After nearly a year of behind-the-scenes negotiations, a proposed “land swap” between Alamance County and a Greensboro-based developer is scheduled to go before the county’s governing board later this month.
The county’s board of commissioners is slated to take up this prospective deal on August 18 so that Koury Corporation of Greensboro can absorb 1.66-acres of county-owned land into a mixed-use development that’s already taking shape in Mebane between South Third Street and Trollingwood-Hawfields Road.
In exchange for this now-vacant parcel, the Koury Corporation will hand over some 2.58 acres that it has acquired off of NC 119 in order to accommodate a new EMS station that the county’s administrators had originally planned to set up at the South Third Street location.
This somewhat roundabout transaction is the end result of months of back-and-forth between the county’s administrators and the Koury Corporation, which needed the county’s acreage on South Third Street in order to build a state-mandated access road into its project.
The developer’s tentative deal with the county first came to light in December when the Koury Corporation presented a rezoning request to Mebane’s city council that included the county-owned parcel as part of the overall footprint for its 83-acre project. An attorney for the Greensboro-based company assured the council’s members that his client had the county’s land “under contract,” and he alluded to another parcel off of NC 119 that he said the county would receive in compensation for the South Third Street site.
See earlier story here: https://alamancenews.com/investigative-report-county-mgr-gave-koury-corp-authority-to-represent-county-owned-parcel-in-its-rezoning-but-she-says-company-didnt-request-what-county-had-intended/
The attorney’s assurances were enough to persuade a majority of Mebane’s city council to approve a “conditional” zoning request that stipulated the county’s property would serve as a secondary entrance into the residential component of the mixed-use development. Subsequent inquiries from The Alamance News revealed that Koury Corporation didn’t actually have the county’s land under contract, although it did have the county manager’s permission to seek a new zoning designation for the parcel.
The Alamance News went on to obtain email communications through a public records request that showed the Koury Corporation had originally approached the county about the South Third Street property in September of 2024. The county had obtained this lot just over a year earlier in a $300,000 deal with the local rescue unit. At the time, the county’s administrators had envisioned this property as a potential site for a new ambulance base that would serve the county’s easternmost reaches.
County officials later told The Alamance News that they had soured on this location by the time the Koury Corporation made its overtures for the South Third Street property. They were also intrigued by the developer’s offer to line up an alternate site for the EMS station – which the Koury Corporation proposed to obtain from a third property owner with nearly 49 acres of land near the juncture of NC 119 and Smith Drive.
Progress on this proposed land swap proceeded at a glacial pace after the Koury Corporation’s success with Mebane’s city council. In fact, the deal was still in limbo two months later when the developer secured a commitment from Target to become one of the new project’s commercial tenants. Nor was there any
discernible movement this spring as contractors began work on the new access road that was supposed to join Third Street on the grounds of the county-owned parcel.
Last month, Alamance County’s administrators told The Alamance News that a finalized version of the land swap agreement should be ready for the commissioners in a matter of weeks. This long-promised document was finally released to the public on Tuesday in anticipation of a vote by the county’s governing board at its next regularly-scheduled meeting on August 18.
Under this prospective agreement, the county will hand over its 1.658 acres along South Third Street in exchange for a 2.58-acre swath of a larger 48.77 parcel at the intersection of Smith Drive and NC 119. The agreement also requires the Koury Corporation to have the second site zoned for a new EMS station and complete a 30-foot-wide entrance off of Smith Drive “prior to or simultaneously” with the property’s conveyance.
According to the proposed agreement, the board of commissioners will have to determine that the value of this property, together with mandated improvements, “constitutes full and fair consideration for the county’s property” along South Third Street. The text of the agreement doesn’t include the figures that the commissioners will presumably use to make this determination. Even so, the county has issued a formal notice about the proposed deal includes the assessed tax values of both parcels.
According to this notice, the county’s tax office has placed a value of $66,975 on the 1.658 acres which the Alamance County Rescue Unit had sold to the county for $300,000. Meanwhile, it puts a figure of $756,140 on the entire 48.77-acre tract off of NC 119 but offers no estimate for the 2.58 acres that would actually be transferred to the county.
