Forsyth County officials spoke on a county government podcast Tuesday, saying they are continuing to work on changes to the county's comprehensive plan as a recently-passed moratorium on residential zonings is set to expire in November.
Forsyth County Commissioners approved the moratorium in April after a request to do so by the Forsyth County Board of Education, which had cited concerns over the ability to provide for growing school populations. The moratorium stops any residential rezoning requests from being heard by the board of commissioners until its expiration in November.
District 2 Commissioner and Commission Chairman Alfred John spoke on the podcast, along with Forsyth County's Director of Planning and Community Development, Tom Brown. John said that while new residential rezonings have been paused, the county has also taken further steps to pause development while the changes to the comprehensive plan are still in progress.
"We also quickly realized that there were a lot of properties that were zoned 20, 30 years ago that still haven't been developed, so what we did was we came back and we put a moratorium on applications for the deveopment of that," John said.
John added that recent changes on the board of commissioners have shifted the philosophies for future residential growth in the county.
"If you look at the trajectory over the last, I would say, two to three years, the board has done a complete 180," John said. "A lot of (what was previously approved) was high density...Today I can think of the last two or three that were approved in my district, the density was less than one home to an acre. That's the direction we're headed towards."
Brown said that in August, county staff will be introducing what he referred to as the first round of changes to the county's zoning ordinances and unified development code.
"We've received some direction from the board of commissioners on changes they'd like to see...They're focused. They have a common theme," Brown said. "They're focused on trees, landscaping, buffers. We're working on drafting that now at a staff level."
Brown said those changes could be approved in October at the earliest. He said if that happens, some districts within the county could be taken out of the moratorium, allowing new some limited new residential rezonings. John added that the county has the option to extend the moratorium in November if they aren't satisfied with their progress on new ordinances.
"If we haven't accomplished what we need to, we have a couple of options available to us. One is, do we work on a couple of these residential zoning categories and release those, or do we extend the moratorium for another six months," John said. "It could be a hybrid, a mix of both, so we are weighing all of that very carefully and having conversations with staff and we'll get there."
John added that he wants to see increased public input on the comprehensive plan.
"When we've had discussions and meetings related to the comprehensive land use plan, we typically get about 18 or 20 people show up, and it's the same group of people that we've seen year after year who are very directly involved and engaged," John said. "We don't have a broad cross-section of the community."
The Forsyth County Board of Commissioners has a special called public hearing scheduled for the morning of Thursday, August 7 at 11:00 a.m. at the Administration Building on E. Main Street in Cumming. The board's next regular scheduled meeting will be at 5:00 p.m. that same afternoon.
