By KAY S. PEDROTTI
Staff Writer

Peachtree City's reputation for stringent land-use and traffic control regulations underwent some tough testing at last week's meeting of the Peachtree City Planning Commission.

Jim Williams, city director of development services, and acting city engineer Troy Besseche steered the commission through decisions on cellular towers and a dilemma at Booth Middle School.

Cell phones require very tall, and not very pretty, towers to handle the radio frequencies that make the phones work. But nobody wants to be near the towers, said Jim Williams, city director of development services. It's a situation that requires exhaustive study of availability of sites, of locations which won't disturb the aesthetics of a neighborhood, and of whether the towers will become "obsolete" as technology moves forward, he added.

At Booth Middle, school board facilities supervisors are trying to separate bus and car traffic, but the school site does not lend itself to a solution that will meet school safety needs and the city's requests for compliance with police recommendations. The school board's original plan included relocation of the bus driveway to the south end of the property, with another curb cut and median break into Peachtree Parkway. That won't work, Police Chief James Murray told the commission, because of hazards that will be created by buses entering and exiting, and traffic making U-turns in the new median break.

Mike Satterfield, school facilities director, told The Citizen Thursday that the school's engineering firm "cannot comply with what we were told on Tuesday morning by Besseche ... it seemed to us to be totally different from what the planning commission had discussed the night before."

Satterfield said he left the planning commission meeting with the understanding that the existing three-lane driveway would not be disturbed. After installing a concrete median of 25-30 feet just south of the present driveway, then the board contractors would install a new 28-foot bus driveway. That's not what Besseche said, according to Satterfield: the school board must tear up the southernmost lane to create a separation barrier, then build a bus driveway. It's just impractical, Satterfield said.

"Until we can approach the planning commission again for another driveway," he added, "we will just tie back into the same drive. But the construction we've done so far creates better bus parking, no kids walking between buses or out in the weather, and enough drive that a broken-down bus will not block all the others."

The planning commission approved one cell tower, at Dividend Drive and Ga. Highway 74 south; denied one on Crabapple Lane at the Fayette County Water System site, and deleted from the agenda another proposed tower at the Fayette County Animal Shelter on Hwy. 74 south. Williams said the animal shelter site is too small, "and I don't know yet where we might put another one, but I know we need more service in that area."

Landscape plans for Siemens Electromechanical Components in Westpark and for Gardner Denver Machinery on Gardner Drive were approved. A landscape plan for the Perlman Medical Building at Prime Point and Petrol Point was moved to a later meeting for consideration.