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By TYLER RALEY | Staff Writer

CHELSEA – With one of the city’s biggest potential residential developments on the table to move forward, the Chelsea City Council held a public hearing for residents to ask questions during a regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, March 18.

The public hearing was held for a proposed ordinance that was submitted by Tripp Norwood of Reserve Chelsea, LLC to rezone the property located at both 9680 and 10450 Highway 11 from A-R, or agricultural-residential, to PRD, or planned residential district.

The rezoning request is ultimately for a new subdivision called Reserve Chelsea, which will be a gated community that contains 114.5 acres of land and 284 lots. The subdivision will hold houses that are for rental only, but is pitched as a luxury community with numerous amenities like a pool, walking trails, a pickleball court and a clubhouse. 

The 284 homes are split evenly between being 60-foot lots and 75-foot lots, and the proposed monthly rent for a house is between $2,500 and $3,000. Outside of the houses, the community will consist of approximately 30 acres of land with trees and trails that are undisturbed. 

“This is not a low-income community and it will never be,” said Tripp Norwood of Reserve Chelsea, LLC. “It will be a very upscale amenitized community.”

After Norwood presented the project to both the council and those in attendance, he allowed the public to ask questions, to which the main concern was the impact on the roads and traffic as the property is located directly adjacent to Chelsea High School.

When asked about the impact that this project will have on the road system on Hwy. 11, Norwood shared what feedback he received after discussing the matter with the county.

“We talked with the county and we met with them, but there was no impact to the road system,” Norwood said. “The county did not see an impact or a need for a red light.”

However, as Dave Schmidt, a citizen of Chelsea stated, the traffic is a huge concern for everyone that travels down the highway on a daily basis and people want to get to their destination in a timely manner.

“Right now, you can’t pass for most of (Hwy.) 11 from (Highway) 280 to (Interstate) 65,” Schmidt said. “So you get somebody that drives 10 miles-an-hour under the speed limit, during the time when everybody is trying to go, you’ve got a half mile worth of traffic or longer. I don’t have all day to get where I’m going.”

Robbin Gregory, director of planning at Gonzalez-Strength & Associates chimed in to say that there would be a 25-foot allocation of land along the highway for a future expansion of the road. 

With 284 homes on the docket, there were also concerns about where the younger kids that live in the community would go to school and how that would affect enrollment numbers. 

In elementary school, kids that live in Reserve Chelsea would be zoned for Forest Oaks Elementary, but Norwood wanted to assure that any effect on the schools would not come quickly.

“You’re not going to get 284 homes next year,” Norwood said. “We’ll build about 140 or 150 of them in the first phase. That will take approximately three years, and as the demand is there, we’ll add 50 more homes or 20 more homes or 80 more homes, so it won’t be all at once.”

Mayor Tony Picklesimer also touched on the fact student counts are decreasing in Chelsea’s schools in each grade from fourth grade to 12th grade for the next eight years, highlighting the fact that there are empty classrooms due largely in part to the recent option for kids in the Mt. Laurel area to go to Oak Mountain. 

Norwood added that he believes the community is no different than a single-family home community, saying the lots will be larger than similar type communities in Chelsea as well.

Another shared concern amongst residents is how the properties are going to be maintained and kept up over the course of the year, with one citizen citing the difficulty of keeping rental properties organized from his own experience with them.

Norwood described what the upkeep process will be like, making a point to ensure that all of the properties will be constantly looked after by a management company to keep them in the best shape possible. 

“We will have a management company on site that is there everyday, and that is their job to manage this,” Norwood said. “It will be a high-quality management company similar to an apartment complex, but with the right owners to maintain this property properly.”

Picklesimer added on, telling those in attendance how this property will be vastly different from a quality-of-life standpoint in every aspect

“This is a luxury, resort, rental community,” Picklesimer said. “The grass will be cut by the management company. The backyards will be astroturf and fenced. This property will be gated. The minimum is $100,000, the minimum rent $2,500 (per month). This is not low-cost, affordable housing. This is a $90 million investment in the city of Chelsea over a three-year period, bringing only professionals and people that make a good income that for whatever reason don’t want to buy a home, and there’s lots of reasons people don’t buy homes.”

Should the homes not be rented out as planned, Norwood stated that there is an alternate plan, which is to just sell the homes as single-family homes. 

“We have an agreement that we’ve signed and given the city for them to review and we’ll create a (homeowners association),” Norwood said. “We’ll already have an HOA in place reporting that if this doesn’t work, they’ll be sold as single-family homes individually, not to another developer that’s going to lower the rents and have a lower-income community.”

Norwood emphasized that this development will be managed by his and his partner’s family for years to come, making sure people know that this community will be under their management long-term.

“We are going to be long-term owners of this,” Norwood said. “Me and my partner, Neil Greenberg, we don’t ever plan to sell this property. Neil owns six million square feet of rental property in the country and he does not sell. This is going to be a legacy property for our families.”

Following the public voicing their concerns, citizens made their final comments during the physical public hearing, which were mostly already heard when they were asking questions. 

The council then made the first reading of the rezoning ordinance later on. A second reading and vote on the ordinance will be made at the council’s next meeting on Tuesday, April 1.

During the meeting, the council also carried out the following actions:

• Authorization of the closure of CD account and reopening of a new CD
• Authorization of the Mayor to execute a contract with ABS for a Waterlogic WL50 Water System at the Chelsea Community Center
• Authorization of the Mayor to payoff the library mortgage early and amend the FY25 annual budget