Is DORA boost to commerce or nightmare for businesses?
A dream came true when my mother and I purchased the property in the middle of the Historic District of downtown Centerville 23 years ago. Even with six years of overseas deployments, The Cottage on South Main Street remained one of few reveries in my mind’s eye that brought me home from hell for a few brief moments. I imagined sitting at my rolltop desk, surrounded by antiques, providing wisdom and solace to my patients, with mortars and rockets and RPGS and the stench of war and burn pits choking the life out of us in the real world of the battlefield. The Cottage and my family were the only go to places in my head when certain death awaited.
The advent of Uptown Centerville has been a tremendous enhancement to the city of Centerville. There is no more perfect place to house a business or practice. I am forever grateful to everyone in the city administration, from Mayor Brooks Compton, to the Economic Development Administrator, Joey O’brien, and to the Centerville Police Department for maintaining such a magical place to work. I received a generous grant to repaint my office house from the Uptown Streetscapes
Program last year and a beautification award for my lush and overflowing English gardens in 2017. When I die, I hope it’s at my desk.
Ownership of the place of my greatest adoration has not been without its major problems. I have had to post four
“no trespassing signs,” two of them Sandy’s towing signs, to prevent those parking illegally in my parking lot, which is reserved for patients, not for five-ton trucks doing business elsewhere. People just refuse to read, even while parked feet or inches from these signs. People have dumped their ashtrays in my parking lot, vomited all over it, driven through my formal gardens, beaten my trees with a bat, trashed the property with everything that could be thrown out of the back of a vehicle, and slammed into my garage three separate times, costing a total of $16,000 in damages over the course of the last four or five years. The first time it was a ladder truck, the second, an ambulance, and the third, most likely an intoxicated driver behind the wheel of a box truck. Yes, Centerville generously paid the $1000 deductible for each hit after much ado, but the last strike was a middle of the night hit-and-skip.
The DORA concept has been met with considerable successes throughout Ohio in terms of economic development and
increased revenue, among them in Coshocton, Deerfield Twp., the cities of Springfield and Kent, and Montgomery County. There is no process in
place to disassemble them if they fail. And there is much more to deliberate than just the money a DORA will generate for any jurisdiction.
What Centerville has overlooked are the human factors inherent in the DORA proposal. As a business owner, I have already incurred considerable damage to my property to the tune of six figures. This will only be made far worse by open drinking areas that will generate more property damage, more trash and more crime.
Who is going to be responsible for trash cleanup and repairs of property damage? It is not the job of law enforcement to monitor intoxicated people urinating on porches or those tossing hordes of drinking cups in our yards. Some of us will have no choice but to upgrade security systems to record all the infractions to come. This is all about “man’s inhumanity to man” at a time when our humanity is rapidly slipping away. It is a tremendously sad fact that if one doesn’t own it, one doesn’t care about damaging or destroying it.
There is a new sign posted on my scarred garage. It reads: “If You Hit This, You Bought It. Your Vehicle and Tag Number are on Camera.” The future of those of us who own property along the new DORA will likely call for a side job after hours, loading others’ good times into trash bags. If there is some blissful way to compromise, my ears are wide open.