A few residents of the Cheswick subdivision off Hodge Road went back and forth with the representatives from the team behind a proposed neighboring development at the Town Council meeting here on April 20.
Cheswick residents have been showing up to council and other town meetings to oppose the planned Stone River subdivision directly to the west of Cheswick for almost a year.
The same developer, Arcaterra Land LLC, and home builder, Terramor Homes, that built Cheswick plan to build Stone River, a cause of some of the Cheswick residents’ complaints. Some Cheswick residents said the developer and home builder would not give them straight answers about what would be going next to Cheswick when they bought their homes.
Arcaterra would have to get part of the property rezoned from GR8 to GR8 planned residential development, allowing for master planning designed to encourage creativity and innovation as well as community amenities and compatibility with surrounding land uses and neighborhood character.
The property also includes zoning of urban residential (UR12) and open space preserve (OSP). Those zonings would not change.
The council voted unanimously to consider the rezoning request at its May 2 meeting.
As the vote was held, Councilor Dustin Tripp urged the councilors to visit Cheswick and the Stone River site to see the drainage issues that many of the residents complained about.
“On Monday night I had to take my garbage out, and I had to put on duck boots to take my garbage out,” Sybil Ide said. She said her Cheswick house first flooded on Christmas Eve when she had lived there less than a month.
Terramor CEO Pablo Reiter said the land on which they plan to build Stone River actually slopes down from Cheswick, with the Neuse River bounding the property to the west, so that water would run off from Cheswick to Stone River.
But Christine Bailey read a letter listing drainage and other problems residents anticipate, among them increased traffic, noise and dust from blasting and the effects of the mass grading Reiter has said is necessary to pull the project off.
Reiter tried to answer the project’s critics, but some of the Cheswick residents groaned occasionally as he spoke.
Michael Blake, who serves on the town Land Use Review Board, which last week unanimously voted to recommend passage of the rezoning to the council, said he could see the reasons for the opposition to mass grading for the project, but that at the site, there are enough steep slopes to make it necessary.
“I understand the drainage concerns. I definitely get that,” Blake said. “But where it came to us is from a rezoning standpoint.”
The public hearing took more than an hour.
Matt Goad: 919-829-4826
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