By Ray Gronberg
gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- A single vote attributed to an absent Durham Planning Commission member was all that stood Tuesday between city officials and the failure of a key element of the financing of the proposed Rolling Hills project.
Commission members voted 6-5 to formally declare 125 acres of the Rolling Hills and Southside neighbors blighted. The label is the first step toward drafting a redevelopment plan for the area that regulators from the N.C. Housing Finance Agency will want to see before approving low-income housing tax credits for the project.
The vote turned on the ballot of city delegate Jarrod Edens, who left the meeting early to deal with a family emergency. He specifically declined to ask colleagues for an excused absence, a move that under the commission's rules assured he would be counted as a yes to any vote occurring Tuesday following his departure.
Members specified that when it comes to them and the City Council, the redevelopment plan for the Rolling Hills area should include language ruling out any use of eminent domain there by the city to acquire owner-occupied homes.
Eminent domain is a power state law allows for redevelopment in blighted areas. City officials have said they don't intend to go that route, but neighboring shopping center owners Larry and Denise Hester have played up the possibility to stir opposition to the project.
The Planning Commission in recent years has been more receptive than the City Council to arguments from the Hesters, whom elected officials blame for failure of a previous redevelopment effort at Rolling Hills.
Commission members who voted for the designation made it clear Tuesday they don't like the way city officials are handling the project in their efforts to hit a spring application deadline for the tax credits.
One such member, county delegate Wendy Jacobs, said she thought officials hadn't done enough to get residents to attend a weeklong design workshop for the project in November.
"I see the value in coming up with a redevelopment plan, but I would caution it needs to be handled very differently than what seems to have been done so far," Jacobs said. "There are a lot of things that need to be considered here."
Planning Commission votes are normally advisory, but state law gives the board the power of decision over blight rulings.
The votes against the designation came mostly from Jacobs' fellow county delegates -- George Brine, Fredrick Davis II, Linda Smith and Ted Womack. City appointee Harry Monds also voted against it.
By law, an area can't be considered blighted unless two thirds of the buildings in it are in poor shape.
Consultants hired by the city counted 319 homes in the area and found that only five looked to be free from "obvious building deficiencies. Almost 86 percent needed major repairs of some sort.
But Smith said that after driving around the neighborhood, she wasn't convinced of the survey's accuracy. She said she saw a lot of ongoing repair work. "I have a hard time believing that this number of houses is in fact deficient," she said.
Other members said the neighborhood's problems are real.
"I do not believe we can redevelop this area dealing with a one-sie or two-sie approach," said city delegate Jarvis Martin, a real estate appraiser who's worked in the neighborhood. "Nobody with any real money is going to come into this area unless they know there's a solid redevelopment plan, where we'll get some major impact that will help the Hesters and others in this area."
Denise Hester also told commission members that "blight is subjective" and the definitions city officials and their consultants were using would apply to most of the neighborhoods people here grew up in.
She also said the city's being "reckless" in proceeding with the project without more study, and complained that she and her husband had been excluded from being members of the steering committee appointed to supervise the work.
The Hesters have been on the outs with elected officials since the late 1990s, when a nonprofit they controlled defaulted on an $860,000 city development loan for Rolling Hills.
But the Planning Commission was sympathetic three years ago when the couple objected to another project, the proposed redevelopment of the Heritage Square Shopping Center, slated for a site adjacent to the Hesters' shopping center. They delayed a necessary rezoning for a while, and cast a split vote recommending approval, which the council eventually granted.
Brine was among the members who sided with the Hesters on that occasion.
