One of those perennial objections about a new housing development came up again Tuesday night when Heritage resident George Georgallis objected to connecting his street, Vann Dowda Place, and Grason Crockett Drive to the proposed Courtyards at Heritage subdivision, saying the connections would increase traffic on Marshall Farm Road, which connects Rogers Road and Chalk Road.
“Connecting will attract more traffic to that road which I believe was not intended to be a major thoroughfare. I think you will be creating more problems than you are solving,” Georgallis said.
Commissioner Zachary Donahue asked if Georgallis had spoken to town staff and if they had explained the rationale for the connections between subdivisions, and Georgallis said they had but he disagreed in this case. He questioned whether both streets need to be connected and suggested a connection could be made to the north to Sandhollow Circle in the Clearsprings subdivision, which is in Wake County’s jurisdiction. There had already been a question about a connection to Sandhollow Circle, but Jerrod Evans with the engineering firm Edens Land Corporation explained that protected wetlands there precluded using that.
Evans also said his firm supports the neighbors’ desire, voiced during required neighborhood meetings, not to have the streets extended. “If the town made a decision to approve the plan without those streets being extended, we would be fine with that.”
After the planning board had voted 9 to 0 to approve the rezoning, planning board member Stephen DeRosa asked about the connections and Planning Director Chip Russell quashed any objections to connecting the streets. “They will be connected at some point.” The streets in the new subdivision will be stubbed to the two Heritage streets and to a possible connection to the east if the abutting property is ever developed. The connections will be made after 80 percent of the 83 new homes have received a certificate of occupancy.
Wake Forest and other North Carolina planning jurisdictions are insisting on interconnectivity to provide access to all homes and businesses by emergency vehicles when there is an ice storm, a hurricane, and downed trees and other barriers by accidents or other event.
Part of the application by Epcon Communities of Wake Forest included a 26-page environmental report. “This is the first time I’ve seen an environmental report as extensive as this,” planning board member Steve Stoller said. He asked about the possible leakage from an old above-ground diesel storage tank and “burial grounds” for what might be old farming equipment. Evans said anything that proved dangerous would be removed and the removal supervised by the person who produced the environmental report.
The development is called Courtyards because each house will have a courtyard on the side, out of sight of the street, Steve George with Epcon Communities said, and the developer will provide all the maintenance to the exterior of the homes and to the landscaping.
The target is active older adults 55 and older only, George said. The homes will be one story with the possibility of expansion to a second story. “The traffic is much less than in a typical subdivision,” he said, because there are few or no children and no commuters.
The other concern raised by Heritage residents and planning board members was the buffer between the two subdivisions. Evans said they would build a Type A buffer although that is not required by the Uniform Development Ordinance, a 25-foot buffer that would be opaque and would use all the existing trees where possible.
The planning board also voted unanimously to recommend approval of a rezoning to General Residential 3 for Wake Forest Baptist Church to make the 1.8 acres it has recently purchased from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary conform to the rest of the church property. The land will soon hold the church’s fellowship and educational building and had been zoned Institutional Campus Development as part of the seminary’s campus.
Both rezoning requests will now go to the Wake Forest Town Board, which sat in on the two public hearings, for consideration at its business meeting Oct. 21.
(You can find more information and description about the subdivision in last week’s article in the Gazette. Keep scrolling down after you reach the “News” section.)
