On Aug. 28, back in 2003
This is the third in what is hoped is a regular feature about Wake Forest in 2003 when the Wake Forest Gazette began publication.
When he purchased the 25-year-old Wake Forest Plaza last fall, Raleigh developer Craig Briner said the changes he planned would be “evolutionary, not revolutionary.”
Wrong.
The plans Briner described to a small crowd at the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce Tuesday afternoon will revolutionize 20 acres in the heart of the town’s commercial district.
Briner and Raleigh architect Dan Huffman envision buildings two, three and four stories high circling a three-level parking deck. The buildings would house stores and perhaps offices in the first story with apartments and condominiums above. The largest, signature building at the corner of South White and East Elm – now the site of D&B auto sales – would be topped with a restaurant. “You could see all of the town,” Huffman said.
Just south of that building a pedestrian mall would lead from South White down to an amphitheater near the original plaza building.
That building will be totally changed in Huffman’s concept with the roof raised to allow for apartments or condos while underneath would be an upper-scale grocery store like Whole Foods or Fresh Market. To bring light into the apartments, the architects are planning a roof garden down the length of the building.
Although only a few of the buildings have been designed, the architects have gone into great detail on those they have drawn. Briner said the detail was necessary to demonstrate to the type of retailers he would like to attract – upscale food store Dean & Deluca was mentioned – how this “dense urban village” will differ from the usual development.
“Everyone wants to do raw land and single-family houses they can sell like that,” Briner said. “That’s not this vision.”
There will be arches covered with vines and flanked with trees leading into the different areas in the 20 acres. Huffman plans to build using tumbled brick and perhaps stone lintels to approximate the look and character of the buildings now in Wake Forest’s historic downtown. Canvas awnings, timber arches for the bridge, trellises over apartment balconies – “We wanted something that will fit in with the town,” Huffman said about his plans.
This will be a place to live, Briner said, with about 55 single-family homes and 110 apartments or condominiums. While the apartments will be above the stores or perhaps in a separate building, the single-family houses – Huffman called them courtyard homes – will be in the southeast corner of the tract, leading toward and connecting with Franklin Street.
The development will welcome families with children. There will be a children’s park in the center of the complex, Huffman said. “We think people will feel safer here than in the city.”
The streets in the single-family housing area will be planted with oaks on the side and in the medians. “I can see a canopy that will meet in the center and cover the entire street,” Huffman said. The streets will also have right-angle intersections to slow traffic.
The houses are planned to have a common wall that extends to the back of the lot to make a privacy fence. Briner said he wants to make the houses affordable, perhaps hovering in price around $200,000.
The project has had some snags.
For one, Wake Technical Community College was all set to occupy the former Winn-Dixie space to consolidate all its northern Wake classes and programs under one roof while the first two buildings for its new northern campus are built. But then, Briner said, “the budget was cut and it didn’t happen.”
For another, one of the larger tenants, CVS drug store, plans to vacate next April, Briner said. The drug chain is reported to be planning a free-standing store at the corner of White and Roosevelt.
The leases for the rest of the tenants are short-term, Briner said.
He is much happier about the cooperation and help he has received from the town and the mayor in planning and arranging financing, including a plan new to North Carolina called tax increment financing. Under that, Briner said, the town can jumpstart the infrastructure spending such a development requires but will repay in taxes once built.
“Everything you see is not within code,” Briner said at the start. Like another developer, Andy Ammons, Briner apparently will be asking the town to change its codes and ordinances to allow a more visionary plan. The town planning staff is already working on ways to accommodate Ammons plans for a conservation subdivision on part of his reservoir tract.
This will be a multi-year process, Briner said. “I’m 50. I plan on owning this for a long time.”
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No money for two expensive water options
Wake Forest is now using borrowed water for its burgeoning population, and the town board must decide this fall whether to acquiesce to merger with Raleigh, try to siphon off some of Kerr Lake’s water or pipe water from the Neuse into its independent system.
Those last two options cost money, an unknown but large amount for the Kerr pipeline and pump stations and an estimated $20 million for the Neuse River intake and water plant expansion.
There is no money in the bank to pay for the last two.
“There is approximately $2.3 million remaining in water availability fees as of June 30, 2003,” Finance Director Aileen Staples reported this week. Of that, she said, $1,730,865 is budgeted this year to be spent on a second water connection to Raleigh, capacity charges for the Raleigh water contract that ends in August of 2007, completion of waterline improvements on South Main and North Taylor streets, engineering for waterline improvements on Wingate Street and individual service change-outs along South White Street.
