Friday, February 27, 2004
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Friday, February 27, 2004 |
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Kedron homeowners encouraged by judge’s opinion in Target suit By J. FRANK LYNCH Officers of the Lake Kedron Community Association considered it a victory Tuesday morning when a Fayette County Superior Court judge admonished the developer trying to build a Target store at Kedron Village for not exhausting due process before bringing the issue to court. Judge Christopher C. Edwards said he wasn’t sure it was legally possible for North Carolina-based FCD Development (Faison) to skip over City Council consideration and take the issue straight to the courts, and ordered the developer to bring its site plan to the council for consideration. The Kedron project is on the agenda for the next council meeting March 4, according to City Manager Bernard McMullen. Pending that outcome, a previously scheduled follow-up court date of March 8 could see the issue back before Edwards in a matter of days. Faison skipped the City Council step in the approval process last October, after the city’s planning commission unanimously denied the original site plan for a 125,000-square-foot Target and 140,000 square feet of additional retail. That decision was largely influenced by hundreds of homeowners living in the five neighborhoods along Regents Park, a dead-end road that bisects collector street Georgian Park opposite the commercial tract. The Lake Kedron Community Association has aggressively fought the proposal, filing numerous court papers in support of the city’s ordinance that bans “big box” retailers like Target in excess of 32,000 feet. Tim Wedemyer and John Hedge, leaders of the homeowners’ group, appeared reinvigorated Wednesday by Edwards’ determination, even though they acknowledged that a city council denial of the plans, which is a possibility, will just send it back to the courts. If nothing else, this week’s decision allows them more time to seek alternatives to an extension of Regents Park as a primary access point for the Target store. In fact, they say it’s their only concern at this point. “We’re absolutely committed to opposing any extension of Regents Park across Georgian Park,” Wedemyer said, disputing the claim made by city planning staff that to do so would require a wholesale remaking of the village’s master plan. “If the road goes away, we can probably work with the rest of it,” he said of Faison’s project. Two weeks ago, the residents’ association, working with state lawmakers Rep. Lynn Westmoreland and Sen. Mitch Seabaugh, managed to convince the DOT that an additional curb cut off Ga. Highway 74 into the shopping center wasn’t an impossiblity. Under the plan brokered by the legislators, the northbound one-way in, one-way out access would tie in with a reconfigured Newgate Road, a deadend spur off Georgian Park that serves the Holiday Inn and no other businesses. “The Regents Park extension presents a real health and safety risk to the citizens of this city, and we have a responsiblity to fight that as far as we can,” said Wedemyer. “We have no choice but to maintain that as the key issue, to protect our homes and investments.” Neither Wedemyer nor Hedge would speculate what steps the homeowners’ group would take if the Regents Park extension isn’t reconsidered. “We believe the mayor and city council will do the right thing,” said Hedge. “And if they don’t, we’ll hold them accountable to that.” McMullen would not comment further, describing the case as a pending legal matter.
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