Garcon Point Road residents protest yet another gas station planned for their neighborhood

Residents of the Garcon Point Road neighborhoods just off the Interstate 10 interchange have had their fill of filling stations being built in the vicinity of their homes, and at a recent meeting of the Santa Rosa County Zoning Board, let their opposition to the construction of yet another be known.

"Not surprisingly, no one in my area supports this. We don't want it and we don't need it," said Tom Bailey, the president of the owner's association of the Windsor Villas senior community.

The "this" referred to by Bailey is a Quick Trip car and truck fueling station and convenience store that the company wants to locate on a 5.5-acre lot at the confluence of Garcon Point Road and the residential streets of Henzelman Drive and Slalom Drive.

The owners of the property, David and Judy Tolbert were requesting from the zoning board a change in zoning from its existing Rural Residential Single Family status to Highway Commercial Development.

Zoning Board members deadlocked in a 4-4 vote on a motion to deny the rezoning, meaning that the motion failed. A previous motion to allow the rezoning went nowhere when it failed to receive a second. The rezoning request will be presented to the Board of County Commissioners in two weeks.

Bailey said he wasn't quite sure how to process the tied vote on a motion to deny.

"To me, they didn't really recommend either way, in the end," he said. "Ultimately it comes down to the County Commission anyway."

Residents of Ski Watch Estates and Sun Dial, as well as Windsor Villas, were among those lobbying against the Tolbert's plans. They argued that they already have three other gas stations within close proximity of their homes and the 2021 opening of the 12,000-square-foot Love's Travel Stop Truck Stop has proved disastrous to what was once their quiet way of life.

Bailey told Zoning Board members that since the Love's had arrived, his community, which is nearly a mile away from the truck stop, has seen increases in traffic, noise, litter and crime.

"We've seen an increase in the number of homeless people and have had to add security to our clubhouse," he told board members.

Scott White, who lives in Ski Watch, said he and fellow residents think the Quick Trip will be just as big and just as bad as Love's Truck Stop, with the added negative of being closer to them.

"One big ol' truck stop is more than enough," he said. "This is not a convenience store that sells gas. It is, I believe, a truck stop."

Angie Jones, who argued the case for the rezoning on behalf of the Tolberts, testified before the Zoning Board that a convenience store that sold gas was precisely what the Garcon Point Road Quick Trip would be. She said calculations had shown that the average stay at QT facilities had been timed at 15 minutes.

"This is not a truck stop that offers showers and overnight stays," she said.

Jones argued that a convenience store and gas station was the right use of the land Quick Trip was attempting to contract to build upon, as it lies just off the interstate.

"If we were designing the world and creating establishments near an interstate, we would decide the best use of this land would be Highway Commercial Development," she said. "The best use of land next to the interstate is HCD. You put in gas stations."

She also said that Quick Trip engineers would redesign the roadway where Garcon Point Road, Henzelman Drive and Slalom Drive come together to ease access onto and off of Garcon Point Road and make the intersection safer.

She said the reconfigured road would also discourage truckers and other interstate travelers from making a wrong turn into the Ski Watch subdivision, a problem that White and several others from that area have expressed worries over.

"There is not an area for the transfer trucks to turn around and we have had to pay thousands of dollars torepair our (infrastructure) due to trucks in the last year," Ski Watch subdivision HOA President Hailey Hamaker said in a letter to the Zoning Board and County Commission. "We have had a major increase of vehicletraffic driving down our street. As a mother this is very troublesome."

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Santa Rosa Garcon Point Road residents protest Quick Trip gas station