Two rezoning proposals on this week’s Mobile Planning Commission agenda have drawn sharp opposition from residents in the city’s midtown neighborhoods, setting up a contentious public hearing scheduled for Thursday.
The first item involves an application from Robert Myers seeking to amend a planned unit development to allow construction of a car wash at the southeast corner of Sage Avenue and Dauphin Street. Helena Roldan, who lives in the neighboring Cromwell Place community, said residents there oppose the project for several reasons.
Chief among their concerns is flooding. Roldan said Hillburn Street already experiences flooding issues, and residents worry that paving the currently undeveloped property would make the problem worse. The proposal also calls for an easement that would give the developer a second curb cut onto Sage Avenue, which Roldan said would create cut-through traffic and make it harder for residents to leave the neighborhood during the afternoon rush.
“Turning left onto Dauphin from Maury between [3 p.m. and 6 p.m.] is just about impossible,” Roldan said, adding that no traffic study had been conducted as part of the proposal.
Noise is another concern for nearby homeowners, according to Roldan, given that the car wash plan includes 37 vacuum stalls. “It’s going to destroy our quality of life,” she said. “We won’t be able to sit on our back porches anymore.” Roldan also said residents were never told what the car wash’s proposed hours of operation would be.
Beyond the immediate concerns about traffic and noise, Roldan said the roughly 38-acre property represents one of the last largely undeveloped pieces of land in midtown Mobile and would be better preserved as open space. She said residents worry that approving the car wash could open the door to additional commercial development nearby and depress property values in the surrounding area.
City planning staff recommended denial of the rezoning application at an April 18 meeting. The item was subsequently held over at a May 3 meeting before landing on the agenda for a public hearing Thursday, May 17. A denial from the commission would not necessarily kill the project outright, but it would prevent the three lots involved from being combined for development purposes.
The property currently carries a low-density residential land use designation, according to a staff report on the application. Property owner Emil Graf, in a letter submitted as part of the April 18 staff report, wrote that his family was “shocked” by the city’s residential designation for the land, noting that portions of the property were rezoned from residential to commercial roughly a decade ago in anticipation of a development that never materialized amid the housing market collapse around 2008.
“This property has been used commercially for decades as a dairy, and we had portions of it rezoned from residential to commercial for our intended development 10 years ago,” Graf wrote. “To now say that this property cannot be used for commercial purposes is wrong, and a possible illegal taking. Until we find a buyer for this property, it should remain in its current zoning classification.” The property, known as the Graf Dairy, operated as a working dairy farm collecting milk from roughly the 1920s until the 1970s.
A second, unrelated rezoning request on Thursday’s agenda has also generated pushback from a different midtown neighborhood. The Infant Mystics, a Mobile Mardi Gras mystic society, are seeking to rezone property at the southwest corner of Broad and Dauphin streets from residential to commercial in order to construct a float barn for the Historic Restoration Society.
Henry Caddell, president of the Old Dauphin Way Historic District neighborhood association, has voiced opposition to that proposal in a letter to concerned residents. “The Old Dauphin Way Historic District is a beautiful neighborhood where I have lived since August 1981,” Caddell wrote. “Our ongoing hope for this neighborhood is that development would only proceed in a fashion that would beautify and enhance the unique historic character of our neighborhood. … The last thing we need at this time is a rezoning to allow an unsightly float barn.”
Both items are scheduled to go before the Mobile Planning Commission for public hearing Thursday.