A controversial rezoning request along Garden Road is poised to come before Burlington’s city council later this month despite having been roundly panned at a recent meeting of the city’s planning and zoning commission.
Yet, this proposal to rezone 2.2 acres near one of the entrances to the Alamance Crossing shopping center is apparently quite different from the one that drew the advisory board’s disapproval shortly before Christmas.
Couched as a “limited” form of commercial zoning, this request from Whitsett resident Stanley Smith had originally sought 67 of the 119 uses which Burlington ordinarily allows in a general business district on property he owns near Garden Road’s intersection with Boone Station Drive.
By the time his request reached the city’s planning commission on December 16, Smith had abandoned roughly a third of the uses that had appeared in his initial application. He went on to jettison several more uses during the meeting itself in response to objections from neighbors as well as pressure from the city’s planning staff. These changes nevertheless failed to sway the commission’s members, who went on to vote 5-to-1 to recommend the city’s denial of the request.
This inauspicious result has prompted a flurry to further revisions according to Burlington’s planning director Jamie Lawson, who summed up the status of Smith’s rezoning request during a city council work session on Monday.
“The number of uses that the applicant has proposed has changed pretty significant even since the last planning and zoning commission meeting,” she explained that afternoon. “At this point, the applicant has reduced their request only to multi-family [development]…and this is the request that will be before you for consideration.”
Lawson acknowledged that Smith’s original proposal had drawn intense opposition from residents of the nearby Fairview Estates subdivision. She added, however, that these objections had largely been based on the assumption that Smith had plans for commercial development and not multifamily dwellings, which are also permitted within a general business district.
Lawson conceded that the latest incarnation of the property owner’s request would still allow a more intense form of development than is allowed under the existing medium density residential designation.
“The zoning will go from 4.85 units to 24 units per acre,” she added. “But this is definitely more compatible, in my opinion, than the series of uses they had proposed previously.”
“And it’s more compatible with the zoning across the street,” interjected Burlington’s mayor Jim Butler as the council accepted Lawson’s recommendation to hear the request on January 21.
