The Waynesboro Planning Commission voted 4-2 on Tuesday night to recommend that Waynesboro City Council approve the request for a conditional use permit allowing a woman who invested money in building up an event business in a residential neighborhood to hold up to 100 events per year there.
I don’t really care about the Planning Commission in the sense that its vote means anything, because, frankly, it doesn’t – the City Council is going to do with this what the City Council is going to do with this.
What I care about is the comment that Kenny Lee, the mayor, who serves as the City Council’s liaison to the Planning Commission, and has a vote on that body on planning matters, had to say – because Lee, inadvertently, made the point that I’ve been making with respect to this application for the past couple of weeks.
“As presented by the staff, in what they’ve presented, then I don’t see where I could say no,” Lee said, as he joined the 4-2 Planning Commission majority.
Handicapping how the City Council is going to deal with this, then, we can already judge the scoreboard as reading Mimosa Farm 1, Neighbors 0.
Lee’s comment gives us the answer to the question from our July 18 report on the Mimosa Farm matter – “Is the city review of the Mimosa Farm permit request just a formality?”
ICYMI
- Waynesboro: Is the city review of the Mimosa Farm permit request just a formality?
- Waynesboro: City siding with venue that has been violating zoning laws for years
The answer: obviously.
The issue that I’ve had from the jump on this is that the city planner, Alisande Tombarge, told us that she didn’t reach out to even a single neighbor as she worked on the staff report that ultimately recommended approval for the request of Jill Wallace, the owner of the Mimosa Farm property, who told the Planning Commission at Tuesday’s meeting that she left her corporate job at the end of last year to run her business full time.
She claimed ignorance of having run her business in violation of the city zoning ordinance for the past six years, then claimed that she reached out to neighbors as she was preparing her application for the permit to get their input.
Which runs counter to what she said at another point in her remarks to the Planning Commission, when she claimed to have been “genuinely, genuinely, blown away” that her neighbors were raising objections to the city permit.
“It’s been a really tough thing to hear,” she told the commission.
Imagine being one of her neighbors, and hearing that the city is moving full steam ahead toward carving a cutout in the zoning ordinance to turn what was a quiet residential neighborhood before Wallace moved in into a full-blown business district.
“Rather than seeking permission before commencing operation, it appears that the approach was to ask for forgiveness afterwards and hope that the operation would simply continue without objection. That significant opposition from the neighboring property owners demonstrates that that is not the case,” said Brian Croghan, one of Wallace’s neighbors who spoke in opposition to the permit request at this week’s Planning Commission meeting.
Another neighbor, Sharon Barrett, cut to the heart of the matter, asking if Wallace’s neighbors have their quality of life “undermined in order to satisfy the commercial interest of one individual who chose to develop an event venue on RS-12 zoned property?”
From what we know of the thinking of the city mayor, Kenny Lee, yes, they should, and it’s precisely due to the reason that I raised issue with the way the city handled this matter from the outset.
Just saying it out loud here: the city sought to make sure with its handling of this request that it was going to end up with the permit allowing the business in a residential district to continue as it has been operating for the past six years.
The review is, indeed, just a formality.
Handicapping the City Council vote on this month: at least one of the five City Council members will vote no, just to make it look good.
Don’t be fooled by that, though.
This one was always in the bag.
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Chris Graham
