Peachtree City residents in uproar over proposed water park resort

Properties: 12 existing, one under construction in the Anaheim, Calif. area and several others, including Peachtree City, in development.

GREAT WOLF’S PEACHTREE CITY PLAN

City leaders and Great Wolf officials are pretty mum about the project right now. But in emails obtained by residents, city officials seem to welcome the development, which they call by the code name “Red Riding Hood.”

Here’s a look at some those exchanges.

Jan. 16: Councilman Eric Imker writes to city officials, "This is a big deal! All indications are this will be the biggest thing to hit PTC ever. Concur?"

Jan. 18: Councilman Mike King writes to Mayor Vanessa Fleisch: "When Red Riding Hood catches the big bad wolf, all of us can take a sigh of relief. I simply don't want any bumps in this road. Maybe I'm a worry wart, but this is too important to let anything get in the way."

Fleisch writes: “Agreed, this is a wonderful game changer for this community.”

Jan. 28: Councilwoman Kim Learnard sounds a down note in an email to planner David Rast: "I can honestly say I don't think I have ever received the number of protest emails I have seen re the Great Wolf Lodge. People are going nuts and they haven't even seen the proposal."

Feb. 12: After residents turned out by the hundreds for a planning commission hearing on the project, King writes to Learnard: "I saw a lot more raw emotion Monday evening than factual data and left feeling ashamed because of how we treated a well intentioned company."

March 24: Mayor Vanessa Fleisch writes about the growing citizen protest and how to derail it. (a little background: John Dufresne heads the homeowners association closest to the proposed park. Jamie Fukofuka is founder of a locally popular Facebook page called "Life in the PTC Bubble"): "Obviously, I couldn't sleep tonight! The news of the protest concerns me greatly as I think it can get out of hand quickly. The meeting was held yesterday and my source tells me that John Dufresne was at the meeting and he was even concerned about the level of hatred in the room. It is my belief that this protest can be diffused (sic) if you are able to meet with these folks within the next couple of days before more news comes out about the existence of this protest. I think that Jamie Fukofuka also needs to be in the group … because she is the administrator of the FB page that really is fueling the misinformation about this project. If I were Great Wolf and I heard about a protest brewing I would not want to come here. I think it can be diffused quickly."

Developers envision a 40-acre resort with an indoor water park that could pull in half a million visitors a year. With its hotel, eateries and arcade, they say, the venture will generate millions in annual revenue from taxes and up to 770 jobs.

In an age of intense competition for economic development, it’s a project many communities would be lucky to land, some are saying. But in this instance, the community is Peachtree City, and many residents are feeling anything but lucky.

A good number of the residents of this town of 35,000 say the Great Wolf Lodge development will bring exactly what Peachtree City doesn’t need: increased traffic and decreased home values.

“It hurts the city,” said resident Martine Yancey. “I moved to Peachtree City because of the community values, the great school system and the family-friendly community. It’s quiet. It’s safe. We like the slower pace and our golf carts.”

Officials at Great Wolf — a unit of Madison, Wisc.-based Great Wolf Resorts, which was acquired last month by a New York investment firm — have declined to comment. So have all but one of the five city council members. The Atlanta Regional Commission and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce also had little to say on the matter.

The public outcry over the Great Wolf project has reached a fever pitch in this 56-year-old city known for its deliberately slow growth.

“We’ve never had anything like this in Peachtree City before,” said councilman Eric Imker said of the uproar.

“No Wolf” fliers are blanketing the community. Residents have taken to Facebook in protest, including a group that’s dubbed itself Operation Red Riding Hood. An online petition against the resort is approaching 1,000 names. A February planning commission meeting to review Great Wolf’s proposal was contentious with several outbursts from residents.

Great Wolf wants Peachtree City to rezone 38.4 acres near Aberdeen Parkway so it can turn an existing conference center there into a private resort. If approved, the site would go from general commercial zoning to Limited Use Commercial, giving Great Wolf more flexibility in developing the site, including allowing water slide tubes to extend into the buffer zones between the property and neighborhoods.

The planning commission voted 5-0 to recommend that the city council reject Great Wolf's rezoning request on the property between Aberdeen Parkway and Ga. 74 North. Subsequent hearings before the city have been postponed numerous times at the request of Great Wolf Lodge.

