Speaking of said controversial Walgreens, the Rhino’s John Hammer weighs in. Strangely, Hammer reports in Dec. 27 issue that the rezoning request has been postponed until the January 15, 2008, City Council meeting, but the N&R reported last week that the developers had withdrawn the request.
Remember in the N&R article that Greensboro City Councilman Robbie Perkins said the case perfectly illustrates the city’s need to review its Comprehensive Plan. While Hammer says that “just looking at the intersection should be enough to convince anyone that putting a Walgreens at this site would be a huge mistake,” he agrees that the case exposes big problems with the comp plan:
The Comp Plan is a huge proponent of infill development, and it appears some commercial enterprises are interpreting that to mean they can now put businesses in residential neighborhoods, and judging from the number of people who attend the meetings to oppose these rezoning requests, it is not what the people of Greensboro believe and probably not what the citizens’ committee that approved the Comp Plan had in mind.
People think that the Comprehensive Plan is something that the City Council went over block by block before it was passed, but the truth is that the City Council didn’t know what it was passing. The Comp Plan was developed by consultants with the help of city planners. Then they took their work to a large committee for approval. So you had this small group working every day on the plan and a large committee meeting periodically to go over the work of the full-time employees.
….Then the City Council passed it as it was presented without even bothering to read it. The Comp Plan has caused a lot of problems and it is hard to see what if any good it has done.
My gut reaction, of course, is just scrap the plan. That won’t happen, so city residents should expect more rezoning requests like Walgreens’ due to the city’s official emphasis on infill development. No doubt neighbors will fight them, and there are probably very few tracts of land within the city limits where a big-box retailer won’t cause problems for someone. It may come to the point where retailers like Walgreens realize that they can’t build anything on the outskirts of the city and they can’t build anything within the city, so they’ll just give up on Greensboro. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because Greensboro has no shortage of drug stores. But let’s just hope the comp plan doesn’t unwittingly discourage non-retail businesses from coming here.
