On Tuesday, the Durham Planning Commission voted 9-1 to recommend against a rezoning request from the Durham Rescue Mission on 2.43 acres of land in East Durham.
The case was heard a week after Durham Rescue Mission held a virtual community meeting to field comments and concerns from neighbors about the rezoning. Many expressed trepidation about how the Durham Rescue Mission intended to use the land should it be rezoned. Sarah Van Every, a project representative from the engineering and planning firm McAdams, suggested the site could include retail, a training facility, and storage but provided no other details.
At Tuesday’s hearing, the Planning Department outlined additional commitments the Rescue Mission was prepared to make at the site, including building sidewalks and high visibility crosswalks.
Durham Rescue Mission CEO Rob Tart said the intention was to unify more of the group’s operations.
“We’re trying to consolidate all of our education, counseling, training all into one building and make it very efficient for the Durham Rescue Mission to help the homeless in this community,” Tart said.
Part of the rezoning would include moving two homes located on the site to a different area in East Durham. Tart said he was committed to moving the homes, though stopped short of making the commitment official with the Planning Department at Tuesday’s hearing.
Neighbors remained wary of the nonprofit’s plans, even with the additional clarity from Tart. The collection of parcels is prominently located on Alston Avenue. The Rescue Mission’s project would be a consequential feature of the neighborhood.
“This is a gateway to our community,” said Aidil Ortiz, a community organizer and resident of the East Durham neighborhood. “Not knowing what is going to be there and there being so little detail for the particular plans that they want to have is a little bit of a red flag.”
A rezoning request does not always include a concrete blueprint for the future of a site. Developers may want to know if a site can obtain the right zoning status before committing to creating a development plan. Even if a set of parcels receives its desired rezoning, it often still goes back before the city council once it’s time to submit the official development plan.
For such a resounding denial, there was little discussion from the commissioners. The project only met 14 of 21, or 66 percent, of the policies laid out by the Growth Management and Infrastructure Policy in the city’s comprehensive plan, according to the Planning Department. Gary Cutright, the lone yes vote on the commission, said that this particular zoning request isn’t about specific plan details, but whether the current zoning is appropriate for how the land should be used in the future.
“We can’t dictate what they can and can’t do on the land,” Cutright said. “What we can do is determine whether or not IL [industrial light] as a zoning makes sense on this particular piece of land.”
Commissioner Tai Huynh, one of the nine commissioners who voted to deny the project, told the INDY that the lack of commitment to specific uses in the Durham Rescue Mission’s rezoning request creates too much uncertainty for neighbors and the city.“Industrial zoning has such a broad range of uses,” Huynh says.
“Without a more specific development plan or any signals of clarity from the applicant, it’s hard to sign off on the rezoning request as is.”
The no-vote from the Planning Commission isn’t the end of the line for Durham Rescue Mission. As mayor pro tem Mark-Anthony Middleton is quick to remind folks, the Planning Commission is an advisory body, not a legislative one. Durham Rescue Mission can still present the project to the city council in the coming weeks. But the nonprofit has a complicated history in Durham. If Durham Rescue Mission is unable to garner goodwill from East Durham neighbors like Ortiz, the site could remain in limbo for the foreseeable future.
“The Rescue Mission, as long as it has been there, has never cooperated with neighbors, has never really been particularly interested in being forthcoming and only doing the bare minimum which law allows them to do,” Ortiz said, “but I would have hoped that their values would have encouraged them to be more neighborly, more trusting, more forthcoming and more collaborative with those of us who will be impacted by whatever they choose to put at this intersection.”
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