Despite a petition expressing opposition from 600-plus people and a 3-2 vote of the county Planning and Zoning Board recommending denial, Bulloch commissioners on a unanimous vote recently approved zoning changes for a planned 109-lot residential subdivision immediately south of Southeast Bulloch Middle School.
The engineering and architectural firm Hussey Gay Bell has planned the subdivision for adjoining parcels of land with three different current owners. Together, the 42.2-acres owned by Barbara Ann Chambers, five acres owned by Teresa McElveen and another 42.2 acres owned by Virginia M. Starling constitute an almost 90-acre tract between Black Creek Church Road and Brooklet-Denmark Road. Now mostly farmland, the site borders the SEBMS campus and a tract the Bulloch County Board of Education previously purchased to build an athletic complex for the school, in a plan now on hold.
Because the land was zoned AG-5, for mainly agricultural uses and requiring a minimum five-acre lot size for a home, the developer applied for zoning changes to R-25, allowing for lots as small as 25,000-square feet, or a little more than half an acre.
“As a community we feel the rezoning of the three proposed parcels from AG-5 to R-25 will negatively affect the community’s Quality of Life as noted in the Bulloch County Land Use Plan,” asserted the petition Daniel Johnson started two weeks ago on the Change.org website.
The petition stated that the signers have concerns about the effects on wetlands, the Black Creek watershed, the Agriculture Preservation District, “our overcrowded schools” and traffic. By the time Johnson submitted the petition to the Board of Commissioners during a hearing on the proposed changes that was part of the Dec. 7 regular meeting, there were 614 signatures, he noted.
A copy received by Board of Commissioners Clerk Olympia Gaines, apparently from an earlier download, showed a count of 575 signatures and listed the actual names. Most are people with Brooklet, Statesboro, Nevils, Ellabell or Pembroke addresses. A few are from further away, even other states, but no more than four or five are dubious names such as “Al Capone” or partial names with initials.
The Change.org count continued to rise after last week’s commissioners’ vote, and Wednesday showed 646 signatures.
“It’s kind of a combination of all of those things,” Johnson said. “I think that’s why so many people jumped on signing the petition so fast, because really within two and half days we had that many people sign. The increased subdivisions are also going to take away very productive farmland.”
Recommended ‘no’
Johnson noted that the decision of the elected county commissioners’ ran contrary to a recommendation of the Bulloch County Planning and Zoning Commission. Nov. 18 in formally separate decisions on all three portions of the site, the appointed “P and Z” board repeatedly voted 3-2 to recommend denial.
Before the P&Z vote, a group of county staff members who reviewed the applications, including County Manager Tom Couch, County Attorney Jeff Akins, County Engineer Brad Deal and Zoning Administrator Randy Newman, also recommended against approval.
In a checklist the staff panel indicated negative impacts for this project and its requested zoning in four categories: land use planning, schools, traffic or roads, and law enforcement. Impacts were judged neutral in six categories: water-sewer, solid waste, environmental, emergency management, EMS-fire and recreation. As Johnson noted, the staff report tallied the number of positive impacts as zero.
Several of the “negative” impacts are requirements for greater county resources, such as in law enforcement and recreation, which under the formulas used would cost more than the subdivision would create in tax revenue.
But C.J. Chance, a principal engineer with Hussey Gay Bell, said the 2,000-square-foot homes could sell for about $300,000 each, more than the $240,000 construction estimate used in the county’s projection.
Interviewed this week, Couch said the staff’s intent in preparing a report about a zoning request is to make a firm recommendation but provide options, in a “we report, you decide” view to the commissioners.
This statement heads a page in the report: “Staff recommends denial of the request based (on) the Comprehensive Plan’s Future Development Map current designation of the property as rural open space. If approval is granted, the following conditions are recommended.”
Some of the 14 listed conditions are routine for residential developments.
County’s traffic study
More project-specific conditions include requirements for buffers and landscaping, and this statement about traffic impact mitigation: “The County has commissioned a traffic study at its own expense. Any on-site mitigation measures recommended by the study, such as accel/decel lanes, turn lane or other measures shall be installed by applicant/developer at their expense.”
The traffic study, which the county contracted the Keck & Wood firm to do at an expected cost of around $10,000, Couch said, still had not been received Wednesday.
With planned connections to both Black Creek Church Road and Brooklet-Denmark, the subdivision should have less pronounced effects on traffic near the schools than if it opened just to one road, Couch said.
The study could also suggest how traffic delays at the Rushing Road-Brannen Pond Road intersection on Brooklet-Denmark Road can be addressed, he said. A four-way stop, installed in mid-2016, remains controversial because of congestion at school arrival and departure hours, but Chance cited numbers showing that there have been far fewer accidents at the intersection in the last five years than in the five years before the four-way stop was installed.
Couch has long suggested installing a roundabout as a further improvement.
Chance presented the developer and landowners’ case for the zoning change, and Johnson and three other citizens spoke in opposition or expressed concerns.
Lost farmland
Active farmers were not heard from directly during the Dec. 7 meeting, but some had commented in the “reasons for signing” space on Change.org.
“This land is some of the most productive in Bulloch County,” Brooklet-area farmer Chap Cromley wrote there. “My fear is that one day, we will wake up and our farm land will be gone.”
But Chance related the acreage that will be lost for farming to U.S. Census Bureau data.
“I think in the most recent census there are 197,000 acres of farmland in Bulloch County, and there are 478 farms,” he said. “Farming is important. I grew up on a farm myself. However, this is less than point zero six percent (0.06%) of the total farmland in the county. … I think it’s also important to note that just about every subdivision that’s ever been built in Bulloch County, and every subdivision that people in here live in, was once farmland.”
Why approved?
Commissioner Walter Gibson made all three motions to rezone the tracts to R-25, with the conditions, including some changes the developers requested to a couple of the conditions.
“We’ve got some good developers in the county, and they do a good job, but I think it all goes back to people owning property, property rights and of course they’ve got a right to sell it, and somebody’s got a right to buy it,” Gibson said Friday. “From what I understood they plan on putting a very upscale, nice development there, and that area of the county is growing, and people are moving in here whether we like it or not. I don’t know that we can stop it.”
He noted that the site is close to Brooklet and the Southeast Bulloch schools and said his thinking would probably have been different if the 90 acres were in the middle of a farm several miles farther out.
Commissioner Anthony Simmons seconded Gibson’s first motion. Commissioner Jappy Stringer seconded the remaining two.
“Personally, I just felt like it was going to be something that if we denied it, it would just be delaying it,” Stringer said this week. “We’ve got progress, we’ve got things coming, like at that (industrial) mega-site down at Bryan and Chatham counties, so we’ve got folks that are going to be looking at Bulloch County. It’s a great place to live and other people know that.”