Dear Editor,
By a 3-2 vote at the called meeting on May 23, 2025, the Putnam County Commission left it to the affected residents to resolve an issue created by a presumed omission by the County Commission. The issue is whether “conditions” applied to previous rezoning approvals are still valid.
The case in point is whether a 1995 resolution of the County Commission limiting access from a commercial zone into the Thunder Valley residential zone is still valid. However, the broader issue is the validity of ANY CONDITION applied to ANY PREVIOUS REZONING approval.
The major legal argument against validating previous conditions appears to be that the county failed to adequately list all conditions of rezoning and to list those conditions with the zoning maps. While the county does have a partial list of rezoning conditions, this list is far from complete and is not shown on the zoning map.
The legal argument in favor of retaining the conditions is simply that the conditions were approved by a duly elected Board of Commissioners and never rescinded.
A motion was offered at the called meeting to allow a neutral third party, i.e., a court, to resolve the issue. Commissioners McElhenney, Wooten, and Sharp voted against the motion, apparently leaving residents responsible for resolving an issue created by a failure of the County Commission.
Steve Hersey, District 3 Commissioner