Mayor recalls when university objected to the then-existing elementary school in the same area of town
Elon University didn’t see much of a homecourt advantage this week when it presented the leaders of its eponymous hometown with a rezoning request for a new elementary school within its campus.
Elon’s town council ultimately put the university’s representatives through their paces over this specialty school for dyslexic students, which opened earlier this fall in a temporary, off-campus location.
Dubbed Roberts Academy after its primary donors, this private school presently serves just 17 students within the decommissioned residence hall that functions as its provisional digs. Over the long-term, however, the university plans to construct a stately new home for the academy that will accommodate up to 144 pupils along East Haggard Avenue.
In order to make good on these plans, the university has asked the town’s leaders to rezone 13.42 acres that it recently purchased in bits and pieces off of this thoroughfare. This property, which had been home to several single-family dwellings, is currently zoned for urban residential development – although parts of it also lie within two overlay districts – one that’s designated a flood hazard zone and the other which the council has created to promote high-density housing.
Elon University has asked the town to replace the underlying urban residential district with one that has been tailormade for university-related uses. It has also sought the removal of the high-density overlay, which presently covers about 7 acres of the 13.42-acre site, while agreeing to leave the flood hazard overlay where it now lies.
The university’s rezoning request hasn’t gone over well with town planner Isabell Cooper, who advised the town council to reject the proposal when it came up for a public hearing on Tuesday.
Cooper pointed out that the university’s request is out of kilter with the town’s “comprehensive plan” for future land use. She also argued that the reduction of the high-density overlay would pare back the area where the town encourages multifamily housing.
“The HDO district is a zoning overlay district intended to concentrate multifamily and mixed-use development near the university and downtown to support population growth and encourage economic development,” Cooper went on to inform the council. “The requested rezoning will remove approximately 6.7 acres from the HDO zoning district and reduce the total acreage of the HDO zoning district to 90.47 acres.”
Cooper conceded that, in spite of her own opposition to this request, the town’s planning board voted 5-to-1 to recommend the proposal to the town council. She added that the only dissenter was Jim Beasley who shared the planning staff’s concern about the reduction of the overlay high-density district.
The council heard a contrary position from Preston Mitchell, a land planner with Womble Bond Dickinson who has handled this rezoning request on the university’s behalf. Mitchell assured the council that the expansion of multifamily housing ultimately has more to do with the desires of property owners than any form of overlay zoning that the town may have in its rulebook.
“In the end,” he continued, “the market decides how many additional apartment units this area can absorb…In this case, those [previous property] owners chose to sell to the university for university purposes…and if this request is denied, the result won’t be more high density housing…but a committed school project that’s lost.”
Although the university’s rezoning request is entirely silent about the details of this “committed” project, Mitchell unfurled a “non-binding” site plan that he said would the council rough idea of what his client plans to do with the property. This sketch depicted a single school building next to an open lawn with a “structured play area” along with a larger “paved play” area, a “mulch trail,” and a “learning lab.” The drawing also featured 60 parking spaces and a meandering network of driveways within the bounds of the site.
“There are two access points,” the land planner added as summed up the site plan, “and every vehicle queues on the site.”
The council also heard from Patrick Noltemeyer, the university’s chief of staff, about the need for land use plans to remain “nimble” both at the university and at Elon’s town hall.
“These plans are built to be living documents,” he added, “because of opportunities that come along which you could never imagine.”
Meanwhile, Ann Bullock, the dean of Elon’s Jo Watts Williams School of Education, presented some additional information on Roberts Academy, which comes under her school’s aegis.
“We are the only university-based school of this kind in North Carolina,” Bullock went on to explain, “and the town of Elon has the opportunity to be a town that’s known for dyslexia education across the state.”
This triple punch from the university’s representatives nevertheless lost some of its clout when Elon’s Mayor Emily Sharpe spoke up to recall another elementary school that once stood along East Haggard Avenue.
Sharpe reminded everyone in attendance that, in 2017, Elon University published an article which raised safety concerns about the elementary school’s geographic situation off of this thoroughfare. She added that this article put pressure on the Alamance-Burlington school system to relocate the school with the university’s help. Sharpe went on to recall that the university was adamant at the time that the school’s location along this bustling thoroughfare presented a safety hazard both to the elementary school’s students and those at the university.
“I have a real issue with that,” the mayor went on to object. “We’re being asked to look at a project that does something which was such a safety concern that the university spent between $18 and $20 million to relocate the problem.”
In response to the mayor’s recollection, Mitchell tried to emphasize the distinctions between a garden-variety public elementary school and a private academy with a comparatively small student body.
“We would stand by the arguments that appeared in [the 2017] article for a conventional elementary school,” he added. “But applying those arguments to Roberts Academy is comparing apples to oranges.”
Sharpe’s reflections about Elon Elementary School weren’t the only hard-hitting remarks that the university’s representatives heard from the council.
Monti Allison, Elon’s mayor pro tem, also observed that the university’s acquisition of land along East Haggard Drive has removed taxable property from the municipality’s tax rolls. Meanwhile, other members of the council pointed to alternate university-owned parcels that could accommodate Roberts Academy and suggested that the university’s representatives seem to take the town’s rezoning approval for granted.
In the end, the council closed Tuesday’s public hearing without any clear consensus about the university’s rezoning request. Its members nevertheless promised to render a final decision when they convene their next meeting on October 26.
