Following a debate over a longstanding dispute at the Apex Town Council meeting Thursday evening, town leaders still haven’t found a good solution to what they’ve considered to be a significant problem in recent years: an Apex resident operating a for-profit parking lot in a residential area near Apex Friendship High School.
Outgoing town council member Brett Gant proposed a way for the council to try and move on from the issue before a new council is seated next year, but his colleagues voted against his idea.
The council is back where it started, with the issue likely dragging into 2026 beyond.
Since 2015, Annie Scott has offered her property, a residential area on Humie Olive Road located across the street from the high school, to students who need parking spaces. Scott charges $300 for the school year for a parking space, $100 more than the cost to park in the limited spaces on the high school’s campus; her yard can accommodate more than 50 cars.
The Town of Apex has taken various measures over the years to try to get Scott to stop using her yard for student parking, including sending letters asking her to stop and notices of the town’s intention to rezone the property from residential to commercial use, a move requiring an amendment to the town’s UDO which could come with its own set of regulatory problems. The property falls within Apex’s extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ).
Members of the current town council have raised concerns about the safety of students crossing the street from Scott’s property to the high school, as well as issues within the parking lot itself, including aesthetics and cars getting blocked in, that the town says it can’t address without a rezoning.
But Scott, who has been clear that she doesn’t want the rezoning to happen, has persisted.
On Thursday, Scott appeared at the council meeting with an attorney, Truth McDavid, who she has not officially retained, to make her case that the town can’t force her to stop leasing out parking spaces to students or fine her for doing so.
Scott, McDavid explained, paid $200 to the North Carolina Department of Transportation (DOT) to designate her private property as a public vehicular area (PVA) that the DOT can regulate with official signage and other measures. There’s no explanation on the books for why the PVA statute exists, and only one relevant case to look to for precedent, McDavid said.
That case, in McDavid’s opinion, says the PVA designation—though there is no written explanation from lawmakers for its original purpose—effectively prohibits the town from taking enforcement action against Scott.
“You guys can zone whatever you want to, but once someone petitions the state … there’s no way to undo that,” McDavid said. “[In the precedent case] dealing with the idea that once we start talking about undoing what the state wants to do, it can’t be undone by the municipality. [State lawmakers had] reasons for doing it, but nobody decided to write any of that down with the statute.”
Back in August, Apex mayor Jacques Gilbert, at odds with some of his colleagues, declared the dispute over, and Scott free to continue operating her for-profit parking lot since she had successfully secured the PVA designation. But other council members as well as the town attorney disagree that the PVA designation preempts local zoning rules, citing information from NC DOT and the League of Municipalities.
“…The clear intention there of the PVA designation is to allow enforcement of motor vehicle laws on the PVA property,” town attorney Laurie Hohe said at Thursday’s meeting, noting that no one was trying to reverse or invalidate DOT’s PVA designation. “…However, the question is whether that designation would preempt our zoning authority, and my opinion and others’ is that it does not. The state legislature has clearly given matters of land use control to local governments, meaning counties and cities.”
Gantt’s proposed solution was to punt the issue to county leaders. By removing the property’s ETJ status, he said, the property would come under the jurisdiction of Wake County. Gantt argued that the high school, a county facility, has the authority to issue parking passes to students and said it is looking at both short and long-term ways to provide more parking spaces for students, including at a planned county library nearby, and several other options.
“My preference would be the county and their ordinances—which my understanding is they also prohibit this kind of parking—the county could have that fight, if they want to, with the property owner, with some kind of enforcement on their end,” Gantt said, acknowledging that for either Apex or Wake, the fight would be “costly” and “not a great look.”
Other town council members disagreed.
“This is our situation to deal with,” said council member Terry Mahaffey. “Kicking it over to our friends in the county just so they can deal with it doesn’t really seem like a responsible thing to do. We took an oath to enforce the laws of Apex. We should be the ones to do it, take the heat for it.”
Gantt made a motion to proceed with relinquishing the ETJ, but it was voted down. So Gantt made a second motion to “direct staff to enforce the town ordinances in this case, however the town manager and planning director see fit.”
There was no timeline, nor further specifics, and it’s not clear how that enforcement will differ from the actions the town has already taken.
“Take into account the history here, and the letters and notifications already duly sent previously,” town council member Arno Zegerman warned before the council gave its unanimous approval to the second motion.
The town could also move forward with amending the town’s UDO to rezone the property from residential to commercial, as it has already threatened, and let the legal process play out as it may. Each side seems convinced of its own chances of prevailing.
In his public comments before the official discussion, McDavid, the lawyer speaking for Scott, was confident that she has the state statute on her side. McDavid asked the town council for “mercy and grace.”
“Mercy in the sense that we could spend a lot of money arguing about this, and Ms. Scott could probably hire me to represent her, but I don’t know who that would serve,” McDavid said after summarizing his case that the PVA designation overrides the town’s enforcement authority. “I hope that this helps you. Helps kids have a safe place to park. It’s in the best interest of the children, and everyone, and it would save a lot of money.”
The council members took a different view.
“From what I’m hearing from the town attorney is that whether we enforce our zoning, or the county enforces their zoning, it’s unlikely the land owner will prevail,” Gantt said during the discussion. “If it comes to a judge deciding.”
It was Gantt’s last meeting before leaving the council, after he declined to run for reelection to his seat this fall.
“I am loathe to let an issue like this fester into the next council, considering it happened on our watch,” Gantt said at the beginning of the discussion.
But after the council voted to stay the course, it looks like that’s exactly what will happen.
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