During their Tuesday, April 16 morning meeting, Bulloch County commissioners voted unanimous preliminary approval for the “Smart Bulloch 2045” Comprehensive Plan update. It adds land use “planning nodes” for denser residential or mixed-use development in a couple of select areas on the county’s Future Development Map.

The vote followed a public hearing, for which no citizens signed up to speak either for or against the plan, held during the meeting. This state-required, five-year update follows close behind a county-initiated amendment approved in 2023, County Manager Tom Couch acknowledged in presenting the latest draft.

“Because we’re going to be in a new environment, we may be doing plan updates more than every five years,” Couch said. “We obviously did a Future Development Map amendment last year, and I think some of you know as I’ve described in this epoch of development and growth, this is kind of like a hurricane.”

When “the hurricane is way out in the ocean,” forecasters produce “spaghetti maps” of all the probable paths of the storm, but as it gets closer to the coast, the possibilities narrow, he noted, referring to the Weather Channel.

Less than a year ago, the Board of Commissioners unanimously approved an amendment to the Smart Bulloch 2040 Comprehensive Plan for the county’s unincorporated area and the cities of Brooklet, Register and Portal. That amendment revised the map to include new “suburban neighborhood” and “suburban corridor” character areas in the southeastern-most part of the county.

The amended map was accompanied by a rewrite – approved first – of the county’s detailed zoning regulations. Both had been developed during a moratorium the commissioners imposed on zoning changes for higher-density subdivisions in the Southeast Bulloch sector from mid-August 2022 until April 7, 2023.

However, that amendment did not take the place of a five-year update of comprehensive plans required under state rules enforced by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs for communities’ participation in grant programs. So the county Planning and Development staff launched the five-year update last fall, with two initial public hearings in November and an online public survey. A hearing held in Brooklet in mid-November on the Unified Long-Range Transportation Plan was also linked to the Comprehensive Plan.

Because the update is meant to extend the previous 20-year plan five years into the future, what was the “2040” plan will now become the “Smart Bulloch 2045” plan, as county Planning and Development Director James Pope noted when he presented its map to the commissioners during their previous meeting on April 2. At that time, he noted that the draft of the “2045” plan would be presented for commissioners’ preliminary approval during this week’s meeting.

Final vote in June

“Then we’ll submit the plan to the Department of Community Affairs,” Pope said. “Then once that’s approved – they check all the standards to make sure we’ve met all their requirements and the minimum planning standards – we’ll bring the final plan for adoption to you in June.”

That was still the schedule when Couch presented the plan Tuesday in the absence of Pope, who was away at a planning conference. Couch thanked members of the appointed Comprehensive Plan Committee, which included Commissioner Anthony Simmons, Clerk of the Board Venus White, representatives of Brooklet, Portal and Register and some residents of the unincorporated area, for their work. Statesboro was not included because Statesboro maintains a separate comprehensive plan, and the city is currently completing its own update with assistance from the Coastal Regional Commission.

During his April 2 presentation, Pope noted that several public input sessions had been held during development of the Smart Bulloch 2045 update. The county’s Planning and Zoning Commission had also received the proposal and voted to recommend it to the elected commissioners for approval.

Meanwhile, the online survey drew about 330 responses, “which was a little bit lower than what I’d hoped, but we do the best we can,” Pope said. “Through that survey and some other public input and some input from the municipalities and the steering committee that we had for the comp plan update, we arrived at this land-use portion of the plan.”

Its key features are “planning nodes” within two new “character areas” smaller than the suburban corridor area that was added atop the map in last year’s amendment.

One is a “Georgia Highway 67 and Interstate Commerce Node,” which Pope said constitutes “a character area in itself.” The other is an “Interstate 16 Node” in a “Black Creek Character Area.”

“This is suggesting types of development within that character area,” he said. “These are policies that we may look at in the future using overlay zoning to where we get a little more into the details of how we develop and protect items like your wetlands but also have density (because) in the next 10 to 20 years we think we should have some pressure to develop within these areas.”

Georgia 67 area

The Georgia Highway 67 Character Area is centered along that highway, which runs “south from Statesboro to Interstate 16 and beyond,” the document notes. Area boundaries are Emit Grove Road on the north, NeSmith Proctor Road on the south, Old Happy Road and the Lower Black Creek on the east, and Clifton Road for 2,000 feet west of Highway 67.

“With the (Georgia) 67character area, residential developments are required to have increased buffers fronting (the highway) to lessen the appearance of developed land and to preserve open space as the corridor develops,” the document states.

Black Creek area

The Black Creek Character Area extends south of Mud Road to Seedtick Road, with east and west boundaries at Old Happy Road and U.S. Highway 80, respectively. A small portion of the area extends south of Georgia Highway 119 to the Ogeechee River.

“Within the area, future higher density nodes are located along Interstate 16 at Arcola Road (exit 132) and GA 119 (exit 137),” the document states, and these are shown on the map.

Suggested land uses within both areas include some higher-density residential development. Within the Black Creek-Interstate 16 area, the draft document suggests allowing subdivisions with two to four single-family homes per acre, but up to eight per acre “along arterial or collector routes,” and 10-20 units per acre in multi-family developments within the planning node.

In the Georgia 67 area generally, the suggested density would be two to eight single-family homes per acre and multi-family housing developments with 10-14 units per acre, but within the area’s planning nodes, the multi-family density could be 10-20 units per acre.

Pope said the idea is to create some “conservation-style subdivisions,” along the highways, where community septic systems may be used until a public sewer system is developed, but with natural areas such as wetlands placed in protected conservation status.

Like the suburban neighborhood and suburban corridor areas added last year, the addition of planning nodes follows from the county staff’s strategy of using public water and sewer service to concentrate higher-density development in the hope of preserving other areas of open land. But the discussion of who will provide those “wet utilities” has now been expanded.

“When you go to the S.R. (State Route) 67 character area, you’ll see that area, along with the other development areas, anticipates that future utilities will be put in place, whether it’s by the county, the city of Statesboro, or even the city of Brooklet,” Couch said Tuesday.