Neighbors of new condos want some privacy back

Upset mobile home residents on Jeepers Drive, who fear the green space and privacy they've always enjoyed may be going the way of the dinosaurs, aren't adjusting well to their recent change in scenery.

Twenty-six residents of the 40-unit mobile home community off Bayshore Drive sent a petition to East Naples leaders, developers and engineers for the Botanical Place condominium project last month.

Jeepers Drive resident Elizabeth Buckingham wrote a letter attached to the petition asking that a privacy fence be constructed between their backyards and a proposed walkway, which will be built between the two properties. The walkway will allow anyone to access nearby Sudgen Park from Bayshore Drive.

Buckingham and her neighbors fear those using the walkway will be able to peer into their backyards and might prompt people to steal things from their yards.

"We've just been going through so much with that development behind us," Buckingham said, referring to Botanical Place. "Our backyard is our privacy. We're going to have no privacy whatsoever."

In addition to walkway worries, residents on Jeepers Drive said the view they enjoy has been transformed into a wall of garages, which in her letter Buckingham refers to as "the Great Wall of China."

Photo by DAVID AHNTHOLZ, Daily News

Workers unload tiles on the roof of a Botanical Place condo building behind mobile homes on the south side of Jeepers Drive on Friday morning. Some residents along Jeepers Drive say the new development has destroyed their view and are asking local civic leaders for a privacy fence.

Responding to residents' walkway concerns, Phil McCabe, developer of Botanical Place, said it has always been his plan to put a hedge between the Jeepers backyards and the walkway. The hedge, he said, will be about 3 feet tall when it is planted and would grow to about 6 feet before construction on the walkway begins.

"They're not going to see anything," McCabe said. "We want to divide ourselves from them too, and this is a better solution than anything else."

The paved walkway will be paid for jointly by Botanical Place developers, the Collier County Parks and Recreation Department and the Bayshore/Gateway Triangle Community Redevelopment Agency, a group managing community tax dollars to try to improve Bayshore Drive and neighborhoods along Shadowlawn Drive.

Jeepers resident Ron Fongemie, an advocate of the privacy fence suggestion, said he would be satisfied with a hedge blocking backyards from the boardwalk. Still, Fongemie said he wishes something could be done to restore residents' formerly green views.

"No matter how rich or how poor we are, we all like to have our own little pot of gold," he said. "You can't stop (development), but we all would like to hang onto what we've got."

David Jackson, executive director of the CRA, said residents will need to get used to the fact that progress is popping up around them.

"These letters pop up when people live in an area where there's nobody around them, and as soon as somebody moves in around them, they have a different perspective of what their property might be," Jackson said.

"You find that people have a different perspective now that somebody has developed a property, that they had the right to develop, after a long period of time of having nothing there."

One perspective shared by many Jeepers residents is that runoff water from Botanical Place, which sits at a higher elevation than Jeepers Drive, flooded their neighborhoods last summer. And with the rainy season fast approaching, residents fear things can only get worse.

"Last year, all the water flowed into my backyard and destroyed all of my grass," Buckingham said. "I have three white dogs, and they were out in all of that black, muddy yuck.

"The whole thing has been nothing but a pain."

McCabe acknowledged there were some stormwater drainage issues early on in the project's construction, which resulted in the destruction of one Jeepers resident's air-conditioning unit. McCabe replaced the man's unit, and said he has since corrected all drainage issues.

"We are designed to deal with 100 percent of our storm water internally," he said. "It's all managed on-site, and it goes into the preserve area in the middle of our property.

"It's doing what it was designed to do."

With the walkway controversy seemingly resolved, and loud construction at Botanical Place nearly completed, residents and developers hope they will be able to live together harmoniously in the future.

"I think it's going to be great," County Commissioner Donna Fiala said, regarding the future walkway.

"I don't know why anyone would be against it."