By Megan Ashley Fink

The Natchez Democrat

NATCHEZ — The Natchez Planning Commission Thursday cleared the way for a new Applebee’s restaurant project to proceed.

Representatives with The Tabani Group, which owns the Natchez Mall, applied for permission to sell part of its parking lot to the restaurant developers.

The board’s approval of the mall’s request was contingent on the restaurant and the mall agreeing on how to share parking spaces.

City planner Riccardo Giani said the agreement would include the mall, Office Depot and Applebee’s, and would have to be approved by the site plan review committee.

“They already did all the parking they could as soon as they built the mall,” Giani said. “They can’t add any parking, so they have to create this agreement so they share.”

Office Depot is located near the proposed Applebee’s and shares the mall’s parking lot.

Quality Restaurants Concepts LLC, which aims to locate the restaurant in Natchez, applied for permission to build the restaurant closer to their lot boundaries than is usually allowed. The developers seek to build a new structure in what is currently a corner of the Natchez Mall’s parking lot.

The request was granted without any objections.

Commission member Jonathan Smith said, “The space is so big overall, 10 or 15 feet’s not a big deal. It’s still 100 feet from the highway.”

In other news:

The commission tabled the question of a special exception to allow Club Envy, a new lounge and sports bar on Martin Luther King Jr. Street. The commission lacked accurate information about the building’s size and parking facilities due to some confusion in the city planning office.

Members of the commission received an inaccurate information packet, and commissioner Butch Johnson said no sign was posted outside the property prior to the public hearing, which caused him to confuse the location with another building.

The planning commission recently denied an application for a bar or nightclub on Main Street, which was appealed to the board of aldermen. The board also denied the appeal.

The nightclub that was denied is located in a different zoning district than the application under consideration.