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Just a short walk down a gravel road, Diana Fisher found morel-hunting paradise. Rolling hills folded into wet ravines, where the prized mushrooms prospered.

That was 23 years ago. The morels are gone; so are the ravines. They have been bulldozed and filled in for development. At the moment, Fisher would just as soon be gone from the area, too. The bucolic views from her renovated farmhouse have been replaced by the taupe and cream and tan houses of contemporary residential enclaves. The two-lane gravel has been paved to four lanes with loopy curves and green spaces. It is Urbandale’s 142nd Street, an almost elegant tip of the hard hat to contemporary engineering and design.

It won’t win any kudos from Fisher and her husband, Rick, who have been transported from their piece of paradise to a growing neighborhood without lifting a foot.

Instead, the Fishers are paying the price of progress, and they’re not alone.

Property owners take the tax man to court

In Urbandale and Indianola, city officials are being called to court over the way they assess property owners for street repairs, especially the costly face lifts that transform lazy gravel roads and battered asphalt streets into smooth thoroughfares capable of handling increased traffic volumes brought on by growth.

All of that growth comes with a price tag measured in large dollars and, recently, controversy. When the price tag is passed along to individual homeowners, it forces sometimes grim choices.

Rick Fisher is building concrete pads for satellite dishes in Mehtar Lam, Afghanistan, to pay his $30,000 share of the progress winding outside his front door in Urbandale.

Lynette Thornton, another Urbandale resident, has been told that her home might “not be viable as a single-family residence” by city officials who plan to widen 156th Street and Douglas Parkway. At the least, she will get a new address, again without lifting a foot, if the city reroutes her driveway from Douglas to 156th. At worst, she will be forced to sell her home to pay the $38,000 preliminary assessment for the project. She is a plaintiff in a lawsuit expected to be filed Monday that challenges the special assessments for the $6.7 million project.

“I wanted to hang on to my home, but not at any cost,” Thornton said of her nine-year struggle with the city over all aspects of the project. During that time, she has raised two kids and gone through a divorce.

In Indianola, Phil and Linda Gray have been told they could split their nearly three-acre lot to help pay for an assessment that will turn a gravel road to concrete in order to accommodate traffic for a new school. At the moment, the Grays are facing a $24,700 assessment to pay their share of the paving. That amount could decline when final bids are submitted.

None of this came without warning, but it still arrived like a nightmare delivered by a bulldozer clawing through a peaceful night.

Planners, grab your Flint Formula

Take the time to read a comprehensive development plan and you’ll find the hints of a city planner’s wishful thinking or outright declaration about the future of many of this area’s roads.

But those documents don’t ease the shock of an official notice from City Hall that foretells a withering of your savings account due to a “special benefit” that will result from the paving of your street. Special benefit suggests that, thanks to the street work, you and your property will prosper sometime down the road. The term special benefit is codified in state law and local ordinances and finds its root in something called the Flint Formula, a calculation whose origins may well be buried in a time capsule under the first mud street transformed into a hard-surface road.

I sit here and I think to myself, ‘The city is supposed to be working for us, we elected them, we pay them. But they’re just not working for us.’ – Diana Fisher, Urbandale resident

Its spirit, though, is very much alive.

The Flint Formula is the basis for virtually every special assessment project in the state. It provides a measure of special benefit that gives court-approved comfort to city engineers and planners and elected officials. In short, it provides a measure for assessment areas that includes property frontage and a depth to 300 feet or halfway to the first parallel street. By the formula, land that fronts the project receives a greater benefit, and a pricier assessment, than land that is a football field away.

“From an engineering standpoint, it’s a pretty good quantitative measure of determining special benefit,” said Greg Taylor, extension specialist in Iowa State University’s department of community and regional planning.

In Urbandale, a modified version of the Flint Formula resulted in recent preliminary assessments for the reconstruction of 1.5 miles of 156th Street that ranged from $60 to $140,000. Some of those assessments will be challenged in a lawsuit. The Urbandale City Council has decided to discuss the city’s approach to assessing street projects during a Feb. 8 work session.

