Stafford Planning Commission Defers Market at Austin Ridge Application
Commissioners, public do not like that the application still includes industrial uses.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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The Stafford Planning Commission on Wednesday voted unanimously to defer making a recommendation on a rezoning and conditional use permit application for the project known as Market at Austin Ridge.
Commissioners—and members of the public, who spoke for over an hour and mainly in opposition to the project—were concerned with the request to rezone part of the property to M1 or light industrial.
The landowner and applicant, Courthouse West, LLC, originally asked to rezone part of the property M2 or heavy industrial, and had proposed a data center as one three development options for the industrial zoned portion.
On Monday evening, two days before Wednesday’s meeting, county staff received an amended application that changed the requested rezoning from M2 to M1 and removed the data center option.
That didn’t alleviate the worries of commissioners and the public.
“I have tremendous concern that you are using M1 to be a placeholder for a a possible future data center,” Chair Kristen Barnes said to engineers Jeff Harvey and Mark Bowman, who represented the applicant. “Our comprehensive plan and citizenry do not consider this to be an industrial area. The M1 we have there now [Austin Ridge Logistics] is plenty.”
Earlier in the meeting, Harvey said Courthouse West had been in conversation with “a data center user” about locating in the back portion of the property, but that after the county changed some of its data center regulations in October, the applicant “decided at this point in time that it’s a bit premature to consider a data center on this property.”
Later, in response to Barnes’s comments about the M1 zoning being “a placeholder” for a future data center, Harvey said the Courthouse Road area is “in transition from a rural, agricultural area to a business and industry area.”
“If that trend continues and our property is surrounded by commercial and industrial uses rather than residences, and times change and they haven’t developed the back part of the property, they may come back in with a rezoning [to heavy industrial], but we don’t know,” he said.
Harvey said the development plan that is part of the current, updated application includes some “new and exciting business opportunities for the county, to include some businesses that don’t currently locate in the county.”
The four contracted businesses that are so far prepared to open in the Market at Austin Ridge are Texas Roadhouse, Sheetz, Aldi, and Flagship Carwash. Other commercial and retail uses mentioned in the application include a child care center, a hotel, a mini-storage warehouse, a brewery or distillery, and office space.
Commissioner Willie Shelton asked Harvey and Bowman if they would consider eliminating the proposed M1 uses completely and rezoning the entire property to B2, urban commercial.
Bowman said that is “something we would consider with a recommendation from this body to move forward” with the application.
During the public hearing on the application, Thomas Sablon, who owns residential properties on Cedar Lane, which runs along the side and back of the Courthouse West parcels, said that the satellite images provided by the applicants of the viewshed from the parcels were altered to show his property as being wooded, when in fact it is clear.
Another speaker, Kay Beverly, distributed handouts showing how the images provided by the applicant compare to those from the county’s GIS map.
“We have to ask, do the applicant’s viewshed images faithfully represent the observable conditions today?” Beverly asked.
Harvey said the viewshed images are “are looking at future conditions, so it was assuming tree growth.”
Bowman said the images are “AI rendered drawings” and that it was “not our intention to hide or disguise anything.”
“AI just puts in the trees,” he said.
The application will come back before the commission next month and will be subject to another public hearing. Barnes said she hopes that during the one month delay, the application will be reworked to increase the vegetative buffer between the development and the Cedar Lane properties; “pare down” the M1 uses or “consider B2” on the entire property; and consider proffers to mitigate the impact on fire and rescue and schools.
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