The Gainesville Planning Department staff is recommending denial of an annexation request for a 20+ acre tract at White Sulphur and Pine Valley roads where an apartment complex has been planned.
The recommendation cites the city's comprehensive plan and adjacent single-family homes.
As AccessWDUN reported a couple of weeks ago, Timothy Bullard's proposal, according to planning department documents, calls for a 240-unit development, consisting of eleven buildings. It would be aimed at low- to moderate-income individuals.
The item is on the agenda for Tuesday's planning and appeals board meeting.
Also on the agenda are plans for a hotel on Browns Bridge Road in the same commercial complex that now houses a Hilton Garden Inn and Fairfield Inn and Suites, and a town home development in the Wilshire Road/Chestatee Road/Dixon Drive area. The planning staff is recommending approval of both of those requests.
The town home recommendation, however, comes with several stipulations, including that the developer, Jack Bailey, be required to include a sidewalk along Wilshire connecting with an existing sidewalk and that a 25-foot evergreen vegetated buffer be planted along the property lines of adjacent single-family homes. Bailey is seeking to have the property rezoned in order to construct 14 town homes in three, two-story buildings, with access to the site from Wilshire Road.
The staff recommendation of approval for a stream buffer variance for the proposed hotel site notes that the request is not without precedence. In 2006, Billy Powell was granted a variance reducing the required buffer zone from 75 to 25 feet for construction of the Hilton Garden Inn. Aneesh Patel is making a similar request for his hotel site. He plans a four-to-story structure on the tract.
The planning and appeals board meets Tuesday at 5:30 at the Gainesville Justice Center on Queen City Parkway.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2016/5/397122/gainesville-planning-staff-recommends-rejection-of-annexation-for-240-unit-apartment-complex