For three decades, hundreds of thousands of hikers, bikers, dog walkers, and other outdoor enthusiasts have enjoyed the hilly, densely wooded, nine-mile network of trails at Lake Crabtree County Park that sits on 330 acres between Interstate 40 and Lake Crabtree, in Morrisville.
Local governments, including Wake County, formed partnerships and poured millions of dollars over the years into building the artificial lake and the park, as well as its trails, picnic shelters, roads, trailhead facility, and municipal greenways that link to it.
Local recreational leagues hold races and mountain biking and trail running events. Youth sports and college groups use the trails to train. The planned-for Triangle Bikeway will run right alongside the park.
“It’s decades of public time and investment, long-range planning and many public dollars that have gone into making this place truly special,” says Dave Anderson, a board member of the all-volunteer nonprofit Triangle Off-Road Cyclists (TORC), one of the groups that has partnered with the county to maintain and enhance the park’s trails. “Nothing compares to how accessible and effective this land is.”
But, this year, the $1-per-year lease between the park’s owner, the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority, and Wake County that has been in place since the 1980s is up. The Airport Authority has plans to develop 136 acres of the park because, it says, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is requiring it to make money off of the leased land.
The plan is part of Vision 2040, the airport’s long-term master plan that was approved in 2017.
But this part of the plan, critics say, is short-sighted.
“That would be the wasted opportunity here, a one-way, irreversible loss of three-quarters of forest,” Anderson says.
The Airport Authority hasn’t said much about what changes at the FAA are driving its plans to develop the park. Public documents shed some light on what it wants to see on the property: “a unique and innovative entertainment destination” that could include restaurants, hotels, shopping, and recreational facilities, similar to any number of mixed-use commercial centers that already dot the Triangle’s landscape.
The Airport Authority says it wants to develop “in a manner consistent and appropriate with the natural surroundings of the site,” and ensure that recreational users are “considered” in the development.
To Anderson and other TORC leaders, this sounds like lip service.
“That statement alone is defeated by what they’re doing,” says Matthew Gronke, TORC’s treasurer. “It might be nice for the remaining little bit of acres, but they’re taking out all of the dense forest to do that, and all that’s going to be left is the little bit at the edge of the lake.”
Anderson and Gronke say the airport developing the park in order to lease it won’t generate the capital it needs to meet its long-term goals which include replacing runways and taxiways, expanding terminals, improving ground transportation, implementing various improvement projects, and supporting the airport’s growth. Instead, they say, the Airport Authority should look at bigger-picture ways to monetize the land it owns nearby.
The park, they say, should be preserved for community use.
“If we could wave a magic wand here, the land would be owned by the [Wake County] parks department,” Gronke says. “Then you wouldn’t always have this [situation where] the lease is going to come up hanging over their heads.”
The RDU Airport Authority is holding a public meeting on Wednesday in the RDU Center at 1000 Trade Drive at 5 p.m. where members of the public can share their thoughts on what they want for the future of the property. The public can also submit comments online.
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