Greenwood planners weigh safety, easement barriers after developer says Holmes Road commitment is impossible

At a June 9 meeting of the Agreement Advisory Plan Commission in Greenwood, petitioners for Davis Homes LLC said they cannot meet a recorded development commitment to “reconstruct Holmes Road to meet standards connecting south” because a roughly 300-foot stretch of county-owned right of way north of an S-curve lies outside the property and is controlled by unwilling adjacent landowners.

Petitioner attorney Eric Prime said Davis Homes has acquired the parcel and plans for-sale townhomes and duplexes rather than the rental development originally contemplated. He told the commission the commitment’s language — as written in item 1b of the recorded commitments — could be read to require reconstruction across the 300-foot county segment but that physically and legally the developer cannot obtain the permanent or temporary easements needed to do that work. “If the board decides that we have to do work in the 300 foot stretch of the county, I think we've just shown you that's an impossibility,” Prime said.

The petitioner’s counsel, Paul Carroll, said his firm had made cash offers for permanent easements and had proposed temporary construction easements and property restorations, including repaving a driveway and replacing disturbed trees, but adjoining owners uniformly declined. “At the last meeting,…