Peachtree City Mayor Bob Lenox and other city officials will meet Monday with residents concerned about possible expansions at Photocircuits, but company superintendent Mark Bunker says the firestorm of protest over variances requests has "caught us completely by surprise."

Photocircuits recently received planning commission approval for a parking lot expansion at its 810 Dividend Dr. property, which does not relate to variances sought for the company's "320" property (the old Franklin Company building at 320 Dividend Dr.).

The variance requests, seeking setback modifications along the Dividend Drive side and the Kelly Drive side of 320, were scheduled for hearing at last week's City Council meeting but were tabled to the March 18 meeting.

Post cards mailed to City Hall about the variances state that "by allowing a variance, Photocircuits will further encroach on its neighbors and erode the health, safety and welfare of all citizens in Peachtree City... reject Photocircuits' request for variances and expansion."

At last week's council meeting, Planterra Ridge Association officer Eileen Shaw told the council that the group is "not opposed to industry," but wants the council to "use all due diligence" in determining the impact of any future expansion at Photocircuits, including health concerns, public safety hazards, traffic, noise and other factors. Shaw said, "We favor the applicant's request to table this take all the time you need."

Lenox scheduled the meeting Monday, March 15, at 6 p.m. at The Gathering Place to "hear the citizens' concerns without the heat of a variance discussion."

The company first approached the city for variances at the 320 Dividend Dr. address in 1998, noting that the Kelly Drive setback violation was created with the building of Planterra Ridge and the extension of Kelly Drive.

The Franklin building and parking areas constitute a nonconforming use as configured on the property, according to City Planner David Rast, and the Kelly setback variance would be a "cleanup" variance. Bunker says the variances would "allow us to use the land better, and by using the Dividend Drive side for more parking, we would be able to create even more green buffer area at the end of the property nearest to Planterra Ridge."

Planterra resident Steve Brown has gone public with concerns about Photocircuits as a toxic-waste producer and a "disaster potential" for the community because of storage and transfer of large quantities of harmful chemicals at the plant. Any expansion of the manufacturing process, Brown says, would only increase the danger of a tanker truck spill, "gas cloud" of chlorine, or "concentrations of air emissions that are not revealed as the health hazard they are because the figures are done on an annual basis; it doesn't say what the dangers would be if a large percentage of those emissions occurred in a short period of time."

In the 1998 discussion, the planning commission requested that a master plan for the whole site, including any future expansions, should be submitted to the city before variances were considered. Bunker says the master plan has been done, after consultations with Planterra residents, and that "we listened to their concerns, for one thing, we removed the additional access driveway on Kelly Drive."

Bunker says the variances requests "have nothing to do with whether we are a health hazard, it's just allowing us to use the land better." There are no plans for expansion at this time, but the master plan does show another 90,000-square-foot addition "if we should ever need it, which we don't foresee at this time," Bunker said. He pointed out that landscaping space along Kelly Drive also will increase if variances are granted.

"We absolutely have hazardous chemicals here," Bunker said, "Chemicals that are a part of our everyday lives. But what we have also are multiple layers of protection to keep everyone safe. I live here with my children too.

"We don't have anything here that would cause a community-wide, or even a three-mile-wide, evacuation. We use professional chemical companies for hauling and operating some systems, we train our employees extensively, we have our own emergency response team, we work constantly with local emergency officials and the HAZMAT (hazardous materials) team, and our systems are designed with containment measures and monitoring methods to detect and stop problems at an early stage. None of this has anything to do with the variances, but it seems we're being challenged about it."

Information from Brown shows that Photocircuits paid a $19,297 fine to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division in 1997, which Brown says was for "air stack emissions without a permit and excessive emissions from 1994 to 1996." Brown says he believes that there may be
"some liability on the part of the city because they approved locating a residential area (Planterra) next door to the industrial area" in 1994.

Planning Commission chairman Julian Campbell says that any future expansion, addition or reconfiguration one any of Photocircuits' sites "would have to go through the commission and conform to conditions, regardless. Photocircuits has done a lot to be a good neighbor, but they're going to have to do a lot more. And the citizens will have to balance their perspectives also."