The City of Baldwin, Habersham County Development Authority and the Habersham County Board of Commissioners will meet in January 2022 to discuss issues surrounding the development of the Habersham County Airport Business Park after a relator shared his frustrations with developing in it.
On Dec. 20, Commercial Relator Wade Rhodes brought his frustrations with development at the airport business park forth to the board of commissioners; after more than 9 months of waiting, Rhodes and his client Don Higgins have been unable to move forward with the completion of a 40,000 square foot building in the business park.
In 2020, the City of Baldwin uncovered that the retention ponds built in the airport business park were built incorrectly. The building errors were fixed by the county’s engineering firm, Foothills Land Design, but the City of Baldwin has been unable to grant a variance from their new minimum development standards to Rhodes and Higgins.
While Baldwin has received adequate documentation from Foothills, the city has further questions surrounding how much runoff water the ponds can handle that the new construction would create.
Rhodes says that while not all available pads are paved and in use, the retention ponds at the business park haven’t “come close” to failing.
“This community has had two hurricanes since 2016,” Rhodes told the commission. “We’ve lost roads, we’ve lost bridges, we’ve lost culverts, have these retention ponds failed? Absolutely not.”
Rhodes and Higgins have been asking the City of Baldwin for a variance from the city’s minimum development standards for months to move forward with building in the business park, but the city won’t grant that variance until they have proof that the variance from the minimum development standards wouldn’t jeopardize the business park or Baldwin citizens.
“He’s [Higgins] wanting to build a great sized building, a building that is needed and a building that will be important for our community,” Baldwin Mayor Joe Elam says. “We all want to see it constructed and hopefully potentially occupied . . . We are just asking for them to provide necessary documents and necessary surveys that show that those stormwater systems can handle the runoff that will be created by the development.”
But the waiting period of getting that information has been frustrating for Rhodes, and because of the timeline for getting the retention ponds properly surveyed, Rhodes’s sales in the business park aren’t in an ideal position, either.
“We have infrastructure in place, water and sewer, fiber, and retention in place, and our prices are cheaper than most of our competition,” Rhodes said. “But now, we have no marketing advantage because we’re shut down because you cannot get a building permit.”
Rhodes says there is a total of about 65,000 square feet of potential building in limbo, which he estimates to be about $2.6 million in tax revenue.
The City of Baldwin has advised Rhodes to not advertise his properties at the business park as having retention until they have confirmed the retention ponds work as they’re supposed to, but Rhodes says that having retention in place is what makes the pads at the business park so marketable.
“The business park might as well be out of business,” Rhodes said. “We are at a stalemate. I can’t sell a pad in the business park and market it as having retention in place.”
Communication and deannexation
The heart of the problem, like many problems, seems to stem from communication issues and lack of understanding.
For several months, the City of Baldwin’s engineering firm, EMI, and Foothills Land Design have gone back and forth regarding surveying specifics and measurements surrounding how much water the ponds can handle. But that waiting period is standard for this kind of project, according to James Irvin of Foothills Land Design.
Irvin says the problem isn’t with how long the surveying process takes, it’s with officials who don’t understand how the process works. He says that Baldwin wanting to know the specifics and capacities of the business park’s retention ponds, and not allowing development until they do, are the reasons the progress of a variance has been hindered.
He also says with the way emails have been dispersed from the City of Baldwin, not all involved parties at Foothills have received the information they need to continue moving forward as quickly as possible.
“I’m pretty appalled at the back-and-forth thing that could have been fixed with those two groups of people [engineers] sitting down together,” Commissioner Bruce Palmer said after Rhodes’s comments, referencing some of the emails between Foothills and EMI. “I don’t know all there is about annexation, or in this case, deannexation, but if we can’t sit down and get this fixed, then, in my opinion, the development authority could look into the deannexation process.”
Baldwin Councilwoman Alice Venter says that while these issues have been a problem for everyone, deannexation isn’t the solution.
“The problem with that is that if the park is deannexed, each individual lot owner will have to annex back into the city for water and sewer, and also fire and police protection, too,” Venter said. “They don’t think about that. We can’t provide water and sewer, fire and police protection if they’ve deannexed out of the city.”
After hearing from Rhodes, the commission took a clear stance that they needed to get involved with finding a solution for the development issues. Commissioner Ty Akins noted that the problem isn’t limited to the City of Baldwin, it’s a county-wide issue.
“We don’t want to interfere with Baldwin’s business, or any municipality’s, but this is promoted on the county’s website,” Commissioner Akins said. “It’s the Habersham County Airport Business Park, not solely the Baldwin business park, and the county has significant resources and capital invested in this, so it’s not like we can just back off.”
Finding a solution
Rhodes suggested the Baldwin City Council, the Habersham County Development Authority and the Habersham County Board of Commissioners all sit down in a public meeting to discuss their concerns and find solutions to the problem at hand.
“Your business park, right now, is closed,” Rhodes told the commission. “You have got to take charge and solve this, and I think if you invite the entire city council of Baldwin and the development authority, and you guys put your heads together, you can figure this out.”
The commissioners, as well as members of the Baldwin City Council, are agreeable to the meeting.
“I think we need to meet, and we need to meet immediately,” Commissioner Bruce Harkness said during the Dec. 20 meeting. “I think common sense has to prevail, good Lord, this is taxpayer dollars and taxpayers’ future when thousands of citizens drive south for a job and we could have a job right here.”
Councilwoman Venter tells Now Habersham that the city is excited for a chance to meet with the commissioners and development authority, and says this meeting is something the council has hoped to have for several months.
“We’ve asked to have meetings, but it was said to us that they [the commission] didn’t think that it was going to be very beneficial,” Venter said. “But with the comments that were made at the commission meeting, it really is kicking it into gear, where everyone’s going to be meeting. Because we need to come to a meeting of the minds.”
She’s hopeful that this meeting will help the council, commission and authority come to a conclusion on how to move forward and help businesses develop.
“I think the goal is to come to an understanding of what the ponds out there can handle, and for the elected officials to have an understanding that there’s no bad blood and that we do want to work together,” Venter said. “We just want things to be done correctly. They weren’t done right in the past, and that’s caused this very issue here.”
You can watch a recording of the Dec. 20 commission meeting and the comments made here.
This article has been corrected to include that Foothills has provided the documentation the City of Baldwin needs, as well as commentary from James Irvin.
