gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM — Neighborhood activists want administrators and the City Council to push the state to modify a nearly completed plan to return Ellerbe Creek to something closer to its natural state as it passes through Northgate Park.
The request, made last Thursday, came from the Northgate Park Neighborhood Association.
Northgate leaders believe the city surrendered control of too much of the park in an April 2008 deal with the N.C. Ecosystem Enhancement Program that cleared the way for the state to spend $915,000 to attempt a so-called “stream restoration” project on the site.
They’re asking for a partial rollback of those concessions. “I want you to support us and bargain hard for us,” one of the group’s leaders, Page McCullough, told council members Thursday.
The 2008 deal gave the state easements that have allowed it to set up 50-foot wide protected corridors on each side of the creek. The plan is to plant roughly 5,000 trees, shrubs and other types of vegetation in the buffers, and then leave them alone.
The goal, according to a 2006 consultants’ report commissioned by the state, is to undo some of the damage the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did to the creek when it straightened it in the 1960s.
The corps’ work left the creek more “a man-made drainage canal than a natural stream,” the state’s consultants said.
Now, the idea is to use catch basins and plantings to prevent erosion, improve the stream’s ability to handle floods and filter pollutants. Ellerbe Creek drains much of central Durham and runs east and north into Falls Lake, the city of Raleigh’s only source of drinking water.
Key to the plan, according to the 2006 report, is a set of plantings that replaces the existing “park grasses and herbaceous vegetation” with something more typical of bottomland forest that can filter out nutrients and organic matter, “improve wildlife habitat [and] provide shade for the stream channel.”
But that’s exactly what Northgate Park leaders now say they don’t want.
Such plantings, they say, will isolate the west side of the park from the view of residents living to the east along Acadia Street, creating in the process havens for drug dealers and other criminals.
In addition, the buffers and a trio of associated catch basins the state’s already installed have reduced the amount of the land available in the under-renovation park for soccer and other activities, they say.
Northgate leaders acknowledge that their crime worries are partly the result of a recent series of break-ins in their area. Police have caught the ringleaders of the group responsible for those, but the problem hasn’t fully abated.
Residents want the plan modified with shorter plantings that will preserve existing sightlines. Without that, “we will have no eyes on the street and it will be a nightmare for us as far as crime prevention,” said Cheryl Shiflett, who lives on West Club Boulevard on the park’s southern end.
Some also worry about the neighborhood’s long-term appeal to new residents.
“When I sell or try to attract people to Northgate Park, the two issues I’ve been able to brag about is that Northgate Park is safe and has an attractive park,” said Nancy Rizzo, a real estate agent who lives nearby. “We’re jeopardizing both. People will not be attracted if they feel it’s not their park.”
The problem, however, is that the easement deal gives the city very little say over what the state does.
Though it’s possible to request amendments, state officials will usually only consider small changes, said Paul Wiebke, acting manager of the city Public Works Department’s stormwater services division.
With a signed deal in hand and money already invested in the project, they’re not likely to consider anything more than a 1- to 5-foot move of easement boundaries, he warned.
But “five feet is not going to do it,” McCullough said.
Administrators promised to relay the neighbors’ worries to the state, which is poised to install the plantings next month.
“We’ll try to help them to understand that as long as they want to do urban [stream] restoration projects, they’re going to have to blend in other considerations,” Deputy City Manager Ted Voorhees said.
The attempt, however, could set up the city government for another round of criticism from area environmentalists who’ve accused it of seeking to water down protections for Falls Lake and the Triangle’s other big regional reservoir, Jordan Lake.
