Church’s project may leave couple’s home between parking lots

After 50 years of living on Chautauqua Avenue, John and Cecial Yarbrough, now elderly and disabled, are facing the prospect of spending their remaining years living in the middle of a parochial school parking lot.

Working toward building a new church and school at the site of the current Holy Savior church, the Catholic Diocese of Wichita asked for and got City Hall approval to wrap their development around the Yarbroughs, the last homeowners on Chautauqua between North 13th and 14th streets.

The Planning Commission and City Council approved the church’s project using a process that – intentionally or unintentionally – kept the Yarbroughs in the dark until after the land around them was resubdivided for construction and the city gave the south half of Chautauqua Avenue to the church.

The church has bought and razed every other home on the street, except for one corner house that faces north onto 14th Street.

The current plan shows that the Yarbroughs’ home will be sandwiched between two parking lots, which would be in use from before 8 a.m. seven days a week.

The front of their house will face the school and their access will be through a turnaround circle in front of their home.

The underlying issue is that the church’s offer to buy the Yarbrough property doesn’t match what the Yarbroughs think they need to start anew somewhere else. A relative who has been in talks with the church said the sides are about $25,000 apart.

The Yarbrough’s home has four bedrooms and two baths and the last mortgage was paid off in 1991, according to Register of Deeds records.

They say they want a house of similar size in a neighborhood where they can feel as safe as they did when they had neighbors who watched out for them.

“I’m 79 years old, my health is failing, I don’t think I’ve got a whole lot longer to live,” John Yarbrough said. “All I’ve asked for since this first started out is just replace what I have now, so I don’t have a payment and don’t have to fix it up.”

Church leaders say they still want to continue negotiating with the Yarbroughs and buy their home before construction begins. They stress that their plan isn’t set in stone and the church is in the process of a feasibility study to determine whether it can be brought to completion.

“In this process, I think we could deal with this as neighbors, which is our desire,” said the Rev. James Billinger, the parish priest at Holy Savior. “That would be the entire parish’s desire, to go back and to do the things we need to do to negotiate. “

The Yarbroughs say they feel like they’ve been maneuvered into an untenable position by the church and the local government, because they didn’t get any warning as the subdivision plan – “replatting” in Planning Department jargon – moved quietly through City Hall.

Neither the Planning Commission nor City Council held a public hearing. Final approval was done through the “consent agenda,” a list of business items deemed so routine that they are all approved with a single vote at the weekly council meeting.

The tiny site map council members got in their background report was inaccurate and didn’t show the gap for the Yarbrough’s home in the boundary of the Holy Savior subdivision. And City Council members said they didn’t know there was any dispute when they approved the subdivision in January.

Council member Lavonta Williams, who represents the district, and Janet Miller, who represents the district next door, said they couldn’t talk about it in detail before investigating what happened.

Williams said she plans to speak with the Yarbroughs and Billinger to see if a solution can be worked out, while Miller said she plans to ask staff why the matter was treated as noncontroversial and why the Yarbroughs didn’t get a chance to be heard.

Willing to move

The Yarbroughs say they’re not against the school expansion and they’re willing to move to make way for it.

But when the church offered them $78,000 for their house, they toured homes in that price range with a Realtor retained by the church.

“They’re all fixer-uppers,” said Brenda Russell, the Yarbroughs’ daughter. “My parents, they’re too old for that.”

Russell, a former medical assistant, lives with her parents and is their primary caregiver. She works at Wal-Mart while studying to become a nurse.

She said she doubts her father could even survive a major construction project around the home, with the dust, asphalt fumes and sleep disruption it would bring.

John Yarbrough worked for 48 years as a Boeing Co. machinist.

Since then, he’s had two open-heart surgeries and a pacemaker implant, is on dialysis for kidney failure and has to use supplemental oxygen when he sleeps. After nearly passing out last week, he was again in cardiology treatment for a weakening heart muscle and leaking valve.

Cecial Yarbrough reared four children and worked a variety of jobs: elevator operator at Lewin’s Department Store, USD 259 school bus aide, sewing at Beech Aircraft and unboxing clothes at Casual Corner.

Now 72, she is nearly deaf and has had both her knees replaced. She underwent wrist surgery two weeks ago.

Before the church bought up the houses, the 1400 block of Chautauqua Avenue was typical of urban northeast Wichita. Some homes were dilapidated and abandoned. Others were occupied by owners or renters.

The Yarbrough house had been the largest and best-maintained on the block for decades.

It was built in 1941, a typical example of the two-bedroom, one-bath box houses hastily constructed to provide shelter for World War II aircraft factory workers.

The Yarbroughs bought the house in 1964. In 1979, they built a two-story addition with two more bedrooms, another bath and a family room.

John Yarbrough built the addition himself and pride still shines in his eyes when he talks about it.

“Me, my dad and a friend of mine, we did everything but the electrical and some of the plumbing parts,” he said.

He’s apologetic about minor repairs he’s let slide the past few years, because he didn’t want to put money into a house that would most likely be torn down.

