Four horses, eight goats, 12 chickens, and a nine-acre hay field for three residentially zoned lots totaling 130 acres, plus several other development-related restrictions.
At last week’s monthly meeting of the Putnam Planning and Zoning Commission, that’s what Adam Schulze and his mother, Connie Barnes, offered as their compromise to several downstream neighbors on a cove off Lake Sinclair’s Emory Drive.
“We want to be good neighbors and live out our days quietly,” with grandchildren and a small number of animals at hand, George Barnes told the commissioners.
However, it apparently is not the animals but the provisions for watering them that has several cove residents upset.
“It is damaging my property values,” Duane Gentes declared. “There is no water coming downstream. It is a muddy mess filling up the cove. Where I had three feet of water, it is now one foot.”
“The natural creek channel is all but dried up,” said Pamela Tibbetts.
They are referring to a farm pond Schulze was building last year when heavy rains washed away part of the dam.
In response, Milledgeville attorney Matt Roesning said the agreement Schulze and the Barnes had proposed could not lead to any large-scale agricultural enterprise, nor allow subdivision of the three lots, nor creation of stand-alone lots.
As for the pond and its drainage, Roesning said two engineers had inspected the dam. And he called its drainage an “intermittent stream, no more than a drainage ditch. In the summer there is no flow.”
He further suggested that some of the cove property owners might be “looking for an opportunity for somebody to pay for it (dredging the cove).”
The situation has a history and, yes, complications.
Just last month, the county board of commissioners (who have the final decision coming after the planning and zoning commission’s recommendation) turned down the owners’ request for a rezoning of their properties from R-1 to Ag. R-1 is the county’s most restrictive residential zone. The Ag (agricultural) is the next step up but allows a broad range of land uses.
The county’s land-use plan designates the properties as agricultural. However, the county’s zoning map has them as residential (R-1), which adds a separate twist. The Seattle-based Weyerhauser timber company previously owned the land and in 2006 had it rezoned from Ag to R-1 in an eventually unsuccessful attempt to convert its part of the peninsula into off-lake residential lots.
This month Schulze and the Barnes came back with a new plan asking for the above listed conditional uses in R-1. At their usual mid-month meeting next week, the county commission will make the final zoning-related decision on the commission’s recommendation to accept the proposed conditional uses.
The rest of the complications are jurisdictional. In short, the county controls land uses and zoning, which is all the county commissioners will be looking at next Tuesday evening. The state Environmental Protection Division controls soil erosion. The federal Corps of Engineers controls the nation’s waters.