A grassy field immediately south of Woodsboro’s Mount Hope Cemetery may one day look quite different.
Local businessman Steve Trout, owner of the 14.5-acre land, is working with a civil engineer and the vice president of a real estate and land development company to design a residential community for the property.
Although plans are still in their early stages, Trout hopes to add 58 townhouses and approximately 1,200 square feet of retail and retail space to the property, which sits about 1,000 feet from the southern city limit.
He plans to donate about 2.5 acres of land to the nearby cemetery.
At last month’s town meeting, Trout and his project partners — Andrew Brown of CPG Realty and Joseph Ceci of Fox & Associates — gave commissioners and bourgeois an overview of their plans.
Trout, Ceci and Brown will present a formal concept plan for the development at a planning and zoning meeting early next year, Brown said in an interview Friday.
At the October town meeting, he said the project shouldn’t see the light of day for two or three years.
During the meeting, Ceci reviewed what the planned parking lot would look like in the development and outlined plans for a small park or playground in the community.
Future designs will offer more detail on plans for the development’s water and sewer infrastructure and other details, Ceci and Brown said.
Later, the city will also have a better idea of the types of businesses that could occupy commercial and retail spaces in the development, Brown said during the meeting.
It would be great if the community could include local businesses, Burgess Heath Barnes said.
“The last thing I want to see is a Dollar General sitting there on one side, a McDonald’s on one side and a Dunkin’ Donuts on the other,” he said.
Commissioner Jesse Case first expressed some apprehension about the development at the town meeting.
When he joined the board of commissioners, he said, he promised to do his best to keep the town as small as possible.
With Main Street to the west and Woodsboro Pike to the east, “it’s going to be two roads, encapsulating all of these people,” Case said. “I never really enjoyed the idea of driving by and seeing a ton of people.”
Still, he says, he thinks the development would be good for Woodsboro.
Jakob Dzik, a local business owner who attended the meeting in October, agreed that the residential community would “not feel like Woodsboro.” But he spoke optimistically about what the development would mean for the city.
It would bring more customers to local businesses, like the auto repair shop he owns on Council Drive, Dzik said. It could also encourage people to buy some of the oldest buildings in the city center and renovate them.
He could see the project bringing “a lot of life back to the city,” he said.
