I’ve always thought it ironic that the neighborhoods we build are often named after the critters we’ve run out with our bulldozers. You have fox hollows all over the place, deer runs, owl’s landings – any number of pastoral, if disingenuous, memorials to our feathered and furry friends.
When developers come into our communities to chase us out of our comfort zones with new construction, we protest about traffic and other matters. But we all live in those former animal habitats, so protest often turns into resignation at the inevitability of new development.
Along Roswell Road near Providence Road, WellStar Health System has broken ground on 23 acres to consolidate its facilities in one location. The $80 million campus should be ready by Sept. 2014. While WellStar has said it wants to work with its neighbors to minimize impact, some I’ve spoken to are not happy with the situation.
WellStar was able to bypass zoning hearings by transferring the property to the Kennestone Hospital Authority, which is not subject to zoning rules.
One person not happy about this is Libby Barnett, who lives in Hidden Hollow off Robinson Road. She is concerned with the lack of transparency in the WellStar effort and other developments, which also includes a proposed senior living complex backing up to her neighborhood on the 54-acre Tritt property adjacent to East Cobb Park.
This complex will undergo zoning hearings in August, and is being planned by Isakson Living, which has built a similar development in Stone Mountain.
Artists’ drawings of the 987 unit senior living proposal depict four-story brick dwellings looming above East Cobb Park, casting the landscape as more urban than suburban.
Can this change be accommodated by park visitors and neighbors? We’ll see. Isakson Living has promised briefings for the surrounding neighborhoods that should address some obvious reservations about the project.
Barnett favors an additional way to enhance transparency being pitched by Carol Brown of the Canton Road Neighbors, a non-profit civic group. Brown has already briefed her “neighborhood notification proposal” to some county commissioners.
As reported by the AJC on June 10, the program would allow communities to “voluntarily draw geographic boundaries and register with the county, making them eligible to receive regular communications on rezoning and other issues.”
This type of system is already in place in dozens of other communities nationwide, including Athens, Ga., that not only fosters transparency, but precludes early zoning disclosures to favored groups.
One geographic boundary could include those communities surrounding East Cobb Park.
In fact, the Tritt property made the final cut in the 2008 parks bond initiative, approved by the voters by a margin of 65 percent, which was curtailed because of budget considerations. Barnett laments the fact that what was once nearly approved as an addition to East Cobb Park will now be transformed into a massive senior living facility.
A comprehensive system might have made such decisions more palatable. Let’s take a chapter from the Athens playbook and support Carol Brown’s notification program.
Craig Allen has lived in Cobb County for 10 years. Reach him at alle3257@bellsouth.net.
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