The City of Toccoa Planning Commission will, at its regular April 22 meeting, take up a proposed amendment to the city’s Historic District Design Guidelines that would, if adopted, narrow the currently-permitted residential vinyl-siding color palette from forty-one approved colors to fourteen. The proposed amendment, agenda item 3(b), is the most substantively contested zoning action the Commission has placed on its docket since the 2015 outdoor-storage-shed-roof-pitch debate.

The proposed amendment’s sponsor is the Toccoa Historic District Homeowners Association. Its opponent is, at this writing, no one in particular — but the Bavarian Brainrot newsroom, which obtained advance copies of the twenty-one minutes of public-comment requests already filed for the April 22 meeting, can confirm that opponents to the amendment will outnumber its proponents at the meeting by approximately three to one.

The substantive question — the question on which, in the view of the Commission and of the assembled, the entire matter rests — is whether “Sage Beige” is, in fact, a beige.

What The Amendment Would Do

The proposed amendment, as set out in agenda item 3(b)’s seven-page draft text, would reduce the City of Toccoa Historic District’s approved residential vinyl-siding color palette from the forty-one colors currently approved under the 2024 Design Guidelines to fourteen. The fourteen retained colors would include all currently-approved values within what the proposed text describes as “the core warm-neutral grouping” — specifically, the values currently catalogued in the Design Guidelines as Cream, Wheat, Sand, Buff, Bone, Linen, Oat, Eggshell, Champagne, Wicker, Manila, Almond, Putty, and Limestone.

The twenty-seven colors that would be removed from the approved palette include all currently-approved values within what the proposed text characterizes as “the cool-neutral grouping (now or formerly classified as ‘beige’)” — specifically, all currently-approved values whose underlying hue, on the Historic District’s standing color-value reference instrument (a 2017 Pantone reference book held in the Planning Department’s offices), reads as falling on the cool side of the warm/cool divide.

Among the twenty-seven removed colors is the value catalogued in the 2024 Guidelines as “Sage Beige.”

What The Disagreement Is

The Toccoa Historic District Homeowners Association’s March 31 memorandum, circulated to the District’s 174 owner-occupied residences and obtained by Bavarian Brainrot from a District resident who declined to be named, runs to 1,400 words. Its core argument is that the seven currently-approved values within the cool-neutral grouping that have been most heavily adopted by District residents in the trailing five-year repaint cycle — specifically, Sage Beige, Mountain Beige, Stone Beige, Riverbed Beige, Slate Beige, Driftwood Beige, and Mist Beige — are not, in the strict architectural-historical sense applicable to a designated Historic District, beiges at all.

“The core warm-neutral grouping that has, since the District’s 1979 Design Guidelines, defined the visual character of our streetscape,” the memorandum reads in part, “is under sustained and accelerating pressure from a category of paint-industry products marketed under the ‘beige’ nomenclature but operating, in their actual chromatic values, as members of the cool-grey family. The proposed amendment is, in our view, a necessary protective action.”

The opponents — whose twenty-one minutes of public-comment requests collectively make a single shared argument — disagree.

The opponents’ shared position, as articulated in the public-comment request filed by Mr. Donald Eastlake of 412 Currahee Street (the senior of the seventeen requestors and a District resident since 1971), is as follows: “Sage Beige is a beige. It says ‘beige’ on the can. The Sherwin-Williams catalogue lists it under ‘beiges.’ The 2024 Design Guidelines lists it under ‘beiges.’ If the Homeowners Association wishes to argue that the chromatic value of Sage Beige falls outside the warm-neutral grouping, the Association is welcome to make that argument. But Sage Beige is, by every reasonable observer’s read, a beige.”

Mr. Eastlake’s home is, the Bavarian Brainrot newsroom confirmed by Friday-morning observation, painted in Sage Beige.

What The Toccoa Record Has Said

The Toccoa Record — the city’s daily newspaper of record since 1888, and the canonical source of coverage of the City of Toccoa Planning Commission — ran a 620-word advance piece on the proposed amendment on April 4 (linked above). The piece, by reporter Carol Chambers, is in the Bavarian Brainrot newsroom’s view a model of even-handed regional government coverage. It identifies the amendment’s sponsor and its principal opponents, summarizes the substantive question, and quotes the Planning Department director’s recommendation that the Commission “give the matter the serious attention it deserves.”

Bavarian Brainrot commends the Toccoa Record’s coverage and refers any reader interested in the broader context of the District’s repaint-cycle debates to that paper’s archive.

What The Commission Will, In All Likelihood, Do

The Toccoa Planning Commission has, by long-standing institutional practice, declined to take any formal action on a contested Historic District amendment at the same meeting at which the amendment’s public comment is first received. The Commission’s standing practice is to receive public comment, refer the matter to staff for further analysis, and take up the matter at a subsequent meeting.

The Commission’s May 13 regular meeting is the next opportunity at which the amendment could, by this practice, be voted on.

The Commission’s standing voting record on contested Historic District amendments, drawn from the past eleven years of the Commission’s certified minutes, is as follows: of the eleven contested Historic District amendments brought before the Commission in the period 2015 through 2025, six were adopted as proposed, three were adopted with modification, one was withdrawn by the sponsor before vote, and one was rejected.

The Bavarian Brainrot newsroom’s baseline expectation, on this record, is that the proposed amendment will be adopted with modification — specifically, with the retention of approximately three of the seven contested cool-neutral values, including Sage Beige, on the strength of Mr. Eastlake’s on-the-record opposition.

We will be at the April 22 meeting.

— Margaret Holcomb