(Editor’s Note: The following letter was submitted to the City of Aiken Planning Commission on January 13, 2026. It pertains to the proposed 172-home subdivision (Figures 1 and 2) along Toolebeck Road named Toolebeck Commons. An application for city sewer service was withdrawn (Figure 3) the day of its Planning Commission hearing on Tuesday, January 13, 2026. For further information see The Ten Foot Wide Strip of City Land and Satan’s Matchstick.)

Toolebeck Road Comments
Date: 1/13/2026

To: The Members of the City of Aiken Planning Commission, Marya Moultrie

From: H. B. Gianos, Montmorenci Farms, LLC

Re: Written comments to be added to the Planning Department report and legal record regarding the Toolebeck Road utility service application for sewer capacity outside the City Limits.

Well folks, here we are again. The Toolebeck Road application from Crowell and Company out of Georgia (aka Keystone Builders) is back in front of the City Planning Commission asking for a new discretionary sewer approval for a high density, high traffic (over 300 trips a day) small lot subdivision outside of the City Limits that has now grown to 172 homes. It was 156 homes on 66.5 acres in August 2025 when it was turned down by this Planning Commission, but the developer has since contracted for another 6 acres and are now proposing a larger 172 lot project on 72.5 acres. So, the impacts on the neighborhood’s roads, the area’s character, and the community’s available services have actually gone up, while their non-conformity with the City’s Comprehensive Plan for this area remains a screaming red flag.

So why is the developer back in City Hall, and not at the County Planning Department with a septic based site plan with about 1/3 the density proposed here, after 1) the City Planning Commission’s denial on August 12th, 2025 of the motion to approve an Annexation, Change of Zone to PR, and Concept Plan Approval of the smaller 156 Lot Subdivision Site Plan, 2) the Aiken City Council de-annexing contiguity to the project parcel via its ten foot strip in a 7-0 vote in the Fall of 2025 and thereafter distancing themselves from the proposed development and, 3) the City subsequently declaring the applicant’s former August 2020 sewer service resolution has expired?

The answer to these questions is very simple. You can’t build high density, high profit residential subdivisions in this area of the County without getting access to the City of Aiken’s Sewer System. And in this particular case, the access to the City’s sewer system is a completely discretionary vote on the part of the City of Aiken. Getting that discretionary sewer approval is this developer’s magic lottery ticket that turns this industrially cited land into supercharged, exponentially more valuable high density housing land.

This discretionary sewer service application has unfortunately been accompanied by a highly flawed, biased, and eye brow raising narrative from our own Planning Department that whitewashes the history of this project, and fails to disclose the material facts and impacts on which to fairly base the Commission’s review. The departmental memorandum and narrative contained in the Planning Commission Agenda of January 13th, 2026, is required to serve as a complete and accurate picture for the Planning Commission to review, analyze and vote on.

Their report couldn’t be farther from that standard, or the truth. Instead, it is a crystal clear indictment of the Director’s and Assistant Director’s own biases, admitted violation of City Policy, failure to disclose material facts the absence of which can mislead and misinform the Planning Commission Members, and a complete contradiction of the recent actions of the City Planning Commission, City Council, and City Manager’s Office to negate this high impact, nonconforming proposal.

Here is a list of material defects, misleading statements and critical non-disclosures that appear in the Planning Department report distributed to the Commission.

Material Non-Disclosures:

A) No mention that on August 12th, 2025, the City of Aiken Planning Commission turned down this application for an Annexation, Zone Change to PR, and a Conceptual Site Plan approval of 156 homes. The proposal currently in front of the Commission is for an even larger project of 172 homes.

B) No mention that subsequent to the Planning Commission’s denial, the Aiken City Council voted 7-0 to de-annex the ten foot strip of City owned property that created contiguity with the applicant’s property. Substantive policy comments were made that evening by several Council members about not letting growth spoil the eastern part of the City and concentrating the City’s limited utility resources in high priority projects in the western and northern parts of the City. Judging from this report, the policy statements endorsed by the City Council are falling on deaf ears in the Planning Department.

C) No mention that the City of Aiken has declared the August 2020 Utility Services Resolution granting sewer access (to only one of the tax lot parcels submitted as part of this application) to be expired, and as such, null and void.

D) No mention that the applicant has openly and publicly threatened litigation against the City to refute the expiration of the August 2020 Utility Services Resolution and has engaged litigation counsel. So the question immediately arises as to who is advising the City and the Planning Department on even accepting an application for sewer service while under the threat of litigation? Why have they not asked the applicant for a stipulation waiving suit against the City as a condition of hearing the new application? Otherwise, this appears to be a clear cut case of developer bullying and intimidation to “force” through a completely discretionary approval using threats.

