The saga continues for residents of the Pine Trail Road area and developers who want to put a shopping center at the road's intersection with Ga. Highway 85.

Fayetteville City Council Monday delayed action on Concordia Partners Inc.'s appeal of the city Planning Commission's earlier denial of its development plan, urging the company to meet with city staff and refine plans for a frontage road along Hwy. 85.

Concordia hopes to develop a center anchored by Barnes & Noble and Linens & Things, and company representative Kent Rose says the firm has secured leases from both retailers and also has a signed lease for a Chili's restaurant. But the plan includes an entrance into the shopping center from Pine Trail Road, something residents and the Planning Commission say is unacceptable.

"We don't want our homes to be gridlocked," resident Pat King said Monday during the City Council meeting. King has been at the forefront of efforts to block the Pine Trail entrance.

"We don't want our homes to be devalued," she added.

Abdul Amer, a traffic engineer who conducted a traffic study for Concordia, told council that intersection improvements planned by the company would effectively negate any ill effects from the additional traffic, though 60 percent of that traffic would come from the south.

Amer said the company plans to add a left turn lane to Pine Trail and line it up properly with the entrance to Fayette Pavilion across Hwy. 85. Currently, left turning traffic from Pavilion and from Pine Trail have to go at separate times because the lanes overlap, he said. Straightening out that problem will speed things up enough so that additional traffic leaving the new shopping center won't have any impact, he said.

Residents weren't buying those claims. "I didn't hear one mention of tractor trailers going in and out of that entrance," said Duncan Padgett. "I mean it's crazy." Another resident pointed out that Amer's presentation dealt only with traffic leaving the shopping center and going south on Hwy. 85.

"The inbound traffic will be worse than the outbound," he said.

Concordia also has promised to provide internal access between its proposed shopping center and a future center to the north, on 54 acres of commercial-zoned property owned by Piedmont Properties Inc. Internal access is a good idea, said city chief planner Jahnee Prince, but a full frontage road would be even better.

She recommended 13 conditions if council approves the Concordia Plan, including the frontage road and a traffic light across from the northern entrance to Home Depot.

The traffic light would allow visitors to both the Concordia and the Piedmont shopping centers to turn south on 85 more easily, she said.

But the city's planning staff has not recommended doing away with the entrance on Pine Trail. In fact, that entrance would be the southern end of the recommended frontage road.

Segis Lipscomb, a member of the Planning Commission, delivered a detailed rebuttal to Concordia's traffic study, saying the study's own figures show that the additional traffic generated by the shopping center would overload Pine Trail. She added that city ordinances do not allow access into a shopping center from a residential street.

"Traffic would go from congested to more congested during the week, and on Saturdays would go from more congested to operating above the capacity of the road," she said.

"You set a dangerous precedent if you support this plan," she added.