Forsyth County has dropped a measure that would have made it one of only two counties in metro Atlanta without a citizens planning commission.
The Board of Commissioners voted unanimously last week to keep the five-member citizens' board in place.
It was a quiet demise for a suggestion that had generated some disagreement among county commissioners themselves.
The idea was first proposed earlier this year by County Commissioner Pete Amos, who argued it could save the county as much as $35,000 a year. With development and zoning requests still sluggish, he said, there is not the same need for the panel as in the past.
County commissioners voted 3-2 in June to begin the public hearing process to modify the Unified Development Code to suspend the Planning Commission until June 30. No hearings were ever held.
"I don't believe the numbers," said Commissioner Todd Levent, one of the two commissioners opposing the idea.
First, he said, the Planning Commission saves the county by using 25 percent of the staff it would require if zoning decisions were made by the Board of Commissioners. Also, the panel saves time by doing much of the preliminary investigations and "smoothing out a lot of the edges" before the Board of Commissioners conducts the final public hearing, he said.
Finally, planners, though not elected, are less likely to have political motivations in reaching their decisions, Levent said.
Whatever the arguments, the County Commission agreed to drop the idea without comment at its work session last Tuesday.
Of the core metro Atlanta counties, Coweta is the only one without a citizens board that meets regularly to examine zoning and development applications before they are heard by county commissioners. It does have a citizens Board of Zoning Appeals that considers variances and conditional uses.
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