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Oakland project moving forward

• Two phases of Oakland Plantation development are expected to open within the next two years.

Holly McCarthy

ALBANY — Development of the 1,700-acre Lee County residential and commercial center Oakland Plantation is moving along carefully, according to operations manager Martie Jones.

Addressing the Albany Rotary Club Thursday, Jones said the sprawling development located on U.S. Highway 82, beginning at Armena Road and ending at Oakland Parkway, is expected to take nearly two decades to fully develop.

“We want to avoid spot-planning and spot-building,” Jones said. “We’ve identified over a 17-year plan what we would build first, making certain that the time we would be ready to release it, that it is ready to be received into the community and it’s what is needed at that time.”

Jones said the community could potentially comprise 13 neighborhoods, so meticulous planning is required to create a balance between work and play.

“That’s a lot of people out there and you want a balance,” she said. “You don’t want to put things on top of each other that aren’t complementary.”

Jones pointed out that several factors influenced the decision to invest in the development, including demographics, economic indicators, community needs and psychographics.

“Psychographics is how you feel when you enter an environment and what you want in your life,” she said. “The psychographics of Southwest Georgia is this: open spaces, everybody has hunting dogs and has to have some place for them, two cars and a pickup truck. With that, you want open spaces. You don’t want to look at someone else’s backyard.”

Several greenspaces, which will contain biking and hiking paths, parks and lakes, are planned for the development. Oakland contains about seven miles of old railroad track which will become walking and biking trails.

“We’ve railbanked that with Rails-to-Trails, which allows us to connect our property in each of the residential communities to both the business and professional sides,” Jones said.

In addition to the proposed 13 neighborhoods of single-family homes, condominiums, villas and town homes, the master plan also calls for a retirement community, fire station, library and daycare facility.

Among the nonresidential entities already in place in Oakland Plantation are First Baptist Church of Albany, which relocated to a new, 37,000-square-foot building on Oakland Parkway in May of this year, and a branch of Security Bank.

Though Jones declined to announce any specific coming retail establishments, she said two residential phases will be open within the next two years.

Those phases include Oakland Square, a plot of 104 single-family homes, and Oakland Crossing’s Lifestyle Center.

Jones said that the developers have received “letters of interest” from several retailers.

“Everybody involved is private at this point,” Jones said. “The contractors and developers keep their cards to themselves.”

She said the focus of the development is to retain the beauty of the land while adding improvements.

“If you’re going to change, change for the better,” Jones said. “You don’t want to bastardize the land.”

Winston Oxford, executive director of the Lee County Chamber and Development Authority, said that he could not give specifics about coming retail development in Oakland, but said that the recent addition of sewer infrastructure enables significant growth.

“They have everything they need there now to move forward,” Oxford said. “In 3-5 years, that corridor will explode with commercial development as well as residential.”

Oxford said the sewer should be operational in about two weeks.

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