‘How do you sleep at night?’ No time, no help for those evicted from Morehead trailer park.
Shayna Plank is 10 years old. She has lived at the North Fork Mobile Home Park in Morehead for the past six years, most of her life, with her mother and sister as they tried to save up to buy a house. Instead they have been evicted by the site’s owner, Joanne Fraley, who wants to sell the property to Lexington developer Patrick Madden so he can build a strip mall at the I-64 exit. The residents have asked for more time and more compensation to uproot their lives by May 1, this Friday, and so far the answer from city and county officials and Fraley has been ... crickets.
So Shayna has a very good question for all of them: “How do you sleep at night?
“You are taking away our homes, our neighborhood,” Shayna wrote in a letter to the editor she sent us. “You are making families homeless. There are families who still have no place to go. When my friend Mindy (Davenport) is standing outside WalMart with a cup asking for money because she is homeless, where will you be? You have enough to spend a little more and do right by North Fork. You act like North Fork doesn’t matter.”
They act like the roughly 70 families of North Fork don’t matter because apparently they don’t. At least not to Fraley, who will make a few million off her property, not to Madden, who’s getting a sweet tax break on the deal and will make millions more, and not to Mayor Laura White-Brown and city council members who believe that more gas stations and restaurants beat out the concerns of their most vulnerable citizens.
That is the human side. Then there is the legal side, which thankfully is getting looked at by Ben Carter, senior litigator at the Kentucky Equal Justice Center in Louisville, who sent officials a 12-page letter pointing out numerous ways that Morehead officials failed to implement rules regarding evictions and the tax breaks called tax increment financing districts being used to prop up the development. According to Carter, the process failed to inform the residents, consider the outcome of their displacement and “multiple failures to meet basic statutory preconditions of holding a public hearing on the proposed development.”
He also pointed out that the TIF (tax increment financing) for the project returns 90 percent of taxes the project is estimated to create back to Madden for infrastructure costs.
“The statutes governing the creation of a local development area require the Council to find that this property would not be developed without tax increment financing. This property is one of four corners at the intersection of I-64 and Flemingsburg Road,” he wrote. “Somehow, the other three corners were developed into retail space without millions of dollars in tax giveaways. Why is it necessary here?
“Kentuckians don’t have to squint very hard to see the parallels between the coal industry’s extraction of wealth from eastern Kentucky and the City’s decision to prioritize the economic interests of a rich developer in Lexington over the physical safety and economic security of people living on the land. Tragically, it didn’t have to be an either/or.”
That’s true. This is a major black eye for all the power brokers involved, and it could have been solved so easily by the city, which could have required more resettlement money as part of the deal, or by Fraley who could have agreed to more time. City officials, knowing that most people no longer subscribe to newspapers, should have gone to every address in the park to make sure people knew what was coming.
Madden contends that he cannot interfere in the dealings between Fraley and her renters.
“I have found the Fraley’s, the sellers, to be reasonable people, and I am relying upon them to work with the tenants,” Madden said in a written statement. “The records of the public meetings of both the City and County will show that the proposed development complied with public hearings that were advertised in the newspaper, as well as on social media and were also live streamed. This was followed by a first and second reading of the ordinance as is required by Kentucky law.
“I am hopeful the current long-time landlord will work with the existing residents to find reasonable relocation opportunities for all involved.”
Fraley did not return calls for comment.
It’s also a big and deserved black eye for TIF programs and the corporate welfare they provide. We’ve written numerous times about state-approved TIFs and how little we know about whether they help the state, whether they provide jobs and economic benefits because the state has never required any study of the program. In addition, any locality can issue their own TIF, like this one in Morehead or the one used to help the Ark Park avoid property taxes in Grant County. No one even keeps track of how many local TIF projects there are.
Here’s one good outcome of the whole mess: Shayna Plank, aged 10, is turning into an activist against injustice in our state. “If I could get a lot of money I’d donate it to people losing their homes because of my experience,” she told me during a phone call from the apartment they now live in. “I’d like to lead these kinds of protests.”
In her letter, Plank disputes the idea that North Folk can be written off.
”Well, North Fork DOES matter,” she also wrote. “North Fork isn’t just a piece of land. North Fork is people, people who care about each other. North Fork is a woman eight months pregnant with a five-year-old girl and no money to move. North Fork is people who will not be silenced. You don’t want us to have power. But we are gaining power. We will rise up, and we will gain power.”
This story was originally published April 29, 2021 at 11:46 AM.
