Slate Row feud reveals record-keeping problems at Macon planning and zoning

Animosity had been brewing for years among the neighbors on Walnut Street’s historic Slate Row.

The infighting between neighbors boiled into public view last month after a complaint was filed against a 95-year-old woman who lives there, accusing her of violating rules meant to protect the architectural and historic character of the building.

Planning officials initially threatened Paula East with fines or jail time over her home’s noncompliant windows. The case was dropped when planning officials discovered the vinyl windows at the center of the dispute had been approved by the Macon-Bibb County Planning and Zoning Commission in 2002.

The Second-Empire style row house, built circa 1860, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places more than 50 years ago. But recently, that designation — and the requirements of property owners that come with it — has sparked fierce infighting among neighbors over what is and is not a violation of historic preservation guidelines.

Tales of unneighborly behavior are documented in a police report that details an alleged assault, recounted in stories of backstabbing, perceived pettiness and screaming matches on front porches.

The bitterness also includes another element: accusations that complaints made to the planning and zoning commission and its advising body, the design review board, have been motivated by yearnings for retaliation and revenge.

“That’s what it is: just weaponizing government against your neighbors,” Macon-Bibb County P&Z Executive Director Jeffrey Ruggieri said of the ongoing tiff among the neighbors. “We deal with it all day. All our complaints are from neighbors.”

The little-understood commission, whose five members are appointed by the Macon-Bibb County mayor and commission, makes decisions ranging from whether a door on a historic district home meets guidelines to if a residential neighborhood should be rezoned for commercial or industrial uses.

“There’s a lot at stake when the commission hears items. Not all the time, but a lot of the time,” said Ruggieri, who was hired in 2022 and has held similar positions in three other states over his 26-year career.

However, the Macon-Bibb P&Z is an anomaly in American government and is set up “unlike any other one in the country,” Ruggieri said.

The main difference? It is, in a way, the judge and the jury.

There is no oversight by an elected governing body. Its decisions are final and require no additional approval by a voter-elected body, such as the county commission. Appeals of the commission’s decisions may be made only to the Bibb County Superior Court. 

‘Some stuff you’d see in a movie or something’

Without help from her granddaughter, a respiratory therapist who lives in Miami, East might have ended up in court over the complaint made by her neighbor about the vinyl windows she installed with P&Z’s permission nearly a quarter of century earlier.

At a meeting in mid-May, P&Z Chair Jeane Easom, who has served on the board since 2013, insisted East had knowingly “defied the recommendation of the planning and zoning at that time” she replaced the windows.

East’s granddaughter, Flora Chakmakis, met with Ruggieri, who dug through boxes of paper records and found notes from the 2002 meeting showing P&Z approved the windows. Before the commission’s next meeting, the matter was dismissed.

Easom declined to talk with The Melody about the matter. She referred all questions to Ruggieri for “legal reasons.”

Chakmakis said she had to travel to Macon three times to help resolve the issue, which Ruggieri said boiled down to an address change that was overlooked by a staff member tasked with researching the complaint. 

“We have old records. We’ve lost records. We have stuff that is in other folders,” Ruggieri said. “If our filing was done correctly, they would have pulled 931 [Walnut] and 933 [Walnut] with a note that said, ‘address change.’”

Chakmakis said Easom owes an apology to her grandmother for tarnishing her reputation, adding that stress landed East — who taught dance classes in Macon for decades — in the hospital for a few days.

“She’s back home. She’s doing OK,” Chakmakis said. “I mean she’s upset. She’s broken-hearted. … That’s some stuff you would see in a movie or something, not in real life.”

Chakmakis told The Melody that the whole ordeal “doesn’t look good. It looks sketchy because it looks like they were just going off of what the guy said.”

‘I shouldn’t be criticized’

Edward Atkins is a 75-year-old filmmaker who moved to Middle Georgia from New York City, in part because of his love for historic preservation.

“I am a preservationist by trade and a historian,” Atkins said.

Since settling in at Slate Row more than six years ago, Atkins said he has been active in the effort to spare from demolition three buildings that were part of the long-closed Central State Hospital in Milledgeville.

“I’m actually writing a book about the history of Slate Row House, so everything dealing with it is of my interest,” he said.

Atkins said he got along with East and other neighbors when he first moved in. They grilled out together and shared drinks. But the relationships soured when he and others began pointing out possible violations of preservation guidelines.

One of Atkins’ complaints concerned East’s vinyl windows, which do not have muntin bars — thin wooden rods that hold in place smaller panes to make up the whole window — like all the others.

“If she had done it right, it wouldn’t be looking different,” Atkins said.

He added that, in the complaint he submitted to P&Z, he was “implying that this violation would transfer to the new owner so that maybe this didn’t have to be done right away.”

He said he did not expect P&Z to move so quickly.

