Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
The proposed Dollar General (DG) store on West Washington Street brought out a large crowd of opponents to the Monticello City Council on Tuesday evening, March 7, their one ask that city officials halt the project.
The citizens, however, left disappointed, much frustrated by city officials’ repeated avowals of their inability legally to stop the project. Instead, the city officials urged those opposed to the project to attend the Local Planning Agency’s (LPA) hearing of the DG application and there voice their concerns.
A date for the LPA hearing has not yet been scheduled, however, as it requires a 30-days notice to surrounding property owners before the hearing can be held.
The council meeting, which was held in the bigger courthouse annex instead of city hall in anticipation of a larger than usual attendance, was packed with more than 50 people, the level of discourse at times growing near disruptive as some citizens’ frustration mounted. More than once, Police Chief Fred Mosley had to gesture to one man
to calm down.
Tensions also flared slightly between city officials and Jefferson County Commission Chairman Chris Tuten, whose request had put the Dollar General item on the agenda for discussion.
Before Tuten could even address the issue, however, City Attorney Bruce Leinback set down the city’s legal position, from which stand the council never wavered.
Leinback pointed out that not only was the permitting process well underway, but the council lacked authority to stop the project even if wanted, so long as the DG met the zoning and land development criteria. The city, he said, could not discriminate against specific businesses based on personal likes. If a project met the code, it had to be approved.
“The city doesn’t have authority to say they can’t build there,” Leinback said more than once. “If the project meets the criteria for B-2 zoning, the city can’t stop it.”
Tuten wanted to know when and how city officials had first become aware of the DG project, and why they hadn’t earlier notified neighboring property owners and the public at large of the fact. He also polled the council members individually as to how each felt about having another discount store in the community.
The council’s general response was that it had learned about the DG application in November, but it had seen nothing extraordinary about the application to warrant anything other than letting it undergo the regular vetting process, as it otherwise met the B-2 criteria.
Personally, several of the council members conceded, they didn’t care for having another Dollar General, but so long as the project met the legal requirements, they were bound to approve it, they said. The best that they could do, they offered, was to impose aesthetic and other conditions on the business to make it more palatable and compatible with the community standards.
Tuten asked if a traffic study had been conducted to determine the impact on U.S. 90. The response was that the city’s consultant engineers had not done a traffic study per se. Rather, they had reviewed the developer’s study and had agreed with its findings that the store would not meaningfully impact the traffic flow.
It shocked and upset several area residents, however, when they learned that the store’s driveway would actually be located off Felix Street, a now narrow dirt lane that the city plans to expand and resurface for the sake of the business.
At times, the discourse between Tuten and certain council members grew testy, with some finger pointing thrown into the mix.
Councilman Troy Avera, for example, noted that the county had not consulted with the city when it had approved the DG just north of town. And Councilman George Evans asserted the city’s right to promote economic development and generate revenues by welcoming new businesses.
Councilman John Jones talked of the many businesses that he had seen come and go in his many years in Monticello. He offered that the new DG would serve residents on the west of town. He then got off on a riff about democracy, free enterprise and the rightfulness of market competition.
The council also took note of the county’s refusal to permit a development that had resulted in a lawsuit, wherein a federal judge had ordered the county to approve the development. Which was exactly what would happen if the city rejected the DG for no valid legal reason was the argument.
“If it meets the law, I won’t say no,” Avera stated.
Tuten conceded that the county had lost the particular case in federal court. But the county had learned from the experience and was revising its land development code to ensure that such didn’t happen again, he said. He urged the city officials to do the same and revise the city code to prevent future discount stores from coming.
“Just because it’s legal and they check all the boxes correctly doesn’t make it right,” he said of the DG application meeting all the current code criteria.
He distributed photos showing litter all around the new DG on U.S. 19. Was this what the council wanted people to see when they first came into town? Or was creating minimum-wage jobs the council’s only goal and its idea of economic development?
Evans accused Tuten of exhibiting a you-versus-us attitude instead of fostering a cooperative spirit between the two government bodies. To which Tuten responded that he had tried on several occasions to work with the city, and he would have done better “to beat his head against a brick wall.”
Mike Willis, who owns a shop in the downtown district, reminded the council of what the town’s center had looked like in 2008, when many businesses had been shuttered. Yet the area had since revived and was now thriving, thanks to the many retail stores, he said.
He appreciated the council’s dilemma, he said. The problem as he saw it, was that the city had a weak code. He didn’t blame DG for taking advantage of the weakness, he said. But it seemed that the council was more afraid of a DG lawsuit than it was of protecting the local businesses.
What was needed, he argued, was a tightening of the code, so that businesses such as the DG couldn’t slip through the cracks so easily in the future.
“We could ask for more than what we’re getting, but instead we take what they give us,” he said, warning that residents would only take so much before they acted to correct the situation at the ballot.
Katrina Richardson, executive director of the chamber and tourist development council, likewise spoke against the project, saying it was not good for economic development in general. She cited an Oklahoma town that had taken legal steps to curtail the proliferation of dollar discount stores in their jurisdiction.
James Rogers, a self-described seasoned retailer, likewise spoke of the need for strengthening the requirements. The problem, he said, wasn’t with the DG but rather with the current permitting process. The solution, he said, was to ensure that the process was meaningful and truly evaluative.
“I do not see any longtime financial benefit to Jefferson County or Monticello having four like businesses within a mile of each other,” he said, adding these stores were not creating new revenue for the community but were rather cannibalizing each other’s customers. He urged the council to implement a market analysis and other evaluative requirements in its permitting process.
The discussion lasted well over an hour, with numerous other citizens speaking out against the DG, citing its disadvantages and decrying the city’s lack of notification of residents. The officials’ response was that notification essentially wasn’t required at this early stage, as the application met all the established criteria.
The council members again urged the citizens to attend the LPA meeting, where they said the DG plans would be discussed in more details and where changes to the plan were possible, provided that they were within the parameters of the law.
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