On Monday, Alpharetta City Council will consider a mixed-use development proposed at Haynes Bridge Road and GA 9, and another request to cut 156 parking spaces out of a proposed data center’s site.

If City Council follows the recommendation of its Planning Commission, a mixed-use development may be built on the MetLife property along Haynes Bridge Road and next to GA 400.

MetLife could build more than 1 million square feet of office space on the property with its existing zoning, Community Development Director Diana Wheeler told the Planning Commission earlier this month. The property owner wants to cut office space down by 560,000 square feet, replacing it with residential condos and townhomes.

Planning commissioners sent a recommendation to City Council that only 474 residential condos be permitted, 72 fewer than the developer wants. That brings the density down to 10 units per acre on the 47.4-acre property.

Mixed-use development creating a live-work-play environment is the trend for planning these days, said Eric Bosman of Urban Collage, a consulting firm that helped develop the city’s Livable Communities Initiatives for the North Point Parkway area near the mall, and for downtown Alpharetta.

While Alpharetta resident Victor Hawa liked the project and thought this was the right location for mixed-use development, he voiced concerns to the Planning Commission at its Jan. 6 meeting that it would turn into another empty dirt lot like what happened with Prospect Park at Old Milton Parkway and GA 400.

“The city can’t afford to have another debacle like we had on Old Milton,” he said.

Westmoreland had said that would not happen when asked when the development would begin.

“The only thing I will say is you won’t see dirt,” he said.

MetLife’s Paul Folger said when the project starts would be market driven, and take at least three years to begin. Architect Terry Herr of Pieper O’Brien Herr said it would take three years just to design the project.

Alpharetta’s planning staff has conceded that its data center parking requirements aren’t in tune with actual needs, but were based on possible future uses of a building if it ceased to be a data center. City Council will get a recommendation from staff to allow a parking variance for T-5’s data center at the corner of Webb Bridge and Morris Road, just east of GA 400. That would cut the required parking spaces from 206 down to 50. The company plans to have 25 employees on site at any time. Plenty of conditions have been suggested to the variance application to require more parking if the building is used for something else. Other conditions protect buffers around the property, screening the data center from view on Webb Bridge or Morris roads.

The 99,000-square-foot building includes 6,000 square feet of space for offices, with the rest given over to data warehousing on computer servers and drives.

The Community Development Department plans to propose changes to the Unified Development Code that would require less parking at data centers.