INC NEWS - Duke rezoning: underlying issues are straightforward & can be addressed (today's Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

"The underlying issues are straightforward and can be
addressed," in most cases with fairly simple
solutions.
--Planning Commission chair Don Moffitt (Herald-Sun)

"I believe many of these could be converted to
committed elements." 
--Durham Planning Director Frank Duke


Dispute may hold up Duke rezoning
By Ray Gronberg, Herald-Sun, 16 August 2006

The Durham Planning Commission's chairman is prodding
Duke University to address 12 issues that a coalition
of merchants and neighbors want dealt with before the
City Council rezones Central Campus. 

On Monday, commission Chairman Don Moffitt e-mailed
George Stanziale, a local landscape architect who's
helping shepherd Duke's application through the review
process, to point out that the university has only one
more chance to convince the board to endorse the
application. 

The commission twice has delayed hearings on the
proposal and now has no choice but to make a
recommendation to the City Council in October. 

Moffitt told Stanziale that while the
neighbor/merchant coalition's initial attempt to spell
out its 12 concerns may have been poorly worded, "the
underlying issues are straightforward and can be
addressed," in most cases with fairly simple
solutions. 

In an interview, Moffitt said he sent the e-mail to
push Duke and the coalition to sit down and work out a
common position, instead of leaving it to his board to
wade through lingering disagreements. 

"It's very vital that the parties all get together,
air their issues and see if they can come to a
consensus," Moffitt said. "It'll be a train wreck if
we're trying to sort through it in a Planning
Commission meeting. I'm saying, 'Please don't dump
this in our laps, come [to the meeting] with
solutions.'" 

Moffitt's e-mail went out a day after Duke officials
announced, also by e-mail, that they'd scheduled a
Sept. 6 community meeting to discuss the Central
Campus redevelopment plan. The public meeting will be
at 6:30 p.m. in the fellowship hall of Asbury United
Methodist Church, 806 Clarendon St. 

The Sept. 6 session will be the fourth Duke has held
with neighbors, and will give Provost Peter Lange and
other administrators a chance to go over the rezoning
application and "bring everybody up to speed on the
substantive issues" the university is coping with as
it refines the Central Campus plan, Duke spokesman
John Burness said. 

On a separate track, the leaders of the
merchant/neighbor coalition, John Schelp and Tom
Miller, are trying to schedule a private meeting with
Lange to discuss the rezoning. Miller said Tuesday
that the two sides may meet next week, and that he's
"feeling fairly confident" that they'll "work this
out." 

It appears likely that on Sept. 6, Duke administrators
"will roll out at that meeting some adjustments" to
what they've shown the public before, crafted to
answer comments from their on-campus constituencies,
Miller said. 

The Planning Commission's delays have occurred at the
coalition's request. Schelp and others say they want
to nail down some details Duke has shown community
members in earlier meetings but omitted from the
largely blank development plan it filed with its
rezoning application. 

Their 12 concerns address things such as the presence
of commercial enterprises on campus, building-height
limits, the placement and mix of residential
development on the eastern part of the 128-acre
parcel, open-space set-asides and the preservation of
the remains of what was once an expansive mill
village. 

The trouble they've run into is that their first
attempt to spell out what they want, issued late last
month, didn't come close to being precise enough for
Duke and the Planning Commission to make the 12 points
binding conditions of the rezoning. 

City/County Planning Director Frank Duke has critiqued
the list twice, but he's also told the Planning
Commission that the coalition's concerns can be
accommodated. 

"I believe many of these could be converted to
committed elements," he told members last week. "It's
just that additional work needs to be done." 

The planning director e-mailed his second critique,
more detailed than his first, to Burness and Schelp
early this month. It covered a host of technical
points and raised policy objections to the coalition's
suggestions for preserving the remains of the mill
village. On that issue, he said the buffers the
coalition wants for the remaining mill houses "are
completely out of character with [the university's]
urban setting," and added that the houses aren't
listed on Durham's inventory of historic properties. 

Schelp circulated at least one e-mail voicing the fear
that university officials were trying to "wait things
out" by delaying any discussion of possible conditions
until the Planning Commission is ready to vote. But on
Tuesday, he said Moffitt's e-mail and other prodding
directed the school's way is changing the situation. 

Miller said he's optimistic because coalition members
and university leaders already have one success on
their record, a prior rezoning of East and West
campuses that's similar to what Duke University is now
requesting for Central Campus. 

"We've done this before," he said. "I don't have any
sense on the part of any of the parties or players
that we won't get it right, or that there's any kind
of difficulty in working it out."