Reporting live from City Council:
This has got to be a first. Bailey Patrick, the dean of local developers’ lobbyists, just got up and urged the City Council to vote against his own rezoning petition.
It’s a rezoning proposal from Crescent Resources, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, which wanted to change its plans, approved in 2005, for the Piedmont Town Center development near SouthPark. They wanted to change approvals for retail and office space into residential space.
The planning staff opposed it. Neighbors opposed it and signed a protest petition against it which means it would need a super-majority vote from the City Council.
The proposal would have wiped out a stand of immense old trees. During the 2004 rezoning — after some publicity from yours truly — the developer agreed to leave a large wooded buffer, giving the trees a reprieve. I visited those trees — immense white oaks along a small stream. The new development would have cut them all down to form a retention pond along the creek.
The real crime here is that it would have been perfectly legal. If you think the city’s tree ordinance protects trees, may I suggest you probably also believe that the U.S. found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.
It appears Crescent decided to cut its losses. Council member Andy Dulin, generally a good friend to developers, made a motion to deny the petition even before the public hearing opened. Which would have been illegal. “I gotta have a public hearing,” Mayor Pat McCrory reminded him.
At which point Bailey Patrick got up and urged the council to reject the rezoning. His client, Crescent, would have withdrawn it, he said, but because the protest petition wasn’t withdrawn it couldn’t legally do that.
Surely it was a first. I happened to be sitting next to 23-year Keith MacVean — who has, as the joke goes, gone to the dark side and now works for developers (one of his new clients made that joke so I figure it’s OK) — who couldn’t remember it happening before.
He also confirmed that the rejection by council means the developer can’t come back with another proposal for two years — unless it seeks a more intense zoning, such as UMUD.
At 9:27 p.m., after hearing a negative recommendation from the zoning committee of the planning commission, which met quickly after the regular council meeting, the council did as Patrick asked — they voted down the rezoning.