Smithfield’s Planning Commission deadlocked on Dec. 10 over Red Point Taphouse’s request for a special use permit that would waive a requirement that the brewery connect to town water.

A 3-3 tie vote resulted from Commissioner GiGi Smith’s motion to recommend the Town Council grant Red Point co-owner Tim Ryan’s request for relief from a condition of the brewery’s 2020 rezoning.

Planning Commission Chairwoman Julia Hillegass, Commissioner Randy Pack and Smith voted in favor of Smith’s motion while Commissioners Charles Bryan, Thomas Pope and James Yoko voted against it. The commission’s seventh member, Vice Chairman Bill Davidson, was absent.

Following the tie, the commissioners voted unanimously to table the matter to February, by which time the composition of the body will have changed.

Pack, who serves as the Town Council’s liaison to the Planning Commission and seconded Smith’s motion, chose not to seek reelection and will leave office by Dec. 31. Three newly elected council members who won seats in the November election and the council’s four incumbents will vote in January to either reelect Steve Bowman or choose another council member as mayor. The mayor will then be tasked with appointing a new council liaison to replace Pack on the Planning Commission, the outgoing councilman said.

Ryan told the Planning Commission in September that he and his business partners had reluctantly agreed, within two years of opening Red Point, to connect the circa-1929 former gas station on South Church Street to town water, not knowing at the time that it would cost over $30,000 to have town contractors extend the required 2-inch water connection to the business, which is currently served by a private well that predates the town’s annexation of the area.

Ryan said the five-figure cost equates to roughly 65% of Red Point’s 2023 profit and would be “close to 100%” of the current year’s profit margin, which he says has been negatively impacted by the ongoing rehabilitation of the Cypress Creek Bridge. Since January, the Virginia Department of Transportation has restricted the two-lane bridge connecting downtown Smithfield to the east end of town to a single westbound lane with eastbound traffic diverted via Main and Grace streets to the Route 10 Bypass.

The cost would “wipe us out,” Ryan said at the Dec. 10 meeting. “If you want to put us out of business, this is a good way to do it.”

The Planning Commission, at its September meeting, had recommended granting Red Point a two-year extension to connect to town water, citing the bridge work. The current council, as a condition of granting Red Point a special use permit exempting the brewery from having to pave its parking lot, at its October meeting reduced from the recommended two years to 30 days the window for Ryan to either connect to town water or file for a separate special use permit to resolve the water issue. Ryan filed the separate permit application on Oct. 24.

Pack, at the Dec. 10 meeting, called the water connection requirement an “unnecessary burden.”

“We now have a viable business there. … They exist, they work, they contribute to our tax base,” said Pack, himself a restaurateur and co-owner of Smithfield Station.

Pope, who earlier during the Dec. 10 meeting had criticized the council for allowing Virginia Beach-based developer Napolitano Homes to change a condition proffered at the time of the 812-home Mallory Pointe development’s 2021 rezoning, took the position that it was necessary for the town government to hold every applicant, large and small, to the conditions to which they agreed at the time of their rezoning approvals.

“You agreed to this before you opened your business that you were going to bring the property into compliance,” Pope said. “… Bringing up to code means town water, town sewer and all the things that go along with that, and y’all agreed to do that, and I think we have to hold your feet to the fire because it’s the same thing we’re asking the big developer to do, the little developer to do. … This is something you had said you were going to do and you don’t wish to do it.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 2:41 p.m. on Dec. 11 to include that Vice Chairman Bill Davidson was absent.