Mark Herbert of MBH Holdings has withdrawn his application to rezone 777 Jones Creek, the location of the clubhouse for the Jones Creek subdivision in Evans.
At the end of last year Herbert requested to rezone the property, which he has owned since 2019, from planned unit development, or PUD, to S-1 special zoning, in order to run the building as a freestanding restaurant and hospitality space.
The rezoning request drew the ire of most of the Jones Creek residents, with homeowner’s association president Tripp Nanney holding a meeting last month at the Columbia County government complex, with Commissioner Connie Melear and county manager Scott Johnson present, for the homeowners to discuss their grievances.
Many of those residents attended the Columbia County Planning Commission’s meeting on Thursday evening, in which the rezoning request was to be heard, to oppose it.
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At the meeting, before the public hearing to address the rezoning request, planning manager Will Butler told the commissioners the applicant had requested to withdraw the application without prejudice. This did not stop neighbors from expressing their disapproval of the proposed rezoning, however.
“This is a procedural sidestep,” said attorney Wendell Johnston to the commissioners, speaking for the Jones Creek HOA, positing that Herbert’s aim is to ultimately resubmit the request as a minor revision, rather than a rezoning, to avoid seeking approval from the Board of Commissioners. “If you remove this from the PUD, you basically you destroy the intent and purpose of the PUD, which is a golf course with a golf course community.”
Both Johnston and Nanney underscored that the clubhouse building is integral to a functioning golf course. Nanney also stressed that the building no longer operating as a clubhouse would hamstring the plans of the Bond Golf Global company to develop a training facility on the driving range.
“Without the clubhouse their project to reopen the golf course would be severely jeopardized,” Nanney said. “Without the clubhouse, any golf operator would require a new golf cart storage area, some type of structures to handle their golf operations.”
Hammad Sheikh, another local attorney and a resident of Jones Creek, argued to the commissioners that the center of the residents’ concerns lies not primarily in what Herbert, or any future owner of the clubhouse property, may do in the future, but the property’s relationship to the surrounding PUD.
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“Right now we have an opportunity to get a golf course again,” said Sheikh. “Right now, we have an opportunity to have the clubhouse again. If this rezoning happens, if this modification happens, we lose that opportunity.”
David Miles, owner of Affordable Self Storage, urged the planning commissioners to consider not allowing the withdrawal without prejudice.
“If we postpone this just one time, it will make these people come back up here and do this again,” Miles said. “If we postpone it a year, you get these peoples working for Jones Creek to go after those people that wants to do something with Jones Creek, we might have a chance at it.”
Ultimately, the planning commissioners unanimously voted to allow the application to be withdrawn without prejudice.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
