Friday, August 28, 2015
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
Dave Morrison smiles when he remembers the black Angus farm that used to sit at Tippecanoe Road and U.S. Route 224 – a place that now features many business offices, a gas station and a Handel’s ice cream store.
When Morrison began with the township zoning department in 1998, “224 was a different road, a different corridor,” he said.
“The residents of this community are offered so much more. There were no restaurants in the township at that time, or there may have been one, but [now] there’s a variety of very good restaurants, and when I started, you could not get a glass of beer or wine with your meal.”
In the past 10 to 15 years, Route 224 has exploded with development. Today is Morrison’s last day as Canfield Township zoning inspector, a position he held during that commercial expansion.
There had been years of neighborhood resistance to development expansion along 224 and toward developers such as Michal Naffah, who wanted to develop family property there. That is now the Ironwoods development, which includes Inner Circle Pizza Canfield and the Hampton Inn & Suites. His development was allowed to proceed after Canfield voters supported his development in November 2002.
Then, the Westford development grew, and now 224 is full of businesses from state Route 11 to the border with Boardman.
“It was great. I think he was actually all for it,” Naffah said of Morrison. “He understood that you needed the business development to be able to help support the township” and take the burden off taxpayers.
Morrison was made a full-time deputy zoning inspector in January 1998. Then-zoning inspector Bales McCall left his position in June 2000 after 10 years in that role.
Morrison said he oversaw about 850 residential permits as zoning inspector, including 2004, which was the busiest year for the township. Morrison said that year had a structure valuation of $24,245,000 and almost $3 million in the business district.
His office issued permits for 101 single-family dwellings in 2004 and of that there were 86 houses and 15 villas. At the time, Morrison cited Westbury Park on Gibson Road, Tippecanoe Woods and Villa Rosa, both on Tippecanoe Road, and Fox Den off Raccoon Road as contributing to that high total.
Naffah said ,“He believed that the corridor between Tippecanoe and Raccoon [roads] should be the commercial corridor for Canfield, and I think he worked with all the officials and the trustees to make that happen.”
Career path
Morrison said he owned his own construction company but sold it after running it for 20 years and left that role after some medical issues. “I felt that I didn’t want to be in my 60s and crawling around on roofs,” he said. “I dealt with zoning inspectors and permits for years and found there was a part-time position.”
Morrison has spent recent time in the office getting things in order, such as schedules for legal advertisements to run, for whoever does take over his position. The township has yet to hire his replacement.
“It’s kind of a specialized field. You have to be an engineer, an architect, an attorney, psychologist,” Morrison said, laughing. “It’s something you can’t just step into. You have to know the community and the people in the community and handle it accordingly.”
Trustee Marie Cartwright said township Administrator Keith Rogers will handle any zoning duties until a new person is hired. “This is the end of the [busy] season, so to speak, and since we’re already working on finding a [replacement], we think we’ll be in pretty good shape,” she said.
Morrison believes there will be continued retail and professional office development. Naffah agreed.
“Once we started our development, it changed Canfield drastically,” the developer said. “Everything that we’ve been trying to do is things Canfield doesn’t have, and within the last 12 years since the start of our project, we’ve been getting those things, and that’s a great thing for the community.”