Bell’s Bend Plan Becomes Fight over Growth

A community meeting about preserving the character of an area known as Bell’s Bend turned heated last night over a proposed 1500-acre development in the area’s southern section.

The neighborhood defeated a subdivision proposal in 2005 and since then, residents have been working to preserve the area’s rural character. In October, they started working on a community plan. Those are documents that neighborhoods formulate to recommend how and what kind of growth they want in the future.

But planning guidelines for a proposed corporate headquarter and residential development called the May Town Center have been included as part of the discussion of the Bell’s Bend community plan. That left many residents like Sumter Camp feeling railroaded.

“Most of the plan they’ve done is great. I mean preserving view sheds and ridgelines and limiting development. Instead of talking about those things, instead we’re talking about why we should accommodate a plan that is wholly inconsistent with everything that already is and that we’ve been talking about for two years.”

Developer Tony Giarratana is working on the $4 billion dollar proposal with the May family, which owns the property. He says the development does protect a lot of the area’s rural landscape.

“The private land owner, in this case being the May family, has been in this community for over a 113 years and is very concerned about the land, very concerned about the future of this city, and has offered to dedicate over 900 acres of land to open space, to preservation in perpetuity.”

The Metro Planning Department will formulate a draft proposal for the community to comment on at a meeting in May. If the Planning Commission adopts the plan, all zoning change requests like one needed for the May Town Center will have to reflect the plan’s guidelines and also have to be approved by the Metro Council.