MIDVALE — One day soon, Pearl Meibos plans to gather her neighbors and friends together, whip up "a drink with a little parasol in it," set up some lawn chairs and watch the walls come down.
The 50-year-old businesswoman is euphoric. It has been more than a decade since she and her family began their legal battle against Hermes Associates over a Family Center development at Fort Union that replaced the trees and bushes surrounding their Croxford family home with blank walls and fences, imprisoning the one-acre plot on three sides.
On two sides, the brick walls are more than 25 feet high.
Third District Judge Tyrone Medley ruled last week that the walls violated the law and, one way or another, had to go. An order detailing how exactly that will happen is on the way.
"It really puts a spring in your step," Meibos said.
Hermes attorney Mark Morris said an appeal "is certainly an option my client is strongly considering." The appeal, however, can address only the remedy — the Utah Supreme Court has already ruled that Hermes must make up to the family in some way. Morris said a more equitable option would be to pay the family money damages rather than force the company to take down the walls, a wildly expensive solution.
Meibos and her sister, Alayna Culbertson, who lives in the larger of the two homes on the property, could have urged Medley to order Hermes to pay them a lot of money rather than tear the walls out. But they may be getting a lot of money anyway (legal action on trespass, nuisance and water-rights deprivation claims is still pending) and in any case, for Meibos, nothing — not even a thick wad of hundreds waved in her face — will equal the feeling of seeing those walls tumble to the ground.
The walls constitute the back side of Ross Dress for Less, Bed Bath & Beyond and Mr. Mac stores, and it may be that the entire buildings will have to be reduced to rubble. Meibos acknowledges that the heavy cost to Hermes is sweet revenge.
"They just devastated our family," she said of Hermes. "There didn't seem to be anything they weren't willing to do. . . . After so many years it turned into this need to right a wrong. The county and Hermes had broken the law and then just trampled on us."
Culbertson, who has lived on the property through this whole thing, was the one most affected. "It's all been too much for her," Meibos said. "She's gone through hell. She's clinically depressed. She has to get up every morning and look at this."
The family has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars in the fight. "We're talking second mortgages on houses and the whole thing."
Medley's ruling is the culmination of a mass of legal wrangling that has affected Utah redevelopment law, created rifts in county government, driven the previously unincorporated Fort Union area into Midvale and indirectly — but definitely — helped effect a change of the structure of county government.
It all started in the early 1990s, when Hermes began the process of expanding its Family Center commercial development at Fort Union Boulevard between 700 East and 1300 East. The County Commission agreed with Hermes that the sleepy residential area to the south was "blighted," giving the county redevelopment area powers, which include eminent domain. The commission also offered Hermes more than $4 million in tax subsidies.
Most property owners sold, but Meibos' and Culbertson's grandfather, Eugene Croxford, refused. (He died soon thereafter, leaving daughter Eva Johnson as the matriarch of the family. She has also since died, leaving the property and the lawsuit in the hands of her daughters.)
The family challenged the redevelopment deal, and the courts agreed that it was invalid (the required legalities of declaring the area blighted were not followed), but the County Commission nevertheless said it would pay Hermes the money it had promised. That spawned a dispute with then-County Attorney Doug Short, including loud arguments, near-fisticuffs, a period of Short being locked out of his office and additional lawsuits.
The conflict between Short and the commission was a driving force behind the change of county government from a commission to a mayor-council form in 2001.
The development was still a go even though the redevelopment area had been illegally created, but now there was another problem: Even though county ordinance required a 42-foot right of way for streets, plus a 20-foot landscape setback for buildings, the roads between the Croxford property and the back of the stores wound up being more like 25 feet (with pavement 15 to 21 feet wide), and no setback at all.
"What the county and Hermes did was kind of cute — they just said they don't have to comply with the requirements because these roads aren't streets," Croxford attorney Ron Russell said. "They have street signs, but they're not streets."
The case went to the Utah Supreme Court, which basically said, "They sure look like streets to us." Thus, even though the store buildings have long been in place, Hermes will likely have to move them about 40 feet back (detailed requirements will emerge in the judge's upcoming order), and install a cul-de-sac.
Since you can't exactly pick up a big building and move it around at will, that means some form of demolition.
"I already have friends who have made reservations for the big wall-coming-down party," Meibos said.
E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com