The Daily O’Collegian

An Oklahoma State University counseling psychology doctoral student had to move to make way for the Athletic Village.

Amy Luna was caught off guard when she found out in June 2007 that she needed to move out of Riverside Apartments.

“I came home from vacation one day and I had a note on my door saying that I needed to find another apartment,” Amy Luna said.

At the time she was working three jobs, so the prospect of adding another big issue to her life “threw off everything,” she said.

“Luckily, I located [another] apartment that day,” she said.

She described why her neighborhood in the 1100 block of North Knoblock Street was a popular place for students to rent houses.

“It was kind of rundown; that’s why students could afford to live there, but it wasn’t dangerous,” she said.

The neighborhood where she used to live is the site of OSU’s Athletic Village, which is part of the university’s Master Plan.

The sales on all but three of the 331 properties in the area OSU has bought north of Boone Pickens Stadium have been completed, said Gary Clark, former vice president and general counsel of OSU Foundation, which helped OSU buy the properties.

“We had several people who didn’t want to close until this year for tax reasons,” Clark said.

Clark works as a volunteer at the foundation to finish the transactions while he works as OSU’s vice president for university relations.

The Athletic Village is about 100 acres and borders Hall of Fame Avenue on the south, Washington Street on the west, Eskridge Place on the north and Duck Street on the east.

McElroy Road divides the area and has been used as a boundary for the first and second phases of the land acquisition, Clark said.

He said south of McElroy was considered Phase 1, which had a moving deadline of June 2006 and Phase 2, north of McElroy, with a deadline of June 2007.

After both phases of OSU land acquisition, the university has bought about 330 plots of land, including 30 that had owner-occupied homes on them, Clark said.

Through the OSU Foundation, Clark was a buying agent of the properties for the university, he said.

“The deed went from the seller directly to the Board of Regents,” he said. “So, the Foundation never was in the title.”

He worked closely with each seller and tried to make them all fair deals, he said.

“What we tried to do was to get a fair market appraisal and then to pay people, as best we could tell, about 10 percent more than the fair market value of the property,” Clark said.

For homeowners, a dislocation bonus was included, which was $300 for each year they lived in their house, Clark said.

The contract informed sellers that selling their properties to OSU was voluntary, but the university could go as far as using eminent domain to buy the properties, according to the Agreement for Sale of Real Estate.

The only case of eminent domain was the one the Board of Regents made against Kevin and Joel McCloskey, McCloskey Brothers Inc., for their property at 616 W. Connell Ave., Clark said.

Harlan Hentges, the McCloskey’s attorney, said the brothers’ case, Board of Regents v. McCloskey Brothers Inc., wasn’t unique because every property owner fell under the threat of eminent domain.

“[The McCloskeys] responded to the situation differently,” Hentges said.

In November 2006, District Court Judge Donald Worthington found $84,000 to be fair compensation to the McCloskeys for their property after a group of real estate agents, Jack Allred, Gene Boyce and Peggy Pickens, appraised the property, according to court dockets.

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The Board of Regents challenged that amount and extended the case, Hentges said.

“The $84,000 was never available to the McCloskeys,” he said.

The trial is at the Oklahoma Supreme Court level and Hentges is writing an appeals brief, which is due June 2, to try to get the McCloskeys their money, he said.

Kevin McCloskey said Joel and he aren’t in an enviable position with this case.

“Nobody else wants to be us,” McCloskey said.

The Board of Regents is wasting its time and money on a simple issue, he said.

“We’re not the holdouts; [the Board of Regents] is holding this thing up,” he said.

RESIDENTS (needs subhed)

Public notices of OSU’s interest in buying land came through notices from Cinnabar Service Co., a land acquisition contractor OSU used for about six months, in November 2005.

After Cinnabar sent its notices, a series of Campus Master Plan forums were held at the Alumni Center. A series of town meetings were held at the Stillwater Public Library from mid-November to February where residents vented their frustration and expressed confusion.

“This process got off to a rocky start, no question about it and that’s partly understandable because you’re talking about a change to a lot of people’s expectations,” Clark said.

Elizabeth Doyel, a resident who has yet to sell her property, made it to a few of the meetings at the Alumni Center and the library. She said the meetings at the Alumni Center were packed with people who whose houses and properties weren’t at stake.

“You have big, burly football, wrestling and basketball coaches and baseball coaches sitting down in there and you have 87-year-old residents at these community meetings that had to stand in the back,” Doyel said.

She said she urged the officials at the meetings to treat the residents with respect and honor the homeowners who had to sell.

