Please see the October 2021 District 4 Zoning Newsletter which includes other community updates. Please feel free to call 678-513-5884 or email me at cjmills@forsythco.com with any comments or questions.
Good afternoon everyone,
I hope you and your family are doing well. So many have been sick this fall and COVID has definitely taken its toll on our health care system. Thank goodness the data shows the peak is over and we can only hope and pray it will stay in control and another variant won’t cause another spike in the future.
On to a better subject (maybe) – transportation. There is a lot going on in District 4 concerning transportation with our new interchange (Exit #18) at 400/369. Much progress has been made in a short amount of time. Being slated as a three-year project, we can only hope that this kind of progress will continue so it will finish on time, or ahead of schedule. I know, wishful thinking on my end. Check out the link to a great video, created by our Communications Department, updating you on the project here.
An event you won’t want to miss is the annual Transportation Summit hosted by the Chamber of Commerce at the Forsyth Conference Center on Tuesday, October 19. Registration and networking begin at 10:30 a.m., lunch at 11:00 a.m., with the Summit beginning at 11:30 a.m. This popular event fills up fast so you will want to register in advance here. Speakers this year include the Georgia Department of Transportation Commissioner Russell McMurry, District 25 State Representative Todd Jones, Executive Director of Georgia Transportation Alliance Seth Millican, Forsyth County Manager Kevin Tanner, and myself as Chairwoman of the Board of Commissioners. I am excited to share all that is happening with transportation in our community and hope to see you there!
Forsyth County loves technology and we’ve invested in a new tool just for you! “Connect2Forsyth” is our new mobile app that functions on both IOS and Android platforms. By downloading this to your cell phones you will be able to report animal welfare, code compliance, or road hazard issues. You can view and pay water bills, property taxes, apply for water service, building permits, auto registration, obtain information on applying for or renewing a passport, read the latest news items on the county website, view county government calendar events, and contact your district commissioner - all while on the go. Download the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play for convenient access to your local county government.
As you may be aware from our zonings, District 4 is a very busy place and highly sought out by others as a coveted landing spot. Unfortunately, I am still dealing with a lot of old zonings and doing what I can to improve them. Recently, the BOC did just that by approving a zoning on Settingdown Circle and GA400. It was a zoning from 2005 with roughly 300 townhomes and we did not have the conditions that we do today to ensure higher quality, other than the design standards we recently put into place. To compound things, we changed the zoning conditions, at the landowner’s request, to a single home product and greatly reduced the density. The landowner’s attorney found a loophole where we had not made the single-family home conditions site plan specific. An error on all of our parts, but an error none the less. The conditions adopted were made for homes, and he was attempting to reference back to an old site plan with 300 plus townhomes. It was quite a mess. I wouldn’t approve his new sketch plat and he wouldn’t abide by the old site plan, so we were at an impasse. I knew an ongoing issue was road safety on GA400. When another old zoning came in for The Falls apartments on GA400, the only way to access them going north was by doing a U-turn at Hampton. Roughly 500-600 cars doing U-turns daily on GA400 where cars are going around 80 miles per hour is a recipe for disaster. I was able to work with the developer for this new site by getting him to build a standard county road off Settingdown Circle, through his development and connecting to The Falls, with a gate. It wasn’t easy, and extremely expensive on their end, but it will help create a safer route for everyone in the area as well as give more traffic to the commercial component on GA400. By bringing so many cars through this new road, it’s hopeful that the commercial will attract some quality restaurants and businesses. Walking trails and a nice green-space area are also included in the plan. This is the lemonade from lemons proverbial phrase that fits. We have conditions that hold these apartments to a very high standard with a continued maintenance check list into perpetuity. This flawed zoning was inherited and not one I anticipated having to deal with. However, we added a huge safety feature while making the zoning better than it could have been. I don’t like dealing with so many bad zonings from the past, but I have approached each with how to improve them and give some “win” back to the community.
Thank you for your continued support and your willingness to learn more.
Cindy
Cindy Jones Mills | Chairwoman
Forsyth County Board of Commissioners, District 4
110 East Main Street, Suite 210 | Cumming, Georgia 30040
(678) 513-5884 office | (678) 230-3864 cell | (770) 781-2199 fax
Forsythco.com | Your Community. Your Future