With the upcoming loss of significant tax revenue from the Keurig coffee-roasting plant in Windsor, it’s tempting to encourage county supervisors to simply rubber-stamp a scaled-back version of the Tidewater Logistics Center, a proposed warehouse complex that would border a residential neighborhood just outside the Windsor town limits.

Sadly, the developer, and the county officials encouraging approval, have failed again to make a convincing case that the project’s benefits would outweigh the considerable harm it would cause. Therefore, supervisors must reject it. 

A shorthanded Isle of Wight County Planning Commission voted 4-3 last month to recommend approval of a plan that features four warehouses instead of five but would create disproportionately fewer jobs than what project backers had estimated for the original plan, which was soundly rejected by supervisors last year. 

Of note, Commissioner Brian Carroll, of late a vocal critic of unpopular development in the county, was absent from the meeting, and supervisors haven’t gotten around to filling a seat in the Windsor-centric District 4 that has been vacant since last fall. Four votes on a 10-member body are insufficient to help ram through a project of this magnitude.

Our Stephen Faleski reported that the revised plan includes a 14.9-acre public park with walking trails where the fifth warehouse would have been and proposes increasing from 6 feet to 9 the height of a 60-foot-wide landscape berm that would buffer the site from the adjacent Keaton Avenue and Lovers Lane neighborhoods. There would be a 10-foot-tall sound wall on top of the berm.

On at least one important point, Windsor Mayor George Stubbs overstated town support for the project when he claimed “consensus” for the town’s accepting responsibility for maintaining the proposed park.

At their last meeting, other Town Council members had to remind Stubbs of his place in Windsor’s form of government. The mayorship is a largely ceremonial position other than wielding the gavel at meetings.

According to a letter to the editor from a Windsor resident elsewhere on this page, the mayor also misstated the citizen’s position on the Tidewater Logistics project.

Supervisors must not construe Stubbs’ personal support of the project as the backing of the town, whose council and citizens remain overwhelmingly opposed.

While the developer’s new plan is a step in the right direction, it needs considerably more work.

We agree with recently retired Planning Commissioner Cynthia Taylor, whose last official act in 10 years of honorable service on the board was to vote against the retooled Windsor plan.

“When I saw this application come before us, I was surprised to see it because as several speakers said, under state law they should only come back to see us after it’s been a year after the board has denied an application, substantially the same application,” she said. “I’ll be quite frank, I don’t see a substantial difference. I see a reduction in the size of the proposal, but they still need a comprehensive plan amendment, they still have the same basic layout and I looked at the traffic impact study. It’s still very close to the same number of trucks that were originally envisioned. … I just don’t think this is something that should even be coming before us at this point in time.”