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By Tricia Hall\nThe Truth Reporter<\/p>\n
By Tricia Hall
\nThe Truth Reporter<\/p>\n
The Dorr Street Coalition hold a community conversation on Monday, April 18, that invited Sandy Spang, the former Mott Branch Library\u2019s new owner and Tom Gibbons to address community concerns that impact Dorr Street. The discussion was held at Jerusalem Baptist Church.<\/p>\n
Once the meeting opened, the first topic on the agenda was the request for information process that led to the sale of the former Mott Branch Library to Compassion Health. Sandy Spang, City of Toledo Commissioner of Business Services opened this portion of the conversation. The City of Toledo had opened a request for proposals to select a nonprofit that would eventually purchase the former Mott Branch Library. According to sources from previous Dorr Street meetings, the applications were reviewed and the approval recommendations shared with Toledo City Council, which were ultimately confirmed. The application and approval process has become controversial in the past few weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have tried to call you several times. I have a nonprofit that was going to buy the building because I thought it was going to be a cash sale,\u201d shared Larry Sykes, former city councilman.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to speak on and correct some matters about Mott Branch. We started talking about the new Mott Branch while we were inside the old Mott Branch, this happened back in 2016 not in 2019. There wasn\u2019t a public meeting or publications, but it was myself, Yvonne Harper and Tyrone Riley. Let\u2019s keep the facts straight,\u201d explained Theresa Gabriel, former City Council member.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a concern. Anytime that the city has a transaction, we must have a meeting with the current residents of Dorr Street. We need to ask them, is this what you want in your community. We missed the mark on this. When this was presented to City Council, I voted no, because we did not have a conversation with the community. Now, here we are back-peddling and trying to fix it. We got to do better. City Council knew when we voted to fix the Frederick Douglass Center, that they wanted to have a medical facility within the Center,\u201d shared Cerssandra McPherson, current City Council member.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe building is in excellent condition, Compassion Health committed to invest $500,000 and the application was evaluated by the committee. I\u2019m sure that there were conversations before 2019, but the former Mott Branch Library was received by an ordinance in 2019. The RFP was transparent and public, because anyone could participate,\u201d shared Spang.<\/p>\n
The second portion of the community conversation invited Anne Ruch, PhD, CEO of Commission Health Toledo to publicly address the community following the controversy surround the former Mott Branch Library RFP process. Compassion Health Toledo has operated at 1638 Broadway Street as a nonprofit for five years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see and hear your pain. I emphasis with you. I worked for ProMedica a lot of years ago and it bothered me when I would hear the person answering the phone ask about insurance, as their first question. I work with pregnant women, and would hear them say, \u2018call back when you have insurance.\u2019 Women in this community, black women and poor women need access to care. Got put it on my heart because I knew it wasn\u2019t right. I wanted to stand up, so I purchased the building on Broadway about five years ago. Everyone that works at that location, see their job as a ministry. Either they aren\u2019t paid or paid very little. I saw the request for proposals in the Blade and people even called me and said that I was doing good work. I applied and was surprised when the committee wanted to talk to me and next thing I knew, we got it,\u201d shared Ruch.<\/p>\n
\u201cWould Compassion Health consider creating an urgent care or doing right by the Frederick Douglas Center to create an urgent care. That\u2019s what this neighborhood is missing,\u201d asked David Ross.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy experience is that urgent care doesn\u2019t provide good care, but in reference to the Frederick Douglass, I would be thrilled to work with anybody.\u00a0 In reference to the radio station, when we sent in our proposal to the committee, we had an architect render drawings. Deborah and her group also had an architect too, but we both wanted to use the same areas of the building. When Sandy Spang called me and said that there was a strong recommendation that we include the radio station. I said, \u2018would love to.\u2019 The problem happened when both of us wanted to use the same space,\u201d explained Ruch.<\/p>\n
The final portion of the community conversation focused on the newly approved Dollar General on the corner of Dorr and Upton.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe process of the Dollar General began back in 2017, when the area was rezoned. In 2021, Dollar General wanted to place a store location there which was considered a minor site planning review. The code doesn\u2019t require a public hearing but we had a public hearing on August 12, 2021. Notices were sent to 20 individuals, plus a sign was posted. No one showed up to the meeting,\u201d explained Thomas Gibbons, director of Plan Commission.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn May 8, 2020, Councilman Riley had a moratorium on Dollar Stores, because they wanted to build one on the old St. Theresa site. The word got back to him and he partnered with Councilwoman Harper to find out why were they coming in the community. The St. Theresa site was blocked because the community was aware and got involved. I don\u2019t know how this happened, but Dorr and Upton was kept secret. You can call it what you want, but it doesn\u2019t take a rocket scientist to figure out, that they didn\u2019t want to the community to know. So, we don\u2019t have a repeat of Dorr and Smead. A moratorium was from May to December in 2020, four new council members were brought on and three months later this moratorium expired. I serve District 1, no one mentioned this to me. We were never alerted to anything. We got new councilmembers on deck that don\u2019t know nothing, let\u2019s slip everything past them. Now this comes up. Nothing was said. Friday and Saturday, my phone is going crazy, people asking me how do you not know what\u2019s going on in your district. I\u2019m making phone calls and no one knows what is going on. This is not about you, Mr. Gibbons, you\u2019ve been nothing but kind to me. But now that a store is going up next to another store, now they want to keep up aware,\u201d explained John Hobbs III, City of Toledo District 1 councilman.<\/p>\n
For information about the Dorr Street Coalition, contact Suzette Cowell, founder and CEO of Toledo Urban Federal Credit Union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Tricia Hall The Truth Reporter The Dorr Street Coalition hold a community conversation on Monday, April 18, that invited Sandy Spang, the former Mott Branch Library\u2019s new owner and Tom Gibbons to address community concerns that impact Dorr Street. The discussion was held at Jerusalem Baptist Church. Once the meeting opened, the first topic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[118],"class_list":["post-4904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4906,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4904\/revisions\/4906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4904"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=4904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}