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Regions Bank seeks judges ruling on driveway access
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Attorneys for Regions Financial Corp. have asked a judge to grant the Regions Operations Center access through a Midtown development before a lawsuit between the bank and the developers goes to trial.

In a motion filed Wednesday, the bank’s attorneys also question whether Gainesville officials properly abandoned a 50-foot strip of land before they sold it to Gainesville City Center LLC, which plans to build two office buildings and a hotel on the property.

Steve Gilliam, the local attorney representing the bank, filed a partial motion for summary judgment Wednesday. It asks a Superior Court judge to determine whether a 25-year-old easement agreement that granted the bank parking and driveway access through the Town View Plaza still allows driveway access, though the parking portion expired in 1994.

Gainesville City Center says both easements expired in 1994, and has blocked the bank’s Bradford Street access with a chain-link fence.

The developers back up their claim with a sworn statement from Sam N. Hodges Jr., the previous owner of the Town View Plaza property. Hodges, who signed the easement agreement in question, said he intended for all easements to expire in 1994.

Yet Gilliam has asked the judge to strike that affidavit from the county’s property records.

Gilliam also questions whether the city properly handled a sale of public property to the developers.

Through the Gainesville-Hall Redevelopment Authority, the city sold its police headquarters and Fire Station No. 1 to the developers for $2 million in January 2008 along with a 50-foot strip of land.

That property will be the future site of a pedestrian overpass that connects the hotel-office development to the Georgia Mountains Center.

However, Gilliam claims the city never properly abandoned the strip, which stands between Bradford Street and the old Town View Plaza parking lot, before it sold the land to the developers.

He cites the city’s Feb. 13 response to a request for documentation of the property abandonment in which Assistant City Clerk Judy Foster wrote that the city had "not located any records" regarding the move.

If the property was not abandoned, then it trumps Gainesville City Center’s argument that any easement rights that might have existed were no longer valid when the city sold the property to the developers, Gilliam said.

The lack of the abandonment, according to the bank’s attorneys, makes the sale of the 50-foot strip of land "null, void and of no force and effect."

Gainesville’s City Manager Kip Padgett did not return a phone message seeking comment Friday.

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