Dan Ferguson, a foreman at the OSU Physical Plant, lived on North Ramsey Street in Phase 1 for about 10 years, raising a family and fixing up his house.

“We bought a home there; we made it nice,” Ferguson said. “It took us many, many years to make it nice. We had four kids; one of them is going to OSU.

“So anyway, I can’t say I was thrilled about it. I kind of saw it as inevitable; not much I could do about it.”

He said he got a fair price on his house.

At the town meetings, Cinnabar talked about making offers to every owner by March 1, 2006 and about using eminent domain as a last resort.

The way the company presented information and negotiated with residents was too forward at times, Clark said.

“They (Cinnabar) were only involved from about November (2005) through June (2006) and from then on I did all the negotiations and such,” Clark said. “And, I think we were able to calm things down considerably.”

Armando Contardi, OSU’s music coordinator at the Seretean Center, lived at Bellis Street and McElroy Road from 1992 to September 2006.

The news OSU wanted to buy his property along with the others in his neighborhood caught him off guard, Contardi said.

“It came as a shock to me because I’d heard nothing of what was going on until I read it in a newspaper,” he said. “Then, we were called to a meeting down at the library where a lot of other people were in shock, also.

“I don’t think the university did a very good public relations thing, personally.”

Contardi and his wife, Barbara, were satisfied with the result, though.

They got a fair price for their house plus a dislocation bonus of about $4,200, he said.

When Contardi heard about Pickens’ donation to OSU athletics, he was ambivalent, he said.

“It was a good donation, really; it was his money,” Contardi said.

Residents weren’t the only people involved with the sales.

Harry Marton, of Harry Marton Realtors, was an agent for Contardi and five other sellers who owned about 100 living units during OSU’s land acquisition, Marton said.

He said people weren’t happy at first with having to sell but came around to the idea.

“But once, they learned the story, what was going on and received offers and stuff, I know of not one person that wasn’t pleased with the way they were treated,” Marton said.

STUDENTS

Apartment complexes in the area, such as Riverside (24 units) and Patio Club (45 units) housed many students.

Students share Luna’s sentiments of having a convenient place to live that was a five- to 10-minute walk to campus.

One OSU student had to move out of rented properties in the area twice.

Kate Rinehart, a hotel and restaurant administration senior, lived in the Patio Club Apartments and described it as “basically a big, brick box just right across (Hall of Fame Avenue) from the stadium.”

Rinehart said the location on Scott Avenue was convenient to campus. She split with a roommate a monthly $530 rent payment, utilities and Internet fees were included.

She said she noticed something weird was happening when she had to start paying rent to OSU.

“We had the notice saying that you’re gonna have to start paying your rent to OSU and we had to pay it to our bursar,” she said.

Clark said once OSU owned the Patio Club, payments were made to the university.

By the end of May 2006, Rinehart and her roommate found a house on Tyler Avenue, which was in Phase 2, she said.

“Our landlady told us that she wasn’t going to sell it to OSU for at least five more years, so we’d be fine,” Rinehart said.

However, Rinehart’s landlady, Norma Jean Shamblin, informed her soon after Rinehart moved in that the house had been sold to OSU, Rinehart said. By August 2006, she found a place in the 200 block of South Duncan Street that was away from any potential campus construction that Shamblin also owned, she said.

Shamblin said she thinks Rinehart was a little confused about the situation.

“We accepted that we had to sell and we worked it out with them (the OSU Foundation),” Shamblin said.

She also said she was fairly compensated for her two properties in the area, but not everything could be replaced.

“You cannot replace the location; it’s just not possible,” she said.

Blayne Prine, an electrical engineering senior, was another tenant at Patio Club Apartments whose lease was going to be up in May 2006. He was looking forward to staying in his conveniently located apartment, he said.

OSU should have considered other options for the expansion, he said.

“I think that it would have been more beneficial if [the land] had been for classrooms or something,” Prine said

He said he thinks the athletic department will be the only beneficiary.

“I personally don’t see how it’s going to be that much of a benefit to the community,” he said.

MOVE THAT HOUSE fact box

Dennis Beyl, owner of Beyl-Davenport House Moving Co., described the main steps to moving a house.

• Estimate the weight of the house by sight to determine the number of beams needed to run under the house.

• Break through the houses to run the beams. This is done either with a sledgehammer or hydraulic hammer.

• Some houses need to be jacked up depending on how low they sit. This is done with a hydraulic dolly.

• Once the house is lifted, timbers are stacked under the perimeter to keep the house lifted.

• The moving truck then backs in to load the house with pulleys and other rigging.