Dear Gina,

Salisbury loves you. Please don’t give up on us. Let’s figure out how to open your second Zaxby’s here.

The Planning Board and the City Council are grateful for what you’ve done for Salisbury and for what you want to do.

Restaurants are tough businesses. You opened your Salisbury Zaxby’s where another nationally franchised restaurant failed.

Less than one mile away, another restaurant building saw one franchise after another fail year after year until Waffle House purchased the property, tore down the old building, and started over.

You did the almost impossible: You took over a location vacated by a national deli franchise. Across the street are two chicken wing restaurants, one a national franchise and one owed by one of Rowan County’s best restaurateurs. Opening a third chicken wing restaurant in a failed location is not for the weak of heart.

You took the risk and succeeded. So much so that you want to do it again. Here! The entire city admires you. And appreciates you. And wants you to grow and expand.

Please understand that rejecting your plan in Pinnacle Office Park has absolutely nothing to do with you. It lies with the specific parcel. When that property was rezoned two decades ago, restaurants were excluded as a permitted use for that location.

To ask the city to change the zoning is to suggest that the city and the developer made a mistake then. They didn’t. They got it right. The entire multi-parcel strip was developed precisely as planned. Nothing has changed.

Had restaurants been permitted for that site when the zoning was approved decades ago, plans would have included room for a turn lane off a fast moving thoroughfare. Plans would have included a wider right-sized road behind the complex rather than a private alleyway. The traffic pattern for a restaurant would have been part of the overall plan. Parking for the dozens of employees a restaurant needs would have been part of the original zoning plan. Access into and out of the property for ambulances and other healthcare needs would have been incorporated.

None of that was planned — or asked for — when the forward-looking vision for this parcel was proposed by the developer and accepted by the city. Your noble effort, and further efforts to reconfigure the parcel to meet community objections, bumped into the developer’s and city’s plan that knowingly and specifically excluded a restaurant decades ago.

Your existing Zaxby’s location is planned well, like many drive-thru restaurants mixed into a shopping area. It is situated on an outparcel with a significant buffer for traffic between it and the other businesses in a retail complex rather than being sandwiched between a row of doctors, accountants, and insurance offices.

City planning isn’t a sport. Rules aren’t made to be broken. Certainly, times and conditions change, but nothing in this homogenously developed location suggests the need to rezone one parcel to accommodate one type of business.

Everyone knows that you are a model citizen and that your business would be a prized addition to that end of town. Clearly, you’ve spent a great deal of money planning this venture, but this is not the only acre of land that could work.

Please, please. Talk to several of Salisbury’s real estate pros. (Call me for some referrals if you want.) Scout the same area. Find a parcel. Build another Zaxby’s. Bring dozens of new jobs to Salisbury.

We love you. Please don’t give up on us.

David Post serves on the Salisbury Planning Board.