Business

Developer pulls Tuxedo Dollar General request

A developer withdrew a request for a rezoning for retail on a stretch of Old Greenville Highway south of Lake Summit.

By Bill Moss, Published: November 21, 2013

A development group that included Henderson County Commissioner Tommy Thompson has pulled a rezoning request that could have led to a new Dollar General store in Tuxedo.

The development group, Westside Village Properties LLC, notified the Henderson County planning office that it was withdrawing the application, senior planner Autumn Radcliff said Wednesday.
Westside had filed a request to rezone a 1.42-acre parcel tract across from the future Tuxedo Community Park from R2R residential to Local Commercial Conditional, a designation that would have allowed the discount store. The planning staff and a technical review committee had recommended the change under conditional zoning that required site plan approval and allowed the county to impose other restrictions to "reduce the impact on the surrounding community." The land is owned by Kenneth Allen, who also owns the Tuxedo antique store in the old Tuxedo Community Store building.
Thompson is one of six owners of the development company that owns the Westside Village strip center on N.C. 191 at Mountain Road west of Hendersonville that has a Dollar General, Subway and HeBrews coffee shop.
Thompson, the longtime Henderson County clerk of superior court who was elected to the Board of Commissioners in 2010, said the discount retailer could not justify a new store on the two-lane Old Greenville Highway in a rural section of the county.
"The Dollar General people in their analysis of the demographics of the Tuxedo area did not feel there was enough households and not enough traffic volume to merit their putting a store down there in Tuxedo," he said. "They not desiring to lease property, we're certainly not interested in trying to put up something if we don't know that we have a guaranteed renter. We pulled the application and there will not be a Dollar General going down there."