Ellettsville puts compliance action on hold as Lowers works to move out of town
ELLETTSVILLE — Robert Lowers has made substantial progress toward clearing from his Main Street property what he claims is recycled building materials and town officials call unsightly, and illegal, structures.
The 60-year-old collector and builder's efforts to comply with local ordinances as ordered by a judge have been slowed since he cracked several ribs last week. He was loading and securing dozens of repurposed windows and glass doors onto a trailer attached to his work van and fell off.
"It's slowed me down," Lowers said. "I was in a hurry, got careless and the next thing I knew I was on the ground."
Previously: Ellettsville gives man more time to bring property into compliance after court ruling
The accident happened May 9, the day before town workers were to return to his property to continue their enforcement of a court order Monroe Circuit Judge Geoffrey Bradley handed down in 2021. They had spent two days there in April clearing land and demolishing structures.
In February of this year, the state appeals court upheld Bradley's ruling that Lowers' home and property violated town codes. The court also confirmed the $140,800 in fines the town levied against Lowers, and ordered him to pay town attorney Darla Brown's $8,765 legal bill.
Lowers was given 30 days to clean up his place and bring it into compliance with Ellettsville's plan department standards.
If he didn't, the town could step in "to perform its own compliance and abatement activity on the Lowers property without need for additional notice to Robert Lowers." And they did.
But neither the workers nor the heavy equipment used to tear down walls and bulldoze land in April returned on May 10. Lowers said someone from the town's planning department told him there had been a delay, and didn't know when the work would resume.
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Ellettsville town manager Mike Farmer said the enforcement action at Lowers' property is on hold. "He is starting to deconstruct what's there," Farmer said this week. "Hopefully, there will be a resolution, and the end of this will result in a positive manner for everyone."
The town returned Lowers' towed-away Honda motorcycle and the faded 1966 Oldsmobile Delta 88 he kept sheltered in a garage-like structure workers knocked down last month. The car's not under a roof anymore. "I've got to get it out of the elements," Lowers said. He worries about it.
The day the town workers descended, Lowers' son Matt established a a GoFundMe account. He hoped to raise $10,000 to buy his dad a piece of land in rural Greene County, where he can build a shed with walls made from recycled beer bottles donated by friends and scavenged from recycling bins.
The online fundraiser says Lowers moved to the house in downtown Ellettsville 20 years ago, "and began adding his personal artistic touch to it over the years. He would repurpose materials that others call trash into what he called art."
A hundred people have donated a total of $9,300. The money helped Lowers buy an acre of land in nearby Greene County, where he is in the process of moving his life, and all of his stuff.
It's a 20-minute drive southwest to a place with no close-by neighbors, no sidewalk-setback restrictions and no fence-height requirements.
Contact Herald-Times reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Ellettsville man Robert Lowers moving after town crackdown on property