The lack of available capital money and the entangled environmental and political obstacles for the Kerr and Neuse options are what make people like Dick Monteith, a realtor specializing in commercial properties and land development who was mayor from 1993 to 1997, opt for the Raleigh merger solution.
This week Monteith pointed out the legal battles over a transfer of water from the Roanoke River basin past the Tar River basin and into the Neuse River basin would probably take years. It took almost a decade for Virginia Beach, Va., to win the right to withdraw water from Lake Gaston. The Kerr option would also be the most expensive, Monteith said.
If Wake Forest wants to draw 6 million gallons a day from the Neuse below Falls Lake, Monteith said, Raleigh will argue there is up to 10 mgd available in the lake itself and will petition the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to withdraw that amount, blocking the town’s withdrawal.
“I think that (the Neuse River withdrawal) may become a very expensive option,” Monteith said, “plus I’m not sure we can get it done in time. I think we will pay through the nose if we try to stay independent.”
There are others like George Rogers, the town’s water resources supervisor, who ardently support independence and say the town should have instituted higher water availability fees sooner to pay for a new water source.
There are others who have argued that the availability fees should be even higher to more truly reflect the cost of building new treatment plants.
Al Hinton, who served on the town board during 1997 through 1999, remembers the feeling was then “there was no way we would run out of water.” Still, they talked of options, including enlarging the reservoir and treating the effluent from the wastewater treatment plant. “It should be noted,” Hinton said, “that the effluent from the WWTP was and is cleaner than either the Neuse River at the intake for Raleigh or at the Burlington Mill plant.” Hinton said those two options are still his preference, and “Independence is costly any way you look at it.”
A consultant is now undertaking a study of the water and sewer user rates. Deputy Town Manager Roe O’Donnell and commissioners would like to see the new rates bring in the same amount of money but place more of a burden on larger consumers while easing the burden for small users.
After the rate study, the consultant will address the question of availability fees. They are also called capacity fees in some cities and towns and can be scaled to provide some (never all) of the replacement cost of treatment plants.
The town has only collected water availability fees in a capital reserve fund since fiscal 1994-95. Before that, availability fees, also called acreage fees, were fed into the operating budget for the water and sewer department.
Since 1995, the town has collected $5.6 million and spent it on an upgrade at the G.G. Hill Water Treatment Plant, oversized line agreements with Dansforth and Heritage subdivisions to provide for future growth and Raleigh water capacity charges.
The town collects the availability fees along with the building permit. The fee for a two-bedroom house is low compared to some other towns — $960.33 as against a flat $2,250 in Apex and $2,500 in Holly Springs for any size house – but the fee rises sharply for larger homes.
A builder who is planning a four-bedroom house pays $2,251.53 and $2,735.73 if there are more than four bedrooms. O’Donnell has made it clear any room that could be counted as a bedroom is counted that way if it has a closet and a door.
As a result, the town collected $1,103,510 in the last fiscal year from the availability fees for about 450 homes, slightly more than it would have under the Apex $2,250 fee and about the same as it would have under Holly Springs’ flat $2,500 per house.
Without capital funds, the town would have to turn to a bond issue to pay for either the Kerr or Neuse options. Right now, the town is considering a bond issue for streets and another bond issue in the near future for a new town hall. Since the town operates the water and sewer department as an independent enterprise, user rates would have to pay off the indebtedness. Town Manager Mark Williams has said the Local Government Commission, which oversees municipal finances, would probably be very reluctant to grant permission for a bond issue given the high water and sewer rates Wake Forest customers pay.
Williams says the town must stop growing at the current 8 or 9 percent rate because the infrastructure like streets will not sustain it. At the current rate, Wake Forest would grow from an estimated 16,000 today to 87,000 in 2025. If the rate slows to 4 percent in the next year or so, we would have a population of 41,000 in 2025.
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Ball fields at the Factory, Franklin Street nearly to bypass
Jeff Ammons’ plan to build ballfields behind the Sports Factory on South Main Street are still alive and well, Todd Warrick told the members and guests of the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce’s economic development committee Tuesday afternoon.
Ammons has asked for $1.5 million of the county’s hotel and food taxes, but Warrick said he is being told now the money will most likely come from a “small pot” of $1 million or so that the county commissioners can distribute at their discretion.
The plan for six or seven ballfields that would be leased for youth baseball tournaments is a “strong candidate,” Warrick said, partly because Ammons is willing to take the money in three annual payments.
Construction will begin soon on the extension of Franklin Street to the N.C. 98 bypass, Town Manager Mark Williams said. Design of the short section is almost complete. The town has received a grant from the Department of Transportation for the section it owns, the site of the old sewer treatment plant, and two developers own the other pieces of land. (This was to extend Franklin Street south to the bypass.)
