RALEIGH—In early December, officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unveiled their plans for “Carolina North,” a satellite research campus on the university-owned Horace Williams tract off Airport Road in Chapel Hill.
The plan calls for developing 240 acres of a 963-acre tract, which is about 1 1/2 miles north of the main campus, as a satellite campus. UNC-CH officials envision Carolina North to comprise a mixture of corporate and university research, as well as shops and homes. In some respects it would be similar to the Centennial Campus of N.C. State University, but on a smaller scale (the Centennial Campus comprises 1,334 acres). Unique to the UNC-CH research park design, however, are the homes and shops.
When completed, UNC-CH officials anticipate, the project will have 13,000 to 18,000 employees working in about six million square feet of research and office space, and also have an estimated 1,800 homes. The estimated cost for infrastructure is about $100 million.
The plan calls for seven phases of development, which would take a half-century to complete. The first phase, which would require an estimated five to seven years to complete, would develop a mix of the anticipated uses of Carolina North. This phase would build 700,000 square feet in offices and research laboratories, 300,000 square feet in residential space, and 70,000 square feet in space for retail on the eastern side of the property. It would also develop a “quad” near the entrance of the tract in order to project a “university campus” atmosphere as well as visually tie the satellite campus in with the main campus. The quad will be patterned similarly to the one on the main campus, McCorkle Place.
The adding of laboratory, office, home, and retail space would continue in the next six phases of development. Parking lots and vehicle access points by building or extending roads would be added.
The plan hinges upon the closing of the Horace Williams Airport. At present, North Carolina legislators have mandated that the airport cannot close before Jan. 1, 2005 — a mandate that came in response to an earlier attempt by UNC-CH Chancellor James Moeser to close the airport. (The airport’s landing strip is visible in the two pictures accompanying this article.)
Another issue facing the university is the cleanup of an abandoned municipal landfill that takes up 35 acres on the property, as well as an old chemical waste dump, which occupies about one-fourth acre).
Financing could become a significant hurdle for Carolina North. Doug Firstenberg, a consultant with Stonebridge Associates Inc., told The News & Observer of Raleigh Dec. 3 that according to his economic model for the project, infrastructure alone would cost nearly $100 million (present value). This includes “streets, water and sewer systems, sidewalks, and other transportation corridors.”
The plan is presently still in draft format, UNC-CH officials point out. After drawing Chapel Hill residents’ ire with earlier campus development plans (an August proposal to build a parking deck and chiller plant near the town’s Gimghoul Historic District was especially controversial), university officials have sought to be more open to residents in presenting its plans as a way to allay concerns about university growth at their expense.
Residents’ concerns appear to center around traffic. The prospect of several thousand new workers and nearly 20,000 new parking spaces has Chapel Hill residents worried about a glut of traffic and accompanying social ills of more dangerous streets and noisier neighborhoods.
Especially worrisome to them is the proposed new north-south corridor to connect Carolina North to Homestead Road and the Weaver Dairy Road Extension. UNC-CH planners say the road is necessary to provide an alternative entry into the satellite campus, other than Airport Road. Residents also worry about the prospect of cut-through traffic through neighborhood streets between the two main roads.
Another traffic concern is that through the building of many thousands of parking spaces and roads, UNC-CH will not do enough to encourage use of mass transit and alternative means of travel, such as walking or biking, at Carolina North.
Some Chapel Hill residents also are concerned about the project’s environmental impact. Carolina North planners have designed around watershed areas and other environmentally sensitive zones. Also the plan calls for the completed project to occupy only about one-fourth of the land. But UNC-CH officials will not permanently ban development on any of the remaining property, which has some residents worried.
In a separate land acquisition, an agreement between the university and a recently elected Chapel Hill Town Council member had some residents suspicious of a potential sweetheart deal. The university had been acquiring properties around Cameron Avenue in order to build a parking lot and a transfer station. It had not acquired one property, however, that being a house owned by council member-elect Cam Hill. To acquire Hill’s property, the university agreed to trade a house on 412 E. Rosemary Street plus $100,000 for Hill’s house on Cameron Ave.
The university could not sell the Rosemary Street house, because it could not keep the proceeds from a sale. The agreement was reached in August while Hill was seeking election.
The deal appeared too convenient to many in Chapel Hill, leading Hill to hold a press conference in which he said he had spoken about the agreement many times during his campaign but neither his opponents nor the media pressed him for details. The Daily Tar Heel of Nov. 25 quoted Hill as saying “I, in no way, at any time, tried to hide this deal from anyone. I gave people plenty to nibble on or bit on to ask this question.”
Jon Sanders is assistant editor of Carolina Journal.