Renderings taken from the Planning Commission packet.
The development of a storage facility and restaurant/retail development hit a snag at the May 24 City Council meeting.
The development is to be at 260 Oxmoor Road, which is the former location of an America’s Best Value Inn & Suites. The owners plan to demolish the hotel on the property and then develop an “aesthetically pleasing” climate-controlled storage facility, he said. There are also plans to develop a retail or restaurant space on the remaining piece of the property. The owners said they are currently in talks with two sports bars.
To get the development, the property needs to first be resurveyed into two parcels, and then the northern portion needs to be rezoned from GURD (Greensprings Urban Renewal District) to C-5 (General Business District). The Planning Commission gave a favorable recommendation for these requests at its April 6 meeting.
But when the rezone request was presented to the City Council, Council President Alex Wyatt said that the owners wanted to change at least one of the proffers that were originally given for the property.
Two proffers still stand. One is that the construction of the building will match the renderings that were shown to the Planning Commission meeting, and the other was that there would be security cameras installed on the side of the building to ensure a safe, secure environment.
The proffer that has become a concern has been the proffer to restrict the use of the property to that only of a self-contained storage facility, said Chelsey Payne, the attorney who represented the property owners at the meeting.
“If we proffer that and that becomes part of the zoning of the property, it becomes something like a covenant or restriction on the title of this property, and lenders are very leery of this,” Payne said.
This could lead to the denial of funding for the project or an appraiser assigning a lesser value for the property, which would reduce the amount of collateral to the bank and could make the project “unworkable” from a finance standpoint.
Now the council will need to schedule another public hearing for the development with the new list of proffers.
Councilor Andrew Wolverton also raised concerns about a Texaco gas station sign that is on the property, although that gas station is no longer in operation. The sign violates a sign ordinance. If the removal of this sign was also going to be a proffer, then the council would need to know this before republishing the item’s new public hearing date. Payne said he was not sure if they would be able to make a proffer on the sign.
“They will talk with the owners of the gas station to see what can possibly be done about the sign,” Payne said. “If it is in violation of the sign ordinance, and certainly if they have some liability under that, then that’s going to be an issue we have to deal with regardless.”
The council will publish a new ordinance for the rezone request, and the new public hearing will be June 28.