On Monday, October 21, Mayor Brandon Hembree submitted a veto of the ordinance for RZ 24-004 that was passed by the Sugar Hill City Council on Monday, October 14 at the regular monthly meeting.
RZ 24-004 was a request to rezone 4.61 acres at 1036 and 1040 Whitehead Road FROM RS-150 (Low-Density Single-Family Residential with a minimum lot size of fifteen thousand (15,000) square feet), RS-100 (Medium-Density Single-Family Residential with a minimum lot size of ten thousand (10,000) square feet) and AF (Agricultural-Forest) TO RS-100 CBD (Central Business District).
The rezoning of the two parcels for RZ 24-004 was actually part of a larger plan cooked up by the City, the applicant, and his realtor to create a 15-acre, 180-unit housing development consisting of townhomes and zero-lot-line homes priced between $400k and $800k around a small park focused on the City’s “Champion Tree.”
The City Charter of Sugar Hill gives the Mayor ten days to veto an ordinance with “a written statement of the reasons for the veto.” According to Hembree’s written notice, he “has concerns with the action taken by the City Council.” He did not specify the nature of his concerns.
The October 14 vote to approve RZ 24-004 came after the case had meandered through the system since August due to pushback from the Sugar Hill Planning Commission and the public regarding an unusual lack of information about the case from the Sugar Hill Planning Department and the applicants. The case had appeared before the Sugar Hill Planning Commission twice and the City Council once before.
Post 1 City Council Member Joshua Page ran for office last year on a platform of lower density and specifically indicated at one time that he would vote no on high-density developments.
At the final hearing and vote, he promptly interrupted Council Member Gary Pirkle’s motion to deny the rezoning with a “substitute motion” to approve the rezoning with 8 additional conditions. Although this was a breach of Robert’s Rules of Order (a substitute motion is supposed to amend the main motion, not abruptly push it off the table as though it had never been made), the Council voted on that substitute motion and approved it 3-2, with Page voting along with establishment City Council Members Taylor Anderson and Alvin Hicks for approval. City Council Members Meg Avery and Gary Pirkle voted against the approval.
It is not unusual for new conditions to be suggested for rezoning cases at the Planning Commission or City Council hearings. Typically, interested developers with objections to conditions will raise those concerns at the hearing, and it’s not unheard of them to ask for their cases to be tabled for further negotiations. These developers raised no objections to the conditions at the meeting, suggesting that by that time, for some reason, they were not serious about proceeding with the project anyway.
This rezoning was required to execute the housing development in anything like the form presented at the vote, so it seems as though that project is now off the table. The veto would revert the zoning of the parcels back to their previous status and erase the conditions.
The veto will be presented to the City Council at the November City Council meeting where it requires four City Council votes for an override.
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Documentation
