Owners of hundreds of acres Clayton County once hoped could become the site of Amazon’s second headquarters are suing the county after the property was rezoned from industrial to commercial and entertainment.
Landowners in the Mountain View area — individual property investors as well as large developers such as Atlanta’s Selig Enterprises — claim in three separate suits that the county failed to hold proper public hearings on the new zoning and that the changes unfairly restrict use of their real estate.
"Plaintiffs have a substantial interest in use of the property for warehousing and plaintiffs have invested substantial sums of money in reliance upon such use and the previous zoning category in effect when the property was acquired," according to the lawsuit, which was filed against the five-member Clayton County Commission as well as a former commissioner whose term ended at the end of last year.
“The ordinance and any intervening zoning restrictions render the property uneconomic, substantially and unreasonably diminish the property’s value, and impermissibly divest plaintiffs of vested rights,” say the filings in Clayton Superior Court.
Clayton's commission pushed the zoning changes through in a 3-2 vote at its last meeting of 2018 over the fervid objections of property owners. The change was made, in part, because some county leaders see Mountain View as Clayton's best chance to attract mixed-use or other developments.
That belief led the commission to put a construction moratorium on Mountain View, which is close to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, for all of last year so Clayton could pitch it as a site for Amazon's second headquarters. After Amazon's decision to split the headquarters between suburban Washington, D.C., and New York, the commission decided to extend the moratorium on Mountain View, but this time the reason given was the board wanted more time to study the impact of its new zoning.
Clayton Commission Chairman Jeff Turner on Tuesday declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said he plans to hold a meeting with the property owners as early as this week.
“They are open-minded and they are willing to talk to me, so we’re going to talk offline,” he said. “We need to know what their concerns are.”
Larry Dingle, an attorney for the property owners, said he has no objections to a dialogue between his clients and the county. The legal action, however, was necessary because the property owners had a 30-day window in which to challenge the zoning changes, he said.
“The property owners were compelled to file these complaints to protect their rights,” he said.
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