Zoning board hears from Dollar General developer and residents who oppose store

Some residents who live near a proposed Dollar General in Macon expressed their opposition to the store Monday during a zoning hearing.

The Macon-Bibb County Planning & Zoning Commission considered an application to rezone 4397 Jeffersonville Road from a single-family residential district to a neighborhood commercial district. Teramore Development plans to build a 9,100-square-foot Dollar General store on at 2-acre site at the intersection with Chestney Road.

Warrington Williams, who lives in the area, said he got 95 percent of the people who live in Apple Valley subdivision to sign a petition against the development.

“We don’t want it there,” he said. “When we leave our neighborhood we have to go by their store ... and they don’t want it.”

He said there are other dollar stores nearby and didn’t see the need for another one.

Sheila Crawford, who lives in Willow Landing, said the store would attract crime and the neighborhood didn’t want “the caliber of people that kind of store brings” and it would “diminish what we have built.”

Other residents who spoke also said they were worried about crime and the added traffic the store would create.

Duke Groover, representing the developer, said he understood the concerns of the residents and that “they were completely rational concerns.” But he had collected the names of many area residents who didn’t oppose the proposed store.

“Obviously, there will be a mix of opinions,” he said. “Obviously, Teramore is not going to do this if there was no market.”

The commission’s Executive Director Jim Thomas said the entire site was previously zoned as a commercial district, but in about 2007 the district maps were digitized and inadvertently a portion of this property was converted to residential. It was originally intended to be zoned as a commercial neighborhood district.

For that reason, after much discussion, the commission approved the rezoning 3-1 “in order to get it back to where it was supposed to have been before the computer mapping glitch,” said vice chairman Jeane Easom.

Commissioner Bryan Scott voted against the application and Commissioner Tim Jones recused himself because he said he had a relationship with the owner and knew some of the residents who opposed it.

In another matter, more than 50 people attended the meeting to oppose a timber cut that took place last week between the Providence subdivision off Bass Road and Interstate 75. However, while the commission was scheduled to hear an application about the site plan for the commercial area adjacent to Providence, there wasn’t anything on the agenda about the timber cut.

The commission deferred the conditional-use application at 1540 Bass Road to allow revisions to a previously approved site plan until the developer presents a plan showing a second access.

This story was originally published December 10, 2018 at 7:30 PM.