Chapel Hill has a new site for future police HQ, fire station, parks & rec offices
Chapel Hill officials hope a busy corner near Interstate 40 resolves the long search for a site to build new police and fire stations and give other town services more space.
Some neighbors of the site at 101 Weaver Dairy Road Extension — now home to Fire Station 4 — are concerned it’s the wrong fit for the intersection of two major traffic corridors surrounded by homes and apartments.
Several turned out Tuesday for a Community Design Commission review of the town’s concept plan to voice their concerns and ask questions. A concept plan is a rough draft of what might be proposed for the site and is not an official application.
Assistant Town Manager Mary Jane Nirdlinger said the application for a conditional-use zoning permit could be submitted later this year. That would trigger additional public hearings and reviews by the town’s advisory boards and the Town Council.
Although roughly half of the four-acre site at Weaver Dairy Road Extension and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is buildable, the plan is to preserve as much of the land as possible around a stream, said project official Eric Schoenagel, with Little Architects.
The proposal is a three- to four-story building near the corner that includes about 80,000 square feet of space with a public plaza and a two-level, connected parking deck to the west. The parking deck could have up to 250 parking spaces, Nirdlinger said.
The entrance for fire trucks would remain roughly where it is today, as would a public driveway off Weaver Dairy Road Extension. A new driveway for police vehicles would be built between Weaver Dairy Road Extension and MLK Boulevard.
Redeveloping the site could create space for the police and fire departments, as well as an Orange County EMS ambulance crew, parks and recreation, and technology services, Nirdlinger said. It’s also an opportunity to reduce the concrete footprint on the land and restore part of the buffer around a Booker Creek tributary that cuts across the western portion of the site, she said.
Police, fire, parks, EMS
Fire Station 4 was built in 1981 and includes a fire training center and four-story burn tower. The concept plan replaces part of that training area with a stormwater pond. A new training center has been built to the north on Millhouse Road.
The Police Department also was built in the 1980s, and like the fire station, was poorly designed, has aging plumbing and ventilation, and is too small to meet the town’s needs, officials have said. The town also is planning what to do with an old coal ash dump at the 828 MLK Jr. Blvd. police headquarters.
The size and functions of the new police department will depend on the future recommendations of the town’s Task Force to Reimagine Community Safety, Nirdlinger said in an email Wednesday.
It would serve administrative staff and officers and include a secure “sally port” where officers can make minor car repairs or process suspects before taking them to the magistrate in Hillsborough. It would not have a jail or holding cells, Nirdlinger said.
“For now, we are planning on moving our daily operations to the new site but it is possible that other recommendations may influence the number of employees we have and where we position our police staff,” Nirdlinger said.
The project team acknowledged that a traffic study will be important, because the intersection can be dangerous for drivers, pedestrians and bikes. A bus-rapid transit stop planned for MLK Jr. Boulevard could be constructed beside the new building.
Other major issues with the new site include stormwater, lights and noise, since the site slopes steeply down to a Booker Creek tributary on the western portion of the land and backs up to surrounding homes.
Several residents shared concerns Tuesday about the potential harm on homes and pedestrians from light and noise pollution, traffic and quality of life, especially in fall and winter when leaves fall from the surrounding trees.
“What we’re talking about is creating a parking lot for a building so that there are 250 spaces backing up to 26 houses. It seems like something of that size, it would be very difficult or even impossible to make it possible so that it does not impact the neighborhood in a negative way,” Adam Silverstein said.
Better pedestrian, plaza amenities
Community Design Commission members also had concerns and a few suggestions for the town, including a different orientation for the public plaza shown at the rear of the building.
“There could be a nice public plaza, and it should be on the corner, and then have the mass … of the building define that space,” Commissioner Ted Hoskins said. “What you’re doing here seems a little backwards to me.”
Commission Chair Susana Dancy offered a different view, saying the plan anchors the corner, blocks noise from passing traffic and makes the plaza “a more pleasant place for people to be.”
“I think that a well-designed building is a significant opportunity,” she said. “I do think that given the southbound BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) stop at the site that there is an opportunity to make a significant entrance, perhaps not at the corner, or maybe at the corner, but definitely close to where the BRT stop is.”
The North-South bus-rapid transit project is an 8.2-mile transit line that could provide more frequent, reliable service by using traffic signal priority and exclusive lanes for much of its expected route on N.C. 86 from Eubanks Road to UNC’s campus to Southern Village. The Federal Transit Administration is expected to pay for roughly 80% of the $140 million construction cost.
Commissioners also encouraged the town to design a building that would serve as a gateway presence for the town’s northern border. Commissioner Susan Lyons suggested looking at the public parking decks in downtown Blowing Rock to see what’s possible.
“There’s something about the subtlety of them that is quite wonderful,” Lyons said. “I think this is a site that deserves subtlety in terms of not overwhelming (the site) and making it interesting.”
The parking also could go under the building, Commissioner Chris Berndt said.
“If the parking and the building were integrated more, we could have much more green space and alleviate a lot of the neighbors’ concerns about the parking,” she said.
UNC, mall negotiations failed
The town has considered at least a dozen sites for the new police department and municipal center over the last several years. In 2016, the town started negotiating with UNC and residents for a municipal campus on university land along Estes Drive Extension.
That deal fell apart in 2019 when UNC wanted to swap the Estes Drive site for the Wallace Parking Deck or the Columbia/Rosemary parking lot downtown, instead of leasing the Estes Drive site to the town.
Town officials said at the time they were not interested in that deal. The town started pursuing a land swap instead with developer Grubb Properties, which bought the CVS building and parking deck downtown.
The Town Council could vote Sept. 30 to swap the Wallace deck for the CVS deck, and start the ball rolling on construction of a new, larger town parking deck. UNC has expressed interest in contributing to construction and maintenance costs in return for 100 spaces.
The town also started negotiating last year with Ram Realty, which is planning a major mixed-use redevelopment of University Place mall on South Estes Drive. But that site didn’t work out, in part because the town wouldn’t own that site, Nirdlinger said Tuesday.
She noted that none of the sites that the town has considered have been perfect, but the Weaver Dairy-MLK site, although it is not centrally located, is on both east-west and north-south transportation corridors with easy access by car or bus.
“I feel like we’ve looked at every piece of property in town at this point,” Nirdlinger said. The centrality of this site “was something that we spent a lot of time working on, and there are a lot of places we looked at that just didn’t fit because they didn’t have the access.”
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 5:50 AM.
