Probably surprising nobody, Statesboro City Council has denied a zoning change and a height variance needed for a gas station and a four-story hotel to be built between Georgia Southern University's Garden of the Coastal Plain and First Presbyterian Church. The requests, from the estate of the late Martha Benson for her former family home at 1301 Fair Road, came to the council with a unanimous recommendation from the city Planning Commission that they be denied. When the mayor and council held their hearing last month, more than a dozen people spoke against the zoning change.