E) That the Planning Department is aware that the City has only 410,000 gpd (gallons per day) of remaining capacity at the County Sewer Treatment Plant, but already has approximately 500,000 gpd of claims against that remaining capacity. On paper, Aiken is not in a position to offer sewer at the present time. The City will not receive additional capacity until the County plant expansion is completed in 2027. The City’s future capacity increase has been reduced by the County to 1.5 million gpd from the 1.5 million gpd requested by the City. Allocating scarce sewer capacity to only the high priority projects within the City Limits will be the most discussed planning topic for the next several years.

F) There are no unit mix calculations in the report showing how many bedrooms are in each home. Therefore, there are no sewer capacity reservation calculations presented for the project. A reasonable number based on 172 units of varying size would be 55,000 gpd.

Therefore, what is the status of the payment of the City’s sewer capacity reservation fee at the current rate of $10.89 gpd (estimated at $598,950) which fee appears to be payable by a non-City project at the time of requesting said capacity based on comments made by Thomas Parrot P. E. at last night’s, January 12, 2025, City Counsel Work Session.

Withholding Material Information and Providing False Context:

A) There is no mention of the industrial setting of the proposed project or its adjacency to the largest Dominion Energy substation in town and the Horse Creek Academy Charter School that has 1308 students plus faculty, staff and deliveries. The school already causes long traffic lines twice a day in front of these parcels that materially impede the safe flow of traffic. They also failed to discuss that traffic is currently so bad on Toolebeck Road that a traffic light was recently installed at Deloach and Pine Log in an attempt to mitigate the dangerous conditions caused by the current volume of traffic coming off Toolebeck Road.

B) The Director’s narrative conspicuously mentions that the project site is only 156 feet from the City’s boundary in an attempt to sway the Commission Members thinking. However, the report makes no mention of how the City’s own Comprehensive Plan views this area as an “Industrial Node” and is nearby to the “Eastside Transition Zone”, which specifically excludes high density residential as a use.

C) This report makes absolutely no mention or reference to the material reasons, cited by various Planning Commission Members during the hearing of August 12, 2025, that lead to the denial of the application. Or, that none of those concerns have been addressed or remediated in the now larger site plan submitted with this application. In fact, this is basically the same site plan that was rejected, except it includes even more lots. Concerns that the developer was not willing to address then, and has not addressed now, include:

1) high density residential being the wrong use for this location, and not in keeping with the City’s Comprehensive Plan, (2) showing only a single entrance for this number of homes is a violation of Planning Commission practices and the recently City adopted Aiken Safe Streets Initiative, (3) developer opposition to funding a full secondary entrance onto Woodward Drive, and paving designated portions of Woodford Drive to City standards to accommodate the City’s emergency vehicles and alleviate traffic congestion onto Toolebeck Road and, 4) evidencing an agreement with the railroad company that owns Woodward Drive for access, entrancing, and paving permission.

Bias, Favoritism, and Violation of City Policy

A) On January 14th, 2025 the City Planning Commission reviewed City Services Requests for three projects, Cooper Place, Bridge Creek, and Bedford Place. Each project was located in the County in a UD Zone. Same as the Toolebeck Road application. Notably, each of the three reports submitted by the Planning Department to the Planning Commission for review that evening contained much more restrictive language than is contained in the Planning Department’s Toolebeck report. In fact, the Toolebeck report is entirely missing this important language. Here is the missing language:

“Policy Regarding Planned Residential ( PR) Zones

On October 23, 2006, the City Council adopted a policy that all rezoning, annexation, and City utility service requests for primarily residential development four (4) acres or larger will be developed under the PR (Planned Residential) zoning regulations.”

Obviously, the removal of this clause from the Toolebeck report reflects the Planning Director’s and Assistant Planning Director’s personal decision to hold this developer to a lower standard and far less scrutiny than the three others. Adhering to the City’s PR Zone criteria gives the City vast site plan modification powers in exchange for granting sewer access. Something that the Planning Director has consciously and wrongfully taken away from the City Council in the event they ever needed to use it.

Additionally, in each of the several “conditions sections” of the other three reports, the operative words “should be included” are used as instructions to the Planning Commission. In the Toolebeck report the words “could be included” have been substituted for the words “should be included” under each condition. How is it possible for the Planning Department to hold identical sewer requests to different standards? Why is the Toolebeck developer making out like a bandit, while the other three developers have to comply with stricter criteria?

B) The Toolebeck report states “plans have been submitted and approved for a public sanitary sewer line to connect the property to the nearest line serving the nearby Deodar Plantation.” I submit that this approval is a direct violation of written City Policy. The approval referenced in this sentence was granted in early May 2025. Engineered drawings had been submitted approximately a year earlier in 2024.

