The Petal Board of Aldermen has given Forrest County property owner Jimmie Dale Odom the green light for conditional use of used auto sales at his lot 405 West Central Avenue in Petal, with three caveats: no predatory lending, no junk cars and a 20-vehicle limit.
At the Feb. 15 board meeting, Odom and his business partner Greg Craven were given one year to get the property – which is located across from the Anything Automotive building – ready to go and beautified with fencing, lighting and landscaping. The site has caused some controversy in recent months, as Odom had several inoperable and tagless vehicles on the lot, which he has since taken away.
“This is something where Jimmie Dale has worked hard on getting his properties (cleaned up), and he’s still got some more that he’s working with us on,” Ward 5 Alderman Drew Brickson told Craven, who is planning to bring an insurance business to the West Central Avenue site. “We don’t want to go backwards; we want to go forward.”
Earlier this month, board members tabled Odom’s request for conditional use, which gave them time to review options for the property. In that time, Craven also was able to come up with a site plan to lay out improvements for the grounds.
If the conditions laid out by the board are not met, the conditional use of the property can be taken away.
“A lot of (Odom’s) stuff requires inspections, so it gets kind of complicated to take it to the highway patrol and make sure all the VIN numbers are in place and that kind of thing,” Craven said in a previous story. “So we’d like to have a dealership here.
“We do a mid-line (business); we’re not a high-end dealership. We’d have some stuff that high school students could afford, and middle-class folks could afford. We’re not going to do real expensive, $30,000 or $40,000 vehicles. Our specialty is $8,000 to about $16,000.”
Ward 4 Alderman Craig Strickland said he is willing to go along with the plan, as long as Craven and Odom follow the conditions.
“If you do this right, you’ll have thousands of cars driving by every day,” Strickland told Craven. “Make it presentable, make it attractive, and put out cars that people want to buy and can finance at a decent rate without predatory lending.”
However, Ward 1 Gerald Steele disagreed with that line of thinking, expressing his concern that the property would go back to its original state before it was cleaned off.
“I feel like we’ve gone down this path already, and although the faces are new, the situation is not,” said Steele, who provided the sole vote against the measure. “I’m afraid of what will happen if you continue down this path, and to be very clear, I’m afraid that someone will pull the rug out from under me, and this will not be a successful business venture.
“So I’m (exercising) caution, and I think I have made my opinion on that very clear.”
At the previous board meeting, Steele said it took months of work to get almost 100 cars removed from the site, and he is against the idea of any more being brought in.
“I have lived here a long time and that area has never looked as good as it does right now,” he said. “Why would we allow the same person to move the same cars back to the same property that we just forced him to clean up?
“If we allow these cars to return, they can legally stay there and the board will lose the power to do what we just did in order to clean up the area – an area that is one of the main entryways into our city.”
