By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — Mayor Sloan Stewart is man of few words. He famously hates confrontation and avoids social media. If you walked into to a room and didn’t already know that he’s the current Moore County Mayor, he’s not going to tell you.

So, on Tuesday, when he walked from the back of the room, to stand parallel with Gateway Development Corporation’s Troy Woodis and his legal representation, Madison Haynes to address the five sitting Metro Planning Commission members regarding the preliminary site plan review for Gateway’s proposed 42-unit townhome community along Main Street, he was sending a subtle message, “enough.”

Gateway’s been on what seems to be a pressure campaign to move their project along — filing public records requests aimed narrowly at three of the Commission’s six sitting members, Dexter Golden, Scott Fruehauf, and Jimmy Hammond, rather than the body as a whole, while its principals have given on-the-record interviews that ran without published quotes from the commissioners whose private messages were the subject of the story.

COUNTY HAS 30 DAYS TO COMPILE RECORDS

That same day, Gateway took its fight over the proposed 42-unit Gateway at Lynchburg town homes to Chancery Court. On July 30, the company filed a verified petition for writ of certiorari, asking a judge to review and reverse the Planning Commission’s June 2 vote denying preliminary site plan approval for the Main Street project. Chancellor granted the writ the same day, directing the Planning Commission, the Board of Zoning Appeals, and Metro Lynchburg-Moore County to compile and file the full administrative record — covering both the Commission’s June 2 denial and the BZA’s subsequent July 21 deadlock — within 30 days.

In its petition, Gateway argues the Commission’s 3-1 denial (with one abstention) wasn’t supported by any staff report, traffic study, or expert testimony in the record, and that no one at the meeting offered evidence to rebut the company’s showing that the project met the Zoning Ordinance’s density and design standards for Group Housing Projects. The company also challenges the legal basis for the denial directly, arguing the Commission misapplied a subdivided-lot density formula that doesn’t govern a project built on a single, undivided parcel — and raises questions about whether the density table cited during the meeting was ever properly adopted by Metro Council.

The case now moves into the record-compilation phase, with no hearing on the merits scheduled yet. It’s Gateway’s first application for judicial review specifically via writ of certiorari — but the fight over this project is now unfolding on multiple fronts, including a separate Chancery Court suit Gateway filed in November 2025 challenging the underlying zoning amendment’s validity, which survived a motion for judgment on the pleadings in February and remains pending.

Officials served Mayor Stewart with a civil summons regarding the suit just hours before the Planning Commission meeting.

“In light of the civil summons I received late this afternoon, and after speaking to our attorney, who could not be here tonight, I recommend that this commission not take any action tonight until we meet with our attorney to get clarification on what this means,” Stewart told the group.

Stewart also stated that he thought the suit’s intended purpose was to force local officials into making a decision quickly that could eventually land on the backs of Moore County property taxpayers.

His comments raise an essential question: does Moore County have a sovereign right to grow at a pace it can afford?

DEVELOPER NOT TAXPAYERS MUST PAY FOR INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS

Frustrated that her two-page technical road review dated July 7 did not make its way into the July BZA meeting discussion, local Roads Superintendent Shannon Cauble asked to be added to the public comment’s section of tonight’s meeting to make sure her concerns about the Gateway project appeared on the record.

Cauble opened by establishing a pattern: she said she has raised traffic concerns about early development on Main Street “at every meeting,” including the June planning session, without those concerns getting real discussion. She then pointed to a formal step she’d taken since then — a technical road review of Main Street that she completed and sent to the Commission on July 7, which was later forwarded to the Board of Zoning Appeals as part of their hearing packet. That framing matters because she’s establishing this isn’t a new complaint, but a documented, escalating one that the county already had in hand before the BZA’s July 21 hearing.

On the substance of the review, she said she used trip-generation multipliers on “the very conservative side” of the standard range to project daily traffic for the developments in question — but was explicit that she expects real-world traffic to exceed those numbers, noting that in rural areas with little to no walkability, actual daily trip counts historically run higher than what standard models predict. She said she gave the Commission “word for word citations” from four separate governing documents — the Metro Charter, the zoning ordinance, the subdivision regulations, and the county’s land use and transportation plan — arguing all four make it “abundantly clear” that the intent of local law is for developers, not the county, to pay for both new road construction and any improvements to existing roads needed to serve their development.

She then walked through a specific factual account of a June 18 site meeting she attended with Gateway representatives and TDOT. At that meeting, she said, TDOT reiterated that local approval is still a prerequisite for Gateway to get state access approval — meaning the county’s sign-off and TDOT’s sign-off are linked, not independent tracks. She raised safety concerns directly with the group about U-turn hazards created by the restricted right-in/right-out-only entrance TDOT had indicated Gateway would need. She said Gateway then asked TDOT’s transportation engineer, Stanley Sumner, about commissioning a traffic study, and that he told them a study was “unlikely to change anything” but that he could not deny them the option of doing one.

She closed with two pointed statements. First, an update: as of tonight, she said she has “seen or heard nothing” from Gateway indicating they pursued that study, despite TDOT having left the door open for one over a month and a half earlier. Second, a standing position: she reiterated that obtaining a traffic study is “entirely the developer’s responsibility” at both the county and state level, and that her “administrative deferral” — her refusal to sign off administratively — stands until the road is brought up to the safety standards outlined in the governing agreement.

The Metro Planning Commission meets every first Tuesday of the month at the County Building Basement located at 241 Man Street in Lynchburg at 5:30 p.m. The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, September 1. •

About the Lynchburg Times: The Lynchburg Times is Moore County’s locally owned, independent news source. Our reporting is supported by readers, small business partners, and underwriters who believe community journalism matters. If this story was valuable to you, consider becoming a supporter at lynchburgtimes.com.