GREENVILLE, S.C. — Dwayne Cooper and his two neighbors say that plans for a large, new subdivision would alter the only road leading to their homes in a wooded area surrounded by the Legacy Pines Golf Club in Greenville County.
“They’re basically changing my legal access to my property,” Cooper said in an interview Thursday. “They can’t change it without my consent.”
Cooper and his neighbors voiced their concerns about the proposed layout for Green Pine Estates during a Greenville County Planning Commission meeting this week.
Commission members quizzed the development’s engineer about the alignment of the access road for the existing homes.
There also were questions about a small cemetery on the 203-acre tract that is not shown in 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 surrounding roads was another topic of discussion.
And although it did not come up at Wednesday’s meeting, there also is uncertainty about the future of the Legacy Pines Golf Club. The plans submitted to county officials indicate that the golf course on Ranch Road will disappear, but one of the partners involved in the development insists that it may remain.
“We’re exploring our options,” said Tommy Biershenk, who owns the company that has been leasing the course from Greenville’s Hejaz Shrine Club since 2015.
What is clear is that the Planning Commission will wait for at least a month before voting on whether to approve Green Pine Estates.
Before Wednesday’s vote was delayed, planning commissioner Metz Looper said he was impressed with the plans for Green Pine Estates. The homes in the development would be built in clusters, and about half of the property would be set aside for detention areas and open space.
“This is one of the better cluster subdivisions that I have seen in a while,” Looper said.
Engineer says questions about access road and cemetery can be resolved Jonathan Nett, the engineer for Green Pine Estates, agreed to the one-month delay in consideration of the development.
He said at Wednesday’s meeting he would seek to resolve any issues about the access road to the existing homes.
“We’re happy to meet with the residents,” Nett said. “If we need to lose a couple of lots to provide access through that, we’re happy to do that.”
Planning commissioner Mark Jones said he was “quite concerned” about the cemetery that was omitted from the development’s site plan.
“That should be protected because we’ve already had one in Greenville County from the Revolutionary War period that was destroyed, and we don’t need to see that again,” Jones said.
Nett said one lot could be eliminated from the site plan to preserve the cemetery and create a 20-foot buffer around it.
Partner in development: ‘We’re trying to figure out a way to keep’ golf course Biershenk, who is a former professional golfer, said he and his partner, Easley developer Anthony Anders, would prefer to keep the Legacy Pines course open while developing custom homes on the adjacent property.
“My heart is in it. We have 290 members,” Biershenk said. “We’re trying to figure out a way to keep it.”
He said plans have been prepared to replace the course’s clubhouse that burned last year.
If the current site plan for Green Pine Estates is approved, Legacy Pines could be the second golf course in the area to fall prey to residential development in recent years. Nearly 850 homes are being built on the former Bonnie Brae Golf Club, which closed in 2019 after being open for nearly six decades.
Besides being concerned about the road leading to his home, Cooper said at Wednesday’s meeting that he is worried about the increasing traffic in the rapidly 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 the developers of Green Pine Estates should conduct a thorough traffic study that accounts for the congestion that those new developments will create in the next few years.
“We don’t want to end up with another Woodruff Road,” he said Thursday.
Kirk Brown covers government, growth and politics for The Greenville News. Reach him at kebrown@greenvillenews.com or on Twitter @KirkBrown_AIM. Please subscribe to The Greenville News by visiting greenvillenews.subscriber.services.