Neighbors want a cleanup where landslide ruined house

For 12 years, residents of Regency Drive have lived with the knowledge that their homes are on shaky ground.

So shaky, it wrecked three homes. They were removed, and the land was taken over by the city as open space.

Well, mostly removed.

There is hardly a trace of two landslide-ruined houses. But the third haunts the neighborhood, southeast of The Broadmoor. The house was razed, but its asphalt driveway and concrete slab with protruding rebar remain, like some ghost of landslides past.

Over the years, the property has become a graveyard for railroad ties and other junk.

Neighbors are tired of the mess, the weeds in summer and the attractive danger the junk presents to children.

“I’m afraid kids are going to get hurt playing there,” said Steve Thompson, whose home overlooks the landslide zone.“Isn’t there something the city can do?”

No, actually.

“There’s nothing code enforcement can do about it,” said Ken Lewis, the top code cop. “There’s no building there anymore. Just a hole, basically. There’s nothing in the code about big holes.”

Lewis agrees the site presents a risk.

“It’s private property, and people need to keep their kids out of there,” Lewis said. Should anyone get hurt, he said, it’s a private matter.

“They’d have to sue the property owner,” Lewis said.

That would be Ken and Ann Garrison of Pueblo. And they aren’t eager for a lawsuit. They don’t even want the property, which is worthless now. In 1995, a jolt in the night turned their four-level, three-bedroom, three-bath hillside home into a mobile home.

“One night I was laying in bed and all of a sudden there was this gigantic pop that shook the entire house,” Ken Garrison said.

In the morning, he found the concrete slab had snapped.

“It literally split in half,” Garrison said, describing how half the house began inching down the hill, leaving the garage and family room behind.

A spate of landslides in the mid-1990s damaged about 100 area houses. The Federal Emergency Management Agency eventually gave the city $4.1 million to buy two dozen of the worst-damaged houses, including those on Regency.

Garrison didn’t wait for FEMA. He sued the developer, won a settlement and moved away in 1997. The amount of the settlement was not disclosed. The only problem is that he is stuck with the lot, which he promises to clean up. He says he probably will also build a fence around it.

“I’m going to take it down to the ground and get rid of the rebar and the railroad ties,” Garrison said. “I want to be a good neighbor.”

Or not. He’d rather give the land to the city as open space.

“They own the lot on either side of me,” he said. “Why not the one in the middle?”

The asphalt driveway and concrete foundation are the big issues, said Kurt Schroeder,

interim city parks director.

“We’d take it, but it would have to be cleaned up,” he said.

Garrison, who has continued to pay taxes on the land, is reluctant to spend the money demolition would cost.

“I would love to give it to the city,” he said. “The best thing for me to do is just build a fence around it.”

Tell me about your neighborhood: 636-0193 or bill.vogrin@gazette.com