By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

A Fayetteville developer says his plans for a 152-home subdivision at New Hope Road and Ga. Highway 314 will work under guidelines recommended by the city Planning Commission after all.

Earlier, he had said that City Council approval of the commission's recommendation would kill the plan.

“We recalculated all of our acreage, and we're able to do it easily” meeting the Planning Commission's recommendation, developer Bob Rolader told council during a work session last week. “The truth is we had an R-30 PUD all along and just didn't know it.”

The Planning Commission recommended that Rolader's proposed 127-acre subdivision, Argonne Forest, be annexed into the city and its zoning category be R-30, which requires minimum lot sizes of 30,000 square feet, roughly three quarters of an acre.

Rolader had asked the Planning Commission to approve R-22 zoning, which would allow lots as small as a half acre, but the group recommended R-30 instead. After that vote, the developer said the cost of land in the area is so high that he would have to drop his plans if the City Council agreed with the commission. But last week after looking closer, he determined that his average lot size is over 30,000 square feet, he said.

But that doesn't mean the project is completely out of the woods. Rolader is now asking City Council to approve the plan as R-30, in hopes of receiving a PUD (planned unit development) designation that would allow him to use an average lot size rather than a minimum lot size.

That would mean that some lots will be as small as 22,500 square feet, barely over a half acre, while others would be as large as an acre or slightly more.

PUD designation is a planning device that allows developers more leeway than straight zoning, so they can put green space and other amenities into subdivisions with varying lot sizes, as long as the average lot size meets the zoning requirement.

Rolader proposes to put one-acre lots around the perimeter of Argonne Forest, where they will back up to other subdivisions with one-acre minimums, and smaller lots in the interior of the neighborhood.

Minimum home prices would be $225,000, he said.

Residents of neighboring subdivisions so far have voiced no objections to the plan.

If council approves the annexation and zoning, Rolader will have to go back to the Planning Commission with detailed development plans to seek approval for a PUD.

In looking over the plans Monday, council members said they would like the project better if the portion of the neighborhood on the south side of New Hope Road has two entrances, and if an entrance into the northern part, directly across from the Pavilion, is routed to discourage traffic from racing through the neighborhood.

They also called for a 25-foot buffer along New Hope Road, owned by the neighborhood association, to prevent “double frontage” lots from developing along the road. Council currently is dealing with complaints from another neighborhood where similar lots, facing both an exterior road and an interior neighborhood street, can't have fences for their back yards due to a prohibition in city ordinances.

City Council conducted a formal first reading of the annexation and rezoning request Monday, and is scheduled to vote on the matter during its July meeting. Ordinarily, that would be July 5, but that meeting is cancelled due to the July 4 holiday.

The next meeting will be July 12, 7 p.m. at City Hall.