Proposed Shopping Center On Connector At Mars Hill 3rd Largest

If the Oconee County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday night were to approve the requested rezone for a shopping center at the intersection of Mars Hill Road and the Oconee Connector, it would be the third largest in the county in terms of building square footage.

It also would be the culmination of efforts going back to 1988 to create a shopping at that location.

Commissioners have approved smaller shopping centers on two of the three properties in the intersection in the past, but the property owners never developed the land.

In this latest attempt to create a shopping center at the location, Maxie Price is asking the commissioners to merge three properties he owns and rezone them for a commercial complex, anchored by a Publix, that also would include hotels, restaurants, and a car dealership.

Price’s request, involving just less than 47 acres, greatly changes the scale of the earlier rezones, which also included residential development.

To accommodate that increased scale, Price is asking that he be allowed to add a new entrance to his property off the Oconee Connector with a traffic light and median break. The property has no access to the Connector at this point.

To justify that request for access, which also needs state approval, Price’s commercial real estate agent, Jamie Boswell, has delivered to Georgia Department of Transportation officials correspondence about the property going back to 1997.

Boswell also is a member of the Georgia Transportation Board, which oversees GDOT.

Price also wants to increase the number of entrances off Mars Hill Road from two to five.

For more on the story, please go to Oconee County Observations.