Dalton City Council to take up requested rezoning of property near Lance and Richardson streets

Published 5:17 pm Friday, January 31, 2020

Four months ago, Dalton City Council member Gary Crews made a motion to approve a requested rezoning of 3 acres at the corner of Lance and Richardson streets to rural residential from high-density residential. The motion died for lack of a second.

On Monday, Crews will have a second opportunity to see if council members will support that rezoning. The council meets at 6 p.m. in City Hall.

Since the council didn’t vote on the request, it’s still active, and the developer who made the request, Bryan Spence, asked that it be put on the agenda.

“I made the motion so that we could get some discussion and see whether this is something the council wanted to approve or deny,” Crews said. “We didn’t get a second, so we didn’t get that discussion. So it will be interesting to see if the council is ready to have that now.”

Spence requested rezoning of three separate properties in July and August of 2019 so that he could build single-family homes. Council members tabled all of them until their Oct. 7 meeting. At that meeting, council members approved only one of the requested rezonings, changing a property on Conway Street to rural residential from light manufacturing.

Crews motioned to approve a requested rezoning of a Chattanooga Avenue property to medium-density residential from heavy manufacturing. That motion died for lack of a second.

Crews then motioned to approve rezoning the property to low-density residential, and that motion passed. But Spence said the larger lot sizes required in low-density zoning would cut the number of houses he could build by more than half, making the project economically unviable.