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County upholds land use plan, nixes Hwy. 85 rezoning

By J. FRANK LYNCH
jflynch@theCitizenNews.com

Homeowners in the fast-changing area around Whitewater High School cheered Thursday when three members of the County Commission stuck with the land-use plan and denied a developer’s second request to rezone 21 acres at Ga. Highway 85 South and McBride Road for an office park.

The property wraps around an unsightly former truck stop many still call the U.S. Station, in an area that has been targeted for improvement.

That’s why two commissioners, A.G. VanLandingham and Herb Frady, voted in favor of the rezoning brought by Tom Reese of Hampton.

But both the county planning staff and the Planning Commission urged denial of the plan.

Reese argued that rezoning the land from A-R to O-I, or Office Institutional, would simply make it consistent with other large tracts in the area. Three schools and several churches are adjacent to the site, all of them O-I.

Reese had proposed accessing his site from Hwy. 85 directly across from Whitewater Middle School, installing a connector street to McBride Road with the buildings on either side.

When Reese said two lots within the development would be reserved as parks, Commission Chairman Greg Dunn pointed out that the green space is required by the septic sewer system that would serve the site, another issue for any type development.

Reese said the O-I usage would provide a step-down buffer between the fueling center, now a BP station, and homes on five acres along McBride Road and Shamrock Drive.

Reese argued that without the O-I usage, the value of the land was greatly diminished because it would be hard to sell homes built on the site.

“Who is going to buy there?” Reese asked. “Nobody wants to live next to a gas station and three schools.”

But several of the homeowners who spoke in the public hearing prior to the vote said they’d rather see higher-density residential development as a buffer between their mostly five-acre minimum lots and the U.S Station.

The most houses that could be built on the property if it is rezoned for residential is six, on three-acre minimum lots, Chairman Greg Dunn pointed out.

Residents who packed a Planning Commission meeting a week earlier to voice opposition also raised concerns Thursday about the increased traffic problems the offices might bring to the area.

Several pointed out that the situation is likely to get worse over the next two years when 11th and 12th graders at Whitewater High start driving to school.

But Reese said traffic would be minimally affected, because the office buildings would be marketed to smaller businesses that have fewer visitors. Besides, the area would be empty of cars after early evening and on the weekends, he said.

In voting for the rezoning, VanLandingham and Frady both said they thought it was as good as it could get for the property.

Frady said he’d been trying for years to clean up the hodgepodge of zoning that was grandfathered into that area of Hwy. 85, and called the project the best possible use of the parcel.

But the others disagreed. Linda Wells and Peter Pfeifer voted to deny the request. Pfeifer said he thought being near a school added value to a home. Wells said she was confident “someone will want to come along and live there.”

In voting to deny, Wells called Reese’s proposal “not bad” for the area, but said it wasn’t grand enough to depart from the land-use plan.

“I don’t believe you should translate ‘not bad’ with ‘not great,’” Wells said. “It’s a bad use of the acreage if it’s not great.”

Dunn cast the tie-breaking vote against the rezoning, agreeing with Wells that the “best possible usage” should be saved for the parcel.

“The question is, no matter how well you do this, does it need to go there?” Dunn said.

And while agreeing that 22 office buildings would generate more tax income for the county than six houses, Dunn said, “We’re not in the business of building a community to raise revenue.”