well this thread was seriously hijacked!! "porn stache AG??" anyway it looks liked the new development took another step to reality.
Planners OK Lakeside Centre rezoning
By Conor Reilly
mreilly@newsadvance.com
July 26, 2006
Impacts of the proposed Lakeside Centre big-box development on Lynchburg’s traffic and environment dominated discussion at Wednesday’s Planning Commission meeting.
“I don’t like big boxes,” Commissioner Andy Sale said. “However, there are a lot of people who do.”
With that, commissioners voted 3-1 to approve a rezoning request from EE LLC, a partnership including English Construction. City Council will get the final say next month.
Commissioners Jane Bacon, Laura Hamilton and Sharon Oglesby were absent.
“We really want this to be a step above anything we have here,” developer Ray Booth told commissioners. “We want this to be a model.”
Booth said Lakeside Centre - a 130-acre project slated to include a home improvement store, grocery store and movie theater - will bring 1,200 new jobs and roughly $9 million in new tax revenue to the city.
Environmental issues were the first to be tackled.
Lakeside Centre will impact a mile of streams originating on the property. They flow into Blackwater Creek and into a dying College Lake.
The typical way of “mitigating” that destruction is to pay cash into a bank. But Booth said the money will probably be used in communities outside Lynchburg.
Alternatively, he’s agreed to use the more than $2 million in partnership with Lynchburg College and state officials to help clean College Lake.
Department of Environmen-tal Quality spokesman Mark Bushing said developers’ cash could be used for environmentally-friendly parking areas or to install a much needed “forebay” that will collect sediment and help fix the lake.
The project also will bring thousands of new cars per day to an already stressed intersection at the Lynchburg Expressway and Lakeside Drive.
City Manager Kimball Payne told commissioners that plans are in the works to make major improvements to that intersection, including widening Lakeside Drive. He said at least some of those improvements should be finished by the time the first stores are opening at Lakeside Centre, scheduled for fall 2008.
But Commissioner Rick Barnes wasn’t convinced the timing was right for a project of such massive scale.
Casting the sole vote against the project, Barnes said he didn’t think road improvements would be done on time or were sufficient to fix the problems already there.
He said Booth’s plans could spawn other types of sprawl development, and soon the city will “have another Wards Road on its hands.”
Barnes also said the project will “shift away from downtown” and make it difficult to redevelop blighted areas in the city’s center.
“Building on undeveloped green space should be a last resort,” he said.
If approved by City Council, mobile home park residents who live on the property will have to look for homes elsewhere. Residents came out against the project earlier this month.
Ray Booth of English Construction offered to pay residents up to $3,500 to offset moving costs, saying he was sensitive to their problems.
Commissioner Richard Worthington said the residents should “be careful what you wish for.”
Booth is under no legal requirement to give the residents any money. So if this development doesn’t go through, nothing prevents another developer from buying the property and giving the residents nothing.
The only real change to the original project had to do with the shopping center’s aesthetic design.
Commissioner Sale said developers need to take care to make their project look good because it is in an important “entrance corridor” that should showcase Lynchburg’s beauty.
Booth and the commission agreed that a “design review board” would have to sign off on any changes to the overall look of the retail complex.
- By ECC29