Last week, the Peachtree City Council adopted a new zoning map that rezoned more than 600 individual tracts of land from a “plain vanilla” open space category to one of two more specific new open space categories.
Each tract was rezoned to either open space-public or open space-conservation. The OS-C zoning is reserved for land that is projected to remain in its natural state such as the city-owned greenbelts and buffers, officials said.
OS-P is designed for facilities that have a public use such as recreation facilities, public buildings and churches.
Although most of the rezonings were for city-owned greenbelts and other city property, the city did rezone a handful of other parcels to the appropriate open space zoning, said Community Development Director David Rast.
Each privately-owned parcel was rezoned with the permission of the property owner, Rast noted.
The rezonings were necessitated by the new zoning categories of OS-P and OS-C that were adopted last year to the city’s zoning ordinance.
“It’s just a very large housekeeping process that we’re doing tonight,” Rast said.
The city also adopted a new future land use map that represented a corrected version of the city’s already-adopted land use designations for each parcel. Rast noted that some land use changes approved by council in 2002 were never made on the city’s official land use map, so staff did an exhaustive parcel by parcel review to make sure all were correct and if not, to fix the mistake with the new land use map.
The zoning for a given parcel controls what may be developed on it in the present, but the land use map represents what the city’s future plans are for a given parcel, officials explained.
