[Durham INC] DRAFT March Minutes

Fri Mar 27 06:50:59 EDT 2015

Please let me know about any additions or corrections.  Regards, pat

March Delegate
Meeting of the InterNeighborhood Council of Durham

NIS Conference
Room, Golden Belt

March 24, 2015

Attending the meeting were:

Neighborhoods

Cross Counties – Pat Carstensen

Downing Creek – Dick Ford

Duke Park – Bill Anderson

Falconbridge – Paula Clarke

Golden Belt – DeDreana Freeman

Long Meadow – Pakis Bessias

Morehead Hill – Paul Cornsweet, Rochelle Araujo

Northgate Park – Mike Shiflett

Old Farm – David Harris

Old North Durham – Peter Katz, John Martin

Stage Stop – Dolly Fehrenbacher

Trinity Park – Philip Azar

Tuscaloosa-Lakewood – Susan Sewell 

Woodcroft – Scott Carter, Jose Sandoval

Visitors 

John Killeen – City of Durham, NIS

Jim Wise – News and Observer 

Will Wilson – DOST 

Don Moffitt – City Council

Marissa Mortiboy – Durham County Department of Public Health

Jim Svara

Kevin Davis

President Phil Azar opened the meeting and went over changes
to the agenda.  Members introduced
themselves.  

Bill Anderson moved to approve the January minutes (the
February meeting was cancelled due to weather), Susan Sewell seconded and delegates
voted to do this.  

Marissa Mortiboy of the Durham County Department of Public Health gave
an update on the 2014 health assessment survey and on efforts to encourage
healthy physical activity.  Since
almost 20% (1/5th) of Durham’s population is expected to be Hispanic
by 2020, the health assessment made an effort to focus on what is happening in
this part of the community and found that they are more likely to be poor and
have less access to health care; for example, while about 10% of the general
community said they sometimes or always cut the size of their meals because of
lack of money, 24% of Hispanics did so. 
Some things the department is doing about healthy physical activity to
address the obesity epidemic with its related diseases are:

·      Healthy Aisle at
Los Primos – They put healthy food in the impulse-buy areas.

·      Bull City Play
Streets – The grant has ended, but we will still be closing some streets to
create a fun and festive place to play for a while.

·      Healthy Mile
Trails – They mark a loop along neighborhood sidewalks and reduce barriers such
as brush reaching into the walking space. 
They have done 3, would like to do at least 2 more, and will work with
neighborhoods to lay these routes out.

·      Health/fitness
website – Track your accomplishments, organize neighborhood challenges, get fun
ideas at http://www.ahealthiernc.com/durhamcounty

Reports

·     
Zoning
and Development (cell towers) – The cell tower amendment to the UDO went to
the Planning Commission, which supported INC’s recommendation that Rural
Residential areas in the suburban tier be treated like other residential
areas.   A lot of work has
gone into this amendment, so thanks to all who helped.

·     
Zoning
and Development (legislative) – A lot of bad news is coming out of the
General Assembly this spring (Someone said that it’s sort of a bad zombie
movie, with all kinds of scary, dead things coming back).  The repeal of the right to a protest
petition was pretty much approved by the House (there is a “third reading”
still to go), so we now need to work on the Senate.  INC has previously voted to support protest petitions, so no
resolution is needed now on the subject. 
Billboards are coming back (HB 218?).  Reserving routes for future roads may get harder.  There could be a massive shift of sales
tax revenues away from urban counties. Finally, INC is considering a resolution
on “3rd party requests for a re-zoning” (See Appendix A), but
neighborhoods weren’t ready to vote and the proposed legislation the resolution
was addressing may have been dropped, so we will vote in April on the
resolution, if it is still needed.    

·     
Hero
Awards and other recognitions – The Hero Awards Event was very well done,
thanks to the many people (and The Pit) who made the event happen.  Bill Anderson moved and John Martin
seconded that we recognize the service of the Fire Marshall Jeff Batten; this
motion carried and Phil Azar signed the certificate of appreciation.    

·     
Communications
– How to improve the website needs more thinking so Pakis Bessias asked for a committee to work
on this; Debra Hawkins and Rebecca Broad were suggested as members.  David Harris mentioned that the
nextdoor app (https://nextdoor.com) is a
useful tool for neighborhood communications.  INC can’t endorse such tools, but someone could post to the
list-serve about their experiences. 
Neighborhood communications might be a good topic for a session at a
Neighborhood Summit.

