Chatham Park developers want to run road through neighborhood
Residents are pushing back on plans for a major road in the Chatham Park development after learning it could take land from their much smaller neighborhood and leave some neighbors cut off.
They don’t think developer Chatham Park Investors and the N.C. Department of Transportation will stop there, said North Woods neighbors, who called the planned North Chatham Park Way a “land grab” by developers who have enough land for their road.
They launched a campaign to oppose the plan — Save North Woods Neighborhood — and will speak about it at Monday’s Pittsboro Board of Commissioners meeting.
“We know we’re surrounded, but now they want to come through us,” resident Diana Dalsimer said. “Once they start cutting through us, and that’s the plan with this North Chatham Park Way, I just feel like this is the beginning of them carving us up.”
The 7,500-acre Chatham Park development is expected to add more than 60,000 residents to Pittsboro over the next 25 years, along with up to 22 million square feet of retail, restaurants, medical offices and other businesses.
Roughly 4,200 people now live in the town.
Still pending is the development agreement for Chatham Park and the North Village Small Area Plan — a development guide for 2,224 acres of Chatham Park between U.S. 15-501, U.S. 64 and the Haw River. The small area plan refines the details laid out in Chatham Park’s 2015 planned development district master plan and could be reviewed in the next few months.
North Village is one of five villages planned for Chatham Park and has 11 sections, each of which will require the town to also approve site and subdivision plans, as well as individual permits. Part of the North Village is open or under construction, including homes, the Penguin Place retail center and the Mosaic mixed-use neighborhood.
The hole in Chatham Park
The North Woods neighborhood is a hole in the doughnut that will be North Village. Its 17 homes and small farms sit on five- to 10-acre, wooded lots on three gravel and dirt roads.
Ducka Kelly’s view from her Russet Run Road home sweeps across open pastures, scattered homes and the towering, old-growth forest that lies between them and the Haw River. Mosaic rises on the crest of a nearby hill — a reminder that Chatham Park is coming.
Most of her neighbors are older adults and empty-nesters, who enjoy exploring the land around them and hosting family and friends for visits, birthday parties and get-togethers, neighbors said. Deer, foxes, rabbits, tree frogs, snapping turtles and a variety of birds are common sights, more so as Chatham Park displaces the wildlife, they said.
“We respect each other’s privacy, but we’re all there for each other in a moment’s notice if anybody needs help with anything,” said Kelly, a 22-year resident and retired vet tech with five acres, three horses and a dog.
Kelly has attended most of the town meetings for Chatham Park, knows the plan, and didn’t think much about it when she saw NCDOT survey crews in her neighborhood last year. In December, neighbors got a letter about the proposed parkway.
”It just really does not feel good at all,” Kelly said.
“These types of neighborhoods, I feel like are just disappearing more and more with development, and I think that’s more of a reason they need to be preserved and respected, not taken over,” she said.
Road cuts through neighborhood
The 2.7-mile North Chatham Park Way will be one of two major roads in a network of neighborhood streets, serving over 7,500 households and 11 million square feet of non-residential space. In the future. It will form part of a bypass around downtown Pittsboro.
Eubanks Road will serve homes slated for land closer to the Haw River and intersect with North Chatham Park Way near North Woods.
A four-lane North Chatham Park Way with a median and a 10-foot multiuse path will run from the U.S. 64 Bypass to Grant Drive, a new east-west road south of North Woods. At that point, the parkway would narrow to two lanes with a median before cutting through the neighborhood’s eastern edge and curving northeast, towards U.S. 15-501 and Russell Chapel Church Road.
Three North Woods landowners at the end of Country Routt Brown Road would be cut off from their neighbors, with only right-in, right-out access to the parkway, an NCDOT map shows. Three more neighbors would lose some of their land.
Country Routt Brown Road would dead-end at the parkway.
Chatham Park developers are working with NCDOT and town staff to plan the road and still need town approvals, as well as water quality permits from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The state denied the project’s water quality permit last year because the application didn’t include several key documents. It was resubmitted in September and open for public comment through Feb. 7 via email at North-Chatham-Park-Way@publicinput.com or on the Chatham Park Way website.
Chatham Park developers Tim Smith and Julian “Bubba” Rawl were not available to comment. Their office referred questions to a project engineer and NCDOT.
Pittsboro Mayor Jim Nass said he needs more information from Chatham Park and NCDOT about alternatives and the effect they could have compared with the current plan. There are going to be impacts somewhere, he said.
“That’s always an issue: what is the best benefit to the general public, to the public good and the citizens,” Nass said. “The board will be discussing that issue very soon.”
NCDOT spokesman Aaron Moody said he was unaware of any future plans to change the parkway’s path, but noted a full intersection with Country Routt Brown Road was removed in December, so that Chatham Park traffic would not travel through the neighborhood.
Moving the parkway onto Chatham Park’s land at this point would require the developers to revise their development plans, Moody said.
Shifting plans, questions
The parkway didn’t always cut so far to the west. Between 2011 and 2015, town and Chatham Park maps showed the parkway running closer to the development’s land along the neighborhood boundary.
Since 2016, however, officials have drafted six options, each with different effects on roughly two dozen streams and watersheds in the North Village, Moody said. The plans also avoid an 1800s-era cemetery near U.S. 64 Bypass.
Eubanks Road, which previously intersected the parkway south of North Woods, underwent the biggest change. A third road, Charlie Brooks Extension, which ran closer to the river, west of Eubanks Road, and crossed multiple creeks and streams, now is a loop near U.S. 64 Bypass.
The parkway was moved about a quarter-mile west into North Woods, and a smaller, residential street was added just to the east on Chatham Park property. The parkway still crosses the same three creeks draining to the river as before but in different places.
Mark Pavao, whose land is bisected by the parkway, said he thinks the realignment made it easier for Chatham Park developers to serve nearly 50 acres they bought north of the neighborhood in 2015 and another 179 acres south of the neighborhood in 2016.
He’s also wary of a stub-out for a future Eubanks Road Extension that’s shown entering his back yard on the latest NCDOT plan. NCDOT “anticipates removing the western stub-out” based on preliminary service road study results, Moody said.
Pavao emphasized that taking land from private homeowners should be the last resort.
“It looks very much like once they completed the land purchases they wanted to complete, they redesigned the road in partnership with DOT, and now to complete that road, they need to take land from private landowners instead of Chatham Park land, which doesn’t seem fair to me,” he said.
Dalsimer agreed. She can see the land Chatham Park bought in 2016 from her kitchen window and knows the high-density housing planned for that land will change the landscape, she said, but she never thought she would see a highway in her neighborhood.
“They have been tooting their horn about how they want to cooperate and they’re just in tune with building with the environment, so this is a test for them right here,” she said. “They need to do the right thing.”
This story was originally published February 5, 2021 at 2:41 PM.
