Stroke foundation pulls heartstrings but angers neighbors

The plain exterior of the American Stroke Foundation's house at 8700 Lamar belies the bucolic feel of the inner compound. Sculpted gardens and paved paths surround the house. A pool and cabana lie steps below vast glass windows looking out onto a patio. The interior of the house is open, well-appointed, and comfortable.

Looking out the back windows of the house, founder Shirley Rose says the house was a necessity to her organization's mission. "We needed a place where people would not feel like they were going back into the hospital," she says. "We wanted to have a home in a residential neighborhood to make the people feel as comfortable as possible. People come out of hospitals and rehabilitation centers, and the last thing they want to feel is like they are going back into an institutional setting. We teach them and help them to readjust to their homes. A real house was the most practical way to do that."

Rose lives in the neighborhood not far from the center. She and fellow neighbor Larry Winn, who acted as an attorney for the foundation and is part of the powerful business and development law firm Polsinelli White Vardeman and Shalton, both looked at four or five houses in Johnson County. The foundation failed to win approval for houses in Leawood and Prairie Village before settling on the house in Overland Park.

They never bargained on the problems Rose Grimes and some very vocal neighbors have caused the foundation.

Grimes, other neighbors, and some city councilmembers say the rules were bent for the foundation. No one, they say -- except the powerful Rose, whose late husband Stan Rose founded Sun Publications -- would be able to get a permit to operate the foundation in an area zoned for single family residences. Now that the city council perverted the permitting process for Rose, Grimes fears it could happen again -- next time bringing commercial enterprises into the neighborhood. Such moves would deteriorate property value, residential ambience, and a sense of community in the area.

Business is businessGrimes sits at the dining room table in her home, a block from the foundation, where she runs a licensed for-profit child day care business. The table before her is stacked with Overland Park City Council meeting minutes, city planning documents, city ordinances, and correspondence on the subject. Just behind her, in the kitchen, stands a half-size breakfast table -- "for half-pints," she says. Outside, in the backyard, is child-size patio furniture and a playground, complete with soft mulch surrounding the equipment and railroad ties outlining the area.

From the dining room table, Grimes and her husband, Alan, helped rally neighbors to speak out against the foundation's presence. The Grimeses say neighbors working together drew 100 to 150 people to city council meetings on the permitting for the foundation in February, August, and November 1999. They believe increased traffic, use other than single family residential, and the exception made for the foundation will change the area irrevocably.

Rose counters that many neighbors have businesses in their homes and that no one says anything about them. She says she and her husband ran what was to become Sun Publications "from our home in Prairie Village for 12 years, and no one said anything about it."

Grimes agrees. "But none of them is saying they are something they are not, and all of them are within the law. No one has asked the city to bend the rules for them," she says. Those home-based businesses, including hers, follow all the rules, pay their business taxes, and need no special zoning. One business in particular, a directory publishing business, grew to the point where it had three employees. Parking became an issue, Grimes says, as did the employees' presence. The business was forced to move out of the neighborhood to a commercial location.

"That's only right," says Alan Grimes. "They were big enough to have outgrown their home-type business. Neighbors complained to them, then the city told them they had to move."

Overland Park city councilmember Kris Kobach says conflict between the foundation and the neighbors began almost two years ago, when Rose acquired the property. "The first real sparks started flying in government halls when we had to decide on something that was a nonresidential use in a residential area," he says. "They came before the council in November 1998 and in August 1999, where we voted a special use permit. We had to have a supermajority."

Overland Park allows residents within 200 feet of a special use permit applicant to submit a protest petition. If signed by a majority of the surrounding residents, the petition forces the city council to have eight of 10 votes to approve the permit. It is a tool, says Kobach, also a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, "that allows neighbors to protect their neighborhood from development it may not want or need but that the city sees fit to allow."

In this case, the city council's planning committee recommended the American Stroke Foundation have the special use permit. The neighbors' petition forced the city council to have the supermajority, which the foundation could not muster. The foundation then applied for a residential day care permit, which requires only simple majority approval from the city council.