Thursday night, Peachtree City’s four-month old controversy is expected to reach a showdown when City Council holds a public hearing on Great Wolf’s rezoning and variance request. Several hundred people are expected to attend. Opponents plan to arrive in a cavalcade of golf carts and hold a “No Wolf” rally before.

“It’s the worst thing to happen in my 40 years of living here,” said Mike LaTella, an organizer of the rally and golf cart protest. “It threatens our way of life here. As we’ve grown as a city, we’ve gotten the Walmarts, but the focus has always been on businesses who served the city. Great Wolf is not meant to serve Peachtree City. It’s mainly for out-of-town guests to come in and spend the night. There’s no allegiance to the city.”

The city council can approve the project despite the planning commission’s recommendation.

“I’ll be asking lots of questions. There’s a lot of emotion in this, and I’m trying to get the facts,” Imker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Imker spent last Saturday talking to two dozen families who live directly in the path of the proposed resort. The councilman said he has been inundated with email that is “running 25-to-1 against Great Wolf Lodge coming into the city.”

If Great Wolf gets its way, Hector Chicas, his wife and two children say they could be permanently looking at a 64-foot water slide from their backyard where they’ve spent $25,000 to create an outdoor oasis with a pool and water fall.

A vice president of an Atlanta firm that makes pet beds, Chicas logged 80,000 miles last year for work and looked forward to relaxing in his backyard. Now the family faces the prospects of being sandwiched between Great Wolf’s proposed four-story hotel and the water slide, Chicas’ wife Maria Esquen said.

“If they do build it, they [city officials] will be breaking their own rules,” Esquen said of the city’s longstanding practice of slow growth. “They will be breaking everything Peachtree City was built for.”

The fight marks an interesting moment for a city that, from the moment it broke ground in the mid-1950s as a planned community of tiny, self-contained villages, has actively resisted big development.

Some are concerned that today’s city leaders are too open to handing out exemptions to the Peachtree City’s ordinances.

“They’re giving out variances to ordinances almost routinely,” said Fayette Commissioner Steve Brown, who once served on the Peachtree City Council. “People are starting to worry — are we losing the essence of what makes Peachtree City special?”

The conference center known as Dolce Atlanta Peachtree Hotel and Resort has been on the market for a couple of years. Potential buyers came and went. Then Great Wolf shows up with its plan earlier this year.

While city leaders and Great Wolf are reluctant to talk, emails obtained by residents through open records laws seem to indicate some city officials have welcomed the prospect of landing “Red Riding Hood,” city leaders’ code name for the project.

In response to a question from Great Wolf Development Director Patrick Pline in late October about whether the city had original structural drawings of the existing site, the city’s senior planner David Rast replies, “If I say yes, can I be the first to slide down the 90-foot power slide?”

To which Pline replied: “The mayor already claimed the first ride, but you can probably challenge her to a rock, paper, scissors competition and let fate decide.”

Former mayor Bob Lenox called Great Wolf’s proposal “one of the better things that could happen on the Dolce property.”

With a dozen properties nationwide, Great Wolf knows what it’s doing, says Lenox, who has talked with Great Wolf officials and mayors in cities with Great Wolf attractions.

“People are blowing this out of proportion,” Lenox said.

Lenox says the plan is a good deal for the city. Great Wolf is expected to invest $75 million in the project, and the project should generate 770 permanent jobs. Fayette County, according to the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech, which analyzed the project for Fayette County’s development authority.

The Great Wolf development would generate more than $2 million a year in revenues for the city from hotel/motel taxes alone, Lenox said. But Imker, who has done his own numbers-crunching, said half of that money will go to Peachtree City’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. He also noted that much of the remaining money would end up in the state’s coffers as well as other municipalities in Fayette.

Lenox said Great Wolf has some supporters in the community but many are afraid to come forward for fear of being “jeered and booed.”

“They feel they’d be facing a lynch mob,” said Lenox, who worries that continued outcry could run off Great Wolf.

“If we tell Great Wolf to go away, we will have basically said to anyone who wants to build a low-density hotel to get the hell out of our town,” said Lenox, who noted that most of the proposed development will remain wooded. “The next guy who shows up won’t be so nice.”