Plan underway to develop old country club

19 acres will be Brenda Bryant Joyner Park

E. Carroll Joyner, who lowered his price to allow the Town of Wake Forest to buy an old farm that became E. Carroll Joyner Park on Harris Road, is about to create a new park in town, the Brenda Bryant Joyner Park named for his deceased wife.

The 19 acres of the nature park will run along Horse Creek and be surrounded by 54.5 acres of passive open space in the Horse Creek floodplain. Together the park and floodplain will cut a wide swath across the entire 147 acres that once was the Wake Forest Country Club.

On Feb. 24 of this year Laura Holloman with the John R. McAdams Company held a pre-application conference with members of the Wake Forest Planning Department staff and presented a concept drawing showing where Toll Brothers is expected to build 389 townhouses with six different configurations, including 66 which would be age-restricted for older people. Those would be separate from the others and reached only through the Country Club Downs subdivision on Purnell Road by way of Hogan Drive and the short Simpson Court.

The remaining 323 townhouses planned would all be accessible from Capital Boulevard by way of Club Villas Drive, which is not up to any standards. An amenity area is planned for the middle of the main block of townhouses while two other townhouse modules stretch to the south. Some planners’ notes were attached to the schematic drawing.

Wake Forest Planning Department Director Courtney Tanner noted that “The application does not require the applicant to state when they will submit. Some applications do not submit after pre-application conference.” Or, we may never see this again.

However, Joyner has been taking steps that indicate he is about to undertake developing the country club property he bought in 2012. In January he transferred ownership of the three country club parcels from his name to an entity called Dry Timber that shares his Youngsville address. And there was suddenly, after years of quiet, a flurry of gossip that seemed to be based on fact. Joyner’s cell phone is constantly busy and he could not be reached despite several phone calls. The editor refuses to call his house or to call after business hours.

Joyner, McAdams and Toll Brothers may be constrained by the planned unit development that former owner Joel Young placed on the land which has the golf course as open space. Tanner said plans like that go with the land, not the owner.

One of the more interesting side notes is that some people still play golf on the overgrown site. Some men and women keep a stretch of one hole clear of brush and mowed so that they can literally step out of their townhouses in the Club Villas and play. Otherwise, the only cleared area is the former parking lot in front of the clubhouse, which was painted an unfortunate green at some point. The pool house and empty pool are shrouded in trees and shrubs.

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In 1967 four people formed a company, bought the land, about 200 acres, and hired well-known golf course designer Gene Hamm to lay out the 18 holes while they built a club house and parking lot. Those people were Tommy Byrne, the Baltimore youngster who became a star pitcher at Wake Forest College and later the New York Yankees as well as a town commissioner and mayor; local businessman Ray Faircloth; local attorney Ellis Nassif; and Jayne Keeter, an avid golfer.

At some point, the original owners sold the country club to Bob Neeb, who in turn sold it to Joel Young in 1984 for $1.2 million. Young began selling off some of the land. In the late 1980s he sold individual lots for the Country Club Downs subdivision and later sold all the land for the Riverstone subdivision.

Then in 1999 he requested annexation and a planned unit development zoning for the remaining 156 acres in which he planned two housing clusters, Fairway Villas and Clubhouse Villas, with the 18-hole golf course as open space. The Fairway Villas were built but the Clubhouse Villas languished until recent years because Young was trying to change the use of the land.

Early in 2006 Young announced he would sell the course to the national homebuilding firm Centex, but that endeavor fell through for several reasons – the watershed designation for Horse Creek and the existing PUD being two – and then in October of 2007 Young announced the golf course would close, which it did in November.

Young’s efforts to sell to a builder met a wall of resistance from the course’s neighbors and golfers who had lost a great course to play on.

Many of those neighbors had formed a group, Concerned Citizens for the Preservation of Wake Forest Golf Course, after Young’s announcement about the Centex sale. In November of 2007 they filed suit, seeking to prevent Young from selling the land for development or changing the use. The suit was later withdrawn.

While that suit was still in court, Young offered the course to the Town of Wake Forest for $2.9 million, considerably less than the $3.8 million he had it listed for sale. The commissioners turned down the offer after a lengthy closed meeting in February of 2008.

Raleigh realtor Tommy Fonville then held meetings with neighbors in the spring of 2008, trying to persuade them his plan for a residential development – a sketchy plan – was a good idea, telling them to try to convince the town to agree to a change in the PUD.

They remained opposed to any development and became furious in early 2009 when the organizers of the North Carolina Renaissance Faire announced the fair would be held that spring on the golf course. The fair’s activities, including parking on the 17^th fairway after heavy rains, were a further source of anger.

Meanwhile the fairways and greens were becoming a wildlife preserve. The value of the course declined rapidly. In 2008 its tax value was listed at $7 million by the Wake County Revenue Department. Young appealed that appraisal in 2009 and by 2010 the value was listed as $76,975.92 with a tax bill of $16,186.18.

Young approached the town about changing the PUD in 2009, and late that year the commissioners, acting on town attorney Eric Vernon’s advice, refused to consider the request. Their decision was based on a case in the 1980s involving the City of Raleigh and a development group called the River Birth Associates. Young filed suit in Wake County Superior Court, asking that the town be ordered to consider his request. In July a Superior Court judge found for the town and granted its motion for a summary judgment, which the town’s attorneys wrote. Young’s motions were dismissed with prejudice, but he still appealed to the state Court of Appeals, which unanimously upheld the Superior Court ruling. Still, without standing, Young continued his case, asking for Supreme Court review.

Late in 2011, Branch Bank and Trust Company (BB&T) foreclosed on the overgrown and disused property Young had owned since 1984, and on Dec. 12 BB&T’s Collateral Service Corporation was the high bidder at $1.3 million. It later assigned the bid to Atlas NC II Spe LLC, the bank’s holding company whose function is to receive and sell real property.           The Wake County tax and property website listed the three tracts in the sale at a total appraised value of $1,550,400.

On April 10, 2012, Joyner bought the property for $325,000, according to the excise tax of $650 charged for the special warranty deed.

The Wake Forest Gazette reported at the time that Joyner met with several golf course neighbors two days later, “. . . and he told them he is exploring what he may do with the property. He did tell them he has no personal interest in a golf course and has never played the game. Since 2006 when then-owner Joel Young made the first of several announcements that he was selling the course for development, those neighbors and many others have hoped someone would step in to purchase and operate a golf course.

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