MUNCIE — Mutual Bank has built the city's latest minipark to go along with its new branch on West Jackson Street. The city's landscape ordinance gave rise to the park.
Besides shade trees and shrubs, the new pocket park offers benches and a rain garden filled with native prairie grasses and wildflowers that are attractive to bees, birds and butterflies.
"I'd say the park exceeds the standards in the ordinance," says Fred Daniel, a planner at the Muncie-Delaware Metropolitan Plan Commission. "They didn't have to build it. They offered it, which is always welcome. It was a trade-off."
The parkette reminds branch manager Jean DeHart a bit of Sturgeon Bay, Wis., which she describes as "charming, flowery and green. I want Muncie to be charming."
She added, "We know there is a push in the city right now to develop green spaces, and that's what we did."
To support a deviation from the zoning ordinance, which would have required the bank to install a 25-foot buffer strip along the rear of its property (abutting a residential neighborhood), the bank offered to build the park. No one opposed the variance to allow only a f5-foot buffer strip of shrubs and fencing in the rear.
"It was nice of them to offer something in return," Daniel said. "They could have just asked for the variance and offered nothing as a trade-off."