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Target gets OK in PTC

By J. FRANK LYNCH
jflynch@thecitizennews.com

“This was a huge victory for Peachtree City,” said Mayor Steve Brown after the City Council voted early Friday morning to approve plans to bring a Target store to Kedron Village, ending months of legal entanglements and paving the way for construction to begin.

The unanimous vote to approve Faison Development’s plans for the 125,000 square-foot store and other retailers came at 12:40 a.m. Friday, making the council meeting,Êwhich started at 7 p.m. Thursday,Êone of the longest in the city’s history.

Earlier in the evening, the council members met privately for about 90 minutes behind closed doors with city attorneys to go over Faison’s latest proposal.

Then they held two hours of open discussion on the details of the plans with Faison designers and lawyers, and nearby residents who were party to the lawsuit.

In the end, everybody appeared to walk away happy, if for no other reason than because the controversy was over.

But all sides appeared to be satisfied.

“We got everything the neighbors asked for,” Brown boasted later, hailing the process as a good example of the city, citizens and a developer all working together to reach common ground.

In the final proposal, Faison agreed to relocate a secondary entrance into the Target development onto Georgian Park away from Regents Park, opting instead to build a new road closer to Ga. Highway 74.

That decision pleased members of the Lake Kedron Homeowners Association who had joined with the city to oppose Faison’s original site plan submitted more than a year ago. They mainly objected to plans to extend Regents Park into the Target parking lot.

Under the plans approved Friday morning, the current termination of Regents Park will be made a true dead-end and a stand of trees and vegetation will remain.

“We want this process to move forward, which means we’re ready to see something built,” said Lake Kedron officer John Hedge.

The compromise also ended up pleasing homeowners in the St. Simon’s Cove subdivision, who had feared the new road would dump unwanted traffic into their neighborhood.

John Turner, president of the St. Simon’s Cove homeowners group, came prepared with traffic flow charts and visual aids to plead their case.

But in a break in the meeting Thursday, Faison attorneys pulled residents of St. Simon’s Cove aside and offered to tweak the design of the road,Êlimiting traffic in and out of Target to one-way, and increasing the height on a landscape berm, to appease them.

Faison will also pay to install a traffic light at Ga. Highway 74 and Georgian Park, as well as at the intersection of Georgian Park and Peachtree Parkway if traffic studies warrant it.

The city will also look into limiting truck traffic into and out of the site off Peachtree Parkway and away from neighborhoods.

Most of the discussion between the council and Faison representative Mike Cohn focused on the design of the Target building itself, which will be owned by the Target Corp.

The center includes 140,000 square feet of retail space in addition to Target, but most of that is broken up among a string of smaller buildings encircling the site.

Cohn explained that designers had tried to match the look of the new buildings to the Kroger strip center that already sits on the site.

“The plans for the out-parcels are fantastic,” Councilman Steve Rapson told Kohn. “But the Target just isn’t up to the standards of the out-parcels.”

Council members specifically took issue with one unbroken wall along the length of the Target, between the store entrance and Kroger. Cohn agreed to create the impression of a small streetscape by designing faux facades along the stretch.

The names of other national retailers who’ve committed to the project haven’t been announced, but a Starbuck’s Coffee will be included in the Target.

No time frame for construction was given, either.