Tuesday, Oct. 20 is going to be another long day for the Greensboro City Council with a virtual work session at 3 p.m. and a virtual City Council meeting beginning at 5:30 p.m.
If you’re interested in the meeting and can’t tune in at 5:30 p.m., don’t worry, it’s a long agenda that’s going to go on for hours, even if the City Council doesn’t get sidetracked by the Minority and Women’s Business Enterprise (MWBE) percentages on some of the consent agenda items, as it normally does.
The agenda includes six zoning and rezoning requests, which is good news and bad news. Good news because rezoning requests mean growth and development and the city needs both. Bad news because rezoning requests that have opposition can take a long time. The Planning Department makes about a five-minute presentation, each side gets 15 minutes for a presentation and then five minutes for rebuttal. Questions from councilmembers don’t count against the time limits.
After the “public hearing” portion of the meeting is closed, the City Council discusses the item. A rezoning with oppositions usually takes over an hour from staff presentation to the council vote.
One of the rezoning requests that will likely take more than that one hour minimum is a request to rezone nearly 40 acres at Glendale Road and South Holden Road from Public and Institutional zoning to Office zoning for World of Victory Church. Although the rezoning request is to Office, Rev. Adrian Sparks, the pastor of World of Victory Church, said that the church intended to build between 60 and 90 apartments on one tract of the land in addition to church buildings and offices. Multi-family is allowed in the Office zoning district.
The major concern expressed by the neighbors who opposed the rezoning request at the Zoning Commission meeting is that the Office zoning has no conditions, which means any use permitted in the Office zoning district could be built on the land if it is rezoned.
The lack of any conditions restricting the development resulted in a 4-4 split vote on the Zoning Commission. So the rezoning request was denied by the Zoning Commission and that denial was appealed to the City Council by the applicant.
