By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

The proposed annexation of the West Village area will be discussed at Thursday night's Peachtree City Council meeting.

Also, council is expected to decide whether to overturn a Planning Commission decision to deny a concept plan that was submitted for the proposed Wal-Mart Superstore.

The West Village discussion will likely crop up during council's consideration of a rezoning application from John Wieland Homes that involves land which could become a part of the West Village area. Mayor Bob Lenox said council is not prepared to make a decision to annex or not, but the topic was added to the agenda to insure council could discuss the annexation proposal as it relates to the rezoning request.

Wieland has requested that the 101-acre tract, known as the Katz property, be rezoned from General Industrial to General Residential 4.

The company wants to build 350 single-family homes on the property. The land is bordered on the south by the area that will become the Cedarcroft subdivision, which will have approximately 200 homes on 63 acres.

Council has been scheduled to vote on the rezoning several times, but each time the matter has been postponed. Most recently, Wieland offered to postpone the decision to await a decision from the West Village Task Force, which voted 10-5 last week to begin negotiations with developers to determine whether the property could be developed like the task force wants.

The Wal-Mart matter is largely based on the expected traffic that the superstore would generate. The Planning Commission denied the concept plan for the proposed superstore at its July 24 meeting upon a recommendation by city staff that the store could not meet the city's traffic ordinance. The ordinance requires developers to fund traffic improvements for projects that might hurt traffic in the area, but the city's traffic consultants say no improvements could be made by the developer that would help.

The store would meet the traffic ordinance after Ga. Highway 54 is widened, but there is no definite time line for the start of the process.

The Wal-Mart would be situated behind the planned Home Depot on Hwy. 54 across from the entrance to Planterra Ridge subdivision.

The developer of the project, RAM Development, contends that the project is not governed by the traffic ordinance, because plans for the store were submitted before the ordinance was passed by council.

Doug McMurrain of RAM Development said the company's position is that the store would meet the traffic ordinance anyway. But that's using the numbers from RAM's traffic consultants.

The traffic numbers from the city's study are a little higher, McMurrain said.