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OPINION — Has the fight for PTC’s soul just begun — or ended?Tue, 03/20/2007 - 4:56pm
By: Cal Beverly
An Opinion column by Cal Beverly, editor and publisher About a decade ago I made the prediction that the big fight for the very soul of Peachtree City would center on the city’s industrially zoned land. Over the years — from the utopian dreams of the 1960s to the more pragmatic changes in the 1990s — the single most coherent vision of our planned city involved a multiple village structure anchored by a single large industrial park, itself as large as one of the five villages. The idea was that Peachtree City was intended for the most part to be a bedroom city, a place for commuters to sally forth in the mornings and return to find greenspaced, leafy rest in the evenings. The industrial park, filled with clean, non-smokestack industries, was to have provided the necessary taxes to pay for that relative luxury of not having regional commercial centers or huge shopping centers or even a large town center. The Avenue was the first perturbation of that grand, consistent vision — a dream in progress. An outside mall of upscale stores, this commercial center without any accompanying village sits on land that once held a frozen food packing plant, one of Peachtree City’s first industries. Now comes a concerted effort to rezone industrial park land on the city’s southside for a big-box store of over 100,000 square feet, plus ancillary commercial businesses intended to generate large traffic volumes to cause carpetbagging cash registers to ring through the day and night. (For the most part, those will not be locally owned businesses. And for the most part, those national-chain stores will depend on many thousands of people coming from places well beyond Peachtree City to sustain the businesses’ profits.) This threatened invasion caught the attention — as these things invariably do — of nearby peaceful neighborhoods suddenly scared into following the agenda items of the previously boring City Council. The predictable localized uproar is occurring, only vaguely noticed by peaceful neighborhoods in other, non-threatened (or so they imagine) sections of town. I have seen this dust-up happen over and over through the years. It rarely ends well for the peaceful neighborhoods. A couple of years back, it was Kedron folks in an uproar over a big Target and ancillary stores beyond the big Kroger of the north. I suspect not many folks in Wilshire or Planterra Ridge or Braelinn or Glenloch paid close attention to the Target travails. This is more observation than criticism: It’s just human nature to get more riled up by unwanted stuff just beyond our fence lines than by reports of domestic discontent a few miles down the road. But, dear Peachtree City neighbors, let me whisper into your collective ear John Donne’s prophetic lament: “...never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” You and me. What’s happening on Peachtree City’s south side and its west side is happening to all of us. I suggest the majority of you wake up to that reality. We have planning commissioners who just moved here praising the intent of the south side developers and urging them to modify their plans to look “more like Peachtree City.” I suggest to you that the very plans themselves are alien to the very vision — the dream — of Peachtree City. There is no way for them to ever “look like Peachtree City.” Instead, Peachtree City is far along toward looking like them, not the other way around. The planning commission — well-meaning but historically and culturally clueless about what lies at the heart of PTC — stumbles toward more developmental disasters that will be inflicted on all of us. The PTC Council — ah, what to say about this bunch? I have thought of them as clueless, hapless, ignorant. But not evil. They are not evil — they just have zero vision, no comprehension of the dream. They mostly think — and vote — like they just arrived in town. They have no sense of history. They certainly have not grasped the consistent vision of PTC as a village-centric place of small communities buttressed by a thriving industrial park. The leaders of PTC have taken us off track, beginning in the early 1990s. Probably beginning with the ill-fated Development Authority venture into managing entertainment and sports venues, our leaders have measurably discarded the consistent PTC vision and replaced it with short-term, results-oriented (meaning profits), interim, stop-gap decisions that collectively have diminished us all. Our council members have set aside considerations of vision and replaced them with a desparate grasping for revenue sources to sustain local programs that in their local way are as much sacred cows as Social Security is on the national level. Exhibit one: A letter in this editon that gushes about the southside development providing new ball fields and spectator overlooks. I say this with deliberate care: Wave a few soccer fields in front of some Peachtree City folks, and they’ll say yes to anything the developer wants. You sports fans need to broaden your vision to discern the consequences to the vast majority of the rest of us resulting from a developer’s “generosity.” I’ll say it again: PTC has got to choose between luxuries and necessities. Any further expansion of the city’s leisure and recreation budget is an incredible luxury that we can no longer sustain nor support. If anyone is still reading at this point, my point is that the rezoning of the industrial land to commercial and multifamily uses — however many redundant ball fields they throw in to sweeten the deal — will inevitably produce a real domino effect, resulting in the shrinking of the industrial park and an increase of big retail centers and traffic that you cannot now imagine in our fair city. So, the real issue is not whether our appointed and elected leaders are selling out the PTC dream. That started years ago. The real issue is whether there is much of the vision left to either save or discard. And the outcome of that issue, my dear Peachtree City neighbors, decisively and irrevocably depends upon you and your willingness to be bothered to step up to the public plate and make a difference. To borrow from Dylan Thomas: Rage, rage against the dying of the dream. login to post comments
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