The Sevier County Commission approved by a vote of 19-3 a request for rezoning to high-density residential and commercial for a plot originally part of the old Stapleton Farm at their monthly meeting on Monday, April 21.
The rezoning will allow Heartland Development to establish a commercial property at 345 Maryville Highway and multi-family dwellings in the Knob Creek community.
Voting in opposition to the rezoning amendment was Ninth District County Commissioner Judy Godfrey, who spoke to the body against the amendment as written for combining both the commercial and residential aspects of the request in one amendment.
“I don’t like them lumping together all the plots into one resolution. I think they should be individual,” Godfrey told the Times.
Godfrey also had some hard questions for Sevier County Planner Jeff Ownby and the Planning Commission, who Godfrey said had not provided updated maps of the proposal until just before the meeting at which they were approved. “We did not have a map which was marked so that we could see which plots were going to be C-2 and which were R-2,” she said.
For the first time commission members were provided by the Planning Commission with letters of approval from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) showing approval for the construction of more than 7,000 linear feet of sewer lines. Sevier County’s zoning regulations stipulate that high-density residential areas must be served by city sewer and water services, but the county is currently under a self-imposed moratorium on new connections to the Boyds Creek Force Main pending a series of upgrades to that system to alleviate overflow issues. The development in question was grandfathered in under the moratorium that TDEC issued to the utility in July of 2007.
“We’ve not received those letters from... Sevierville sewage before, but we did with this one,” Godfrey said. It was speculated that the letters were included to the Commission in response to the moratorium, but “No one wants to address that,”Godfrey said. “We’re still trying to get information on it.”
“We just need more information,” Godfrey said, “and better communication with Planning. They didn’t state what the purpose [of including those letters] was.”
“They did try to answer some of my questions,” Godfrey told the Times, “but I just don’t feel that comfortable about it.”
The plan as submitted to Commission makes allowances for a single exit onto Maryville Highway within several hundred yards of the intersection with Chapman Highway. Phase one of the project could see as many as 98 housing units added, in addition to the commercial traffic.
Asked if she thought that the development would add significantly to the congestion of that intersection, Godfrey replied emphatically “Oh, yes. You can bet. The way we’re growing and having it R-2, it’s going to add a lot.”
“I would like to see us be able to slow down” the pace of development, Godfrey said. “I’m not sure we can, but I’m going to try.”
The Commission also approved a rezoning from R-1 to R-2 in the 1200 and 1300 blocks of Estates Drive in Seymour for Marshall and Taylor Development. The proposal stipulates the construction of single-family residential condominiums, called The Villages at Walnut Ridge, which would require the building of a new sewer pump station before sending the sewage approximately 2.75 miles to the city’s existing system near the intersection of Old Sevierville Pike and Boyds Creek Highway. The line extension work would be paid for by the developer.
No approval letter from TDEC was included with the packet that Commissioners received regarding The Villages at Walnut Ridge. That development is also not included in the list of grandfathered projects provided to the Times under the moratorium, and it was unclear at press time whether or not the development could be allowed a connection to the city’s sewage system without violating the terms of the corrective action plan the city submitted to TDEC.
