After a disappointing neighborhood meeting about the current plan for the former Wake Forest Country Club, Richard Ostergard, head of the citizen group opposed to dense development on that 150 acres, and others are marshaling facts and arguments to buttress their case.
Although Nil Gosh, an attorney with Morningstar Law Group in Durham who led the neighborhood meeting at The Sutherland; McAdams engineering firm; and E. Carroll Joyner, owner of the property, have not said they have a different plan to submit to the town, and Gosh said they were not planning a second meeting because the town does not require it, Wake Forest Planning Department Director Courtney Tanner said in an email this week, ” I recommended a 2nd meeting to outline proposed plan changed prior to resubmitting.”
The current plan by McAdams calls for dense development – up to 10 homes per acre – has only one entrance when safety considerations require two, and does not provide any plan for a greenway, trail or park in the Horse Creek floodplain.
It met the description in the draft version of the Community Plan that has been available until very recently. Putting The Joyner Property as the number one site for development, the draft said, “Once the Wake Forest Country Club, this large property at Capital Boulevard and Country Club Drive now sits underutilized. It should be developed for Mixed Residential, offering a variety of housing choices. Horse Creek, existing ponds, and floodplain areas should be preserved and integrated into the site design, enhanced as resident amenities, and cluster development should be encouraged. Pedestrian and bicycle connections should be provided within the site and should connect to the larger network. Connectivity should be emphasized to nearby commercial areas along Capital Boulevard and E. Carroll Joyner Park to the east.”
But since the neighborhood meeting about the country club land and since the community input meetings about the draft Community Plan, the future consideration of the country club has been drastically changed.
Now it reads: “Once the Wake Forest Country Club, this large property at Capital Boulevard and Country Club Drive now sits abandoned and requires a balanced perspective for redevelopment. To preserve and protect the environmentally sensitive areas such as Horse Creek, existing ponds and floodplain, a cluster subdivision development is required. These environmentally sensitive areas should be integrated into the site design as enhanced resident amenities with development only permitted east of Horse Creek and north of the existing ponds running parallel to Country Club Drive. Pedestrian and bicycle connections should be provided within the site and should connect to the larger network. Connectivity should be emphasized to nearby commercial areas along Capital Boulevard and E. Carroll Joyner Park to the east.”
BUT the current plan and any future plans McAdams acting for Joyner will not have to meet those changed objectives; the plans will be considered under the ordinances and the zoning existing when the first plan was submitted. That is why Ostergard and others are collecting information to rebut any of the developer’s plans.
Ostergard, after the first meeting where an official count was 136 people, has found there were 82 neighboring homeowners who were not notified. He had a map, drew a circle and compared the homes within the circle with the list of neighbors Morningstar Law Firm used.
He was also disappointed that only three slides were used to illustrate the McAdams plan, which had already drawn 114 comments or problems or needed corrections from the Wake Forest planning staff, and that there was only 10 days of notice before the meeting.
Another concerned neighbor wrote to the Gazette, saying she understood “that both before and after 2007 when the course was closed, the Corps [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] has not allowed anyone to step into the creek to retrieve their errant golf ball, ball cap, etc.” because of the cleanup the Corps did to the creek earlier. This has not been confirmed but should be investigated.
It is very possible that the development team for the country club land believes that if they can get approval for their first and only plan, or for a second plan or a third plan, with the land rezoned and the plan approved the Wake Forest town commissioners will dissolved the land use plan (PUD) and supplemental use plan (SUP) that Joel Young requested, the town imposed and then fought to keep in court after Young changed his mind.
But it all might hinge on something simpler. At the end of the Feb. 22 meeting, “Glosh could not say whether the mammoth builder Toll Brothers was still involved in the project.
“When asked, Ghosh hedged again, “It all depends on whether we can get the (GR-10) rezoning.”
(Readers can find a report of that meeting by going to the February 23, 2022 Gazette.)
One Response
As a former resident adjacent to the Old Golf Course, it sure looks to me like the town is trying to slip something through on that parcel of land. To do that, the town has to abandon past agreements with property owners. Although I was not at the meeting, people who attended a meeting held a few years ago that Carroll Joyner had with owners adjacent to the Old Golf Course property that he purhased, Mr. Joyner promised the residents that he would not do anything with the land that was detremental to the existing homeowners. In my opinion, the proposed development will definitely be detremental to the homeowners.