Apex, Morgan County Work Through Findings In Citing Application

By Benjamin Cox on August 14, 2020 at 9:08am

The Morgan County Zoning Board of Appeals have placed a citing application on hold while conditions are worked through by the company.

Morgan County planner Dusty Douglas says that the conditions were expected: “The attorney outlined a series of conditions for the Board of Appeals that have to be met before we can actually issue a permit, and we were expecting [the conditions]. We knew it wouldn’t be cut and dry. It sounds a bit scary with a mention of 41 conditions; but in looking at past documents, the public hearing that I read of in Logan County, they were in the 30-40 condition neighborhood, as well. I don’t think it is anything out of the ordinary, so we have that list of conditions that the attorney is going to summarize and bring back to our next Plans Commission meeting on August 26th. It will be a nice summary for the board so they can feel more comfortable in making a recommendation.”

Douglas says that there were 2 main issues surrounding the 41 findings: “Decommissioning from the very beginning has been a big issue. We got some issues with the road usage agreement. I would say those are the 2 biggest items. Some of the issues that were found, frankly, could almost be checked off immediately after Apex heard about them, but they have to be noted and we are just checking the boxes of things that have to get done.”

Douglas says that the timeline of the project won’t be effected by the 2 week delay. He says that the independent engineer, Patrick Engineering, didn’t release their findings on the project until the day before the public hearing last week. Douglas says that the zoning board also wanted to receive final comments from those who objected to the project: “We spent most of our time at the public hearing dealing with objectors. The Board of Appeals told me that they wanted to hear more from them rather than the supporters. We read some of those objections into the record and everyone on the board was given a packet of those written statements. It was not really anything that we hadn’t heard about before. Apex had some expert testimony that took a little bit of those [objections] away. There not as many objections as I expected, but we were glad to receive the response.”

Douglas expects a decision to be finalized by the Zoning Board of Appeals at the August 26th meeting and then the decision will be given to the Morgan County Commissioners for a final vote possibly as early as Monday, August 31st.