Audio By Carbonatix
Beelzebub arrived in a white pickup. He pulled to the curb in front of the Kelleys’ home in Cherry Creek, his truck facing oncoming traffic, and proceeded to leer at Vicki, who stood in jeans and a T-shirt cleaning her own truck.
Vicki is blond, pretty. When men glance her way, as they often do, her husband, Ben, usually takes it as a compliment. But when Beelzebub arrived — in the form of a leering, dirt-hauling construction foreman with a ponytail — Ben took offense.
“What are you doing?” Ben shouted, stomping onto his porch. “That’s my wife!”
Beelzebub kept gawking, his truck idling.
“Hey!”
Beelzebub slowly shifted his gaze.
“And that’s when I got my first spooky look,” Ben recalls. “He looked over at me like, ‘I’ll eat your lunch.'”
After that, the dump trucks came, the dirt piles rose two stories high, and the neighborhood went to hell.
The Kelleys live on South Monroe Street near Alameda Avenue, in one of the last original houses on the block. The rest have been systematically bulldozed, scraped off and replaced by $400,000 townhomes, condos and duplexes. Over the past decade, Ben, a native of Cherry Creek, has watched his friendly, working-class neighborhood turn into an exclusive enclave.
When I first wrote about him last summer (“Up the Creek,” August 12, 1999), Ben was counting the days until the Kelleys, too, would be pushed out. Ben is a 32-year-old impressionist painter just establishing his career; Vicki, also 32, works as an accountant for a mining company. Between them, the Kelleys barely cover the monthly bills and their $1,000 rent. They’re saving for their first home, but in this white-hot real estate market, they can’t afford a house anywhere near Ben’s old neighborhood. That bothers him.
And then came the man Ben considers the devil incarnate, the construction foreman for JBC Enterprises. That’s the excavation company that’s working for Paragon, the developer that has decided to store fill dirt and excavation equipment on two lots that it leases on South Monroe. For the better part of a year, Ben and his neighbors have been choking on Paragon’s dust. And although the lot is fenced now, the dirt piles smaller, the street cleaned and the storage site officially permitted, residents aren’t breathing any easier.
“It might be quiet now, but it’s not over,” Ben says. “Not by any means. As soon as the development in the neighborhood kicks up again this spring, all that dirt is coming right back across the street. This is just round two.”
The first JBC dump trucks arrived last February, Ben remembers, shortly after the ratty pink house across the street — the one with the tenant who’d skulked around like a hermit and let his dogs defecate in the basement — was demolished. In the beginning, Ben and Vicki were so happy to see the pink house go that they didn’t mind the trucks working on the vacant property next door to where the house had stood. The city was in the process of replacing the neighborhood’s water pipes and paving the alley behind the Kelleys’ house, so they assumed JBC was working with a developer that would soon put up a few more houses.
“The assumption was that it wouldn’t go on very long,” Ben says.
But the building project seemed to be going very slowly. Crews showed up at sunrise, fired up their rigs, then proceeded to haul dirt from nearby construction sites, dump it on two vacant lots kitty-corner from the Kelleys’ and push the dirt into huge mounds. Then the trucks would rumble away like Panzer tanks, in the process waking up the entire neighborhood, including Ben and Vicki, whose front door was seventy feet away.
“They’d be out there at 7 a.m., and sometimes earlier,” Vicki says. “You’d hear ‘Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!’ and ‘Clang! Clang! Clang!’ You didn’t need an alarm clock.”
“You’d have to close all the windows and all the doors and crank up the TV,” Ben concurs. “That deep bass sound of the diesel engines would rumble the house. They’d come on Saturdays, too.”
And they’d leave dust behind. After dumping their loads, the trucks tracked dirt back onto the street, where it was pulverized by passing cars, kicked up by the wind and blown into the homes of the Kelleys and their neighbors.
“When they’re working, this street looks like a dirt road,” Ben says. “You can see huge plumes of dust just blowing off into the atmosphere. Hundreds of pounds of particulates just going into the air. And that dirt is not clean, either. I’ve seen parts of broken foundation in that lot, pipes, rebar, different colors of dirt, different kinds of dirt, dirt that glows in the dark. And keep in mind that this area used to be a dump, so we were breathing in whatever they used to dump around here. You walk around with flu-like symptoms all the time, and when you cough, there’s dirt in your phlegm. This has just been a devil of a winter.”
Copycats began to follow JBC’s lead, lightening their loads on the empty lot that once held the pink house. “Since there was no fence, it attracted anyone and everyone,” Ben explains. “We had weekend warriors with four-wheel drives. We had riffraff. I even have photos of one young man from one of the other construction crews in the neighborhood dumping his garbage there with chunks of concrete. It became like a trash pit.”