·     
A new
committee on minilots – There are lots downtown that are too small in some
dimension (e.g. less the 50 feet of frontage) to build on, some with large
liens against them.  They once had
small homes.  A committee of Bill
Anderson, Will Wilson, Pete Katz, Kevin Davis and anyone else who wants to join
will work on this.  

New Business

As planners for the proposed light rail system have
negotiated with the railroad, the eastern-most stop has shifted west, which is
the wrong direction for serving the activity centers of East Durham.  See Appendix B for The Northeast Central
Durham Leadership Council’s resolution, which could be the basis for an INC
resolution.  

Neighborhood Reports

·     
Downing Creek and other neighborhoods in SW
Durham County are concerned that a proposed light rail route along NC54 would
have at-grade crossing with trains every 15-minutes across the routes out of
their neighborhoods.

·     
Susan Sewell reported that their neighborhood
was notified of a meeting in 2 weeks to look at improvements in Business
15-501.

·     
There was a charette on Monday about $12-21M to
reconfigure the Downtown Loop.

·     
It’s Creek Week, and the West Durham Hike is
Saturday.

·     
The Northgate Park Foodtruck Rodeo is this
Thursday, featuring new vendors.

Appendix A: A Resolution by the InterNeighborhood Council of Durham
Concerning Equal Access to the Legislative Zoning Process 

WHEREAS, the North Carolina Bar
Association intends to seek legislation during the 2015 session of the North
Carolina General Assembly comprehensively rewriting the statutes on city and
county zoning; and 

WHEREAS, contained within the Bar
Association’s draft bill are provisions which would take away the rights of
citizens who are not owners of property to be rezoned to apply to city and
county governments to rezone land on an equal footing with property owners;
and  

WHEREAS, the power to regulate land use
is an exercise of the government’s police power and is valid only if it
promotes the public health, safety, and welfare, and the zoning governing a
particular parcel belongs to the public and is not the property of the
landowner; and 

WHEREAS, the rezoning process is a
legislative function of local government to which every citizen should have
equal access;  

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the
InterNeighborhood Council of Durham through its delegates assembled that
Interneighborhood Council opposes the legislation sought by the North Carolina
Bar Association insofar as it proposes to limit the ability of all citizens to
participate in the legislative zoning process on an equal footing without
regard to land ownership and calls upon the City and County of Durham and the
Durham’ legislative delegation to also oppose such legislation. 

This ____ day of _______________,
2015. 

THE INTERNEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL OF
DURHAM 

By:
________________________________________ 

Philip Azar, 

President 

Additional Background
Information from Tom Miller

The NC Bar
Association is working on a comprehensive rewrite of city and county zoning
statutes.  The draft bill is currently 160 pages long. Although it is
supposed to be mostly clean up and reorganization, it contains a revolutionary
provision about what it labels “third party rezonings.”  It’s about who
can file for a rezoning.   Under the law as it is today and has been
since the beginning in 1923, anyone can file an application to rezone any piece
of property.  You do not have to own anything.  This is because
zoning is an exercise of the government’s police power – the power to regulate
for public health safety and welfare.  Zoning is a public right, not a
property right.  Rezoning is a public legislative process.  Everyone
has an equal right to participate.  If the law is changed in the way the
NC Bar Association proposes, only the city and landowners would be able to file
for a rezoning.  People who don’t own the land in question would not have
a right to apply to have it rezoned.  They would have to ask someone who
had the right to apply to do it for them – the landowner or the city.

Here is an
example:  Today, I can apply to the City of Durham to rezone the RU-5(2)
property on Edith Street around the corner from me to RU-5.  Even though I
do not own the land, I can apply to rezone it the same way a developer would do
it.  I can pay the fee, fill out the forms, and submit the maps and
attachments required.  If I do this, even though I do not own any of the
land, the city must send the case to the planning commission for a public
hearing.  After that, the city must receive the advice of the planning
commission and then the city council must hold its own hearing and then it must
decide the case.  The council has no discretion to not consider the
application.  If the NCBA bill passes as it is written, I will not be able
to do this. To rezone the land, I would have to ask the landowner to apply to
have it rezoned and, if that didn’t work, I would have to ask the city council
to initiate the rezoning.  They could refuse my request.  They could
even refuse to consider my request.  I would have no right to compel a public
hearing or a vote.  If the city council granted my request to initiate the
rezoning I requested, they could modify it without consulting me.  It
would be theirs.  They could even change their minds and withdraw the
rezoning case half-way through.   If they kept the case on track, the
thing would then go through the hearing process as described above, but the
city would be the applicant, not me.  They would not have to involve or
consult me at all about how the thing was handled. 

