Isle of Wight County supervisors have approved a 120,000-square-foot self-storage facility in Carrollton.

W.C. Sawyer, who owns and operates the Sawco Self Storage facility on Carrollton Boulevard, applied in March for a zoning amendment that would allow him to open another facility less than a mile away on the same highway. The proposed Sawco expansion would be located on 8 acres and include 468 rentable storage units and an additional 64 parking spaces for recreational and commercial vehicle storage.

The proposed site was rezoned in 2009 under the ownership of a previous developer who had proposed at the time to build retail and office space. The conditions to which the prior developer had agreed included a prohibition on mini-warehouses or self-storage units.

Sawyer’s proposal drew the support of nearby landowner Sam Cratch during the supervisors’ July 21 public hearing, after which the board voted unanimously to approve the requested zoning amendment.

Isle of Wight’s Planning Commission had previously given the project its blessing a month earlier, despite initially raising concerns about “market saturation.” There are seven other self-storage facilities within a five-mile radius of the proposed site.

According to Amy Ring, the county’s director of community development, northern Isle of Wight has an average of 9 square feet of rentable storage per person compared to a state average of just over 5 square feet per person. But only one of the seven sites in the five-mile radius had a unit available as of last month.