By Megan V. Williams
Wilmington, NC – Wilmington's City Council sent the developers of a planned mixed-use project alongside the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge back to the drawing board last night.
Council members voted to ask developer John Evans to retool his plans for a 14-story residential and commercial complex before they would consider his request to rezone the property it would sit on.
Currently, the weedy, rubble-strewn lots in question are zoned Light Industrial. Evans wants to be the first to win the city's new Riverfront Mixed Use designation.
Between the project's supporters and its opponents, there was hardly room to stand during the public meeting; the audience filled the chairs, wrapped around the walls and a few even headed up the chamber's little-used gallery.
Among the speakers, Wilmington resident Ed Spencer described the land today as "a broken concrete jungle from a bygone era," calling it an 'eyesore,' a word repeated by many on both sides.
Pleading Gateway's case, Spencer argued that the development would not just improve the entry to the city, but also provide jobs and increase the local tax base.
Many of Gateway's possible neighbors formed the opposition, from residents of the nearby historic neighborhood on one side, to Colonial-Carolina Inc. on the other. A representative of the chemical storage company said the change could zone them out of business.
Castle street resident Hannah Vaughn brought a petition she said nearly a hundred of her neighbors had signed to oppose the project. While she personally would like to see the land remain industrial, Vaughn says there might be proposals the neighborhood could accept.
"If they could scale it back, put a few condos there or something, I do think the neighbors, we could all live with that," Vaughn said. "But nothing that's going to present this much traffic."
CONA, the Council of Neighborhood Associations, Residents of Old Wilmington and the Cape Fear River Watch added their protests against the project. Wilmington Downtown, Inc. spoke in favor, although they also listed a couple of conditions to their support.
City Council members too brought up several concerns, from better traffic mitigation to guaranteed public greenspace, eventually giving Evans a laundry list of changes they want him to make before he starts the approval process all over again in front of the Wilmington Planning Commission at its next meeting in March.
After the meeting, Evans said he doesn't expect the final project to look very different from the current proposal.
"The presence of something inspirational and viable right next to the gateway to Wilmington, those are the big points," Evans said. "How we can have a lighter impact on the neighborhood, those are details."