Oconee County commissioners are scheduled to continue their discussion of proposed changes to the county’s Alcohol Beverage Ordinance on Tuesday night with the goal of taking final action on a revised ordinance at its regular meeting on Dec. 3.
The five commissioners spent 35 minutes at their agenda-setting meeting this past Tuesday (Oct. 29) reviewing a draft of the ordinance from County Attorney Daniel Haygood.
Haygood agreed to make additional changes in the draft based on that feedback and present a revised version for the regular meeting at 6 p.m. on Tuesday in the Commission Chamber of the county Administrative Building.
The changes that Haygood proposed and that the Board seemed comfortable with will expand the service area for the sales of alcoholic beverages, allow for brew-pubs, allow for restaurants serving alcohol within grocery stores, and move responsibility for administration of the ordinance.
At present, the granting of licenses is administered by County Clerk Holly Stephenson, and Haygood proposed moving that responsibility to the county’s Department of Planning and Code Enforcement.
The proposed expansion of the service area would allow for alcohol sales in The Village At Malcom Bridge strip shopping center now under construction on Malcom Bridge Road opposite Malcom Bridge Middle School.
The Board of Commissioners on Tuesday also will consider five rezone requests, including one by Kristen and Phillip Gibson that the commissioners also considered at their meeting on Oct. 1.
Reasons For Proposed Change
At the meeting on Tuesday evening, Board of Commissioner Chair John Daniell said that as the county went through the revision of its Comprehensive Plan last year, “we put out some questions to the community about some possible changes in certain areas” of the county’s Alcohol Beverage Ordinance.
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| Haygood, County Administrator Justin Kirouac, Commissioners Mark Thomas, Chuck Horton (L-R) 10/29/2024 |
“And so we're just going to kind of talk through some of those tonight,” he said. “Make sure there's consensus with the Board on how to move forward so Daniel (Haygood) can finalize the ordinance.”
“First thing, I guess we should talk about,” Daniell said, “is brew pubs and distillery pubs. I don’t know if there is such a thing. But that was one of the questions that was put out in our Comprehensive Plan.”
“It was very overwhelming response that those would be acceptable to the community,” Daniell said.
Proposed Changes
Haygood said brew pubs “were a little simpler to accommodate under our ordinance” and so he started there, creating the pubs as a subclass within the restaurant classification in the ordinance.
“We can put distilleries into this,” he said, “but you get into a different kind of thing, I think, when you do distilleries.” The draft he presented does not include distilleries.
Haygood said he retained the requirement in the current ordinance that 75 percent of the sales ticket for the restaurant, including at a brew pub, has to include food.
The ordinance does not include any reference to farm wineries, which are regulated by the state, Haygood said.
Administration of the ordinance is moved from the County Clerk to the Director of Planning and Code enforcement or her or his designee in the draft document.
The revised ordinance includes the provision that a license for the sale of alcohol by the drink “may be issued to a restaurant which is located entirely within an existing building, such as a restaurant within a movie theater or a grocery store.”
The current ordinance restricts sales of alcohol at the movie theater at Epps Bridge Centre to designated theaters, and Daniell said the theater operators had requested that they be allowed “to sell alcohol for all theaters that are open that time.”
Penalties for failure to pay the excise tax imposed on alcohol is increased in the draft document Haygood gave the Board.
Service Areas
Daniell, at his State of the County address in March, said that the county had received a request from the developers of The Village at Malcom Bridge that the county extend the service area in which alcohol can be sold to that development.
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| Map Of Existing Service Area With Schools, Developments Marked (Click To Enlarge) |
At present, one of the service areas runs along Mars Hill Road and U.S. 78, but it does not include any part of Malcom Bridge Road, and Daniell said again on Tuesday night that an extension down Malcom Bridge Road “has been one that was requested.”
The Village at Malcom Bridge currently is under construction, as is a separate development just north of that project that will be the location for a child care facility and for a facility providing pet care, according to signage at the property.
The Village at Malcom Bridge Road and the adjoining development are across Malcom Bridge Road from the campuses of Malcom Bridge Middle School and Malcom Bridge Elementary School.
The existing ordinance restricts the sale of alcohol beverages to the designated service areas and also states that “licenses shall not be issued for any location which is within six hundred feet of a school building, school grounds or college campus or a church.”
The distance is measured door-to-door from the building serving alcohol to the door of the school or church, according to the ordinance, so it would not be a prohibition for any of the buildings in the developments under construction.
Response To Request
In 2018, Lenru Development, a partnership involving Rodney and Philip Hammond, asked the county to be allowed to change the building configuration for the previously approved commercial strip development to accommodate plans for The Village at Malcom Bridge.
At that time, the developers said the strip center would include restaurants and retail tenants, food markets, bakeries, and “other uses deemed appropriate under B-1 zoning.” The county ordinance prohibited alcohol sales in those properties at that time.
Jones said the development will have a “residential flair” to fit into the surrounding neighborhoods as well as with Malcolm Bridge Elementary School and Malcom Bridge Middle School.
Signage at the site today indicates that The Village Market will be a tenant.
Discussion of services area took up much of the discussion on Tuesday, and Daniell said one option would be to do away with the service areas altogether and allow alcohol sales in any property in the county zoned B-1 (Business) or B-2 (Highway Business).
“That's makes me just a little bit nervous,” he said. “This ordinance has worked so well over the years because of the way it was done. We've had very few problem at all.”
“I don't have a problem with amending the service area map to include that area,” he said, referring to the Malcom Bridge Road request. “We've not changed it since the ordinance was originally adopted.” The county has allowed alcohol sales in restaurants since 2015.
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| The Village At Malcom Bridge 11/1/2024 |
The Board agreed to continue its discussion of the changes in the document Haygood presented to the Board on Tuesday, give first reading to the ordinance at the Board’s agenda setting meeting at the end of the month, and give second reading and adopt the ordinance on Dec. 3.
Rezone Requests
At the its Oct. 1 meeting, the Board postponed a decision on a request by the Gibsons, who are seeking resolution of a problem they have with the 2.5 acre parcel on which their home sits at 1030 Garrett Road in the northwest of the county.
After the purchase of their home and the land in May of 2022, they say, they discovered that no building permits had been issued for the partially completed guest house on the rear of their property.
The guest house is for Phillip Gibson’s mother, they said, and the couple say they are prepared to go through the process of getting permits to finish the structure and meet all of the code requirements.
But they also want to be able to use an abandoned drive to access that second home.
The county holds a one-foot, no-access easement on the property at the abandoned driveway. The county placed the easement on the property at the time the 2.5 acres the Gibsons owned was rezoned in October of 2020 to remove access to Hog Mountain Road.
The Gibsons said they didn’t know about that restriction when they bought the property.
The county planning staff recommended denial of their request to be able to use that driveway, and the county Planning Commission in September voted 6 to 1 to recommend to the Board of Commissioners that it deny the Gibson’s request to be able to use that driveway.
The commissioners decided they wanted more time before making a decision.
At the Oct. 1 meeting, the requester of a rezone of 17.4 acres on U.S. 78 (Monroe Highway) east of Wellington Drive for an eight-lot subdivision also asked for a delay in a decision. That request also is on the agenda for the meeting on Tuesday.
Video
The video below of the Oct. 29 Board meeting is on the county’s YouTube Channel.
I did attend the meeting, and the still image above is from the video I shot. The audio is better on the county’s video, so I did not upload my version to my Vimeo site.
The meeting actually begins at 7:20 in the video.
Discussion of the Alcoholic Beverage Ordinace begins at 13:27 and continued to 48:45.
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