The City of Baldwin, Habersham County Commission and both the city’s and county’s engineer firms sat down this morning to discuss plans moving forward with the airport business park.
The airport business park has been a hot-button issue for Habersham residents ever since Commercial Realator Wade Rhodes came forward at last week’s county commission meeting, sharing his frustrations with not being able to develop in the airport business park. At that meeting, the county came to the conclusion that the city and county needed to meet to discuss development at the business park.
This morning, they did just that.
“We have a plan in place, and I think we’re moving forward,” Commissioner Ty Akins said in a joint statement between the county commissioners and the City of Baldwin. “Everybody was on the same page and I believe wants the same thing, which is good.”
The city is currently in the process of surveying the business park’s retention ponds, which they discovered were not built properly last year. Because of this, they are not allowing building in the business park until they can confirm that the retention ponds can handle the stormwater runoff the new buildings would create.
After this meeting, though, the county and city are confident they have found a solution to the issues with retention ponds and allowing the development of business.
“It was very good to have everyone in the room and be so interested in finding a solution for this,” Baldwin Mayor Joe Elam said. “I’m thankful for the teamwork that was represented with this meeting. We’re very excited, it looks like we have found a process to move this along and move it forward.”
Elam noted the city’s awareness of how important building at the business park is to the community, and that they want to move forward with a solution.
“As we all know, it’s important that this development has the opportunity to succeed,” Elam went on to say. “The city of Baldwin has never had the interest in delaying this process, this is just a process, and as a process, it does take time. We’re so thankful that we have our consulting engineers and the county’s consulting engineers working together to see a positive result.”
Habersham County Commissioner Bruce Palmer is also looking forward to a positive end result after today’s meeting.
“We’re really looking forward to a positive outcome from the meeting,” Palmer said. “We have talked about a lot of issues that have happened in the past and a way to go forward in a positive manner for the future of Habersham county, the citizens and the city of Baldwin.”
Many citizens have wondered who is to blame in terms of the development holdups, and who caused the hangup in development in the first place. Commissioner Palmer says that no one person is at fault, and that the entities involved are dealing with a complicated process.
“I know there’s been a lot of concern with citizens about delays, and really and truly, there’s no one person at fault in the delays,” Palmer said. “It’s just making sure things are done properly in a productive way so we can move forward for the future.”
