Wednesday, October 20, 1999
Elsmere ready to fight new jail
4.5-mile protest among plans
BY CINDY SCHROEDER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
INDEPENDENCE — Elsmere residents plan to use everything from lawsuits to a 4.5-mile human chain in their bid to keep a jail from being built in their community.
“We will file every possible lawsuit we can file to keep the jail out of our residential area,” resident Terry Whittaker said Tuesday night.
Speaking before a standing-room-only crowd at the Kenton County Courthouse in Independence, Ms. Whittaker urged Kenton Fiscal Court to reconsider its decision to build a jail in Elsmere.
Opponents say the jail site is surrounded by subdivisions, has poor access, is one of the farthest from the Kenton County Courthouse in Covington, and will have an adverse financial impact on one of Northern Kentucky's poorer cities.
After the meeting, fiscal court members said they were willing to meet with jail opponents to address their concerns, but added they did not plan to reopen the site selection process.
Opponents of the Elsmere jail site planned their own meeting for 7:30 tonight at the Elsmere Senior Center.
One proposal slated for discussion is the formation of a human chain from the TGI Friday's restaurant off Turkeyfoot Road in Crestview Hills to the jail site off New Buffington Road in Elsmere. Organizers said they hope to get hundreds of people to line the 4.5-mile route on Oct. 30.
“It's basically a demonstration to show people the route that most police agencies will take to get to that facility,” Ms. Whittaker said.
Ms. Whittaker said that a lawyer also will attend tonight's strategy meeting to discuss environmental issues.
Last month, Kenton Fiscal Court decided against a leading jail site at Interstate 275 and Ky. 17 in Covington. While a previous fiscal court had recommended the Ky. 17, or 3L site, the current county officials ruled out the 3L site, citing the high cost of environmental cleanup at the former auto parts junkyard.
“There's nowhere that we could build this jail in this county where somebody isn't going to be unhappy,” said Kenton Judge-executive Dick Murgatroyd. He said county officials chose the Elsmere site only after reviewing and eliminating 45 other sites.
“We wish we had a site that was perfect,” said Kenton County Commissioner Adam Koenig. “However, we picked the best site we had available.”
Mr. Koenig said the Elsmere site was flat, had willing sellers, and was environmentally clean.
Among those appearing before Kenton Fiscal Court asking county officials to reconsider their decision were 15-year-old Becky Abbey and 16-year-old Amanda Baker, who live in the Turkeyfoot Acres subdivision bordering the jail site.
The teens submitted petitions signed by 244 school-aged Kenton County children.
Several in the crowd carried signs reading, “Elsmere Prison Not an Option,” while others wore T-shirts calling for “no jailyards in our backyards.”
Shelli Phelps, who financed the T-shirts with $800 from her checking account, said that she had sold about 30 of the shirts by Tuesday night.
“We wanted to send a message and look united,” said Ms. Phelps, who added she and her husband are concerned about the jail's effect on their property values.
Mr. Phelps said that she lives about 200 yards from the jail site “in a brand-new house appraised at $110,000.”
“We don't have the equity in our house to sell and move someplace else,” she said.
In a fact sheet that they soon plan to distribute to Kenton County residents, the fiscal court notes that the current Kenton and Boone County jails are close to residential areas and have not had an adverse effect on property values.
The county's fact sheet notes that the Kenton County Jail is across the street from residential units and one block from Covington's Historic Licking-Riverside neighborhood, while the Boone County Jail is within 0.2 mile of a development where homes carry market prices “in the mid-$130,000s to $180,000.”
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