GREENVILLE, SC – Dwayne Cooper and his two neighbors say plans for a large, new subdivision would alter the only road that leads to their homes in a wooded area surrounded by the Legacy Pines Golf Club in Greenville County.
“They are basically changing my legal access to my property,” Cooper said in an interview on Thursday. “They cannot change without my consent.”
Cooper and his neighbors expressed their concerns about the proposed layout for Green Pine Estates during a meeting of the Greenville County Planning Commission this week.
The commission members questioned the project’s engineer about the alignment of the access road to the existing residences.
There were also questions about a small cemetery in the 203-acre tract that is not shown on the site plan for the proposed 437 home subdivision.
The effects that Green Pine Estates and other recently approved developments in the area will have on the surrounding roads was another topic of discussion.
And while that didn’t come up at Wednesday’s meeting, there are also uncertainties about the future of the Legacy Pines Golf Club. Plans submitted to county officials indicate that the Ranch Road golf course will disappear, but one of the partners involved in the development insists it can remain.
“We are exploring our options,” said Tommy Biershenk, owner of the company that has rented the pitch from the Hejaz Shrine Club in Greenville since 2015.
What is clear is that the Planning Commission will wait at least a month before voting on the approval of Green Pine Estates.
Before Wednesday’s vote was postponed, planning commissioner Metz Looper said he was impressed with the plans for Green Pine Estates. The houses in the development would be built in groups and about half of the property would be set aside for detention areas and open spaces.
“This is one of the best cluster subdivisions that I have seen for some time,” said Looper.
The engineer says questions about the access road and the cemetery can be resolved Jonathan Nett, the engineer at Green Pine Estates, agreed with a month’s delay in considering development.
He said at Wednesday’s meeting that he would try to resolve any questions about the access road to existing homes.
“We are happy to meet with the residents,” said Nett. “If we need to lose a few lots to provide access through this, we would be happy to do that.”
Planning commissioner Mark Jones said he was “very concerned” about the cemetery that was omitted from the site plan.
“This must be protected because we already had one in Revolutionary War period Greenville County that was destroyed and we don’t need to see it again,” said Jones.
Nett said a plot could be eliminated from the site plan to preserve the cemetery and create a 6-meter buffer around it.
Developing partner: ‘We are trying to find a way to maintain’ the Biershenk golf course, which is a former professional golfer, said that he and his partner, Easley’s developer Anthony Anders, prefer to keep the Legacy course Pines open while developing custom homes on the adjacent property.
“My heart is in this. We have 290 members, ”said Biershenk. “We are trying to find a way to keep it going.”
He said plans were prepared to replace the clubhouse of the course that burned last year.
If the current location plan for Green Pine Estates is approved, Legacy Pines could be the second golf course in the area to be the victim of residential development in recent years. Nearly 850 homes are being built at the former Bonnie Brae Golf Club, which closed in 2019 after being open for nearly six decades.
In addition to being concerned about the road leading to his home, Cooper said at Wednesday’s meeting that he is concerned about increased traffic in the fast-growing area south of Mauldin.
Cooper said the subdivision at the former Bonnie Brae Golf Club is among seven developments near Ashmore Bridge Road that have been approved in the past three years.
He suggested that Green Pine Estates developers should conduct a thorough traffic study that takes into account the congestion that these new ventures will create in the years to come.
“We don’t want to end another Woodruff Road,” he said on Thursday.
Kirk Brown covers government, growth and politics for The Greenville News. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter @KirkBrown_AIM. Subscribe to The Greenville News by visiting greenvillenews.subscriber.services.