Students protest zoning changes

    The Milledgeville City Council will make a decision on the controversial ordinance limiting the number of unrelated persons living in a single-family household to three without a recommendation from the Planning and Zoning Commission. The P&Z’s decision not to approve the ordinance came after the members heard more than two hours worth of testimony from individuals in both support and opposition of the ordinance on Monday.
    The commission held a public hearing at Oak Hill Middle School on Monday, and the members found themselves deadlocked 2-2 concerning the ordinance.
    Billy Waller and Barney Collins voted in favor of the ordinance, Charles Birten and Chairman Mike McGee voted against it and Jacquelyn Parham and Carie Jarrard abstained. The knotted vote results in no recommendation given to the council.
    “We are ecstatic that this was not passed,” Meg Mason, president of the Milledgeville Residential Investors, a group of landlords against the ordinance, told The Macon Telegraph after the meeting. “We feel that this was not necessarily vindication, but this is a positive way to show that we have a propensity for change, but it has to be done in a collaborative relationship.”
    More than 25 speakers, a group comprised of students, residents, landlords and lawyers, addressed the commission before the vote was held, with each bringing his or her opinions to the issue at hand. The majority of the speakers had been ready to speak at the original meeting, which was rescheduled for Monday because the number of people who showed up at City Hall on Oct. 2 — nearly 200 — violated fire code. If anything, the rescheduling increased the number of people in atten-dance. Nearly all of the 460 seats in the Oak Hill auditorium were filled.
    Those in favor of the ordinance said limiting the number of unrelated persons living in a household would curb the traffic, noise, parking, trash and other problems that have become common-place in the downtown area.
    “I’ve been living in my house for 43 years, by the grace of God,” Milledge-ville resident Richard Brookings told the commission. “I love it, but I can’t live there with things going on.”
    Some echoed Brookings sentiments. Mark Pelton, a downtown resident, pulled incidents from The Colonnade as proof of the need for the ordinance.
    “Party busts on Dolles Boulevard, public urination by male and female students, public drunkenness, underage drinking, fights, theft and vandalism have occurred on our city streets and public places,” Pelton said. “That’s not me reporting this — it’s the student newspaper. Every resident here has been touched by these problems, and probably could detail their own, unpleasant, late-night experiences with drunken college students.”
    Others added their own spin to things. John Alton, Historic Preservation Commission chairman, said the ordinance will not only eliminate some of these undesirable acts, but will give a definition to the term “single-family unit.”
    “This ordinance will attempt to provide definition to just what a single-family unit is to a community and to the Planning and Zoning Commission,” Alton said. “The city of Milledgeville needs to curb the constant and steady encroachment of boarding housing, apartments and multi-family units within identified single-family areas. This ordinance is needed as the first step toward the preservation of a stable, quiet, family-oriented neighborhood that many of these owners present today moved to Milledgeville for.”
    But those against the ordinance said the road to this type of environment can only exist with the enforcement of current laws, not the creation of new ones.
    “I understand what these people are saying … but you’re tap dancing around the real problem,” Robert Binion, a local realtor and property owner, said. “The real problem is noise. The real problem is traffic. The real problem is parking. And you can have that whether you have one, two, three, four or five people living in the house.
     “Limiting the number of students in the downtown area is not going to solve the problem. If they are peeing in the bushes, enforce the ordinance that talks about that. If they have a bunch of cars parked in the yard, you have a parking ordinance … Think about what you are doing here, because you are not solving the problem,” Binion said.
    Janessa Hartmann, GCSU student body president, included Binion’s sentiments in her request that P&Z give a “no” recommendation to the City Council.
    “Yes, there are some households that are disruptive to some neighbors, [but] there are already laws in affect, and it’s been proven that these problems could be solved with these other laws,” Hartmann said. “Could this committee please make a recommendation to the city to enforce those laws before going to pass this regulation and making it a blanket affect?”
    The pleas from both sides of the argument were taken into consideration by the commission, but a recommendation was not given. Now the City Council must deliberate and make a decision on the ordinance at the regular Nov. 14 meeting scheduled for 6 p.m. at Oak Hill Middle School.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 3 2006. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry