AG 1998 01 20 - Laserfiche WebLink

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5. The rezoning is too large for this location in the County. According to maps and the site plan, the proposal would rezone 500+ acres, of which 385 acres would be developed. Under the proposal, the land would contain 55 industrial sites of 7 acres each. Each site would have a building of up to 100,000 sq It, about the size of 3 football fields. Total employment would be somewhere around 10,000. If this were to happen, the site would be larger in size and employment than the cores of either Concord or Kannapolis, several times larger than that of the Concord Mills Mall, and about 22 % of total County employment of 45,000. The transportation planning staff for our area have estimated the traffic load alone at 55,000 trips/day, over 10 times the capacity of Derita Road, and up to 20 times the available capacity of Poplar Tent Road. This road is already close to capacity. This proposal would not fit on a 4-lane urban arterial, which typically carries about 40,000 cars/day, even if there were no other traffic. Add in the present traffic, the trucks, and the poor access to the Interstate, and the picture is clear: the site. is un- workable as planned, and would not work even with a 4-lane access. Ironically, if the site were developed as proposed, the traffic would congest the airport area and slow down economic activity. There is also no present sewer service to the site, although a trunk line is planned down Rocky River. The proposed development has been argued as superior to residential development and having no impact on schools. That is not the case. Part of that argument was based on incorrect traffic estimates, which when corrected showed the site to generate about 4.7 times the traffe that residential land would generate. According to the transportation analysis, the site would generate about 55,000 trips/day if industrial, versus about 12,000 trips/day if residential. Up to 1/3 of these trips would typically be truck traffic, which further reduces the capacity of the small road network. The site's development would block access to the airport and its related industrial development, and the success of that effort would be threatened. Further, if the site were industrial, where would the 10,000 workers live? Unless we're prepared to argue that none would live in Cabarrus County, then clearly the additional employed families would also add to schools and other County needs. Assuming modestly that only 1/2 of the employment were local, the other new 5000 workers' families would add roughly 2500 children to the County school system. It is just not reasonable to assume that all these new workers come from other counties and are "diverted" to the site from jobs in Mecklenburg, Some will be existing workers, some new arrivals, and some diverted. 6. The site's classification is too intense. The site's proposed reclassification, General Industrial, would create an intense and inappropriate land use surrounded by other less dense land uses, residential and limited industrial. The present subdivisions of Beech Bluff, Mistywood and Twin Creeks, ali of which predate the present land uses by several decades, would be particularly negatively affected. The latter two would be surrounded by industrial development. This proposal violates sound planning principles, in which intense uses are shielded from less intense uses by buffer uses, in graded fashion.