For a hot, uncomfortable, for one person in the room, several seconds, a motion made by Jeremy Sloat, the at-large member on Waynesboro City Council, to set a Sept. 14 vote on a request for a city permit to allow a woman who has built an events business in her residential neighborhood hung out there, in need of a second.
No second, and the permit request would be dead, and would need to start over, from scratch.
Vice Mayor Lorie Jean Akanbi eventually broke the silence by coming forward with the second, but, man.
Drama!
Manufactured drama, but nonetheless.
They got us thinking they’re really thinking hard about this one, but I continue to say, sorry, it’s a done deal – and I’m continuing to say this having tuned in, via the YouTube machine, to the two and a half-hour public hearing on the permit request issue held on Monday.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro: City siding with venue that has been violating zoning laws for years
- Waynesboro: Is the city review of the Mimosa Farm permit request just a formality?
- Waynesboro: Mayor tips city’s hand on where things are going on Mimosa Farm request
- Waynesboro: Mimosa Farm neighbors note ‘hardship’ caused by residential business
Our City Council got an earful from more than two dozen neighbors of Mimosa Farm owner Jill Wallace, who bought the 8.3-acre property on Alphin Avenue in 2020 and transformed the home in a residentially zoned neighborhood into a thriving events business.
If you’re wondering, no, you’re not supposed to be able to just start an events business in a residentially zoned neighborhood.
The obvious zoning violation was brought to the attention of the city government earlier this year, prompting the need for Wallace to apply for a permit that would allow her to continue hosting events – with the city staff signing off on a plan that would allow up to 100 events per year, with the possibility of up to 500 attendees at seasonal festivals, and 100 invited guests, not including event staff, at weddings and other events.
Wallace, of course, had her supporters at the public hearing as well, though, notably, we didn’t hear support from anyone from among her neighbors – she did have members of her family and people who have attended weddings and other events at Mimosa Farm there to speak out on her behalf.
Where we are with this now is, Wallace will need three votes from the five-member City Council to get her permit, and at this point, we know that she already has one – the mayor, Kenny Lee, who is also the City Council’s representative on the Waynesboro Planning Commission, which gave its recommendation to the request at its meeting on July 21.
Lee, in joining the 4-2 majority at that Planning Commission meeting, said “(a)s presented by the staff, in what they’ve presented, then I don’t see where I could say no,” buttressing a point that I’ve been making since our first report on the request – that the city staff, in its move to sign off on recommending approval of the request, did not factor in the views of Wallace’s neighbors at all, which is serving to predispose city leaders to rubberstamp something that seems to have been a done deal from the jump.
To that issue, involving the incomplete grade for the city on the staff review, the city planner, Alisande Tombarge, who did the leg work on the review of the permit request, and signed off on the recommendation, told us by email last month that “staff does not usually seek comment from the neighbors for land use applications.”
Going forward, they very much should.
In the meantime, her answer caught the attention of the city manager, Mike Hamp, who noted in an email that we obtained from a FOIA request for access to internal city government communications on the Mimosa Farm request that he sent to Leslie Tate, the director of community development – and Tombarge’s boss – that “(i)t might be a fun exercise to address the question why staff does not seek or include comments from neighbors in a staff report.”
I’ve got an inquiry out to Hamp to get a sense of what he meant by that comment.
Having to explain why you didn’t do things by the book should not be a “fun exercise”; it should be a topic in the exit interview, if you get where I’m going there.
The lack of input from Wallace’s neighbors in the staff report sure stands out now, against the backdrop of what City Council heard from the neighborhood at Monday’s public hearing.
All of that said and reported out to you, I’m still saying, it still feels like a done deal to me.
Lee, it’s worth noting, went out of his way, after the public hearing, to state that he has never attended an event at Mimosa Farm – I wasn’t sure that was an issue – and that, thus, he feels no need to recuse himself from the Sept. 14 vote.
Again, not sure that was an issue.
That odd outburst makes it feel to me that this one is going to be a 3-2 vote in favor, with Lee serving, in effect, as the tie-breaking vote.
I would be sure that Jim Wood, who represents Ward D, in which Mimosa Farm and the angry neighbors is located, would vote no, so as not to invite dozens of people in his district to vote for his opponent, Sam Hostetter, in the Nov. 3 city election.
Wood defeated Hostetter for the seat in the 2022 cycle by a scant 17 votes.
How the other three members – Akanbi, Sloat and Terry Short – split to get us to 3-2 seems like kayfabe to me.
They’re going to want it to be 3-2 so that it seems like they really agonized to get to a 51/49 decision.
Don’t be fooled when that happens.
All the evidence you need to figure out how this is going to go down: Wallace has continued hosting events, and advertising her space for future events, this whole time.
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Chris Graham
