Green Level’s town council has unanimously rejected a contentious rezoning request that could’ve paved the way for a flea market along a dead-end road on the outskirts of the town’s municipal limits.
The council ultimately voted 5-to-0 against this request after a lengthy public hearing on Thursday that drew nearly 90 people to the town’s municipal building.
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The impetus for this unusually large turnout was an application that Chris Proffit had submitted in June to obtain permission for highway business use on a 24-acre parcel along Stonewall Springs Road – a dead-end byway in the town’s extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Proffit’s request would’ve technically opened the door to a broad range of activities that the town allows in a neighborhood business district. The applicant had nevertheless been forthcoming about his plans to set up flea market at this location in order to help fill a niche left by the recent closure of an 84-acre bazaar that had operated for decades along Buckhorn Road on Mebane’s eastern periphery.
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Proffit had subsequently been at some pains to downplay the connection between his proposed flea market and the erstwhile operation along Buckhorn Road. Yet, the prospect of a similar market outside of Green Level would become both a ray of hope for Buckhorn Road’s displaced vendors as well as a source of anxiety for many neighbors of the site along Stonewall Springs Road.
The two groups initially squared off before Green Level’s planning board in August, and they returned to the town’s municipal building last week to hear the planning board’s members vote 3-to-2 against the rezoning request. Both sides were, consequently, eager to put their best case forward when Proffit’s proposal reached Green Level’s town council on Thursday.
A total of 27 people went on to address the council that evening – with 15 of them speaking up in favor of the rezoning request.
The vast majority of the proposal’s supporters were vendors from the defunct Buckhorn Road flea market, which had been especially popular with the Hispanic community before Mebane’s city council rezoned its longtime home for a new trucking depot. The refugees from Buckhorn Road pleaded with town council to let them relocate their shop stalls to Stonewall Springs Road.
“Many vendors like me survive only by selling at the flea market,” Yessica Cortez declared during the hearing.
“We’re good people,” added fellow vendor Enrique Beltran, who addressed the council through an interpreter. “We don’t want to make any problems; we just want to work with everybody’s permission.”
The council also heard from the applicant and members of his family, including Arlon Proffit, who had been the manager of the Buckhorn flea market before its demise. Meanwhile, Charity Proffit, the applicant’s wife, assured the council that she and her husband would continue to live next to the flea market’s proposed site to guarantee that it wouldn’t become a blight on the neighborhood.
“We’re trying to do things right,” she insisted. “We live here. The owners of Buckhorn didn’t even live in the state…This is our market. This is coming from us…We want to look over it.”
These entreaties from the flea market’s backers were countered by another dozen speakers who leaned on the council to turn down the rezoning request.
The proposal’s detractors included several neighboring residents, who complained that the proposed site along Stonewall Springs Road is ill-suited for a retail operation even a fraction of the size of the one on Buckhorn Road.
“The proposed location can’t support what is required for highway business zoning,” argued Kelly Bollinger, who lives near Stonewall Springs Road’s intersection with Sandy Cross Road. “The property in question is in the middle of homes and families and the proposed use of a flea market is absurd.”
The council also heard from some longtime residents of Green Level, proper. Fay Pinnix, for one, objected that the historically black municipality has become something of a dumping ground for projects that other communities don’t want.
“Mebane got rid of Buckhorn Road after 40 years,” she told the council, “and I find it interesting that anything that Mebane, Burlington, Graham, Saxapahaw doesn’t want comes Green Level’s way.”
Meanwhile, the town’s former mayor, Algene Tarpley, recalled the fracas that had accompanied the municipality’s decision to create an extraterritorial jurisdiction nearly two decades ago.
“I told several people ‘You now know why we have an ETJ; it is necessary to protect property,” Tarpley added. “Now, is your chance as a council to protect property.”
After more than an hour of public comments, the council was ready to close the books on the controversy over the proposed flea market.
With no questions and only a modicum of discussion, its members voted on three separate motions that declared the rezoning request to be out of step with the town’s growth strategies, deemed it inconsistent with adjacent zoning as well as the town’s land use plan, and finally denied the request.
Each of the three motions passed by a margin of 5-to-0.
Read earlier coverage: https://alamancenews.com/displaced-buckhorn-flea-market-eyeing-green-level/
