Last week, Bulloch County commissioners had their say on rezoning for a small part of the land where developers want to stand up a large Kroger supermarket and other new things at the intersection of Cypress Lake Road and the bypass.

By a pair of 5-0 votes during the Jan. 6 meeting, commissioners approved rezoning two tracts totaling 2.8 acres from R-25 residential to HC, highway commercial. 

“It looks like we’re getting a Kroger!” commission Chairman David Bennett said afterward.

He had quickly assured the room that his previous comment about including a condition against more chicken restaurants in the outparcels was a joke.

A 10-times-larger portion of the roughly 31-acre total tract is just within Statesboro’s city limits, and City Council had approved rezoning the two in-town parcels totaling 28.3 acres from R-3, medium-density residential, to MX, mixed use, on Dec. 2.

Southeastern Property Acquisitions LLC, which requested the zoning changes from both the city and the county, intends to make the almost 100,000-square-foot Kroger store the anchor destination of a shopping center that would also feature a Kroger Fuel Center and four more-or-less one-acre outparcels for restaurants, stores or shops. Also, but only within the portion inside the city limits, the sketch plan calls for further residential development, with perhaps 70 home lots on the side abutting the existing Whispering Pines neighborhood.

But the city’s previous annexation in the area left out two smaller parcels near the intersection of Cypress Lake Road and Veterans Memorial Parkway, which is the U.S. Highways 25 and 301 Statesboro Bypass. These smaller lots are now part of the developers’ plans and real estate contracts.

One of these was a 1.7-acre section of a total 5.2-acre parcel that technically extends across the bypass. Only the 1.7-acre part to the north, inside the bypass, was rezoned for the Kroger project. The other small tract under county jurisdiction measures 1.13 acres.

No ‘island’ annex

These parcels, totaling 2.83 acres, were outside the city limits and not annexed, for reasons county Planning and Development Director James Pope alluded to and local attorney Stephen T. Rushing, representing Southeastern Property Acquisitions LLC, explained further.

“It’s kind of an odd situation,” Pope said. “You don’t typically see this where one development is in the city and county. However, due to Georgia annexation laws, the city was unable to annex this portion. So for them to use this property in a commercial way, that’s why they’re here at the county.”

Rushing noted that the developers or property owners had, in fact, tried to have those smaller parcels annexed.

“We attempted to annex these two parcels into the city, and they researched it in depth and came back and said that because it would create an island for the Louisiana Pacific parcel that is behind these two parcels … for some legal reasons they could not annex it,” he said.

Apparently, doing so would have surrounded an unannexed county parcel with city-annexed land.

15 accepted conditions

Another unusual thing was the number of conditions on the county rezoning. Before the request went first to the county’s appointed Planning and Zoning Commission and then to the elected Board of Commissioners, a county-staff review team — Pope, Fire Prevention Chief Joe Carter, Development Services Manager Mary DeLoach and County Engineer Ron Nelson — had recommended approval, but with 17 conditions for things the developers would have been required to do or prohibited from doing.

The first of those conditions, which was approved, has to do with fire protection, since the county-zoned property is just outside the city limits, now the extent of the area with primary fire response provided by the Statesboro Fire Department. Otherwise, the bulk of the property would be in the SFD response area, but the little parcels outside the city limits would be served by the Bulloch County Fire Department.

Condition 1 states: “Issuance of any building permits shall be restricted until an intergovernmental agreement regarding fire protection services has been executed between the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners and the City of Statesboro.”

Agreement may also be needed on other public safety aspects for the shopping center, Pope suggested.

Other conditions had to do with sidewalks, building materials and finishes, the preferred “use of muted and earth tone colors,” other details of facades, landscaping plans and plant materials, and provision of parking spaces and lighting, including that exterior lighting fixtures “must be recessed and downcast” and not produce a nuisance to drivers or surrounding properties.

2 conditions scrapped

After its hearing on the rezoning requests Dec. 16, the Bulloch County Planning and Zoning Commission had voted 5-0 to recommend approval with 15 of the conditions, but recommended removing two of the 17.

Those now removed were Condition 2, which would have required sidewalks at least five feet wide “along Veterans Memorial Parkway for the width of the property fronting the highway,” and Condition 7, which would have required that any building facades more than 50 feet long “provide wall projections or recesses” of a certain minimum size.

When the requests arrived for their final hearing before the elected commissioners last week, attorney Rushing explained that the developers had agreed to accept all of the conditions except those two.

“As for the 17 conditions, quite frankly we were taken aback,” he said. “We struggled to narrow it down to four at the city, but certainly in the spirit of compromise, since we’re here asking, we are actually good with 15 of those conditions, as worded, and it is the two … we had some objections to.”

Although the developers will place sidewalks “throughout the internal parts of this development,” they “were not planning along Veterans Memorial, parallel with it,” Rushing said.

He noted that there are no sidewalks along the parkway between there and the U.S. 301 main highway, “so there’s nothing to connect to,” and no sidewalks on the bypass near the existing Publix shopping center.

In regard to the condition about wall projections and recesses along façades, the developer’s attorney said the outparcels will be marketed to “national franchise businesses and restaurants,” which “come with a package” for prototype buildings, and “to put this on them would make it difficult to market that property.”

In any case, the county-zoned parcels will be a small part of the development. The shopping center’s “pylon sign” and part of the access drive from Veterans Memorial Parkway will probably be on those two lots, Rushing said.

Commissioner Timmy Rushing made two separate motions — one for each of the small parcels — to approve the zoning change with all conditions except 2 and 7. Commissioner Anthony Simmons seconded each motion, and both were passed 5-0, with one commissioner absent.