Wake agrees to lease 151 acres from RDU airport for public mountain biking park
Wake County took a big step this week toward creating a public off-road cycling area next to William B. Umstead State Park.
County commissioners voted Monday to lease 151 forested acres from Raleigh-Durham International Airport for a decade. If the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority approves the lease next month, the county would put in a gravel parking lot, composting toilets and a shelter, and rebuild a network of trails already on the property.
The airport would receive nearly $5.3 million in lease payments over 10 years. Cary and Morrisville have agreed to kick in $350,000 a year, with the remaining $1.8 million coming from the county.
The deal includes no mention of $360,000 that the Wake Stone Corp. agreed to pay annually toward the county’s lease as part of its agreement with RDU to quarry stone on airport land across the road. Several commissioners objected to an earlier version of the lease that would have required the county to cover those payments if the company doesn’t get a mining permit and stops paying.
Now if Wake Stone is forced to abandoned the quarry project, the county would not have to make up the difference, said Emily Lucas, deputy county manager.
Commissioners voted 5-1 to approve the lease. Vicki Adamson raised several questions about the project, including whether the county was paying too much, and urged her colleagues to delay a vote until the county completes a new appraisal of the property.
“It feels like we’re ahead of ourselves if we are doing this before we have our own appraisal,” she said.
But other commissioners noted that the county’s 2018 appraisal of the property set a good benchmark and that the proposed lease had been thoroughly studied and negotiated. Board chair Sig Hutchinson, the driving force behind the park idea, was presiding over his final meeting and said he wanted to get it done.
“This process has been going on for five years,” Hutchinson said. “I think collectively the community is ready for a solution. I’m definitely ready for a solution.”
Commissioners take a stand on proposed fence
RDU acquired the wooded land along Old Reedy Creek Road in the 1970s as part of an unrealized plan to build a new runway. It put the land, known as the “286 property,” up for lease in 2017 to generate income for airport projects. It received one offer, from the county.
To Hutchinson and others, the land is ideal for off-road cycling, because it lies at the confluence of greenway trails and near Umstead and the network of bike trails at Lake Crabtree County Park. The land is already laced with mountain biking trails that cyclists have blazed over the years without the airport’s permission.
RDU has said it would build a fence along its property to keep cyclists from using the trails. Critics said the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire was an unnecessary eyesore that would prevent wildlife from moving freely.
Monday, commissioners said a condition of leasing the 286 property is that no fence be erected between it and the rest of the airport property. Instead, a creek will define the boundary between the two.
In addition to the lease payments, the county would spend an estimated $3 million getting the land ready for public use, including bringing the trails up to professional standards. The county estimates it would cost another $3.3 million to run the cycling park over a decade.
Value of airport’s land questioned
Commissioner Susan Evans eventually voted for the deal but said she worried about spending so much money on leased property.
“At the end of this lease, we don’t own anything,” Evans said. “And we invest in infrastructure. There’s just some piece of me that’s just not as comfortable with this whole scenario as I’d like to be.”
Adamson previously questioned the airport’s appraised value of the property at more than $15 million, too high, she said, for land the Federal Aviation Administration would not allow to be sold or developed for a non-aeronautical use. Former county commissioner Erv Portman picked up that theme Monday.
“The airport claims the lease is a fair market value,” Portman said. “But on closer review we see it’s neither fair nor market value but predicated on selling the land for single-family homes, a use that both the airport and the authority clearly know is inappropriate and not allowed by the FAA.”
But commissioner Matt Calabria steered his colleagues toward the cost to the county, after the contributions from Cary and Morrisville are taken into account. At $176,000 a year, the county would pay less than $100 an acre per month, Calabria said.
“I would be very skeptical that anyone could find a better per-acre cost than $97.13 per acre,” he said.
The county and RDU will go through similar negotiations for Lake Crabtree County Park, which includes 181 acres of airport land. The county pays the airport $1 a year for that property but expects to pay considerably more when the lease comes up for renewal in 2025.
This story was originally published November 22, 2022 at 11:43 AM with the headline "Wake agrees to lease 151 acres from RDU airport for public mountain biking park."
