gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM — City Council members voiced confidence Wednesday that they have the Rolling Hills project on the right track, despite qualms on the Durham Planning Commission that came close this week to sinking the project’s financing.
The Planning Commission’s narrow, 6-5 vote Tuesday night to declare the Rolling Hills and Southside neighborhoods blighted cleared the way for the city to draft a formal redevelopment plan for the area to qualify the project for low-income housing tax credits.
One of the project’s backers, Councilman Howard Clement, signaled Wednesday that he’s inclined to pocket the victory and move on.
“I have no qualms with it,” Clement said when asked about the narrowness of the vote. “It’s timely, and it will facilitate the process of transforming that area. I really appreciate what was done.”
Other council members, however, said they were mystified that some commission members questioned whether the neighborhood is blighted and criticized the city’s outreach to affected residents.
Mayor Bill Bell watched the latter stages of the meeting on television Tuesday night. He didn’t mince words the next morning.
“If anyone has taken the time to go through that neighborhood and not determine it to be blighted, I just don’t understand it,” Bell said. “That’s what amazed me. If they don’t consider that to be blighted, I’m not so sure what they would consider to be blighted.”
“For them to say we didn’t give notice to the neighborhood is plain old BS,” added Councilman Eugene Brown. “We bent over backwards to make sure the neighbors were alerted to [a November design workshop].”
The narrow vote came even after Planning Commission members received clear notice Tuesday that the Rolling Hills project is receiving close supervision from elected officials and City Manager Tom Bonfield.
Community Development Department Assistant Director Larry Jarvis told them up front it’s become “the priority” for the council, Bell and Bonfield.
But commission members also heard a project opponent, Denise Hester, describe the city government’s handling of it as “reckless.” Officials are working quickly to hit a spring application deadline for the tax credits.
Even among members who supported the blight designation, there were qualms about the city’s outreach effort.
The low turnout at November’s weeklong workshop should have been “a signal” that more needs to be done to involve residents in the discussion, city delegate Barbara Beechwood said.
“I am concerned about process,” she said. “You have to figure out how to do better. It’s very tough. But you have to keep at it until you meet the residents where they are.”
Other members were bothered by the absence from the meeting of supporters of the project — particularly members of the steering committee the council established to monitor the work and officials at a local bank, the Self-Help credit union, that’s involved in the project.
One also said the meeting suffered for the absence of staff from the city attorney’s office. Members had questions about the legal issues surrounding the blight designation and couldn’t get answers except from Jarvis, who is not a lawyer.
Advice from an attorney “would have been a huge help for me last night, and I think for some of the other commissioners too,” said county delegate Jackie Brown, who like Beechwood voted for the blight designation. “It wasn’t an easy decision without legal advice being there.”
The Planning Commission had decision authority over the blight designation, but will only have an advisory role when the redevelopment plan is ready for review in a couple of months.
Nonetheless, “I hope to see proponents for the redevelopment of Southside and [Rolling Hills] there to testify on its behalf,” city delegate and commission Chairman Don Moffitt said.
Among the members who voted against the blight label, there were at least a few complaints on policy grounds.
City delegate Harry Monds indicated he’s not sold on the redevelopment’s planned heavy dose of rental units because one of the neighborhood’s problems is a shortage of owner-occupants. He also called the city’s process “horrible.”
But the Planning Commission’s apparent willingness to give weight to the views of Denise Hester and her husband, Larry, former would-be developers of the Rolling Hills site, didn’t please council members.
The Hesters have been on the outs with elected officials since a nonprofit they controlled defaulted on an $860,000 loan from the city in the late 1990s.
“I don’t think [commission members] understand the sordid history of the role the Hesters played in the demise and the failure of Rolling Hills,” Eugene Brown said.
The votes against the blight designation came mostly from commission members based in Durham’s suburbs. One, county delegate Linda Smith, lives in Rougemont, little more than half a mile from the county’s northern border.
Clement said the Hesters are “entitled to their views,” but he reiterated what he said three years ago during the debate on another project in the area, that “the issue here is one of who’s going to be in control” of what happens in the Hayti district.
He left no doubt that he doesn’t think his colleagues should allow the Hesters, who own two shopping centers on nearby Fayetteville Street, to wield a veto.
“The city, the city manager’s office and the council, we need to maintain control of what’s going on in that area,” Clement said. “That’s all I’m going to support.”
