letter to the editor
Vice Mayor wants to clarify CLUP/Horne-Ford situation
At the risk of contradicting the gentleman who buys the ink for this newspaper, the main issues regarding Doug Horne’s proposal for (former) Mayor (Eddy) Ford’s property, which were discussed during the January 2021 and March 2021 Farragut Municipal Planning Commission meetings, were not related to the amendments to the Comprehensive Land Use Plan approved by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen in October of 2020, as stated in last week’s edition of the farragutpress and in a narrative pushed on social media by a private citizen.
Specifically, the Planning Commissioners’ discussion was centered on the protections built into the Comprehensive Land Use Plan to protect existing neighborhoods from incompatible new development. Those protections are explained in the Transitions policy on page 12 of the CLUP.
The representatives from the HOAs of Park Place and Glen Abbey presented a well-thought-out, pertinent and effective argument as to why Mr. Horne’s proposal did not and cannot meet the standards of the Transitions policy. You may view the Planning Commission meetings on the Town’s Youtube channel.
With regard to the portion of the Ford property where Mr. Horne proposed multi-family development, the Transitions policy requires that the periphery of the property match the density of the existing adjacent development and gradually increase density as the development moves away from the common boundary.
Given the narrowness of the Ford property between these existing residential neighborhoods, it is not possible to gradually increase density from slightly less than 3 units/acre (the approximate density of both Park Place and Glen Abbey) to 12 units/acre and back to slightly less than 3 units/acre in this narrow space.
According to the Transitions policy, which has been a policy in Comprehensive Land Use Plan since it was adopted in December 2012, high-density multi-family was never going to be an appropriate form of the development between Park Place and Glen Abbey, regardless of the recent amendments to the Comprehensive Land Use Plan.
Certainly, we owe Doug Horne and Mayor Ford a debt of gratitude for their years of service to our Town.
However, that debt should not be paid by imposing incompatible development on the homeowners of Glen Abbey and Park Place.
One final thought: this community should be concerned that the private citizen on social media would be advocating for incompatible development between two existing neighborhoods, neither of which is he a resident; particularly in light of the fact that he fought a similar battle against the Smith Road apartments in 2015 in order to prevent such a development from being built adjacent to a neighborhood in which he was a resident.
Vice Mayor Louise Povlin
Town of Farragut
(Editor’s Note: Doug Horne is owner of Republic Newspapers, Inc., parent company of farragutpress)
