Visions of Greenland Past included a huge automobile junk yard and a notorious speed trap that funded city government, but there's a new mayor in town and a new approach to sensible development. The Greenland City Council on Monday enacted an ordinance that halts all commercial development in the city and allows officials some time to better organize its planning process.
Greenland Mayor John Gray said the new commercial moratorium and the residential moratorium passed in April offer the community a respite from unregulated development and provide time to set up a master land-use plan, a master street plan, and a comprehensive planning process. “We need to define a concept of what we want our town to look like,” he said.
That's quite different from the approach taken by Developer Dan and Alderman Robert Rhoades to undermine the planning process. When the Fayetteville Planning Commission tried to follow the City Plan 2025, the developers demanded to have it their own way. Conscientious commissioners were purged and replaced with new members more attuned to the Chamber's pro-growth rodeo. The results were evident Monday night -- the same night Greenland took bold action--when the replacement players Porter Winston and Matthew Cabe were part of a 4-3 majority that ignored traffic safety concerns and approved a large-scale development for yet another Walgreen's store on beautiful Sixth Street.
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