How the City of Peachtree Corners Handles Zoning Can Cost You

One of the three services the new city of Peachtree Corners is required to provide by the city charter is zoning.  Zoning has to do with determining how a piece of land will be used, how it may be developed, how the private land owners are treated, and how the citizens are kept informed, etc.  Some of our neighboring cities have mishandled zoning and cost their tax payers significant money.

Dunwoody’s city council was discussing selling land previously acquired to be a city park to a private developer.   The story made the news the other day because someone leaked this information from a “secret” city council meeting.  Does the city government really have any business acquiring land under one purpose only to actually sell it to a private developer soon thereafter?  The city government enters the real estate speculation business, attempting to ensure that land gets used the way they want it used versus the way the open market would use it.  This is the type of thing that has dominated Gwinnett County for years.  I expect to see much better from our own new council.

The emphasis from the news in this Dunwoody case was on the leak and not on the fact that secret meetings were going on.  The Peachtree Corners City Council will have some work cut out for them in clearly defining the policy on open meetings.  I think that most all the candidates agree that all council meetings should be open to the public and if possible viewable over the internet.   This combined with having the right people on the council will prevent secret land deals to circumvent zoning and foiling private property rights and the free market.

The fate of land across the street from the Forum has appeared recently in blogs and other conversations during the campaigning for city council.  How this land was zoned by the county and will ultimately be handled by our new city is much on everyone’s mind.  I have obtained a consent order issued by the courts concerning this rezoning case.  If you would like a copy of the consent order please e-mail me (electbrent@yahoo.com) and I will e-mail it over.  Roberts Peachtree Parkway, L.P. bought the property, I believe sometime in 1999.  They filed for a rezoning on approximately 18 acres of the property.  Gwinnett denied the rezoning and Roberts Peachtree Parkway, L.P. filed a lawsuit (199-CV-0764-CC) based on The Fair Housing Act.  Gwinnett County fought the lawsuit for several years and finally worked out an agreement and was settled as is stated in the Consent Order mentioned above.  Two distressing points in this are that the county zoning regulations were not strong enough to withstand the legal challenge and the fact that we the citizens of Gwinnett County had to pay $390,000 to Roberts Peachtree Parkway, L.P. for attorneys fees.  Of course we had to pay the Gwinnett County attorneys also. 

I have heard from a number of sources that the “land across the street from the Forum” has been deemed the site of a new 30 million dollar city hall.  I would hope that each and every person running for City Council would go out of their way to put this rumor to rest for good and let’s get busy establishing the systems that will prevent the potentially disastrous real costs of running a City.  Thankfully, we have established a very limited city with only three services: Zoning, Code Enforcement, and Trash.   These do seem simple on the surface, but done without proper due diligence by city representatives, they will cost us.   I am running for City Council Post 5 with a clear objective to do that work and be accountable to the citizens for it.