It comes with the territory for someone who served as planning director for the City of Charlotte during some of its most explosive growth.
“Sometimes, if the government wants to rezone something, they just rezone it,” says Fields, who now is a consultant who helps guide his clients through the municipal planning maze.
But occasionally, government comes up against a well-heeled, attentive property owner, and simply wanting to rezone that property isn’t good enough.
It’s a lesson the Town of Davidson appears to be learning in its drawn-out deliberations over the potential rezoning of a 178-acre tract along N.C. 73, referred to as Davidson East.
Earlier plans for the site approved by the town board called for a mixed-use development of retail stores, homes and offices. But developer Frank Jacobus abandoned the project, and lender CommunityOne, an Asheboro-based bank, foreclosed on the property in December 2009.
While the recession played into the project’s demise, the economy also led the town to consider ways to diversify a tax base now dominated by residential taxpayers by luring more corporate and industrial resources to the area.
The best way to do that, town leaders reasoned, was to have sites ready for companies looking to relocate.
Davidson East — far removed from the town’s center and strategically located between interstates 77 and 85 — seemed like a perfect candidate. All that was left to do was to rezone the property.
Or, in Fields’ words, it was time for the Town of Davidson to do what the Town of Davidson wanted to do. Trouble is, what the town wanted and what Fields’ client, CommunityOne, wanted were two very different things.
The bank was stunned late last year when it received a letter announcing that the town was beginning discussions on how to rezone the property. And when those discussions concluded with the town’s preference that Davidson East be turned into an “employment campus,” CommunityOne’s representatives were flummoxed.
By the town’s own estimate, roughly 30 percent of the property cannot be developed due to its topography which, along with market factors tied to the slumping economy, made a largely commercial use unattractive to CommunityOne.
Then there was the “vacuum development” factor. For nearly a year, the town pushed ahead with its plans to rezone Davidson East without addressing the broader future of the entire N.C. 73 corridor — a point raised repeatedly at Tuesday night’s Davidson Town Board meeting by Commissioner Brian Jenest.
Commissioner Laurie Venzon also questioned the limited scope of Davidson East.
“Can a large employment campus cause a problem for the development of the N.C. 73 corridor?” she asked.
“It depends,” Town Planner Laura Blackburn replied.
But Fields noted after the meeting that if myopia was an issue for the town before, it’s coming around now.
“Only in the last couple months would the town step back and take a more expansive view,” Fields says. “And when they stepped back and looked at the big picture, it’s not just about (the zoning of) this piece of property.”
That broader perspective, Fields says, has made a difference.
“We heard a different tone tonight from the town,” Fields said after Tuesday’s town board meeting, “because of the work we’ve put into the process.”
What looks more likely now is zoning that will offer some flexibility while encouraging a mix of multi-family and single-family residential, commercial and retail, while maintaining aesthetic standards along the road fronts.
Or, as Fields puts it in his own blunt way:
“Why not have a chance of succeeding?”
Why not, indeed?