Mike Carver, one of the city council members who promoted the idea of revisiting the city’s assessment policy, isn’t convinced a change is needed.

“I think that the plan we’ve used to date has worked,” Carver said. “I’m not suggesting that we start over and come up with something new.”

But he does recognize that as the city’s population fills in the wide open spaces of its western frontier, the large properties that incur large assessments might provide a new challenge.

“How do you develop a consistent policy that might provide other criteria that you would look at as you make the assessments?” Carver said. “Frankly, I don’t have the answer.”

In Indianola, where the city has been sued by 18 property owners along West Euclid Avenue over assessments ranging to about $25,000 to pave their patch of gravel, Mayor Jerry Kelley thought he had found an answer several years ago.

Can there be life without special assessments?

Kelley, who has been mayor since 1995, wanted to develop a capital improvement budget that relied solely on property taxes, not assessments. The city’s bond attorneys warned that a proliferation of lawsuits would result because nearly 31 percent of all private land in the college town is tax-exempt. However, those properties, such as Simpson College and the new elementary school that led to the Euclid Avenue project, can be assessed for improvements.

Instead, Indianola is in court after it followed the Flint Formula and even deviated from it a bit to accommodate larger properties, say those in excess of one acre.

“The City Council made the decision early on that the assessments on this road would be handled with as much community support as possible because a community building made them necessary,” Kelley said.

That support dwindled during an acrimonious public hearing.

“I don’t know of an assessment project where the person receiving the assessment thinks it’s the right amount,” Kelley said. “I don’t care whether it’s Johnston or Urbandale or me.”

For some, special benefit clouds the future

Phil Gray admits he stirred the pot a little at the public hearing.

“We felt like we were just getting run over by a big steamroller,” said Gray, 65, a semi-retired manufacturer of hot-air balloons and their components. He cannot pull his $24,700 preliminary assessment out of a hat.

Gray and his wife, Linda, are mulling over whether they should split off two parcels from their almost three acres and sell them to pay the assessment. That would mean they’d have to share the property they bought 31 years ago and the view from the house Phil built.

“This isn’t how I envisioned things,” he said.

“They’ve acted like we’ve bought this speculating and that sort of thing,” Linda Gray said. “And we didn’t.”

She concedes that the city was faced with a tough choice, too.

“I don’t want to make the city or anyone else out to be the bad guy,” she said. “I’m not unhappy with what they did. We still have our deer and our squirrels. It’s just closing in. It’s just so unreasonable.”

And it’s the shocking price of development to accommodate community growth that stunned Urbandale’s Rick and Diana Fisher.

“They were taking away our retirement,” she said about her reaction when she received notice of a $33,000 preliminary assessment to pave 142nd Street along her 3.5-acre property.

The Fishers filed a lawsuit in February 2005 challenging the special benefit that the city maintained they would receive from the paving project. They dropped the lawsuit several months later after the city agreed to pay a total of $26,000 to reroute their driveway, build a retaining wall along the street and save a sycamore tree that stood between the Fishers and the encroaching roadway.

Rick Fisher, a bricklayer by trade, did all the work. “We about broke even on that,” Diana Fisher said.

Where they didn’t break even was on a simple way to pay the final assessment of $30,000, which would grow to $45,000 if the Fishers used all 15 years allowed by Iowa law to pay the tax bill.

The Fishers, both age 60, stopped work in 1995 on an addition to their home when they first got wind of impending changes for 142nd Street. They were afraid the realigned road would come through the house. Today, the addition is under a vaulted roof, but the new kitchen is bare of all appliances and the family room is floored with plywood.

Rick Fisher was recruited to work in Afghanistan by EMW Inc., a communication and information technology company based in Herndon, Va., after the couple found out they could not sell part of their property to pay off the assessment – the city would not allow the property to be split until the assessment was paid.

“I sit here and I think to myself, ‘The city is supposed to be working for us, we elected them, we pay them. But they’re just not working for us,'” Diana Fisher said.