Duke tries to assuage Central Campus plan concerns

DURHAM -- To quell concerns about the Duke University Central Campus development robbing the homegrown businesses on Ninth Street of customers, Provost Peter Lange told merchants and neighborhood advocates Wednesday that officials might be willing to limit the retail space in the project.

The verbal commitment was made at a meeting in Asbury United Methodist Church where Duke officials gave an update on their plans for the 128-acre parcel between the Gothic-style West Campus and Georgian-style East campus that will be transformed into student housing, academic buildings, campus eateries, performance halls and shops.

Duke hopes to persuade city and county officials to put the property under university and college zoning regulations rather than the residential zoning rules that govern its use now.

But neighborhood advocates have persuaded city officials to stall consideration of the proposal until the university submits more details of how the property will be used for the next three decades.

Frank Duke, the city and county planning director, told Duke officials Wednesday that the Durham City Council decided earlier in the day that if the details were not submitted by the first Tuesday in October, consideration of the plan would be delayed again.

At the meeting Wednesday, Lange told the couple of dozen people gathered in the church fellowship hall that the university did not plan to build a bookstore on Central Campus during the first phase that would offer as wide a selection as The Regulator, an independent bookstore on Ninth Street. The university plans to sell textbooks and computers there, Lange said, adding that the function of the store would be to sell Duke souvenirs.

"There will be nothing more than an airport-style bookstore," Lange said.

Neighborhood advocates, who have spent nearly three years trying to persuade Duke officials to develop a plan that enhances the city, wanted more certainty than the verbal commitments.

Tom Miller, a state worker who grew up in Durham, asked the university to subject itself to the same rules with which others in the city must comply. Since the 1920s when Durham was divided into land-use zones, property owners had to live within the regulations governing the projects or apply for changes that were subject to community scrutiny and approval of city officials.

"The rest of Durham lives within a zoned world where we live within limits of scale," Miller said. "We're essentially inviting Duke to participate in the same land-use regulatory process that the rest of us have."

Lange agreed to try to reach a middle ground about retail limits, suggesting that Duke and the city work together on new bus routes that would make it more convenient for students to leave campus for the nearby shops and restaurants.

Although the thorniest topic has been about a written commitment to retail limits, John Schelp and other neighborhood advocates also have concerns about environmental issues, building height limits and parking.

The Central Campus master plan is vague, in part, Lange said, because it is a three-phase plan that could take 40 years to complete.