Over 19 acres of land in Wilder that have sat vacant for years may finally see development.
The Wilder Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously approved a zone amendment that would make way for a 9,600-square-foot industrial-type building behind the Waffle House and McDonald’s in Wilder.
ANDIS LLC presented their ideas at the Oct. 27 meeting, which outline the zone change sought for 19.53 acres located at Pooles Creek Road and St. Johns Lane. ANDIS is a business that works in utilities, site access, civil services, excavation, and power-line/grid maintenance.
The development would include an office, maintenance garage and outdoor storage.
The map amendment recommendation on Monday would change the site to a highway commercial and industrial park; however, ANDIS currently has no plans to develop the highway commercial portion of the land. The commission’s recommendation will now go to the city council for final approval.
Wilder City Administrator Terry Vance said the property has a large transmission power line easement that runs almost diagonally across the site, making it difficult to develop.
“We’ve been approached by apartment complexes, we’ve been approached by a couple of churches, and every time they sat down and got their site plan out and started to plot it out and see how they could do it, they just couldn’t make it work,” Vance said. “So, this is the closest anybody’s got to come in with a plan that works.”
Artie Toms with ANDIS said during the meeting that the facility will primarily be used for ANDIS personnel to have office space and for outfitting, testing, and inspecting new trucks, all to be done indoors.
Toms said he anticipates maybe 10-12 trucks on site at a time.
“I don’t plan on doing a storage yard,” Toms said. “This is mainly just that we can service our own stuff and get it back on the road.”
Some of the types of vehicles that ANDIS intends to have on site include bucket trucks, a derrik digger (truck), dump trucks, a pole trailer, an enclosed trailer, a tilt trailer, and a vac truck.
The property has been untouched since at least the 1997 Wilder Comprehensive Plan. The difficulty in developing and the fact that the land has remained empty for so long were the reasons the commission used to approve the zone change.
“The reasons for making the motion to change the zoning are that the property has been sitting empty and undeveloped for all practical purposes for decades, the new zoning would lend itself to some tangible economic development that would benefit the city, and the property has been described as having limited uses, and we would now have a use in place that will potentially benefit the city and community,” Wilder Planning and Zoning Commissioner Nancy Lauer said.
Some residents attended the meeting and asked questions, but no one spoke in favor of or against the project.
