A long, arduous slog to reach Burlington’s city council turned out to be an illusory achievement for one businessman with aspirations to develop some vacant land near Garden Road’s juncture with Boone Station Drive.
After several rounds of revisions and two contentious appearances before Burlington’s planning and zoning commission, commercial property manager David Morton had finally maneuvered his hard-ridden rezoning request before the city’s elected leaders on Tuesday.
Since its debut, this proposal for general business use had drawn fierce resistance from homeowners near the 2.2-acre site, which also overlooks one of the entrances into the Alamance Crossing shopping center. Along the way, Morton and his colleagues had truncated their plans almost beyond recognition in order to win over the neighbors, and by the time the council took up the rezoning request, its once sweeping possibilities had been reduced to the sole option of multi-family apartments.
The council’s response to all this was to kick Morton’s submission back down to the city’s planning commission in the hope that its members will proffer further adjustments to the request.
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“Maybe that would allow an opportunity to some kind of compromise,” councilman Bob Ward opined before the council’s 5-to-0 vote. “So, I would make a motion that no decision be made tonight and that this item be remanded back to P&Z.”
An all-out effort
Notwithstanding Ward’s appeal for compromise, Morton’s request had already been pared back quite a bit from when it was first submitted to the city’s planning commission.
Framed as a “limited” form of general business zoning, this proposal had first popped up on the planning commission’s agenda alongside a list of 67 proposed uses that the Morton wanted the latitude to develop on five separate lots that Whitsett resident Stanley Smith owns along Garden Road. These prospective uses spanned the gamut of what the city allows in a general business district – with such high-intensity entries as a gas station, a car dealership, a hotel or motel, a drive-thru restaurant, and a commercial laundry.
Jamie Lawson, the city’s planning director, recalled that this sprawling proposal didn’t survive long in its original incarnation.
“There’s been a number of changes since this application came in to the planning and zoning commission,” Lawson explained at Tuesday’s hearing before the city council. “One of the parcels has been removed at the request of the applicant. Furthermore, there have been a series of changes to the list of limited uses. The only use that they’re requesting as part of the limited use request tonight is multi-family dwellings. Everything else is off the table.”
Among these assorted revisions, Morton had rejiggered his proposed development’s site to exclude one of Smith’s five vacant parcels, which happened to jut out into a nearby neighborhood known as Fairview Estates. After an initial, inconclusive appearance before the planning commission, the applicant also slashed his roster of requested uses in response to feedback from residents as well as recommendations from the city’s planning staff.
A return visit to the planning commission saw the applicant jettison some additional uses that had raised the planning staff’s eyebrows. Yet, these changes, which were enough to obtain the staff’s blessing, failed to win over the commission’s members, who chose not to recommend the request to the council after a long, tense debate in December.
Lawson admitted that Morton and his colleagues continued to tinker with the proposal after the planning commission’s decision. She added that, in the end, they settled on multi-family dwellings as the only proposed use they would take to the council.
Lawson went on to acknowledge that multifamily dwellings are already an option under the site’s existing medium density residential zoning. She noted, however, that that a shift to general business use would increase the potential crop of multifamily dwellings from 5 to 24 units per acre. In any event, she felt comfortable endorsing this version of the rezoning request as a reasonable transition between Alamance Crossing and the single-family neighborhood on the other side of the site.
Yet, even with Lawson’s thumbs up, Morton and his colleagues weren’t taking any chances when their moment of reckoning arrived Tuesday night.
Although usually content to stay out of the spotlight, Morton was on hand in person when the council convened its public hearing that evening. At Morton’s side was Chad Huffine, a civil engineer who had previously done much of the heaving lifting on the property manager’s behalf. Also present was Lawson Brown, a partner with Burlington’s Vernon Law Firm who also serves as Mebane’s city attorney.
A relatively recent addition to Morton’s developmental dream team, Brown had the signal honor of presenting his client’s case to the council. To this end, this power forward of real estate law assured Burlington’s elected leaders that Morton had spared no expense to make his request palatable to the community.
“We have taken into consideration the neighbors to the extent that we can,” Brown told the council. “General business would have allowed 119 uses. But we have narrowed it down to the use we want, and in particular, [Morton] wants to do senior apartments.”
Rousing the neighbors
Brown went on to argue that multifamily dwellings built to general business standards are the most suitable use for the now-vacant acreage at Garden Road’s intersection with Boone Station Drive
“The proposed zoning is consistent with the current land use plan,” he added. “It is also consistent with the future land use plan…It is a logical extension of the apartment zoning that is across the street…and it is really the highest and best use of this property.”
Yet, the attorney’s polished performance failed to impress the dozen or so residents from the small but well-established subdivision that abuts Morton’s site to the south and southwest.
Known as Fairview Estates, this decades-old neighborhood has been a burr in the property manager’s saddle ever since he submitted his rezoning request to the city’s planning department. Each time the proposal came before the planning commission, the neighborhood’s residents were out in full force, and a self-selected strike team of these homeowners delivered a coordinated attack that remained scrupulously mindful of the commission’s time limits on speakers.