“I thought it was probably going to be a year or two years or something. Well, whenever it changed hands,” he said. “I’m glad that she doesn’t have to change them because it was a big deal. I just would like some day [for] them to look like the others and that’s my only concern.”

Asked if he discussed the matter with East, Atkins said he did not mention it again after informing her of the apparent violation. He said it would still be better if the windows matched the others along the row house.

“It’s like changing the Hay House windows and not putting in matching windows,” Atkins said. “I shouldn’t be criticized for wanting those windows to look right. It’s the ‘poor me,’ ‘Oh, she’s 95 years old.’ Well, she wasn’t 95 years old when she made the mistake of putting the wrong windows in. … Maybe down the road, when somebody else has lived there, they’ll want to make them look like the rest of the house.”

But some neighbors view Atkins as a P&Z complaint-wielding zealot.

Gertrude Palmer, who lives between East and Atkins, said she put up a window shutter on her front porch to block the sun and create a partition between her and her neighbor.

Later that month, Palmer received a letter in the mail from P&Z notifying her that the free-standing “wall sign” was “not permitted” under certain zoning regulations.

Palmer wrote back and said the only sign in front of her apartment was a small sign left by a security company.

“If, as I suspect, this letter is a response to my neighbor Mr. Atkins, please be aware that his complaints are capricious and an ongoing campaign to force myself and my elderly neighbors from our homes,” she wrote.

Atkins denies that accusation.

Palmer has submitted her own complaints. One was against Atkins for operating a historic bookstore in the bottom floor of his home. P&Z staff found the “home occupation was determined to not meet threshold to require permit,” according to a synopsis of complaints P&Z provided to The Melody.

A little more than a year ago, the stairs to East’s apartment, and the wall holding them up, began to collapse after the county removed a tree from the alley beside her house. The tree’s roots caused a terracotta pipe to burst, and water spilled into the bottom floor.

East hired someone to build a cinder block structure to support the stairs, but Atkins, noticing the work underway, told East she was in violation of the design rules.

Carol Frayne, a friend of East’s who represented her  during a Feb. 2 design review board meeting, told the board that a total replacement of the stairs and wall would have cost East nearly $28,000.

Ultimately, P&Z permitted the cinder block support on the condition it would be painted stucco in the same softened Pepto-Bismol pink as the house.

But, Frayne said, other problems persist. One of them is Atkins, whom she described as a “grumpy neighbor.”

Another is the complaint process, she said. In helping East deal with the Atkins complaint, she said she realized the process is arbitrarily taxing and difficult for regular folks to navigate.

‘Splotchy’ records, changed processes

Complaints about possible violations can be submitted to P&Z by email, phone or in person at the commission’s offices inside the old Macon Mall.

“We log it in a central database and it goes into our zone inspectors’ kind of daily task,” Ruggieri said. “The first thing they do is verify whether it’s real or not.”

Atkins submitted the complaint about East’s windows in late February, Ruggieri said.

“In this case, what we would do is we would research essentially old [Google] Street Views. … We identified the original windows and then we identified at some point that they changed.”

In East’s case, P&Z determined the violation existed, so an inspector visited her to inform her in person.

“We give them 15 days to give us a plan to comply or to respond to us whether they’re going to or not,” Ruggieri said. “If they agree to fix it, no problems. If nothing happens, we’ve got a more formal process, and we give them a formal letter that says you need to comply within this certain amount of days, and we work with them in that timeframe. … If they don’t complete it, then it goes to court, it goes in front of a judge, and we present our case.”

He said there’s no standard penalty for design violations.

“It’s literally a case-by-case basis,” he said.

For properties that are subjects of complaints, staff members first search records for the address. In East’s case, the street numbers did not match.

“We do have a record. It’s splotchy,” Ruggieri said. “I can only attest to what we have since I’ve been here.”

Before that, “things get a little shady,” he said.

The address East provided in 2002 was 933 Walnut, the address of the bottom floor of her home, not 931, the upstairs portion with the vinyl windows, Ruggieri said. The property’s address, he said, apparently changed at some point.

“We didn’t do an exhaustive review of the history. I found it by chance,” he said. “Addresses do change, especially in condos. That’s why the staff member missed it. … I tell my staff, ‘You only make a mistake when you make it twice.’”

Going forward, Ruggieri said, P&Z is “going to be a lot more diligent in determining violations. … We’re going to research the full record.”

Still, many records exist only on paper. Some are lost or misplaced, he said.

Ruggieri said emotions can sometimes run high when people are passionate about historic preservation.

“They don’t get the term ‘hysteric districts’ for no reason,” he said. “It’s because people that live in those districts love the districts. They love older homes. They love doing work on historic districts and keeping the history alive. That’s their passion. And when they see other people not doing it, sometimes they get upset.” 

But the East issue is settled, he said.

“I apologized. … I made changes to the process to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Nobody’s perfect, but we try to be as right as we can and not make the same mistake twice.”