It also became a home to lecherous hardhats. “I’d open the door in the morning to go to work and they’d watch me,” Vicki says. “I’d get into my car and they’d watch me. I’d look in my rear-view mirror and they’d still be watching me. There were times when I didn’t want to leave the house.”
And there were times it was almost impossible to leave, Ben adds, because there was so much construction equipment around. “With all those big trucks turning in and out, it’s only a matter of time before there’s an accident,” he says. “I’ve seen a shuttle bus slam on its breaks because a JBC truck pulled out in front of them. Everyone around here is completely pissed off.”
Ray Miolla included. He bought a $300,000-plus Paragon home and moved into the neighborhood last March. Now he’s beginning to regret it. “I work at home several days a week, and with all the dump trucks and backhoes coming and going, I can’t function,” he says. “The trucks are so loud I can’t use my phone for business calls, and it’s hard to concentrate when you’re working on the computer. Then I’d go out in the morning and there’d be dust all over my car, front porch and windows. Just an awful amount of dust. It’s been a nightmare.”
A nightmare he certainly didn’t expect to find in this increasingly upscale neighborhood. “I didn’t move to Cherry Creek to be moving next to a construction yard,” Miolla says. “You move in here because it’s residential and it’s nice. And then to have a construction yard across the street? It’s embarrassing to have people over.”
It could be costly, too. “Candidly, I’m concerned what it does to my property values,” Miolla continues. “I work for a major corporation, and if I’m transferred next week, no one will pay what I paid to live here knowing that they’re going to live across from a construction zone.”
Matt Langan, who lives next door to Miolla, worries about more than money. When his daughter visits, she complains about her asthma. “It used to be a fairly peaceful area around here,” he says. “It’s lucky for them I don’t have a shotgun.”
By late last summer, the light finally dawned. “They weren’t building anything,” Ben says. “This was a dirt storage site.” He asked city inspectors to take a look, which they did. “We’ll get right on it,” they told him. “We’ll have them cut the weeds right away.” When Ben said he wanted the dirt gone, they told him, “If they’re doing it, it must be okay. No one does something like that without a permit.”
But in fact, the city discovered that neither JBC nor Paragon had a permit to dump dirt in the lots; they’d been dumping illegally for months. Still, officials with the Denver Department of Planning and Development’s Neighborhood Inspection Services didn’t seem inclined to make the companies come clean until Ben achieved “pain in the ass” status at city hall. In October, Paragon finally got a permit for a temporary construction yard to store dirt and excavation equipment on two lots at 274 South Monroe.
The neighbors think there was something dirty about how the permitting was handled, too. Although Paragon was required to notify surrounding neighbors of its permit request, there’s only one such notice on file with the city. (Paragon declined to discuss the project in detail, saying only that it does not plan to renew the permit after it expires; JBC did not return Westword‘s calls.)
“I can’t prove it, but you have to think they knew exactly what they were doing,” Miolla says. “They had to know there was a larger group of people who were going to be inconvenienced by this, but they didn’t provide any notice to the people kitty-corner from the lot, nor behind it. Looking out my window, I can count eight other people who live around the lots that they’re using. I’ve never gotten notice from anyone on anything from day one. I think they hoodwinked the city.”
At the same time neighborhood inspectors were untangling the permit mess, an air-quality inspector with the city’s Department of Environmental Health visited the site on South Monroe and found infractions involving trucks tracking “fugitive dust” onto the street. At one point, the inspector climbed atop a dirt pile, faced off against a tractor and issued a stop-work order. “I was really proud of her,” Ben says. “She really seemed to take control over the situation. I thought, ‘At last. It might be over.'”
He was wrong. Although the city was supposed to keep Ben’s complaints confidential, the Kelleys say they became the targets of deliberate harassment. During the day, the truck drivers would hit the gas after dumping a load, then slam on the brakes so that their tailgates clanged shut. At night they’d shine their headlights into the Kelleys’ house all night long. One morning Ben found five nails apiece in two of his truck tires. Another time, someone drove a backhoe onto the front lawn.
And all the while, the foreman in the white pickup would drive by the Kelleys’ house and glare.
“It’s a funny primal thing,” Ben says. “It’s like he’s trying to call me out.”
“Sometimes I want Ben to stop,” Vicki adds. “It’s become an obsession. I tell him that maybe we shouldn’t press it.”
