Lithonia holds comprehensive plan open house

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Lithonia is updating its comprehensive plan and has invited residents to a Aug. 17 open house to share their thoughts on what the city’s goals and direction should be.

A comprehensive plan outlines a framework for the development of an area, recognizing the physical, economic, social, political, aesthetic and related factors of a community, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC). Lithonia Mayor Deborah Jackson said the city is required to do a major update every 10 years.

“Every five years we do an update of the five-year work plan,” Jackson said. “The last time the city did a comprehensive plan was in 2010, and this is the stage of updating that. The Department of Community Affairs changed a lot of the requirements and they’ve made it much more manageable, and we’re getting assistance from the Atlanta Regional Commission to actually do the writing this time. Last time we had a citizen’s group to do it.”

During the last comprehensive plan update, Jackson said the city accomplished a few goals, including updating the zoning ordinance and a housing inventory.

“We were able to do more community outreach, and some of the big things were the redevelopment of the [Lithonia] Plaza,” Jackson said. “We were able to get a grant from the DeKalb Development Authority to remediate the asbestos on the city-owned part of the Plaza. Now we’re working on identifying what will it take to separate the two structures so it can be demolished.”

The city is working with a developer, Wendover Housing Partners, which wants to do a housing development on the city-owned portion. The developer proposed a $12 million apartment complex development that will include 75 units consisting of 24 one-bedroom, 45 two-bedroom and six three-bedroom apartments.

Jackson said new development within Lithonia Plaza is the top issue for residents and city officials.

“People want to see [changes to the plaza] happen,” Jackson said. “That’s been a long time issue since the development of the plaza, some people thought it was a bad idea at the time 50 years ago and now we’re looking at bringing in some development that will be much more consistent with the historic character of the city.”

Residents are also interested in having more businesses in the city, according to Jackson.
“We want to reach out to the private sector to diversify the types of businesses that we have in the city,” she said. “We also want to increase community activities. We’re very excited about restarting programing at the Lithonia Amphitheatre. We’re continuing with the upgrades that we started a couple of years ago and have had some private donations to our Downtown Development Authority that will allow that to happen.”