Five years later, Toccoa’s record still gives no answer on 27 Broncos Drive rezoning

The consequential fact for residents of 27 Broncos Drive is not a new zoning action but a longstanding gap: Toccoa City Commission scheduled a public hearing and consideration of Andrew Vassar’s rezoning request for March 22, 2021, and the identified record still does not say what commissioners decided. The meeting was set for 5 p.m.; WNEG Radio reported that it would be conducted by teleconference.

That missing disposition matters because a rezoning can set the land-use rules governing a particular parcel and shape what uses or development may be permitted there. A public hearing put Vassar’s request into the city’s public decision-making process, but a hearing on the calendar is not itself a zoning change. Without a documented final action, the public account cannot establish that 27 Broncos Drive was rezoned.

The March 22 agenda was the formal city step: it listed a hearing and consideration for Vassar’s request at 27 Broncos Drive. On the same day, WNEG Radio reported the planned hearing and the teleconference format, including a dial-in option for people wishing to attend. Both accounts describe a proceeding that was to occur; neither reports what happened after the item came before the commission.

Vassar was the applicant identified on the 2021 agenda, while the City Commission was the body scheduled to hear and consider the request. Residents were given a way to listen to the teleconference, WNEG Radio reported, but the reporting does not preserve comments, competing arguments or commissioners’ deliberations. The agenda likewise identifies the request without stating the requested zoning classification or any position for or against it.

What is documented is a proposed public hearing and consideration, not a completed rezoning. The March 2021 agenda does not state an approval, denial, continuance, withdrawal or other disposition, and WNEG Radio’s contemporaneous report establishes only that the hearing was planned. A January 2024 City Commission agenda concerned a separate rezoning request for property between Big A Road and Colonial Drive, so it does not resolve the Broncos Drive matter.

No later official action or new public hearing for Vassar’s 27 Broncos Drive request is documented here. The next public development would be a city record that identifies the request’s disposition or places it back before the commission. Until then, the central questions remain undecided in the public record: whether the commission acted in 2021 and whether the parcel’s land-use rules changed as a result.