What Were They Thinking?

Could the City of Sugar Hill Have Prevented the Current Developer Lawsuit?

The lawsuit filed by developer Jason Nam Kim against the Mayor and Council of the City of Sugar Hill for denying his request to rezone his property from residential to commercial states that Kim purchased the land intending to develop it for commercial use due to its location on Highway 20 and its designation as a commercial node in the City of Sugar Hill’s 2019 Comprehensive Land Use Plan (“comp plan”). It also states that the Sugar Hill Planning Department recommended approval of the rezoning, citing compatibility with the comp plan.

All of the City’s planning and zoning decisions are supposed to be made following that plan. That’s why comp plans are so important (and why you should get involved in the comp plan update going on now). Since the City Council acted against a comp plan of their own creation and did not publicly indicate why that was necessary, could they be at a legal disadvantage?

The lawsuit does not mention the months of discussion between the developer, his attorneys, and neighborhood residents. Although the lawsuit accuses the City of “delegating their authority to neighbors and other property owners” in violation of the Georgia Constitution and says that they denied the rezoning “in order to curry political favor with neighbors and other residents in the City and in unincorporated Gwinnett County,” they never mention that the developer and the residents came to an agreement on conditions for the property.

During the final hearing at the May City Council meeting, the developer’s attorney presented a list of conditions that were satisfactory to the developer and that he thought would satisfy most residents. Most residents who spoke and submitted comment cards at the hearing seemed to agree. His conditions were based on the ones Planning Director Kaipo Awana presented, with a key change - the developer's attorney included restaurants as a prohibited use.

The no-restaurant condition had previously been agreed to by the developer at the SHPC hearing. The SHPC favored that no-restaurant condition when it voted for approval, but the Planning Director continually rejected it, and no City Council Member requested to add the no-restaurant condition. Even so, the developer had repeatedly signaled a willingness to leave a restaurant out of the project and could have, and might have done so even without a condition.

Although the Mayor and Council did not publicly disclose a reason for their denial of RZ-22-007, I can’t help but wonder if the reasoning revolves around their desire that this property host a restaurant close to the City’s new Ridge Lake Park and their concern that this project would not include their restaurant.

A more conspiracy-minded individual might think that the City, who had been bending over backward to get this thing through from the outset, was STILL working to get this thing approved, perhaps even working with the developer.

Maybe the developer’s attorney made a show of working with residents and offering concessions so they could get on the good side of the public they need for these businesses. The City denied the rezoning so they could claim they really are tough with developers in a critical election year. And in the end, the whole thing very predictably goes to Superior Court, where it could be reversed, and concessions the residents thought they were getting are thrown out the window.

The developer gets his rezoning with no conditions, and the City gets the restaurant (originally planned to be on a septic tank instead of sewer, no less) that it wanted all along without having to own the decision. Taxpayers foot the bill for the whole lawsuit.

A more conspiracy-minded person might think ALL of that.

Incompetence explains it, too.