By Susan Vela
The Cincinnati Enquirer

NORWOOD - Residents will square off tonight at City Hall over the proposed $125 million expansion of Rookwood Commons - with one faction urging planning commissioners to work with the developers and the other clamoring for them to resist.

In the middle will be planning commissioners such as Mayor Joe Hochbein, who has called the Rookwood Exchange project a pre-eminent retail endeavor that could save Norwood from its constant budget problems by generating $3.5 million a year in earnings tax revenues.

"That is a very key project for the city of Norwood," he said. "That real estate must be developed properly. Otherwise, the city will bump along financially."

The Rookwood Exchange project, proposed by Anderson Real Estate and the Miller-Valentine Group, calls for a mix of offices, apartments, condos, posh restaurants and shops for a wedge of property occupied by 79 residential and commercial properties. Some homeowners have refused to sell, creating a controversy over whether the city should use its powers of eminent domain to force the issue.

Beginning at 6:30 p.m. in council chambers, 4645 Montgomery Road, the hearing will focus on the city's attempts to draw up a planned unit development, or PUD, for the site. The PUD would give the city a greater control over what ultimately appears on the triangular piece of property bounded by Interstate 71 and Edwards and Edmondson roads.

Zoning will remain residential, transitional and general business. But if developers eventually can buy the land they want and raze the buildings there, the PUD would allow planning commissioners to control lighting, landscaping, parking, building materials, even "the color of the paint on the buildings," said Jack Cameron, a planning commissioner and the city's safety-service director.

"It is very likely that if Anderson and Miller-Valentine don't develop it, someone else will," he said. "We can see it's coming. A PUD gives the most control we can have."

Planning commissioners and council members already have approved PUD plans for four acres wedged between Interstate 71, Williams Avenue and Smith Road, where the $44 million Cornerstone of Norwood development will appear, and for 22 acres near Carthage Avenue that includes the former General Motors parking lot north of the Norwood Lateral, where a $35 million medical office development is planned.

"There's tremendous pressure on the area to develop," Planning Director Susan Roschke said.

Residents from two camps promise to be at Monday night's hearing: Those who have agreed to sell their homes for about 40 percent more than their $130,000 to $175,000 appraised values, and those who remain unwilling to sell. Some of the 46 property owners who have agreed to sell say their resistant neighbors appear to be holding out for a better price or for sentimental reasons.

Brenda Hauser, who is looking for a home in Montgomery after recently agreeing to sell her Edwards Road home, said developers "have been more than fair."

"Any person does what's best for their family. (And) we're landlocked. If it's not going to happen now, it's going to happen in five years. It's not a quiet residential area anymore. It's not."

E-mail svela@enquirer.com