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Wanted for PTC Council: Some spine, principles “Do what I want, or I will do my best to hurt you.” If a man walked into your home or business and spoke the words above, he would be subject to arrest. If he is developer Doug McMurrain, and he says that to the Peachtree City Council and homeowners of Planterra Ridge subdivision, he is hailed by some as a “win-win” negotiator. What he would hurt the city with? In his description, a Hooters restaurant and a Pep Boys auto parts store. What McMurrain and RAM Development Co. (what an appropriate name for what that company has done to Peachtree City, with its apartments and big boxes on the west side) want is for the city to suspend its big box ordinance to allow a Kohl’s “moderate price” department store to be built across Ga. Highway 54 from those apartments and big boxes Wal-Mart and Home Depot. Oh, and he also wants the council to sign over to him city-owned land, including all of Line Creek Parkway and Line Creek Court, two publicly owned streets, to give him enough land to build the Kohl’s. Without the city giving in to his demands, he would not have enough land to build the 89,000-square-foot department store, even with a waiver of the big box ordinance — which limits stores to about a third that size. And two members of the city council — Mayor Harold Logsdon and Steve Boone — support the public land grab. A third — newly appointed sewermeister Mike Harman, the recent chairman of the expansionist-minded sewer authority — is thinking hard about approving the plan. Only council members Stuart Kourajian and Cyndi Plunkett opposed this naked extortion that came wrapped in polite civic terms. Exemplifying the dismal state of the current Peachtree City Planning Commission, two of its appointed members — Marty Mullin and Patrick Staples — fell in step with the Westside Destroyer and applauded his plan. The current planning commission is proving itself inferior in all respects to its predecessors. They seem to have abandoned a heritage of consistent planning integrity, which featured as a fundamental concern the effects upon current and future residents. We once had volunteers zealous to preserve and protect Peachtree City and its planning ideals. This bunch is throwing away our city under the cover of “win-win” negotiations with developers intent on wringing the last dollar out of their johnny-come-lately investments. A more apt description would be incremental capitulation to bullying developers. What the city is contemplating is — so far as I can remember, and I’ve been here since 1977 — unprecedented. The city is actually seriously considering giving in to zoning blackmail, and some scared residents of nearby Cardiff Park and Planterra Ridge are falling in line like frightened sheep who are being led complicitly to their own slaughter. This whole deal is wrong, folks. It is just simply wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is governmentally wrong and it is morally wrong. It is governmentally wrong for a city council to become a partner in the conversion of publicly owned land and facilities for the sole purpose of enabling a developer to build an unwanted big box. It is bad public policy to sell or trade public land to a developer under the Westside Destroyer’s threat of bringing in undesirable businesses. The city has had opportunities in the past to sell public land to local businesses, but in every case I can recall, it has declined. I say again, the city has declined in the past to sell or trade public land to local — LOCAL! — businesses. Now along comes this out-of-town developer with his threats to hurt the city and its residents, and those people elected and appointed to protect our rights and the Peachtree City vision go all wobbly in the knees, moaning, “How high, boss?” That’s an immoral act committed against the people of Peachtree City. Too bad they no longer allow miscreants to be tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. I can nominate some very worthy recipients of that old-time response to bully threats. In the absence of that remedy to our current troubles, I suggest instead that the Peachtree City Council — at long, long last — display some slight spark of civic courage and moral outrage at this blatant developer’s blackmail and instruct the Westside Destroyer to bundle up his Kohl’s plans and store them permanently where the sun doesn’t shine. Bring on the Pep Boys, the Hooters on commercial land that has been zoned for just such uses for years before there was a Cardiff Park, a Planterra Ridge. Is that worse than what faces them just across the street on the north side of Ga. Highway 54? And after that, the city should make the Westside Destroyer work hard for every new thing he will ever seek from Peachtree City again. Extort us, and development life should get very hard for Mr. Destroyer. login to post comments | Cal Beverly's blog
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