Next Tuesday the Wake Forest Planning Board and Town Board will hear a request for a special use permit to build a Sam’s Club on 13 acres, part of the 42 acres approved in 2004 for the Shoppes at Caveness shopping center.
If the planning board and town board approve the permit, with or without changes, the developers of the big-box store will have to make substantial changes to Capital Boulevard to provide safe access.
There will be two synchronized traffic signals, one at the Caveness Farms Avenue and one at the driveway access to the unnamed private road that runs behind the office building housing DentalWorks and Mattress Firm, the Texas Roadhouse and Red Robin.
The large – 139,037 square feet – store and its station with six or eight gas pumps will be built behind those businesses with the two access points on the private road. One condition the town staff made is that the road be dedicated to the town.
The state Department of Transportation concurs with the traffic analysis that traffic going into the Sam’s Club site – and the apartments at Caveness Farm plus the new ones called the Estates at Wake Forest – should mostly enter from Capital Boulevard onto Caveness Farm Avenue and the traffic leaving and turning left should do so at the unnamed driveway. Right turns will be allowed out of both streets onto Capital, and right turns will be allowed into the two streets.
The developer, Sam’s Real Estate Business Trust out of Bentonville, Arkansas, must widen Capital Boulevard to three lanes north and south between the Walmart/Nissan access and the ramps for the bypass and build right-turn lanes for the unnamed driveway, Caveness Farms Avenue, Corona Boulevard, Common Oaks Drive, Wakefield Park and the Walmart/Nissan access.
There will be dual left-turn lanes on southbound Capital at Caveness Farms Avenue and dual left-turn lanes on the unnamed driveway for access to the southbound lanes of Capital.
All the traffic improvements must be completed before the town will issue a certificate of occupancy.
The site is accessible from South Main Street by using the Ligon Mill extension which meets the east end of Caveness Farm Avenue and also by the unnamed private road which connects to the Walmart/Nissan access road and then to South Main through the Walmart parking lot. The town plans to widen the part of Ligon Mill Road from South Main to the Walmart driveway in the near future.
Weingarten Investments Inc. owns the 35.8 acres that is the remainder of the Shoppes at Caveness property minus the four outparcels that have sold.
Caveness Farm residents complained about the poor access at a recent town board meeting, and the changes required for Sam’s Club may provide a solution.
The Sam’s Club request – which will be a quasi-judicial hearing with sworn testimony limited to verifiable evidence, usually an expert in the field – may overshadow the second hearing.
Steve Gould and his engineers, Rich & Associates from Beaufort, want to rezone about 4 acres on Wait Avenue and Bowling Forest Drive to GR3 conditional use and RMX conditional use. They also want the town to approve the plan for the land which will be phase four of the Bowling Green subdivision.
Gould plans 18 single-family lots in this phase.
At Wait Avenue, Bowling Forest Drive meets Middlegame Way, the entrance to Bishops Grant on the north side of Wait. There is also a private road, Old Murray Drive, which is very close to and almost parallel to Middlegame Way. There have been requests by area residents for a traffic signal at this intersection.
Because this is a consideration of a change in the subdivision’s master plan, this too will be a quasi-judicial hearing. The members of the planning and town boards can only consider the sworn evidence presented in the hearing.
The planning board meeting will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the second-floor meeting room in Wake Forest Town Hall on Brooks Street. It is also accessible from Taylor Street.
One Response
The second to the last paragraph on this article is inaccurate. The rezoning request that is part of Bowling Green is not quasi-judicial, it is a rezoning to a conditional district – which is a legislative process, not a quasi-judicial one.