Still open to negotiation

Across the street, Holy Savior officials say they’re trying to build something that will lift the whole northeast community.

Their plan would expand enrollment at Holy Savior Academy from 145 children to 325, including preschoolers.

It also would consolidate the school and the church – Wichita’s only predominantly African-American Catholic parish – on a single campus.

“The dream would be that the children would be on the church campus and this would be a place of obviously worship, but education and formation for children and adults, and a place of service also,” said Amy Pavlacka, a spokeswoman for the Diocese.

At present, the school is situated at 4640 E. 15th St., 1½ miles from the mother church. They have to bus children back to school after morning Mass, cutting into the school day.

The school is open to children of all faiths and serves a predominantly low-income area.

“Only a third of the children are Catholic children,” Billinger said. “The majority of the children are children in this neighborhood and this area of Wichita and different parts of Wichita.”

Church leaders thought the $78,000 offer was fair and in good faith.

They paid much less for most of the houses they bought. “Every one of those houses were in need of great repair,” Billinger said.

The most the church paid was $80,000 for a home that was on a larger piece of land.

“We cannot sometimes meet the price that was asked of the parish,” Billinger said. “There were a couple of proposals (with the Yarbroughs) and we would have liked to have negotiated that, and I think we’re still at a point where we want to negotiate.

“At no point in time would we want to be an unkind or irresponsible neighbor.”

Pavlacka said property expenditures have to be approved by the church Parish Council and Bishop Carl Kemme, who signs the planning applications as president of the Diocese.

Church members say they’re dismayed that the situation has made it look like they’re pushing around old and sick people.

“Holy Savior has a reputation as a very close, welcoming, open, family community and even in our interactions with our neighbors and the rest of the community,” Parish Council member Michelle Crigler said. “Why would we stop being neighborly and friendly and family oriented at this point?

“We’re still very much open to having these conversations” seeking a solution with the Yarbroughs, she said.

Pavlacka said the Yarbroughs wanting a comparable replacement home is “not unreasonable.”

“More than anything else, we want to be a good neighbor,” she said. “We’ve tried to be open in our communication and as transparent as we can be.”

Notice of the changes

As for the Yarbroughs getting no input or notice of the subdivision change and street vacation, church and city officials both said they did what the other told them to do.

Phil Meyer, vice president of the Baughman Co., the engineering firm that prepared the replat for the church, said he and a church volunteer “sat down with the city and showed them our development plans and what we wanted to do, asked them if they wanted us to go through the vacation process, or if this could be handled through the platting process.

“At that point in time, they told us this could be handled through the platting process,” he said. “We clearly told them at that meeting we did not own the Yarbrough property and that we did not own the property at the intersection of 14th and Chautauqua, so they were aware there were some gaps in this. I would tell you that the Diocese followed, met with the city and followed, the directions that they were given.”

Dale Miller, current plans manager for the Planning Department, said the city followed the church’s directions.

“We only react to plats submitted by the property owner,” he said. “They submit it to us, it’s not us telling them. In this case they did not own it (the Yarbrough property) so they platted it around the property.”

Miller vigorously defended not giving the Yarbroughs notice of the changes, saying that neither state law nor city code required individual notice to homeowners outside the plat boundary line.

Both the state and city have requirements for giving notice to interested parties when significant land-use changes are made.

But Miller said department policy is that individual notices don’t need to be sent to neighboring property owners for a replatting.

The city does require a “courtesy notice,” a posting of three or four yard-style signs around the property, saying that there’s a pending development application and giving the case number.

However, when plats are filed, the city requires applicants to make a written statement that they comply with Kansas Statute 12-512b, a state replatting law.

That law states, in part, that it’s only applicable where there’s a planning commission with subdivision regulations “and the regulations provide for the giving of notice to all persons having property rights or interests affected by the platting or replatting.”

Shown that language, Miller said “that’s a legal question” that he couldn’t answer.

In an ordinary street vacation case, the city requires notices to every property owner on the street segment being vacated. Where vacation creates a dead end, all property owners on the remainder of the street must be notified.

But Miller said that rule doesn’t apply when a street vacation is part of a replatting.

“The thought process is, it would be redundant,” Miller said.

Another key issue is whether the Yarbroughs have what the law calls as an “interest” in the church property. City code requires that all persons with “any record, title or interest” in a subdivision sign a letter consenting to replatting.

The Yarbroughs may have an interest in the church property, albeit a small one.

They hold an easement for a shared driveway, three feet on their side of the property line and three feet on the church’s side.

Meyer said he thinks only actual owners of the property need to sign off on replatting it.

“I would tell the Diocese today that this easement is valid and that upon redevelopment of this site, their driveway has every right and must stay in place to serve their property,” he said. “It does not require the signature of the Yarbroughs on the plat; it does require the Diocese to honor this driveway, in my opinion.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2015 at 5:05 PM with the headline "Church’s project may leave couple’s home between parking lots."