The neighborhood’s residents relied on this relay-approach yet again when the city council opened the floor to any audience members who wanted to weigh in on Morton’s request. First up that evening was Chad Mills, who presented a petition in opposition to the proposed change in zoning.
“As residents of Fairview Estates, We are united in our desire to preserve the peace and privacy that our neighborhood affords…and we ask that you maintain our neighborhood as a single family residential island.”
– Chad Mills
“As residents of Fairview Estates,” Mills told the city’s elected leaders, “we are united in our desire to preserve the peace and privacy that our neighborhood affords…and we ask that you maintain our neighborhood as a single family residential island.”
The council then heard from Deborah Velazquez, who objected to the potential impact that Morton’s proposed apartments could have on traffic.
“We are already having problems with traffic,” she declared. “I personally don’t see how you can put that many units in that small a space – you’re going to have a traffic nightmare if you ask me.”
“We are already having problems with traffic. I personally don’t see how you can put that many units in that small a space – you’re going to have a traffic nightmare if you ask me.”
– Deborah Velazquez
Velazquez passed the baton to Melissa Mills, who challenged the applicant’s argument that multifamily housing would make a suitable buffer between her neighborhood and Alamance Crossing.
“This influx of residents will have a detrimental effect on our neighborhood. We ask that you deny this request that will fundamentally alter the fabric of our neighborhood.”
– Melissa Mills
“This influx of residents will have a detrimental effect on our neighborhood,” she insisted. “We ask that you deny this request that will fundamentally alter the fabric of our neighborhood.”
Brown’s mention of senior-oriented apartments also drew a rather skeptical response to Charles Bostek, who bemoaned that there’d be no way to ensure this age-restricted occupancy.
“The other thing I would like to point out,” he added, “is that our property values will be severely affected by having an apartment complex shoehorned into our single-family neighborhood.”
Meanwhile, Luis Perez objected to Morton’s previous “invisibility” during the city’s review of his proposal. This thread was later picked up by Angela Bostek, who insisted that, with the exception of Huffine, she and her neighbors hadn’t had much contact with anyone pushing the rezoning request.
“We do appreciate the reduction in the number of items,” she went on to acknowledge, “and we appreciate the time that Chad Huffine spent meeting with us. But we never met with Stan Smith, and we never met with Mr. Morton, and we have certainly never met or talked with his attorney.”
Once more unto the breach
Tuesday’s public hearing wasn’t entirely monopolized by Morton’s opponents. The council also heard some words of encouragement from fellow developer Shawn Cummings, who presented his own request for senior-oriented housing later that night – albeit to a much different response from the council.
“I know I’m going to be a lone voice. But there is a great need for high quality safe housing like this, and it’s a great area…in terms of the amount of shopping and restaurants, its close proximity to the park, religious institutions, and the highway.”
– Developer Shawn Cummings
“I know I’m going to be a lone voice,” Cummings declared when he came up to the podium in Morton’s defense. “But there is a great need for high quality safe housing like this, and it’s a great area…in terms of the amount of shopping and restaurants, its close proximity to the park, religious institutions, and the highway.”
The council, for its part, had a few concerns of its own to thrash out after it heard from the general public.
Among other things, the city’s decision makers were eager for some more information about the property buffers, the parking provisions, and the traffic accommodations for Morton’s proposed apartments. Jamie Lawson acknowledged that some of these details will require a specific site plan, which isn’t an obligatory component of a “limited use” rezoning request, but would be submitted after the fact should the council decide to approve the proposed change.
The city’s planning director went on to observe that some of the council’s questions are addressed in the city’s unified development ordinance, which spells out the requirements for buffers, setbacks, and parking quotas in different development districts. In this particular case, she said that the buffers would range from 30 to 40 feet depending on the character of the adjacent property.
Chad Huffine, who was also called to the podium in his capacity as Morton’s civil engineer, echoed the planning director’s remarks about the constraining effect of the city’s unified development ordinance. Huffine added, with these parameters in place, his client’s proposed apartments would be an ideal fit for the no man’s land between Alamance Crossing and Fairview Estates.
“We’ve got to find a way to allow single family to transition to the commercial area,” he argued. “Textbook planning tells us that this is what goes there. It’s our job as designers to make it fit and make it blend as best as we can in the context of the ordinance.”
The assurances of Huffine and Morton’s other defenders seemed to resonate with Burlington’s mayor Jim Butler, who recalled the much greater degree of uncertainty that city officials have had with rezoning requests that weren’t limited in their use.
“In this case, we know what will go in, and it’s limited to that one use,” Butler went on to contend. “We know what it’s going to look like because it’s like [a set of existing apartments] across the street.”
But Morton’s proponents had a much tougher nut to crack in the city’s mayor pro tem Harold Owen, who repeatedly expressed a desire for a formal site plan to augment the rezoning request.
“I’d like to see how this might look like and how it might impact the surrounding neighborhood,” he conceded. “I know it can work; really do. But the devil will be in the details.”
In the final analysis, the council resolved that the city’s planning commission should also have an opportunity to weigh in on the project’s particulars. To this end, its members voted 5-to-0 to send the request back to this appointed advisory board for further review.