And still, the trucks keep rolling — no matter how many warnings, stop-work orders and tickets have been issued. “Basically, they broke every law they could,” Ben says. “Noise. Clean air. Zoning. But what’s one more ticket to them? These companies have money set aside for this. In Cherry Creek, green is king. People are doing whatever they can to make a profit during boom time. People like us don’t matter. This is a machine. And once it gets kicked up, there’s no stopping it. The city is not going to enforce anything, and these guys know it.”
The city doesn’t see it that way. Although inspectors say they understand the neighborhood’s concerns, they point out that current zoning allows for the temporary storage of dirt and construction equipment in Cherry Creek (as well as other areas). In fact, such storage is not unusual. As long as JBC and Paragon have a permit, which they now do, and as long as they meet the conditions of that permit, which they have, then they have a right to keep working, even if their work is dirty and noisy.
“No one wants to live across from a dirt pile,” says Lydia Rea, the city inspector now handling the Monroe Street case. “But it’s a permitted use.”
If JBC and Paragon do something that isn’t permitted, like kicking up dust again, the city can haul them into court. Which it has. At a hearing last month, after JBC promised to clean the dirt from the street and keep the dust down, a judge imposed a $100 fine and placed the company on probation. But unless city inspectors witness JBC breaking the rules, they can’t do much.
Celia Vanderloop, a supervisor with environmental health, says her inspector has visited the dump site numerous times but never heard crews making enough noise to break the law. Noise from most moving vehicles, including trucks, is exempt from the ordinance. So are many construction projects operating between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.
“It’s just the way the noise ordinance is written,” Vanderloop explains. “It’s partly a recognition that construction is a temporary inconvenience. Otherwise, when someone replaces a roof, they’d be in violation. In order to put up a building or take one down, you’re going to make some noise. It’s difficult to hammer quietly.”
Amy Wiley, an air-quality inspector with the same department, puts it this way: “I know the neighbors are unhappy and frustrated. To have a site like that across from you is not fun. But I come out when I’m called, and I respond to what I see. I can’t make them go away. They don’t need a permit on the air pollution side; this site is too small. A construction site will never be pristine. That’s just the nature of the work.”
The city will concede this much: Since new neighborhood inspectors were being trained last summer, it might have taken more time than usual to sort out the South Monroe situation. Denver has been deluged with paperwork from new construction projects, and it doesn’t have the people or the time to verify every permit. So when developers say they notified neighbors of permit applications, zoning-department officials often take them at their word. And zoning isn’t the only department involved: neighborhood services and environmental health also play a role, and sometimes the different departments don’t work together as closely as they should. Add to that mix developers and contractors who know every trick on the books, and you have projects that escape the notice of city officials.
“It’s like trying to keep up with juggling balls down there in Cherry Creek,” says Joaquin Gonzales, a supervisor with neighborhood services. “We’re trying to respond better, but sometimes some properties fall through the cracks. But I can tell you, we’ll be persistent and get it complied with in a manner that’s fair to all parties. Sometimes that means giving them a little time to comply.”
And JBC’s been given time on South Monroe — time enough to buy a portable street sweeper, make arrangements with a neighbor to use his garden hose to spray down the dirt and dust, and fence off and screen the construction site. The city says JBC and Paragon have even begun hauling away dirt dumped illegally on neighboring lots — but then, the owner of those lots had threatened to sue.
“Right now,” says Rea, the city inspector assigned to the job, “it’s in compliance.”
Ben wheels an industrial-strength air purifier into his living room. “We have to leave this on all night,” he says. “Right in front of the TV.” He and Vicki also deep-clean their carpet once a month, wash their cars twice a week and run up the water bill regularly to hose off their porch and driveway. “It’s just amazing what this has cost us,” he says. “If I could afford it, I’d hire an attorney. We’d have a great case.”
Miolla agrees. “When I asked the city what the process is to challenge the permit, I was told, ‘There is no process,'” he says. “To me that means I have to hire a lawyer. You hate to see private citizens paying attorneys to fix things that never should have happened in the first place, but sadly, we’re at that point now.”
Both Ben and Miolla insist they aren’t against all construction in the neighborhood — Miolla’s house was part of that new wave, and Ben has reluctantly surrendered to the inevitable development of the area. But a dumping ground is something else.
“JBC is simply too close to neighbors to operate that kind of business,” Ben says. “If they were building something, we could live with that. Eventually, the home would be done and that would make the neighborhood better. But with this, there’s no end in sight. When their permit is up, they’ll just apply for another one. They’re just going to stay here and bring dirt in, take it back out, bring it in and take it back out. Our sleep is shot, our home is filthy, we have respiratory problems, and then we step out our front door and get harassed?
“I refuse to be chased out of here by this. I want them out of here. This is my home. When they’re working, it’s hell.”
