Newton County will have a five-week moratorium on permit applications for places of worship after a motion proposed by District 1 Commissioner John Douglas passed unanimously at the Newton County Board of Commissioners (BOC) meeting, attended by a standing-room only crowd, Tuesday night.
The motion was added to the meeting’s agenda by Douglas in response to a 2015 land sale of 135 acres at the intersection of Hwy. 162 and County Line Road. The land was purchased for a proposed place of worship, cemetery and possible school by Al Maad Al Islami Inc.
A use permit was granted on June 16, 2015 by Newton County Developmental Services without a public hearing or notice because a county ordinance permits churches in all zoning areas. Cemeteries are also permissible in areas zoned agriculture residential as long as the property is at least 10 acres in size and all graves are set back 40-feet from property or right-of-way lines.
If a school was built on the property, as mentioned in a Letter of Intent from the purchaser of the land, the BOC would need to grant a permit.
Newton County Manager Lloyd Kerr said at Tuesday’s meeting that the project was in line with the county’s zoning. Because the place of worship was named Avery Community Church, he said he did not discover it was for a proposed mosque and cemetery until a meeting Aug. 8 with engineers, the county’s zoning administrator, a member of the fire services department and landscape architect.
“My concern tonight is for the fact that our zoning department allowed this project, with its attended proposals for significant development beyond simply a worship hall, to advance as far as it has without any requirement that it be brought before this board for review,” Douglas said. “Given the trend toward larger and larger campus style, multi-service facilities for places of worship, I believe we as a board need to ask our planning professionals to take a look at the zoning ordinance and see if the current procedural and substantive requirements for places of worship are sufficient for the realty of these types of developments.”
To do that, he said, the county should take a five-week break from allowing new developments to come in, and analyze its zoning ordinances and procedures.
He requested that during the BOC’s Sept. 20 meeting, county staff should present its findings and the board would decide whether to amend its ordinance, extend the moratorium or allow the moratorium to expire and keep its ordinance as is.
“Such a moratorium is by no means intended to be a permanent hindrance to expansion of worship in general or any specific religion in Newton County in particular,” Douglas said. “Instead it is to be focused on good planning practice for the protection of the public health, safety and welfare.”
Douglas also proposed a second motion to hold a public hearing for Monday, Aug. 22 on the development of a place of worship and cemetery.
The public hearing featuring citizen's comments on a proposed mosque on Hwy. 162 will be held Monday at the Newton County Historic Courthouse, 1124 Clark Street, Covington, in two sessions. Both sessions will have limited seating of 300 people each.
The first will be from 6 p.m.-7:30 p.m. and the second from 7:45 p.m.-9:15 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 22.
For more information on this story see Sunday’s print edition of The Covington News.
