Application documents show the developer intends to raze the current building as part of the project.
If approved, the car wash’s main entrance will be off of Cedar Hill Drive, with a secondary entrance and exit to the south.
Planning commission earlier this month recommended approval of an initial development plan, though multiple commission members raised concerns regarding traffic in the area. City council held a public hearing for the project on April 24, after which the proposal was moved to a second reading.
The 1.5-acre site is located on Brandt Pike, at the corner of Cedar Hill Drive, next to Knickerbocker Pools & Spas, in a high-traffic area just south of I-70.
As a condition of approval, City Planner Aaron Sorrell said the developer will install a gate at Cedar Hill Drive, to be used during peak times, to control the flow of traffic into the facility.
Kronos Legacy also owns the Flying Ace Car Wash on Merrily Way off of Old Troy Pike, an area of town that’s notorious for traffic congestion during peak volume times.
The developer believes the addition of the proposed car wash on Brandt Pike will improve issues at Old Troy Pike and Merrily Way. The new site would have the capacity to queue 51 vehicles compared to the Merrily Way location’s 31-vehicle capacity.
During the April 20 city council work session, Sorrell presented results from a study conducted in Columbus, where the developer owns additional car wash businesses, that supports this prediction.
“They had a similar situation like Merrily Way in Columbus, on Broad Street,” Sorrell said. “You could see from the monthly traffic when they opened a second site about a mile and a half away ... the traffic between the two sites evened out.”
Council members had raised concerns during the work session about the intersection of Brandt Pike and Stonehurst, highlighting the area’s traffic issues.
While the intersection doesn’t directly affect the proposed car wash, Mayor Jeff Gore said during a public hearing for the project on April 24 that he’d like to see something done to improve the safety and flow of the intersection.
“We think just realigning the striping that is currently there will help the visibility because when cars queue, they’re not looking directly across to each other, there’s an offset, so it’s just a matter of changing the orientation of the paint,” Sorrell said.
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