All right, good evening, everyone.

My name is Ruchi Agarval, and welcome to City of Johns Creek Zoning Public Participation Meeting.

Or Land Use Petitions Public Participation Meeting.

I'm the planning and zoning manager with the City of Johns Creek in community development department.

And tonight we have one case that the applicant will be presenting in front of you.

I appreciate a few residents who are here from the neighboring subdivisions.

But let me explain the format of the meeting first.

I will just introduce the case and then I'll turn it over to our applicant here.

And he will make a formal presentation, which is getting recorded, and it will be available online for any viewers who missed the meeting or wants to know more about the project here.

And after that, we'll close the recording and we'll just have any questions that the public have and have a more candid QA session.

So with that, I'll start.

So tonight we have the land use petitions, a special use permit, which is SUP-25-0001, and with three concurrent variances, which is VC-25-0002 and 0003 and 0004.

This subject property, it's kind of outline on the screen here is outlined in black is a collection of three parcels located at 10505, 10509, 10625, Jones Bridge Road.

It's together 4.872 acres.

It's currently zoned as AG1, and a special use permit is requested to allow for a 22,500 square foot church building with three concurrent variances.

Variance number one is to reduce the 100 foot church building setback to 50 feet along the West Property Line.

Variance number two, which is VC-25-0003, is to allow temporary grading and land disturbance within the 25 foot undisturbed buffer and 10 foot improvement setback along the West Property Line.

And the last variance, concurrent variance, is to reduce the 50 foot undisturbed buffer and 10 foot improvement set back to 20 foot undisturbed buffer along the rear property line.

With that, I will actually invite our applicant to tell you more about this project.

So all yours, introduce yourself, please.

Thank you.

My name is Dwayne Wood with RDW Real Estate Company, and I'm the applicant on behalf of the church, Christ Fellowship Church of North Atlanta, Inc.

And I've got a statement that I'd like to just read to the public from the church so that they can y'all can have a chance to understand where they're coming from and who they are, a little bit of what they are.

Christ Fellowship Church is a local church that has been serving the Alpharetta Roswell and Johns Creek communities for the past seven years.

We exist to glorify God through the gospel in community and on mission.

We gather weekly for worship, teach the Bible faithfully, and encourage one another in community as we seek to live out our faith in everyday life.

We are not a large institution or a remote organization.

We are local church members made up of families, professionals, young people, and longtime residents.

Many of our members live in Johns Creek with children attending nearby schools, including Dolvin Elementary.

We care deeply about this community because we're part of it.

We also understand that our neighbors come from many different backgrounds and beliefs, and we want to be respectful and supportive of members of this diverse community.

Our vision for this property is to create a welcoming space that services that serves both our church family and the surrounding neighborhood.

The facility will be used primarily for Sunday worship services, Bible studies, children's ministry, and occasional community gatherings.

To be clear, we do not plan to operate a daycare, a school, a former counseling center, a formal counseling center, or transitional housing on this property.

While we care deeply about these needs, we believe others in our community are better equipped to meet them.

Instead of duplicating those efforts, we partner with organizations that specialize in these areas, offering our financial support, volunteers, and encouragement without housing those services on our campus.

We want to be good neighbors and a long-term positive presence in Johns Creek.

Our goal is to approach every step of this process from planning and construction to ongoing operations and maintenance with integrity, transparency, and a commitment to stewardship.

We welcome dialogue and sincerely want to listen to the questions and concerns of those who live nearby.

We are grateful for this opportunity to pursue the special use permit and to be considered as part of the future of this site.

Thank you for your time, and we look forward to continued engagement with the community.

And that was from a spokesperson with the church.

Wanted me to read that and let y'all have kind of a general flavor about who they are and where they're coming from.

They like you live in the community.

Not every one of the members lives in Johns Creek, but there's a number of them that do live in Johns Creek.

And again, their children go to school, various elementaries, some of them in Dolvin Elementary.

They we've actually already initiated and have some goodwill being established with Dolvin Elementary already.

So the project that you're seeing here, if you look at it, this is about a 4.9 acre site.

And on this 4.9 acre site, it's formerly been part of an SUP previously for a 10,000 square foot church.

That's what was here, I guess, since the early 2000s.

And we're filing for a new special use permit because we want to do a little more modern and a little bit larger church building.

It's to be a multi-phase project.

We will not build everything in phase one.

And we are equally concerned about getting people in and around our site and getting them back off site and out the door and getting them in efficiently.

So you'll see two driveways there, which is unusual for a lot of church sites that you'll see that are this size.

But that's what we'd like to propose to do.

And so on the west side, the variances there are to help us with some of the issues that we're dealing with with the width of the property and the setbacks on both sides.

So when you look at this, you'll see there's about 1.85 acres, I think it is, around the entire site that can't be built on that will remain natural, that takes up a good part of the land.

And so the variances that we're looking for is a building setback, which would be normal if it were zoned, a different zoning other than AG1.

But AG1 in Johns Creek puts a hundred-foot buffer in there, so the 50-foot is more commiserate with what you would see in a typical commercial zoning.