The Wake Forest Town Board sandwiched a lengthy closed session between two agenda items, spending more than an hour of its work session that began at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday on the dispute with the Town of Youngsville.
Wake Forest has annexed land in Franklin County near Youngsville twice, once for the Richland Hills subdivision and more recently for the Everly subdivision. All was well between the two towns, which had arranged their extra-territorial jurisdictions between the two with a joint ordinance in 2007 and agreed their staffs would “exchange information” and tell their boards about any zoning or other action in the respective ETJs.
Then in January of this year the Youngsville commissioners adopted a new development ordinance and official zoning map, a map which modified its ETJ, which thereby altered the planning and zoning rules in the area between the towns. The petition, drawn up by Samuel Slater, an attorney with Wake Forest’s contracted law firm of Wyrick Robbins Yates & Ponton, says Youngsville made the changes without communicating or coordinating with Wake Forest.
“The result of Youngsville’s UDO is that certain areas previously subject to zoning by Youngsville will no longer be subject to zoning,” the petition says and goes on to say Franklin County is acting to restore zoning in the affected area and will do so in April.
The petition claims Youngsville’s action has breached the annexation agreement and “directly harmed” Wake Forest. It asks the Franklin County Superior Court to keep the Youngsville zoning ordinances passed in 2016 in force until Franklin County can enact zoning for the affected area.
The Wake Forest commissioners unanimously agreed to pursue the action in the petition.
They also agreed to begin a plaque program for the new street benches in town, a program suggested by Commissioner Liz Simpers, but the particulars – the cost of the plaques, whether they remain forever or go away when the benches are taken out of use, and other questions – will be worked out by Lisa Hayes, the downtown development director.
Alana Keegan with the Triangle Council of Governments gave a presentation about a new program to help governments identify and develop brownfield sites in their downtowns and other areas. Brownfields are abandoned, idled or underused industrial and commercial properties. The plan is to help towns and cities reclaim all possible land for use because 80 percent of the growth in Wake County is in municipalities.
There are already two brownfields in Wake Forest, Town Manager Kip Padgett said. One is contamination in the soil under the Retreat at Renaissance townhouse subdivision where the residents were protected by a barrier under all the buildings. The second is at the former Parker-Hannifin (Schrader) site, where the company continues to remove a harmful cleaning agent by exposing the groundwater to the air.
Assistant Planning Director Jennifer Currin said the department has been working on the plan but has not yet reached the point where they will discuss it with property owners.
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