At 3:50 p.m. Monday, a little over two hours before the city of Statesboro’s 6 p.m. Sept. 9 public information meeting on the big Burkhalter Village annexation proposal was scheduled to begin at City Hall, city Public Affairs Manager Layne Phillips emailed a notice that the event was cancelled.
As she noted, the developer had sent a formal request to the city staff Monday afternoon seeking to have the project removed from the regular Sept. 17 regular City Council agenda and placing a “temporary hold” on the annexation and rezoning requests.
“Blue Fern Development cited the need for additional due diligence and hopes to revisit the requests in the First Quarter of 2025. Additional information on the status of the project will be forthcoming as the developer advances in its planning stage,” Phillips wrote. “We apologize for any inconvenience due to the cancellation of tonight’s meeting, but city staff felt there was no need to have the meeting since the developer has withdrawn the requests.”
Earlier this summer, Blue Fern, which is a Redmond, Washington-based company, and local property owner Jeff Pope of JCWSJR LLC requested that the city annex the 714-acre tract off Burkhalter Road for the proposed housing development city officials initially called Blue Fern Village, but which they and the developer now call Burkhalter Village. The developer’s concept included roads, a community park and trail, and after some initial revisions, 1,794 housing units – in townhomes, duplexes, “casitas,” or small cottages, and single-family homes – to be built out in phases over 10 years.
In addition to annexation, which would be required to give the project access to the city’s water and sewer systems, the developers requested a zoning map amendment from the city’s annexation default zoning of R-40 single-family residential to PUD, or planned unit development and a mixed-use variance.
However, in a letter sent electronically to Statesboro city Planning and Housing Administrator Justin Williams, dated Sept. 9, Scott Rosenstock, authorized representative of Blue Fern Management LLC, conveyed the developer’s withdrawal of Burkhalter Village from the Sept. 17 agenda.
“Please accept this letter to formally remove the Burkhalter Village project from the upcoming City Council meeting on September 17, 2024, and put a temporary hold on the pending request for Annexation and Zoning Map Amendment,” Rosenstock wrote, and then cited the application numbers for the zoning change and variance.
“Further due diligence from the applicant team is needed to continue the pursuit of these applications,” the developer’s letter continued. “We will reach back out to development staff in the coming months to reinstate the land use process for this project as required.”
In this instance, “development staff” is a reference to the Planning and Development office staff at City Hall.
First quarter 2025
Phillips in her notice about the info meeting cancellation and Williams in a phone interview both referred to the developer putting the project on hold until some point in the first quarter (January through March) of 2025. But Rosenstock in his brief Monday afternoon letter, which Phillips released, did not actually refer to the first quarter or when the land use permitting process might be relaunched.
“It was really along those lines of, I think they need some additional time to research everything,” Williams said. “Especially with just, you know, the back and forth in the community, they want to defer that, and I think it’s not a bad situation to defer it if they are concerned.”
Blue Fern representatives had been invited to Monday’s information meeting, but with the company being based near the West Coast, they might have attended by a videoconferencing service, such as Zoom, City Manager Charles Penny suggested last week. That was the plan, Williams said, until he heard from the company and received the postponement letter around 2:30 p.m.
“The first quarter of 2025, I think, is what they’re looking at,” for restarting the process, he said. “So I would just refer to that in regards to it, and we’ll address these issues when it comes back up.”
Because of its size, the project was the subject of a Development of Regional Impact report that the Coastal Regional Commission of Georgia prepared for the city of Statesboro, completing it July 17.
In their submissions for the DRI report, the Bulloch County government cited concerns about the amount of traffic expected to be added on Burkhalter Road, and Ogeechee Riverkeeper called for protection of Little Lotts Creek and for the city to prioritize construction in the less environmentally sensitive portions of the property.
After the city formally notified the county and school district of the annexation request, the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners filed a formal objection with the city and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs at the 45-day deadline. But the DCA, stating that the deadline was missed because of a missing but required form, declined to appoint an arbitration panel to work out annexation issues between the city and county.
The Burkhalter Village annexation, rezoning and variance requests will still appear on the Sept. 17 council agenda because the council last month formally tabled them until that meeting, Phillips stated in her notice.
“However, no action will be taken on those items since the developer has withdrawn the requests,” she wrote.