head last week," Baker said.
"Once we have
the costs, we're obviously going to have to look
at them and
assure ourselves they are realistic."
Tresness, who also had a lawyer at the
meeting, said she is
willing to pay what is reasonable for utility
hook-ups and isn't
looking to stand in the way of progress.
"I like peace and quiet," she said. "I don't
like confrontation.
I worked 40 years and I just want to be left
alone."

Copyright 1997, The Detroit News

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N. Schultheiss
ncsc...@oakland.edu
Detroit, Michigan, USA
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