Lake Norman apartments will worsen traffic, neighbors say. ‘Stop the over-development!’
Neighbors along the Brawley School Road peninsula on Lake Norman this week blasted a developer’s planned apartments and commercial space as too massive for their quiet, wooded setting.
New York-based URS Capital Partners has submitted plans to the town of Mooresville for a 180-unit multifamily building and roughly 5,000 square feet of commercial property in a community called Cypress Point, town spokeswoman Megan Suber told The Charlotte Observer.
The development would be on 10 acres at the northeastern corner of Blume and Brawley School roads. Plans include a pool, amenity center and dog-run area, according to documents the developer filed with the Mooresville Planning Department.
URS Capital Partners is a New York-based real estate investment firm with $750 million worth of multifamily projects along the East Coast, according to its website, URS Capital Partners.com.
”Crazy traffic”
Opponents concerned about traffic and over-development packed the Mooresville Board of Commissioners meeting Monday night.
“I’m here to ask you to stop the over development on Brawley School Road,” resident Virginia Manzari told the board.
She moved with her husband to the peninsula a few years ago from Princeton Junction, New Jersey, where she served on her community’s zoning board and president of her township council.
“Seeing all of the development that’s popped up in the last three years that I’ve lived here, I can tell you, you’re making the same mistakes that the state of New Jersey has and is making,” Manzari said. “Things that our town in New Jersey fought tooth-and-nail to prevent. Except you don’t seem to be fighting it. You seem to be encouraging it.
“Over development is ruining New Jersey, and it’s going to ruin Mooresville as well, if you continue on this path.”
She rarely leaves her home in the late afternoon, “because I know I’ll be stuck in crazy traffic. Some mornings, it has taken 45 minutes to go less than three miles to Walgreens.”
Dr. Michelle Stowe cited concerns over evacuating the peninsula if an incident occurred at McGuire Nuclear Station on the southern tip of the lake in Huntersville. “Brawley School Road is getting very overcrowded,” she said.
Residents spoke at a rezoning hearing that town planners requested to correct “several inconsistencies” on seven parcels across town, including the 10-acre site at Blume and Brawley School roads, Suber told the Observer.
The inconsistencies stemmed from mapping errors made during yearly zoning map updates “and, most recently, the adoption of the new Unified Development Ordinance and Zoning Map in February 2022,” Suber said in an email.
The hearing was not held to consider approving the development, she said.
“The correction in zoning will allow this long-standing project to move forward in the development process to staff review,” Suber said.
No one from URS Capital Partners spoke at the hearing. Company officials didn’t respond to a request for comment from the Observer on Wednesday.
The project is unrelated to the 21-acre River Rock Easy Living at Blume Road community that commissioners approved in December 2022, Suber said in response to questions from the Observer
Commissioners unanimously approved the rezonings Monday night.
‘I feel your pain’
“We have to legally fix this,” commissioner Lisa Qualls said and “begrudgingly” made the motion to approve the rezonings. “Otherwise, we can pay an attorney that will have to defend all the maps that have to be changed. So we can pay the attorney now or pay them later.”
That prompted an uproar from the crowd. Mayor Miles Atkins had to bang a gavel five times to quiet the room.
“It’s a correction we have to do,” commissioner Thurman Houston said.
He said he grew up on McKendree Road off Brawley School Road and road horses to where Lake Norman was being built. McKendree was a dirt road back then, he said.
“And I probably hunted where you live today,” he told the crowd. “So I don’t know where the traffic came from. So y’all can tell me about it.”
“This is by right,” he said of the corrected rezonings, meaning the zonings for each property had been approved years ago. “I don’t see what else we can do. I feel your pain. I just don’t know where all the traffic came from.”
This story was originally published September 20, 2023 at 3:14 PM.