The city and county’s efforts to have a new set of design and planning standards for several “gateway” corridors in place by the end of the year just got a little more tenuous.

The City of Milledgeville Planning and Zoning Commission delayed an up or down recommendation on the city’s end of the joint corridor standards until a special called meeting to be held Monday.

District 4 Commissioner Meg Mason made a motion to delay the vote in an effort to allow time for commissioners to take resident comments into consideration in making their decision on whether to positively or negatively recommend the corridor standards to the Milledgeville City Council.

The Gateway Corridor Standards are a joint effort between the City of Milledgeville and Baldwin County to impose measures addressing site planning, architecture, paving, landscaping, signage and illumination in order to encourage continuity as future development occurs along certain corridors deemed to be gateways to the Milledgeville community. According to the document, the objective of the standards is to encourage quality development that is “in harmony with the historic character of Baldwin County and the City of Milledgeville.”

These gateway corridors slated for the new standards include parts of U.S. Highway 441 north and south, Log Cabin Road, Meriweather Road and parts of Ga. highways 22, 24 and 49 and properties within 500 feet of the corridor.

City Councilman Steve Chambers was one of three Baldwin County residents to address the commission in Monday’s meeting.

As the chair of the Architecture Control Committee — spawned from the Baldwin 20/20 leadership retreat — that made the standards a priority for this year, Chambers spoke of the standard’s attempt to use the county’s land use codes and the city’s zoning ordinance to provide a continuity throughout the community, not just in its planned county seat.

Chambers told commissioners of how the Atlanta architects who completed the Milledgeville State Properties Master Plan said that the road to Milledgeville could have been in any town in the United States with its “sprawl, signs at different heights, buildings with no coordination at all.” But how when they got to downtown Milledgeville they were blown away by the character of the community’s built environment.

“They didn’t think that [Milledgeville] would be at the end of the trail leading to downtown,” Chambers said.

Chambers went on to describe the process of developing the standards and what they learned from the City of Madison, which has already incorporated similar standards into its zoning ordinance.

“I think this is probably one of the best things we’ve done for the future of our city,” Chambers said.

But two other residents who spoke before the commission Monday think otherwise.

John Weaver said that he is in support of the intent of making Milledgeville’s gateway corridors attractive, but the standards presented by the city and county need to be modified.

Weaver said his biggest concern was with the way the standards could conceivably make some of the city’s smaller lots unusable. He said the 50-foot-setback requirements could make some buildings on small lots harder to see from the road, and he recommended the standards leave the setback requirements at 35 feet in line with the city’s current requirements.

But Weaver also asked that the standards not apply to land owners at the time of the standards’ adoption.

“If what you can do with the land changes, so does the value of the land,” he said. “I feel that going forward, all owners of record should be grandfathered in. When you buy property, you don’t like the rules to change while you own it.”

Local accountant David Pettigrew said that the new standards are a shot in the heart of local businesses because they could increase the cost construction as much as 30 percent.

“This will eliminate the people that want to build homegrown in Milledgeville,” Pettigrew said. “It would be great if we had the money of Hilton Head, but we don’t.”

Pettigrew said that many of the landscaping requirements are a burden to the cost of construction, and that Milledgeville should be weary of attempts to emulate Madison, which he emphasized is withering on the vine.

“Let’s not become Madison; let’s be forward-thinking,” he said. “We don’t want to be stuck in the past — we’ve got some good history — but tourism brings $6-an-hour jobs. Industry brings $20-an-hour jobs.”

Following Pettigrew’s presentation, Mason, although saying she personally thinks the standards are a great idea, motioned to postpone the commission’s decision for one week.

Also in Monday’s meeting, the commission gave a positive recommendation to the Animal Rescue Foundation’s proposal to install a crematory at the South Wilkinson Street location. To facilitate the crematory, ARF needs to rezone the property from commercial to office-institutional with a special use for the crematory.

Finally, commissioners gave a positive recommendation to Tim Wright to rezone property at 621 S. Jefferson St. from single family duplex to multi-family to allow a 14-building apartment complex with a total of 32 bedrooms.

The commission’s recommendation will be forwarded to City Council for a final up or down vote.