Second neighbor meeting about former country club

By Wanda Mukherjee and Carol Pelosi

Neighbors and interested Wake Forest residents will gather at The Corner in Historic Wake Forest from 5:30 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30, for a second time to hear about a plan to build more than 350 homes on the former Wake Forest Country Club land in the Falls Lake watershed. The plan will be the second submitted to the Wake Forest Planning Department and will include commercial development along Capital Boulevard.

The plan will be unveiled via a Zoom meeting led by Nils Ghosh, an attorney with Morningstar Law Group in Durham. The town planning staff concluded that a Zoom-only meeting was not explicitly precluded by the current ordinance that requires meetings to be held within a reasonable distance from the property. However, neighborhood organizers have rented The Corner, which can hold up to 225 people, so they can view the plan as a group in order to gather questions and comment in real time.

The property is currently governed by a 1998 PUD/SUP – Planned Unit Development and Supplemental Use Permit – that dedicated the 147 acres of the golf course as open space and allowed owner Joel Young to sell the land for two housing clusters. Young closed the club and golf course in 2007 and then in 2009 asked the Wake Forest Town Board to modify the PUD and SUP because he was negotiating with a builder. The commissioners and mayor refused to take that action, Young sued the town and in 2011 the North Carolina Appeals Court upheld the town’s position.

Young, who at one time offered to sell the course to the town for $2.9 million, said in his suit the property was still for sale as a golf course with an asking price of $3.8 million. In 2008 the Wake County Revenue Department appraised the property at $7 million. Young appealed that valuation in 2009, and the Wake County website in 2011 listed the combined value at $1,550,400. The property went into bankruptcy, was acquired by BB&T, and in 2012 E. Carroll Joyner paid about $335,000 for the old country club.

Neighbors objected to the meeting being held via Zoom because they worried there will be many residents who may not have the ability or bandwidth to attend the meeting online, which led to the rental of The Corner. The goal is to have as many voices weigh in on the development as possible.

“We welcome the developer to attend the meeting in person with us at The Corner, and simultaneously broadcast via Zoom,” said Richard Ostergard, the spokesperson for Concerned Citizens for the Preservation of Wake Forest Open Space, a group representing the neighborhoods around the former golf club.  The group has also offered to put up posters of the proposed development if McAdams Engineering provides them.

“We are willing to accommodate the developer in order to have our residents understand their plan, including paying for the venue,” he added. The developer has not responded to either invitation – to attend in person or provide physical copies of the plan.

“By meeting in person we will be able to discuss the plans with neighbors immediately while the plan is still fresh in their minds. The interaction with neighbors will quite frequently bring another question to mind. We are smarter together,” he added.

At the first meeting last month 136 people were at The Sutherland for a presentation that was light on information and did not address the 119 issues the town planners found in the plan submitted last fall.

Ghosh, who also led the February meeting, sent letters last week to residents within 500 feet of the former golf course. In this letter, he stated the owner will be seeking both GR10, which can include more than 10 housing units per acre such as single family homes, townhomes, and apartments; and Highway Business. In February, Ghosh said that Toll Brothers involvement depends on whether the property can obtain the intensive GR-10.

The current zoning on the property is GR-3 which now includes up to six units per acre. The five Wake Forest neighborhoods built on the northwest side of Capital were built under R-40 watershed rules to insure maximum impervious surface and watershed protections.

The letter still lists Riverstone’s Open Space parcels in the rezoning. However, residents have been reassured by town staff that these parcels will be removed from this latest iteration of the plan.

The Wake Forest Draft Future Land Use plan, recently passed by the Planning Board, requires a conservation subdivision comprised of traditional neighborhood units on the property. A conservation cluster or subdivision would allow some development on the Capital Boulevard frontage while preserving the floodplain, ponds, wetlands and areas around Horse Creek, a tributary supplying Falls Lake where approximately 600,000 Wake County residents get their water.

The first plan by McAdams was submitted under the old Community Plan and Land Use Plan which will be in effect until the Wake Forest Town Board approves the new and revised Community Plan, probably in April. Any new submittal or revision of the McAdams plan before midnight on April 6 will be considered under the old plan.

However, Planning Director Courtney Tanner wrote in an email: “If a revised application is not resubmitted by the deadline 11:59 pm (not close of business), the application will be considered withdrawn and a new application and review fee shall be submitted if the applicant wants to continue forward with their project.”

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