About Lake Oconee news. (Greensboro, GA) 199?-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 24, 2017)
Page A12 Lake Oconee News G Friday, February 24,2017 Mark Engel/Staff Rabun Neal, President of Reynolds Lake Oconee, spoke at the public hearing to support changes in open space requirements for Planned Unit Developments like Reynolds. Mark Engel/Staff Harbor Club resident Mark Shoals addressed the Greene County Commission at a public hearing on February 16 about the revised county Zoning Ordinance. Zoning Continued from A1 resource protection, amenity or buffers...” PUD developments like Harbor Club and Reynolds Lake Oconee can have a wide variety of residen tial housing such as single family or multi-family homes, condos, day-care homes and accessory and maintenance buildings. However, the old zoning ordi nance also required a “minimum of 33 percent of open-air rec reational uses and other usable spaces.” The new ordinance changes this to a six-level sliding scale where PUDs that average 3.51 to 4.00 units per acre must have a minimum of 35 percent open space. The required percentage of open space drops as the housing density goes down. In the lowest level, PUDs that have 1.5 units per acre or less will have no open space requirement. Reynolds and Harbor Club are now at the low end of the scale. “Open space was originally a contract between the county and any developer, following the rules of a PUD,” another Harbor Club resident, Jerry Hill, told commis sioners. Hill has been an outspo ken critic of any effort to decrease open space in the county.” “The concern that I have,” he said, “is that in other locations besides Greene County, we’ve had open space that has been taken away and turned into develop ment.” Rabun Neal, president of Reynolds Lake Oconee, told the commissioners that he supported the new ordinance. “I think the timeliness of this is very important to us as a develop er,” he said. “Currently, we have 86 acres inside the Landing that we cannot develop. We also have 13 acres in our core development that we’ve not been able to develop anything past the 33 percent.” In addition to changing require ments for land currently zoned as PUD, developers will be able to “annex” land adjacent to the PUD no matter what the current zoning of that land is. Hang on. That’s not all. While open space was the only subj ect raised at the public hearing, the entire 233-page document covers every type of zoning issue on the books including off-street parking, signs, cemeteries and junk cars. It also incorporates recently approved ordinances on solar farms and chicken houses. The new ordinance primarily cleans up inconsistencies in the old ordinance but there were some small changes that popped up without explanation in a compari son of the old and new ordinances. For instance, the distance a swimming pool can be built from a property line was shortened from 20 feet to 10 feet. Also, required buffers and vegetative screening around all utility facili ties in PUDs were dropped. “This is a living document,” County Manager Byron Lombard told the commissioners, “that has to be adjusted based on develop ment patterns and the needs of the community, especially a growing community. There are a number of areas that have been repeatedly reviewed and discussed over the last several years.” Commissioners passed the ordi nance on a 5-0 vote. Reflecting on the open space changes, Commissioner Jonathan Human (Dist. 3) said Tuesday that they were necessary. “Our tax digest is based off property taxes,” he said. ‘We have to look at what’s good for the county long term. To be honest, around the lake if we didn’t do this sliding scale, we’ve probably only got 10 more years of real residen tial growth.” He said that by approving the changes, they probably now have about 20-30 more years of resi dential growth. District 1 Commissioner Angela Deering said it’s all about taxes. “Our main goal is to figure out how to diversify the tax base.” She says that relaxing open space requirements on the large gated communities will allow more res idential building, which means more property taxes but she’s not worried about abuse. “I don’t see Reynolds building in a way it’s going to hurt their com munity. They’ve been very respon sible and Harbor Club has also,” Deering said.
