Planners OK two requests

In a short meeting, the Wake Forest Planning Board voted to approve an increase of nine lots and a reconfigured plan for the Lakestone subdivision on Wait Avenue and a rezoning to mixed-use residential for a 26-acre wooded lot between North White Street and North Main Street owned by Jim Adams and Charles Grant.

The only real questions came from three women who own land near the Adams/Grant land. Ninese Dixon Piper’s land fronts on North Main and is just west of the Adams/Grant land, and she wanted to know how the future Northern Loop would affect her land. Planning Director Chip Russell said he really did not know now just where the 100-foot right-of-way will be. “Hopefully in the next five years we’re going to get started on it [the Northern Loop].”

Anita Pearce and her mother, Marcia Cole Pearce, own property along Crowder Avenue south of the Adams/Grant property, and they both said they want a buffer along with a way to prevent people from making mischief in the wooded area next to their land.

“We have four lots that back up to that proposed site,” Marcia Pearce said. Some years ago some agency, she said the town, “went through our property with a sewer line and someone from the town cut the fence between the mill [the former Royall Cotton Mill, now Glen Royal Apartments] and our property.” She said people from the apartments and others walk through the hole in the fence and get into the woods where they are “camping in the woods, setting the woods on fire. They are riding mini-bikes and four-wheelers. If you would fix that hole in that fence, that would cut a lot of that out.”

Anita Pearce said she wants a buffer zone. “If they come and play in the woods, I don’t want any liability on my part. Is there some way to put up a fence?”

Senior Planner Charlie Yokley said the rezoning was done without a plan for the use of the Adams/Grant property. “When they have a plan they will have to have a [neighborhood] meeting. The ordinance doesn’t call for a fence, but you can tell him about your concern then.”

Adams was the only speaker in favor, saying he and Grant had owned the property since 1996 and had redeveloped the mill property to renovate the old mill to apartments in 1994. “We have no desire to develop retail or industry” on the land in question, and he knows they will lose three or four acres to the Northern Loop.

After the votes on the agenda items, the board discussed the possible definitions of heavy construction traffic in hopes of a policy that would shield existing neighborhoods from such traffic when an adjoining subdivision is built and also protect existing roads and streets.