The St. Charles Parish Council voted Monday night unanimously to approve a zoning change within the Ashton Plantation development off River Road in Luling, giving the subdivision developers the ability to later develop 16.5 acres for additional residential homesites.
The 16.5-acre tract, located adjacent to the SummerHouse Ashton Manor nursing home on Ashton Plantation Boulevard, was previously zoned C-3, a zoning district designed to allow for a wide range of commercial occupancies. The council’s recent zone change approval converts the use of the acreage to a single family residential detached district, which would allow the developer to place additional individual homes on the site instead. The developer commented current plans call for around 43 additional homesites on the 16.5-acre tract.
Some residents within Ashton Plantation Estates have begun to vent their frustrations on social media and in public forums regarding traffic congestion, given Ashton Plantation Estates has grown considerably over the years but currently has just one functional exit at River Road in use with a second emergency exit access point gated up in a different location. A train track divides a portion of the neighborhood, a route that temporarily prevents residents from exiting the neighborhood when trains are running in the area.
“If the train stops on that track, adding more residential homes to that subdivision will cause more traffic for us,” Reanda Pierre, Ashton Plantation Estates resident, said at the council meeting.
Ashton Plantation Estate’s main River Road exit is situated in the nearby vicinity of the I-310 exit onramp, a busy morning location that often adds to resident’s traffic gripes during peak weekday commute times.
Troy Bellanger, representative for the J.B. Levert Land Company – a partner in the development – spoke at the meeting, arguing the residential zoning change would be beneficial to Ashton Plantation Estates residents given it was likely to attract less traffic than a property that was zoned for commercial use only.
“As far as traffic, in the process of doing our development for the subdivision, we’ve had to complete a traffic study,” Bellanger said at Monday’s council meeting. “And the findings of the traffic study [are] that commercial [occupancies] bring much more traffic than residential use.”
A different company’s representative commented in a September 7 Planning and Zoning meeting that the 16.5-acre parcel is in an area with higher elevation more favorable for flood insurance purposes for future residential homeowners, one of the several reasons the developer said it was seeking a zoning change on the property.
Ashton Plantation Estates resident Larry Gaspard also spoke up against the zoning change at the Planning and Zoning Commission’s September 7 meeting, a meeting that served as the first step in the approval process before the zoning change was formally presented to the St. Charles Parish Council Monday night.
Gaspard argued other residential-zoned areas within Ashton Plantation in the rear of the development had yet to be developed and felt those areas ought to be developed first before potentially adding to the neighborhood’s traffic woes; the 16.5-acre parcel is situated much closer to the front of Ashton Plantation Estates and along the path of the neighborhood’s primary exit route.
“Getting out of the neighborhood is just terrible in the morning time,” Gaspard said. “I think that they should finish what they are doing in the back, and then later on maybe come and decide to change to [R1-A].”
The zoning board approved the developer’s request unanimously in September, moving on to the parish council on Monday night where it also was approved unanimously.
Council member Julia Fisher-Cormier noted at the meeting the developer would still be required to go through a number of additional steps and safeguards, through various parish channels, before any development or construction went forward.
A commercial development is meanwhile underway within Ashton Plantation in a parcel at the front of the development near River Road, with the intended occupancy yet to be publicly disclosed to neighborhood residents.
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