My name is Linda Wilson. I live at 302 Watts Street, in the original Watts Hospital. We are one block north of the proposed development. I served as a member of the Trinity Park Neighborhood Board from March 2000 through April 2006. Prior to that, I was a member of the Board from 1976 through 1982, serving as President 1981. I am a lifetime member of the Trinity Park Neighborhood Association. I have spent my entire adult life in Durham, and have worked for 40 years on neighborhood and school issues, serving on the Merger Issues Task Force and as President Elect of the InterNeighborhood Council. In 1992 I founded a non-profit business to address issues of community and education in Durham’s low-income neighborhoods. My business, though small, achieved a national reputation, and in 1995 I was named Volunteer of the Year for my work.
I want to be sure that you have a clear picture of the ways in which the neighborhood has worked with Park City Developers and their partners since the announcement of the hotel and condo projects in October of 2004. Either as a Board member or as a private citizen, I have attended every Association meeting at which the developers made a presentation except one. I have also attended every presentation to which the developers have invited me except the recent Christmas party. I did not attend the charette held by the developers in March 2006, but I gathered information and did a short article on it for the Trinity Park Newsletter. I have also been a part of several ad hoc committees formed over the last two years to address issues that have arisen around this project and the hotel project. I have met one-on-one with one of the developers, and participated in a focus group sponsored by them.
I believe that this massive exposure to the project qualifies me to tell you a bit about the process that has brought us to today. I have copies of this statement for each of you, and attached to those copies is a chronological list of presentations, meetings and encounters that will support what I am about to tell you.
To be sure, the developers have come to the TPNA quite often to talk about their project and to ask for the support of the Association. Without exception, a significant number of neighborhood residents and TPNA Board members have expressed concern about this project each time it has been discussed. In the early months, the concern was about the impact of the condo project combined with the impact of the hotel project. Aspects of the size and quality were a part of the Board’s earliest concerns. When the developer asked for neighborhood support for a rezoning of the hotel property, an ad hoc committee formed to examine the issue carefully. The developers were asked repeatedly to provide a development plan. They steadfastly refused, often reminding us that the then current zoning would allow for any number of undesirable uses. Eventually, wanting to take as positive a posture toward the developers and the project as possible, the Board agreed to support the rezoning, but with grave reservations.
This kind of refusal to provide specifics while beseeching the neighborhood for its support has become an all-too-familiar pattern. Until approximately six months ago, the developers continued to show the neighborhood the same computer-generated drawings they had shown at the first meetings, and they have continued to tell us that these are just general ideas – not specifics. Even now, at this incredibly late date, the developers refuse to commit to the elements pictured in the drawings that they present to us.
But the process moved forward after the neighborhood supported the rezoning and the developers, who had told us how excited they were about building a high-quality boutique hotel with a maximum of 70 rooms, sold the property. First they sold a partnership to a hotel owner from Virginia. Next he sold a portion of the ownership to a developer of extended stay hotels, and eventually the original developers sold their interests to the extended stay folks, telling us how sorry they were that we would not be getting that lovely boutique hotel, and that they had just not been able to control the process. So now we are staring down the barrel of a 101-room extended stay hotel with a parking deck! I realize that the hotel project is not directly at issue here today, but I believe that it is important as an indicator of the reliability of the developers.
Without exception, at every one of the presentations or meetings that I listed earlier, the developers were asked to provide details about the proposed hotel and/or condo buildings; size, configuration, footprint, materials, style. I know this for a certainty, because on a number of occasions, I was the one who asked! And without exception, in every one of those presentations and meetings, the developers refused to tell us anything other than what is required in the site plan.
This pattern has repeated itself so often that at the January 2007 TPNA Board meeting, when the most recent set of revisions began to cause extreme opposition to the condo project, I proposed that the developers find a way to “bond’ themselves to a series of committed elements. The developers agreed readily, and the TPNA empanelled a team to work with them. That team has spent some six weeks trying to come to an agreement, only to have the developer shut down negotiations last week.
So it incorrect to say that the developers have worked with the neighborhood; rather, they have asked repeatedly for neighborhood support, but have given the neighborhood virtually nothing in the way of bankable assurances as to what they plan to do.
I ask you today to carefully consider the chronology that I have given you, and keep in mind that whatever else anyone says, the Trinity Park Neighborhood Association has made every effort to work with these developers for more than two years. It has never turned its back on them, it has never threatened them, and it has never, not once, shut down negotiations with them. Of course the Association will never be able to deliver the vote of every person in the neighborhood…. this is still a democracy. But I am convinced that the vast majority of residents in Trinity Park want an elegant, beautiful condo project on the corner of Watts and Lamond Streets, and that the developers can build that project if they will interact and work with the neighborhood rather than delivering ultimata.
