The council chambers at Athens City Hall was packed Tuesday with Canebrake residents concerned about how the city’s most exclusive neighborhood would be impacted by a proposed development.

The Athens Planning Commission held a meeting to vote on a master development plan for Links at Canebrake. It would be located to the south of the Canebrake subdivision on Lindsay Lane.

The property is owned by Canebrake LLC but would be sold to a private developer. It is zoned as C-PUD, or conventional planned unit development. The Links would be built out in six phases and could include a new elementary school if Athens City Schools decides to build there.

By the end of the lengthy meeting, the commission voted to recommend the master plan be approved at a later date by the Athens City Council — but with two amendments. Both of the amendments concerned access points between the two neighborhoods.

The City Council will hold a public hearing on the matter before it votes to approve. The date of the public hearing has not been determined.

Neighborhood watch

Homes in Canebrake range from the upper $200,000s up to the $1-million mark. Carl Hunt of Canebrake LLC, which owns the property the Links subdivision would be built on, implored the commission to develop guidance for developers now and those who will be building high-end homes in Athens.

“We’d better get our act together, because like it or not, the development is coming,” he said.

The Canebrake subdivision has only one entry and exit point, right off Lindsay Lane. An amendment presented by Commissioner Rick Johnson would have provided connectivity between the neighborhoods via two existing stub-outs in Canebrake on Turnberry and Winged Foot lanes. The proposal called for them to be controlled, gated access points that could only be opened by city officials or first-responders.

Johnson’s proposal also introduced the possibility of connecting the two developments via sidewalks. Those sidewalks could be used by school-aged children to walk to school if a new elementary school was built.

The connectivity plans were not embraced by the Canebrake residents who pushed for zero connectivity between the two developments. A popular sentiment through the meeting was to let the two developments to stand on their own, independent of each other.

Neighborhood voices

Canebrake resident Clare Middleton asked the commission to leave Canebrake “the way it is now without other entrances.” He said the controlled access is why most people choose to live there.

The most vocal opponent of the access points to the neighborhood was Athens City Councilman Harold Wales, a voting member of the commission who is the council’s appointed representative on the board.

He’s also a longtime Canebrake resident.

“I’ve got one vote, and I cannot vote for this,” he told his fellow commissioners during a work session. “Those people out there depend on me to represent them, and I’ve had but one person who came to me and said this was a good idea. Everybody else said, ‘We don’t want this.’”

When asked after the meeting if he would recuse himself from voting on the issue at a future City Council meeting, Wales said he would seek advice from the city attorney.

Compromise

Ultimately, the commission approved Johnson’s amendment to the original master plan, but with an additional amendment by Wales to omit the two access points.

Wales’ amendment also recommended the creation of a gravel access point off Lindsay Lane that would be a cut-through to the parking lot of the Canebrake Club sales office. The gravel drive would be available only to first-responders and not the general public.

Commission Chairwoman Gina Garth pointed out that both the city’s zoning ordinance and subdivision regulations encourage connectivity with other subdivisions. She cited safety and accessibility by first-responders as reasons why the city encourages connectivity and accessibility.

Athens Mayor Ronnie Marks said challenges lay ahead for the planning commission as the city anticipates a population boom related to the future Toyota-Mazda production facility.

Garth then asked if the commission could receive guidance from the council on how to deal with issues of connectivity between subdivisions in the future.