Monday, January 26, 2026–8:20 p.m.
-David Crowder, WRGA News-
The Rome City Commission has approved new gas station and convenience store regulations.
A moratorium has been in place since late last year on permits for new stores to give officials time to come up with the standards.
“There are several requirements here,” said Rome-Floyd County Planning Director Brice Wood. “That they be along arterial roads and have access to them–there is an exception there if you are in a multi-tenant retail shopping center of 100,000 square feet or greater. There are 600-foot distance requirements from schools, daycare centers, churches or places of worship, drug and alcohol treatment centers, public parks, or public right-of-way associated with eco-greenway trails. There is an exception to that, again, if you are in a planned multi-unit shopping center.”
There is also a 1,000-foot distance requirement between stores, which is measured from property line to property line, as well as a 300-foot distance requirement from single-family homes or property zoned for single-family homes. Gas stations will also be banned in the historic district, given that most of those were developed before the mass production of the automobile. The new regulations also ban gas stations from within 500 feet of the rivers, and from within the 100 year flood plain. Gas stations are also prohibited within 500 linear feet of a government-operated well.
Attorney Fisher Law, who represents a number of convenience store and gas station owners and developers, asked that there be a transition period of some kind between the end of the moratorium and when the regulations take effect to give his clients an opportunity to see their investments through.
“As you can imagine, when somebody closes on a piece of property that is already zoned community-commercial or light-industrial, and they get their engineer working on it, it’s a crushing defeat to essentially have that project taken away from you with a stroke of a pen, and with very little recourse.”
The commission approved the development standards without any changes.
The Floyd County Commission will also consider the development standards during its meeting on Tuesday.
