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The sell-out trio wins again; we lose The Peachtree City Council voted its customary split last Thursday in favor of further destroying the declining peace and tranquility of our “planned” community. More traffic, more traffic lights, more flailing about for ever more specious rationales for decisions that a majority of city residents would unhesitatingly vote down if given the chance. But who cares about the majority of citizens? As the mayor once remarked to me, “After all, the crowd wanted Barabbas.” I put quotation marks around “planned,” because there’s a report now that our current crop of planning commissioners have not actually laid eyes on the city’s comprehensive land use plan for some time. Whether that’s technically true or not, the planning commissioners and three of the five city council members talk, act and vote as if they have abandoned such bourgeois pettiness as being fettered by such an archaic document. After all, it’s only the legal basis for making land use decisions in our “planned” community. Why bother with actually reading it, much less following it? So, following their tortured logic, the block of three voted to affirmatively enable the very thing they have been saying they did not want: a dense, big-box center right across from Walmart/Home Depot. When could they have said no? The best time was when the developer came to the city, hat in hand, pleading for the option to buy city-owned land then occupied by two city streets. As I wrote back in the fall of 2007, “The council in effect would become an enabling partner in the construction of a big box development that could not otherwise be built without the city’s explicit facilitation. “In view of the public’s overwhelming aversion to another such development on Hwy. 54 West, the council’s approval would amount to a a complete and total sell-out to the developer who is most responsible for the wretched look and mounting problems of the city’s west side. “Whoever votes for this perverted city-developer partnership will become a synonym for the sell-out of the Peachtree City vision.” It was almost exactly one year ago this week that Mayor Harold Logsdon and council members Steve Boone and Cyndi Plunkett voted to sell out the Peachtree City vision. Newly installed council members Don Haddix and Doug Sturbaum voted against it. Plunkett swung first against it in 2007, then swung in favor of the bigger development in 2008. Why? I don’t know. After all, what has land use planning and long existing zoning got to do with anything? That’s been the pattern ever since: 3-to-2 to sell out Peachtree City. All three come to the end of their terms this year. Their rule of ruin is comparable to the infamous trio of Burrell, Gosa and Sprayberry on the Fayette County Commission in the late 1990s. That gang never met a rezoning or increased density they didn’t like. One of those unlamented commissioners even worked for an engineering company advocating for rezonings before the commission. The public finally reacted with disgust, and all three disappeared from elective office, a blessing to the whole county. But much undoable damage was inflicted in their four-year rampage overturning the county’s land use plans and careful zoning. Such a disappearance by the current trio of sell-outs on the Peachtree City Council would likewise be a great benefit to what’s left of the vision of a “planned” community. login to post comments | Cal Beverly's blog
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