After years of planning and coordinating with local municipalities, organizers of the Jerome Village project will put shovels to dirt in the next 30 days. With a water service agreement now in place, developers can begin initial construction work on the project. Tina Guegold, vice president for marketing at Nationwide Realty Investors, said that work will begin with some of the site’s infrastructure.
“The first work you’re going to see will be on the utility infrastruc- ture, for the water work on Brock Road and Industrial Parkway,” Guegold said. “That will begin within the next 30 days.”
Jerome Village will be a 1,585- acre mixed-use development in the southern portion of Union County. It will include homes, condos, stores, offices and a town center. Representatives of developer Jerome Village Corp. have said that the project could take 15 years to be completely built out. Seventy acres has been set aside for two new schools that will be part of the Dublin school district, and 200 acres will remain open space.
As the project moves forward
this summer, Jerome Village will be broken up into individual plats, each of which will be reviewed by the LUC (Logan-Union- Champaign) Regional Planning Commission.
“We are the subdivision platting authority for all three counties, so they are required to submit all of those plats through our office,” said LUC director Jenny Snapp. “Each of those neighborhood phases will be submitted to our office, which we then send out to reviewing agencies. After those agencies review the plats, they provide us comment on them, and they are then returned to our zoning and subdivision committee. We then make a recommendation to our executive committee, which either approves, denies, or approves with conditions the proposals.”
Snapp said the agencies that provide input on each subdivision plat include the Union County engineer’s office, the Union County commissioners, the Union County Soil & Water Conservation District, the Union County Health Department, the city of Marys- ville, Jerome Township, ODOT District Six, and the city of Dublin’s engineering office.
The LUC is currently in the process of reviewing two of Jerome
Village’s first plats for construction, which include Glacier Park Neigh- borhood (GPN) 2 and 7. On June 10, the LUC executive committee reviewed the final plat for GPN-7, but tabled a vote on the plat at the developer’s request, according to Snapp.
“The requests (from the LUC) were for some outstanding docu- ments associated with the site, and those will be completed shortly,” Guegold said. “That will allow us to re-submit GPN-7 for an August approval. We will begin work on the utilities prior to the plat approval in August, and then that plat approval will allow us to finalize those home sites.”
The LUC also approved the preliminary plat for GPN-2 at its June 10 meeting. This section is proposed to have a total of 47.701 acres and 95 lots, and will contain 15.1 acres of open space.
Snapp said working on a proj- ect of the scope of Jerome Village has been a positive experience for the LUC.
“Something like this gives us a lot more inter-governmental interaction than we normally have,” Snapp said. “I think it brings us together at one table, which ultimately is a good thing for regional cooperation.”
