A woman in Catoosa County has an issue with a neighbor’s use of his property as a school bus yard despite it being zoned for residential use.
The property is taxed as a business, highlighting one of the many anomalies in the county’s zoning map that can lead to headaches and disagreements on land use.
Megan Levise lives in a condo on Sunset Cove Drive in Fort Oglethorpe and has for about four years. When she moved in, her neighbor across the street on Anderson Lane had used his garage as a small-scale repair shop for campers and other vehicles, she said.
Catoosa County, like many largely rural counties in Georgia and elsewhere in the United States, was late to adopt property zoning. Catoosa County implemented zoning in 1991, and ever since, the property in question has been zoned as residential.
However, the property is also taxed as a small business, from when it was operated as an auto repair shop. The repair shop has recently evolved into a bus barn where at any given time starting this fall, Levise said, 15 to 20 school buses will fire up early in the morning, run for 45 minutes to an hour, and again later in the afternoon as they warm up for a day of routes.