Planning & Zoning Meeting Today

The majority of people in today's meeting were there for the Old Mall Project. Although Paul Wilber even admitted that the project wouldn't work under the PRD Zoning yesterday in Court, they decided to go ahead with the project and take it to the next level.

The WWTP & Publics Works Department said they could add 6 new hook ups a day for the next few years and still not be over capacity. I personally find that hard to believe as well as several other people in awe at such a statement. Do note, John Jacobs was not present and did not make this statement.

The Developers brought out several letters from Citizens apparently stating they support the project but that was very quickly brought down by Terry Cohen stating these are the same people who are on the record stating they are not in support of this same project once they learned in detail what these Developers truly had in mind.

My big question is, where was Mike Dunn? Where were the 100 supporters of this project he so boldly told everyone he had? I didn't count a single resident of the City of Salisbury there in support of the project. That speaks for itself!

There are now going to be 16.17 units per acre and as we've seen the decline of promises towards Senior Housing in Sassafras, here we go again with this project. They had brought the project to the City offering 150 Senior houses and have now dropped that figure down to 100 homes.

One major question that was asked time and time again was, where's the lake? I thought you were going to build the lake first? "We just didn't want to commit to it, just in case." Just in case of what? Now they're on the record as stating they're NOT going to build the lake after all.

There were other concerns about the housing market being in a decline and the Developers didn't seem to have a single concern about that. They want to bring a Grocery Store into the project, even though the new filing for a PRD won't allow that much retail space, they believe they can ask and receive a special exception and exceed the legal limit as to this retail space. They originally wanted 298,000 sq. ft. of commercial office and retail but the PRD brings them all the way down to only 30,000 sq. ft. of retail space and they'll ask for an additional 100,000 sq. ft. of space for the Grocery Store.

Although the Old Mall does need a drastic change, keep an eye out for this property being flipped once this Developer gets what they want by the City. A perfect example would be something called Sassafras.