Gwinnett zoning issue stalls sale of Southern Baptist center

Denomination is desperate to unload expensive property.

The Georgia Baptist Mission Board will have to demonstrate the virtue of patience after the Gwinnett County Commission rejected a rezoning proposal that would have allowed the Southern Baptist ministry to sell its 40-acre property across from Gas South Arena near Duluth.

For now, the organization remains saddled with an oversized building that it can no longer afford.

The organization ministers to a network of 3,600 churches in the state, representing 1.5 million Baptists, said David Melber, chief operating officer.

The mission board moved into the five-story building on Sugarloaf Parkway with nearly 300 staffers just before the 2008 financial collapse, Melber told county commissioners. Church donations declined in the ensuing recession and the organization reduced staff accordingly, he said.

Now, an average of just 33 people work each day in the building, which has an operational overhead cost of about $1.3 million per year, he said.

The property includes a 55-foot cross towering out of a pond in front of the 175,000-square-foot building, which contains religious monuments and statues, a chapel, a prayer room with a stained glass window and an engraving depicting the Last Supper in a conference suite. There is also a twostory parking garage.

“It’s way too large for our needs,” Melber said. “We need to redeploy those assets of that property elsewhere.”

Melber did not respond to a question from The Atlanta Journal-constitution about the property’s asking price. The county this year appraised the building at about $30.5 million and the land at $7.1 million, records show. It is zoned for residential, office and general business use.

The potential buyer, multi-family residential developer JLB Partners, proposed rezoning it for a mixeduse development with about 600 apartments behind five office buildings along Sugarloaf Parkway. Four of the office buildings would have three stories and one would have four stories with retail on the ground floor. The ministry center would be demolished.

An earlier proposal included 113 townhouses built by Toll Brothers, but those were eliminated after county officials weighed in.

The Gwinnett County Planning Commission denied the latest rezoning request at the recommendation of staff. County commissioners late last month unanimously followed suit.

Commissioner Kirkland Carden, whose District 1 includes the property, said he’d communicated his desire for an “intense commercial” project there to coincide with redevelopment plans for the Gas South District. He said other lots on Sugarloaf Parkway are better suited for residential development, but the area needs high-end office space.

“This has to be one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Gwinnett County, given its proximity to Gas South and the interstate,” he said. “Whatever goes at that site must build on Gas South, not be dependent on it.”

Carden told the AJC he hasn’t seen the Gas South Arena proposals the Gwinnett Convention and Visitors Bureau is reviewing but “I am really excited by what I’m hearing was submitted.”

JLB Partners will not buy the Baptist property without a residential component to the project, said the company’s attorney, Carl Westmoreland of Morris, Manning & Martin in Atlanta.

“The real question for the commission is, if they think there’s another viable use for which a developer is knocking down the door, where are they?” Westmoreland said. “The Baptist mission board is stuck with something they can’t afford and they can’t sell. That’s the consequence of this.”

The Baptist organization hopes to move to an existing space for about 50 employees, probably in Gwinnett County, Melber told the AJC. But any such move is contingent on the sale of the current property, he said.

Carden said he anticipates a lot more interest from commercial developers once the Gas South District redevelopment plans are finalized and announced.

“I think we’ll be OK,” he said. “I don’t expect for this site to lay there for years on end.”

HYOSUB SHIN/HYOSUB.SHIN@AJC.COM Georgia Baptist Mission Board’s building, which it no longer needs, sits on 40 acres near the Gas South District Arena that a developer is eager to convert to mixed-use, heavy on apartments and offices.