After a few months’ hiatus, the Cashiers Marketplace development’s quasi-judicial hearing returned for a full day of proceedings last week at the Cashiers library.
The hearing was once again continued to a future date, and it is understandable if residents are getting tired of the start-and-stop process the development proposal process has been in for almost a year.
If you recall, the proposal was formally announced at The Village Green one year ago in April, and that community meeting was certainly one for the books as there were several residents who were displeased with the overall project.
The Cashiers Marketplace proposal calls for a 31-acre development near the crossroads that would include a hotel, short-term rental cabins, cottages and condos. Questions were immediately raised by members of the public regarding increased traffic, wastewater treatment, and environmental impacts.
The initial hearing got going in November and had to be paused until the end of January, at which point the council decided to give time to the developers to put in an amended application.
Once it restarted last week, there was just one day of proceedings before it was continued.
Yes, government proceedings such as these tend to be slow, and there may be a debate about whether they aren’t moving quickly enough.
That’s one of the reasons why Cashiers is also in the middle of a recodification process with Chad Meadows, a planner from the CodeWright firm in Raleigh. The planning council could decide to do away with the quasi-judicial hearing process in favor of conditional zoning.
There are pros and cons to either zoning process and, in the future, the council will have to decide which is the lesser of two evils.
What concerned community members can continue to do is to sit in the hearings, no matter how many days it take, to finally get the proposal approved or denied. The only way for the process to come to completion in a thorough manner is by all parties staying committed to being heard and seeing the hearing through to the end.