A public hearing during last week’s meeting of the Lamar County Board of Supervisors cemented a few changes to the county’s zoning maps, including the creation of three new agricultural districts in the county designed to protect the interest of landowners.
The three new zones are A-1 (Agricultural), A-2 (Agricultural Estates) and A-3 (Agricultural Residential), which have been instituted in previously un-zoned areas of the county. Much of the A-1 zoning is located in the area of Oral Baptist Church and Clifton Hickman farms off Mississippi 589, while a portion off West 4th Street is now zoned A-2. An area zoned A-3 can be found off Mississippi 589 north of the Sandstone subdivision.
Lamar County Administrator Jody Waits said the new designations are larger-lot districts that will allow for some agricultural uses, which are not permitted in certain other residential districts.
“In that area, there are quite a few large tracts of land that people own and live on – some have farms and raise horses and cows,” he said. “So in talking to the people and finding out what they want, we’ve created these districts that would give them some protection for what they’re doing, and from commercial encroachment.
“The people that lived in those (previously un-zoned) areas were subject to anything – someone could go into those areas and build a convenience store or a Dollar General or an office building. It’s part of our planning process to make sure that residential and commercial don’t encroach upon each other, or they don’t work against each other and that they work in harmony.”
Lamar County Senior Planner Michael Hershman agreed with the need for the zoning additions, nothing they provide landowners with a sense of control.
“It goes around them,” he said. “Essentially a commercial or industrial use now cannot go in outright. The only thing that can go in this particular area are residential and agricultural type uses.”
In addition, a tract of land along U.S. 98 just west of 589 now bears a commercial zoning designation.
“In our comprehensive plan, we identified that as a potential commercial corridor, so we zoned that as such to get some control and aesthetics for when it’s developed in the future,” Waits said. “Also, just beyond that area, there was a neighborhood that already existed, and it was un-zoned around it, so that was zoned residential to protect the integrity of that neighborhood from any commercial encroachment.”
Waits said Lamar County is unique in that it carries local legislation which allows officials to spot-zone the county. Therefore, quite a bit of the county remains un-zoned.
“So when you look at a zoning map, you’ll see un-zoned areas, which is unique to other counties or areas,” he said. “Several years ago – certainly with the growth in the northwestern part of the county – there was quite a need to put some order to what was going on with zones without zoning the entire county.
“If you had zoned the entire county, you would have placed restrictions on areas that were used to having no restrictions on how they lived. And there’s still parts of the county where people desire to have no restrictions.”