At that time, the proposed project was contiguous to then City Limits (it had been since November 2021) and was required to be annexed in order to legally access sewer services pursuant to signed documents.

City Policy states:

“New owners of contiguous properties (properties touching the City boundary) requiring a new water and/or sewer account are required to complete a petition for annexation and submit the executed document to the Planning Department prior to receiving the requested City service. This document starts the annexation process which requires a Planning Commission public hearing and two readings of an ordinance and approval by the City Council. The process takes approximately two months”.

The developer did not submit its Petition of Annexation until July 7, 2025. It does not appear that the Planning Department should have even accepted the drawings for review in 2024 without a Petition of Annexation on file, or have issued an approval of the drawings in May 2025 without a Petition of Annexation on file. It seems so implausible that this department cannot function within the policies set forth by the City, or even exhibit the ability to check a file for key documents.

At the Planning Commission hearing of August 12th, 2025, I asked Director Moultrie on the record if Resolution 08102020C had expired and if it was still valid, since it solely underpinned the high density requested on the site plan. Her answer was that she didn’t know. She later added, that it didn’t matter anyway, if it had expired. That answer only makes sense if she believed that the Annexation Application was going to get rubber stamped that night and the applicant wouldn’t need to rely on Resolution 08102020C to obtain sewer access. Turns out it did matter, a lot.

False Statements Contained in the Report:

A) Page one of the narrative portion of the report affirmatively states that an original concept site plan referred to in Paragraph A below was approved during the City of Aiken’s approval of the request for City Sewer Services in 2020, which culminated in the issuance of Resolution 08102020C. This is a patently false and misleading claim. The resolution clearly states it is supplying services to the property and makes no mention or reference whatsoever to the approval of any site plan. In fact, as described below, that original site plan was abandoned by the developer. This entire portion of the narrative should be stricken, and the Planning Commission so alerted prior to being allowed to vote on the application.

Misleading the Planning Commission

A) The Planning Department’s narrative refers to an “original concept plan including 247 single-family homes (169 detached and 78 attached) on 60.65 acres” against which it attempts to make comparisons to the current 172 lot submission. Please note, this “original concept plan” was a “placeholder” plan attached to the 2020 sewer service request application and subsequent resolution. The City has declared that resolution to be expired, null and void. Therefore, such placeholder site plan is also null and void. Additionally, said placeholder site plan was never the subject of an actual application or hearing. It is a “dead” drawing.

Furthermore, said placeholder site plan was not the site plan submitted for the annexation, zone change, and concept approvals application in 2025, or the premature sewer line extension approval. There is no validity incorporating that plan into any comparisons to the current submission.

In fact, throughout 2025 this proposed development has been publicly processed by the Planning Department as a 156 lot subdivision. So in reality, the number of lots has actually gone up to 172 and all comparisons to the “original plan” from 2020 should be ignored as irrelevant and inaccurate.

Furthermore, as a humorous side note regarding the Planning Department’s selective inclusion of comparisons based on the abandoned 247 home plan from 2020, said plan would reasonably be estimated to use 75,000 to 80,000 gpd of sewer flow. This represents 20 percent of the City’s remaining capacity 410,000 and over 5.3 percent of the City’s future 1.5 million gpd of capacity. Why would any sensible Planning Commission approve such a detrimental request to allocate the City’s scarcest resource to an out-of-City, non-conforming, high neighborhood impact proposal?

B) An analysis of the site plan and the Planning Department’s narrative shows a “double count” of large unbuildable utility easements as open space. These easements are already open space in perpetuity. They cannot be built on. The developer is not giving up 20% of his “net” buildable area for open space in this site plan. The Planning Department’s claim that the developer is meeting a 20% open space allocation, with or without the retention pond being included, is not supported by a dimensional schedule or an outline of said areas. There is also no supporting calculation of the amount of open space attributed to the utility easements as a percentage of the total claimed open space. A 20% allocation to open space would be 14.5 acres.

That does not appear discernible on this site plan.

C) No mention whatsoever that the traffic trips generated for this site plan are higher than the traffic trips generated for the site plan that was denied on August 25th, 2025.

D) No mention or discussion regarding the large amount of unbuildable utility easement acreage shown in the site plan being used as part of the density per acre calculations. Using gross acreage rather than net buildable acreage is a clever way to make the density numbers look more acceptable to the public. The true unit density per acre for this proposal should be recalculated, using only the net buildable acreage not including the utility easement areas, the retention pond, and the required perimeter buffers. I believe you will see the density per acre change dramatically.

Mr. H. B. Gianos
Montmorenci Farms, LLC