There was a full agenda for the October 17th City of Suffolk Planning Commission meeting that included two rezonings and two Conditional Use Permits (CUP). The council chambers was full of people from multiple areas of our large city who had questions and concerns about several of the agenda items.
While the meeting was very interesting because of the amount of attention from so many Suffolk citizens, one of the most interesting things came about after votes were cast and the meeting was done: another Planning Commission meeting was scheduled out of cycle to re-hear both of the rezoning requests. Apparently, the required public notice letters were not sent out to adjacent property owners and this is the reason for the repeat public hearings.
The new meeting is scheduled for Monday, November 6th at 9a.m. in the City Council Chambers. A phone call to the Planning Department informed us that the letters to adjacent property owners have now been sent out and that the other form of required notice—publication in a local paper—would be in the Virginia Pilot Online, which it is as of October 22nd. As of October 24th, this new meeting is also posted on Planning’s Rezoning and Conditional Uses/Public Hearing Items webpage.
The first rezoning issue to be re-heard is a request to rezone property by the Riverfront neighborhood in the Harborview area from Office Industrial to Residential Urban-18 to allow for multiple four-story, age-restricted apartment buildings (55+ years old.) This proposal is called Mosaic at the Riverfront. There was a lot of opposition and multiple speakers for this issue at the October 17th meeting. One of the main concerns is that the existing residential neighborhoods around it are all single-family homes and 4-story apartments are not compatible.
A rezoning request on Turlington Road is the second item that will be re-heard on November 6th. This is a request to rezone from Agricultural to Residential Low Medium Density to allow for just over 100 homes. There were no opposition speakers during this public hearing on October 17th.
The city providing a ‘do over’ because they neglected their duty to notify adjacent property owners is laudable. However, scheduling an out of cycle Planning Commission meeting and then ONLY advertising it the Pilot Online when these are usually posted in the Suffolk New Herald, could create its own problems. Will the public see this change in time to be able to provide their feedback? Or will this fly under the public’s radar? Why not just push it into the next month’s Planning Commission meeting and the regularly scheduled day and time, using the standard means to notify the public?
When contacted about this, the response we received from the city was that this would keep these rezonings on the same City Council meeting agenda for which they were originally planned. It wasn’t advertised in the Suffolk News Herald because the city wasn’t able to make the deadline to get it in to provide two weeks notice. We don’t know exactly why keeping these items on the November 15th Council agenda is so important, but this situation is unfortunate and a bit confusing. Hopefully, it won’t prevent citizens from weighing in.
Link to City of Suffolk’s Rezonings & Conditional Uses/Public Hearing Items for more information on the rezoning applications for the Mosaic at the Riverfront and the Turlington Road Associates
Below is the public notice as it appeared in the Pilot Online on Sunday, October 22, 2023, available using this link.