Also, Williams said, the town has received a federal grant of $325,000 to help offset the cost of purchasing the land for Joyner Park. The town borrowed $2 million for the purchase.
Allen Massey, who is co-chair of the economic development committee with Warrick, said he had been elected president of the BIP (Business and Industry Partnership) with David Morgan in line to be president next year. The group is striving to attract more development to the South Forest Industrial Park that BIP developed.
Mark Fleming, the chamber’s executive director, said he and Mayor Vivian Jones met with some DOT officials about a sign for the South Forest park on Capital Boulevard. “They wanted to be helpful,” Fleming said, and a sign will be erected in five to six months.
Jones reported on the recent ElectriCities annual meeting and an economic development workshop, where she learned companies now use consultants to locate new sites and those consultants seek out regional groups, not small town development groups, for advice and tips. She learned that in five years “50 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the world will be in the Pearl River delta in China.” Also, retail now is two-thirds of this county’s gross national product. “We need to be making things,” Jones said.
An upcoming two-day seminar will help the town’s small business people, Susan Aycock said. Dave Ratner will lead the marketing seminar on Oct. 22 and 23 entitled Growing Your Small Business in a Big Box World. Tickets and more information will be available soon.
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Put conservation subdivisions on a fast track, boards say
Requests for conservation subdivisions should be put on a planning fast track, planning board member Frank Drake said last week while that board and the town commissioners were discussing Wake County’s newly adopted Growth Management Plan.
It might be difficult to tell other developers that the conservation plan will be considered before theirs, Planning Director Chip Russell said.
“I’ll tell them,” Drake replied.
Last Wednesday’s work session for the two boards is the first step in implementing the strategies the Wake County Growth Management Task Force assembled and endorsed over a two-year period. Mayor Vivian Jones and Commissioners David Camacho, Boyce Medlin and Kim Marshall were Wake Forest’s representatives on the task force along with Russell.
Actually, Drake said, looking over the different topics, “A lot of those we (already) have here in Wake Forest.” Those include tree protection, historic preservation, appearance standards and transportation planning.
“One of the things the staff would like to do, depending on what you pass on to us, is to add a separate column (to the executive summary) showing what Wake Forest already does, what we’re working on or what you might want to talk about further,” Russell said.
For example, Russell said, his staff is already working on a model conservation subdivision ordinance, prompted by the interest the planning board evidenced when planner Chuck Flink explained his plan for Andy Ammons’ reservoir land.
“It will be a big change on the part of the development community,” Commissioner Thomas Walters said.
“It an optional choice,” Russell said, going on to say that whether or not to plan a conservation Jones said there are criticisms the land set aside for open space in a conservation subdivision “is land you can’t develop on anyway.” The rule, she said, should be that the percentage of wetlands in the dedicated open space could not be more than the percentage of wetlands in the total area. Some of the open space should be buildable land.
One of the key issues for the task force was schools. “That was a hot topic, let me tell you,” Russell said. Parents are complaining about constant reassignment, busing and not being able to attend neighborhood schools. “It has a lot with the way we deal with some housing issues,” Russell said.
One strategy would be inclusionary housing in which 10 percent of the homes, scattered through a subdivision, would be affordable housing, Russell said.
“Is the school board actually interested in these processes?” planning board member Michael Penney asked with a note of disbelief in his voice.
“They were represented (on the task force),” Russell said. “I don’t know if it was presented to the school board.”
The board members discussed the advantages of interconnecting adjoining commercial properties, which the town is doing, as well as interconnectivity of neighborhoods and communities.
Another point the board members seemed to agree on was the need for preserving open space for water quality and natural habitat.
The boards will be considering the strategies in the next few months. As Russell pointed out and the overview said, not all of the strategies can or should be implemented in every town. “What might be good for Cary or Wake Forest, Wendell or Zebulon might not be ready for,” Russell said.
The workshop ended with planning board chairman Sherrill Brinkley predicting that by 2050 “you won’t know where you are (in the county) except for the signs. We’re just going to be one mass of people.”
Penney said his 8-year-old looked at the clear-cutting along Ligon Mill Road recently and asked, “How did Wake Forest get its name?”
Drake said he once lived in Louisville, Ky., a county with 88 municipalities. “It’s now a single city-county government. We’ll be a city-county government. I don’t advocate it, but I submit that’s what will happen.”
It has happened in Jacksonville, Fla., and Duval County, planning board member Speed Massenburg said, with signs saying “Jacksonville City Limits” 18 miles away from the city proper.
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