PERRY: Making holes for Dunkin’ Donuts could bring concrete improvements

If you want to see how real progress gets undone, just look to Aurora city hall.

As you read this, the chance to clean up one of the city’s festering eyesores and public safety blunders is about the evaporate.

I’m talking about the old Johnny’s Diner on the southeast corner of East Iliff Avenue and South Havana Street. It’s easy to look the other way from the shuttered, shabby fast-food-a-teria. In its heyday as a diner, it was funky. Now, it’s nasty. And because some previous dolt in the city allowed the thing to be built with no sidewalk on the north perimeter, along Iliff, it’s actually dangerous. The problem is, it could easily stay this way if things don’t go right in a plan to turn it into a Dunkin’ Donuts shop.

And this isn’t the only place in Aurora where good things won’t get better because rules are rules.

If you haven’t noticed big changes along Havana Street during the past few years, you haven’t been there. Since the Havana Business Improvement District was created in 2007, Aurora’s long, worrisome boulevard has made a huge turnaround. It’s cleaner, busier, more inviting and has throngs of cool, sustainable businesses. That wasn’t the case not very long ago. After the failure of Buckingham Square Mall, bad things got worse. What was seen as a long, derelict strip of car dealerships and boarded up strip malls, pretty much was.

Since then, Buckingham has been replaced by The Gardens on Havana, a miraculous transformation. That’s helped spread success up and down the boulevard, creating a bustling, attractive landscape that even boasts public art instead of public nuisances. Right or wrong, I’m not alone in crediting much of the success to Havana BID chief Gayle Jetchick, who is to Havana Street in Aurora what Dana Crawford was to Larimer Square in Denver. Sure there are lots of people who’ve worked hard to push Havana away from the edge of becoming the metro-area’s longest ghetto, but the Mayor of Havana Street deserves the crown. Business by business, parcel by parcel, virtually brick by brick, Jetchick and others have made the strip brighter at night, busier during the day and a place Aurora residents and others want to go to instead of drive past.

The effort has been so successful, that the vacancy rate of existing retail space is almost nothing. Even marginal properties like the old Johnny’s Diner has piqued the interest of entrepreneurs.

But the quintessential push and pull between neighbors and businesses may undo a chance at bringing Dunkin’ Donuts, or anything desirable, to the funky corner of Havana and Iliff. You probably didn’t know this because few people here actually walk or ride a bike, and even fewer do it in that part of town, but there is no sidewalk for about 100 feet east of the intersection on the south side of Iliff. Let’s say, just for grins, you were either poor, health conscious or just curious, so you wanted to walk on the south side of Iliff up to Havana, and cross the street. If the parking lot at Johnny’s was full, you would have to snuggle up to the hoods of those cars and face possible death being whacked by a motorist in the right lane of Iliff, because you would have no place else to go. It’s beyond stupid, it’s perilous.

So how does stupid stuff like this get fixed in Aurora? Often, it just doesn’t. And plenty of times when it does, it gets paid for by businesses, who trip improvement requirements when they expand or move in. That’s the case here. Anyone who would argue that there’s no need to fix this sidewalk problem is an idiot. Local neighborhood activists and Councilwoman Molly Markert want the sidewalk fixed. But plans for the Dunkin’ Donuts call for only cosmetic changes to the site, which don’t evoke the “time-to-fix-big-expensive-stuff” requirement. Besides, the parking lot is so small that a sidewalk addition would push the parking spaces back so far that it would prevent the drive-thru lane needed to make the Dunkin’ Donuts shop possible. See where this is going? So the new owner would have to just delete those parking places, which would then put the shop in violation of the city’s parking allotment requirements. So maybe all that could be worked out, but Dunkin’ Donuts owner Buzz Calkins’ prize for trying to improve one of Havana’s stubborn trouble spots? A whopping tab of several thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. While you may think that Dunkin’ Donuts kings live the life in raised glazed castles, I speak with authority when I tell you that donut shop profit margins are slim. Calkins didn’t tell us if he would just love to peel off thousands of dollars to make his plan hard to work with, but I’m guessing he and others looking at the site will say “no” and “hell, no” when confronted with the prospects. And while things have gotten better on Havana Street, this isn’t Fist Avenue in Cherry Creek North, folks. That sad little old broken down burger joint and sidewalk from hell are going to be there a long time if this doesn’t work out.

I’m not saying “right” is letting Calkins into the property without the sidewalk being fixed. It’s an atrocity that it hasn’t been fixed sooner. I’m saying, Calkins shouldn’t have to pay, or not pay all. That’s what the government is for. It’s not his fault a previous Aurora administration created something so irresponsible for all residents, and especially handicapped ones. And there’s no question it must be fixed. So rather than everyone digging in to say that “it just isn’t done this way” because it just hasn’t been, Aurora needs to have a procedure and funds to fix things when they must get fixed. The city must make become more flexible in places like this and create exceptions to parking requirements to allow a real, working, needed business into that deteriorating building, and it must fix the sidewalk.

Of course the alternative would be a real, funded urban renewal district, where the city would pay dearly to condemn, purchase, raze and rehab property, and then turn the parcels over to developers with all kinds of rules.

That’s not going to happen. So why not give something else a try?

Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com