Neighbors do
not often initiate rezonings of land they do not own, but it does happen. 
In the 1980s and 1990s, my neighborhood association applied to rezone huge
swaths of land in Watts-Hillandale from multifamily, commercial, and office
zones back to single family.  The land was developed already as
single-family houses, but as the houses aged, developers had begun to buy them
up and get the property rezoned to more intense uses.  The idea was to use
rezoning to raise the property values for resale.  When the properties began
to attract the attention of motel and office developers, the neighborhood
association applied to the city to rezone the property back to single family
use.  It was a huge fight and the landowners all filed protest petitions,
but the neighborhood made its case and won the rezoning cases with only one
dissenting council vote.  The ironic thing is that the zone changes turned
a severely declining older neighborhood of small houses into one of the city’s
more popular neighborhoods.  Watts-Hillandale didn’t invent the idea –
Trinity Park had done the same thing a few years before us and the TPA leaders
who were so helpful to us when we were organizing, suggested the idea to us.

Zoning was not
created to annoy property owners by restricting development on their
land.  It was created to protect the investment neighboring property
owners make in their land.  The zoning on your property protects your
neighbors from the crazy things you might do if there were no zoning.  The
zoning on your neighbors’ property is there to protect you in similar
fashion.  Neighbors are the primary stakeholders in the whole idea of
zoning, not property owners.  The Bar Association bill would make zoning a
cozy arrangement between developers and the city. If it passes, a landowner would
still be able to compel the city to consider his rezoning request, but
neighbors would only be able to ask the landowner or the city to start the
process – a request would could be ignored or refused.  It would reduce
neighbors to Oliver Twists asking for more gruel. It would reduce neighbors to
second-class citizens.  The gruel is ours.  We shouldn’t have to ask
for it.

Appendix B: Resolution
Regarding the Alston Street Light Rail Station Site 

The Northeast Central Durham Leadership Council has given
careful attention to the recent announcement by the Triangle Transit Authority
to move the Alston transit station one quarter mile west on Pettigrew to a
location near Grant Street.  East Durham is not
well served by this change, and we call for TTA to identify a site east of
Alston Avenue. 

TTA made presentations to our organization and other
organizations and groups in Northeast Durham about the plans for station
locations in the light rail system, and we are distressed that TTA did not
request our input or inform us of the possible change in the station site
before making this new recommendation to a meeting of the Durham City Council
and County Commission on January 13, 2015.  To be true to the statements
from TTA about how light rail would serve East Durham, we think it is essential
that they continue to look for ways to place the station in a location east of
Alston Avenue. 

The NECD Leadership Council opposes the Grant Street
location for the following reasons: 

•     The Grant
Street location will not serve the heart of northeast Durham as well as a site
east of Alston Avenue.   

•     The Grant station site would be three-quarter miles rather than one-half mile from Driver
Street which is a focus of economic revitalization efforts by the neighborhood
and the city. 

•     The Grant
station is less convenient for pedestrians using the Bryant
Bridge who would have to walk an additional quarter mile to reach the Grant
Street location.    

•     The Grant station site would be three-quarter mile rather than one-half mile from
MacDougald Terrace.   

•     The Grant station is would be less than a half mile from the Dillard/Fayetteville Station and
that station would serve many of the same residential areas that would be
served by the Grant Street location.  

•     The new location would reduce the likelihood of
placing the light rail Operations and Maintenance Facility in East Durham and
eliminate the possibility that light rail could ever be extended to a new station that would directly service Driver
Street, Briggs Avenue, and Durham Technical Community College.1  The light rail system
should be planned now in a way that keeps open the possibility of extension in
the future. 

Fundamentally, the level of
light rail service promised to East Durham would not be provided and possible
future enhancements would be eliminated by the using the Grant Street station
site.     

TTA has announced that the
Alston station cannot be at its exact original site north of the water tower on
Pettigrew, but that does not mean that pulling the line farther back from East
Durham is the only or best option.  TTA has realigned the light rail with
only slight shifts in the location of other stations in the latest version of
the plan.  They should make the same effort to keep the station east of Alston
by moving the line outside the railroad right of way.  The light rail line
could be moved closer to NC147 with its own bridge over Alston Street at Gann
Street and a station placed close to the Bryant Street bridge.  We call
for a balanced assessment of the pros and cons of this and other potentially
feasible alternative sites east of Alston for the current eastern terminal
station in the light rail system.        

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