About Sandy Springs reporter. (Sandy Springs, GA) 2007-current | View Entire Issue (May 2, 2019)
MAY 2019 ■ www.ReporterNewspapers.net Community | 11 SS There was even a brief debate over whether tree-cutting violates Pope Fran cis’s encyclical about protecting the envi ronment. (A science teacher said it’s com plicated, but basically OK.) But the biggest debate is about the old agreement, where residents approved the Upper School expansion in exchange for a written promise that the school would never grow further on the site or any ad jacent property. Holy Spirit acknowledg es that agreement could block the school part of its project, but says it is now in valid due to a legal technicality: the NPA failed to renew its annual registration pa perwork with the state. The NPA’s Stephen Phillips says Holy Spirit is wrong and the neighbors are willing to test it in court. “Listen, if we wanted to be in a lawsuit tomorrow, we could do that,” he said after the meeting, adding that the NPA is willing to negoti ate further instead. The NPA’s yard signs are touching a legal nerve as well. Dotting scores of lo cal front yards for months, they read “Re spect Our Neighborhood” and “Honor the Agreement,” along with the NPA’s web site. One resident complained that last month he found the school’s public re lations director photographing his yard sign and was told it was evidence-gather ing for a possible lawsuit. Head of School Kyle Pietrantonio acknowledged that was true. “At the advice of the board of direc tors, we were advised to document and photograph 170 or so signs and map the corresponding addresses for a potential suit [alleging] defamation against the in stitution,” Pietrantonio told the crowd. “At this time, we don’t plan to pursue that.” Pietrantonio said in an interview that the defamation claim was based on the idea that the signs are false because “technically, there is no agreement... We felt like we could prove some institution al reputational damage.” But in a com pletely reverse move, Pietrantonio ar ranged for Phillips to make a special, full-length presentation about the agree ment and claims of its validity from the podium during the community meeting. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Phillips said afterward about Holy Spirit’s defamation lawsuit idea and photo-talcing. “We were really shocked and dismayed about it.” Pietrantonio also complained about harassing activity related to the signs. He said that on the night of Palm Sun day - an important Christian observance - someone planted a large number of the signs on the school’s field and on buses parked there. And recently, he said, some students wearing Holy Spirit gear at the Atlanta airport ran into someone who said they “better honor the agreement.” Traffic pros and cons Traffic and parking are big drivers of the campus expansion. Holy Spirit says church parking is already a problem and that having separate Lower and Upper Schools generates unnecessary traffic between them. The parking deck would be project number one. In combination with a new driveway on Mount Paran, a vehicle queue within the new deck, new turns lanes and traffic officers, Holy Spir it says overall traffic would be lower and flow better. Some top neighborhood leaders aren’t convinced. Sally Rilcer, president of the Mt. Paran-Northside Citizens Associa tion, estimated the plan would add 200 vehicles to the campus total and do so in 30-minute crunch times in the morning and afternoon. She said the plan needs more mitigations, such as longer turn lanes. Ronda Smith, president of the Sandy Springs Council of Neighborhoods, said it is likely the current Lower School would be sold to a different school that would generate its own traffic in the area. Liken ing it to the game of musical chairs, she said, “It will be musical schools in this re gion.” Tree loss Holy Spirit’s plan is aimed at a 13-acre, largely wooded site. That has led to con cerns about tree loss and related effects, such as stormwater runoff and flooding. Holy Spirit’s arborist said the site has over 700 trees, of which roughly 92% are healthy. It remains unknown ex actly how many would be removed, but it appears to be a large number, as con sultants said the steeply sloped proper ty would have to be heavily flattened for construction. Under state and local laws, an area around a stream on the proper ty cannot be developed, so the trees there would remain, and Holy Spirit says that alone could meet the city’s requirement for 40% tree canopy coverage. Large new trees would be planted, and some other notable trees could be saved. Resident Rand Knight, a trained for ester who ran for U.S. Senate a decade ago, said that “not all canopy cover is created equal” and that simply mapping trees and replacing them with “plant ed ornamentals” doesn’t address “habitat destruction” and full ecological impacts. A side discussion alleging another form of broken agreement involved the 2003 sale of the property to Holy Spir it by the late Ben Sims. Some residents said his family members and obituary in dicate he essentially gave the land to the church on the condition that the wood land be preserved. “I don’t care about his obituary,” re plied Msg. Edward Dillon, the church’s pastor, who said he brokered the sale and that the price was about $170,000 an acre. Dillon said that Sims was, for lack of a better word, a “tree-hugger” who fig ured “if he sold to the parish, as long as I was around, we would preserve a lot of that” — particularly as opposed to it be coming another suburban subdivision, which is has not. The disputed agreement Behind the wiliness to negotiate is the legal leverage both sides see in the disputed 2003 agreement. On the NPA’s side, the agreement explicitly bars the school expansion. On Holy Spirit’s side is the claim that the agreement has lapsed - and in case was a deal with the school, not with the church, which could pro ceed with the parking deck on its own. In his presentation, Phillips gave a history of how the agreement came from previous legal hardball. In January 1998, he said, the school - then called the Don- nellan School - sought to come to the site with an expanded building and parking deck. After months of talks with resi dents, the school withdrew and filed with the city. More than 800 opponents gath ered at a meeting and connected with At lanta officials, who ultimately rejected the plan. The school then attempted to use a permit from a previous school who facility it had purchased; the city also re jected that. Only then did the school re turn to neighbors and seek the agree ment signed in 2003 - five years later. The new move to declare the agree ment invalid on a technicality is “moral ly reprehensible,” said Stanley Birch, a lo cal resident who is also a retired federal appeals court judge. “And here we stand in a church, and we’re talking about, ‘The agreement doesn’t matter because our reason is good.’” Birch said that going to court could delay the project for years and cost a lot of money. Referring to Holy Spirit’s at torney, Carl Westmoreland, Birch said, “Now, Carl’s a very good lawyer, and if he’s having to fish this hard for a reason not to enforce the agreement, then the church isn’t in that good a spot.” However, a resident who is also an at torney spoke in support of the project and said that the agreement’s permanent ban on school expansion wouldn’t stand up in court anyway, under legal princi ples barring eternal deals. Meanwhile, Westmoreland had an other legal pressure point to poke. He said to get an “independent opinion,” he asked a title insurance company to re view the agreement and see whether it would insure the project; the company reportedly said the agreement wouldn’t stop it. But Westmoreland said he is also pro negotiation, noting that some people didn’t want any change and some peo ple were more open. “I’d like to think the solution is somewhere in the middle,” he said after the meeting. Phillips had a similar approach. “They’re passionate, some might say ar rogant,” he said of Holy Spirit, but the NPA is willing to talk with them further. (^VM Surgical 404-303-3157 vJ I 1 N Specialists G YNSurgicalSpecialists. com A Northside Network Provider NOW WITH THREE CONVENENT LOCATIONS! We are a full-service gynecologic practice that offers routine gynecologic care and the most advanced minimally invasive surgical procedures to treat a wide range of gynecologic conditions. 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