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Harrington Grove gets city's ear

By SARAH LINDENFELD HALL, Staff Writer RALEIGH

Facing an uphill battle with City Hall, some Harrington Grove neighbors took advantage of its election-year timing. They spoke up about their beef, got a challenger interested in their cause and turned out in droves to help kick out the incumbent mayor.

Mayor-elect Charles Meeker, who during his campaign called the dispute a case study of what's wrong with City Hall, is already promising to resolve the situation as one of his first actions after he takes office Dec. 3.

Now, it appears the 1,400-home neighborhood in Northwest Raleigh --one of the city's biggest after it was annexed this summer -- could get at least part of what it wants even before Meeker takes over.

For several months, residents have complained that the city's plan to extend North Exeter Way for an adjacent subdivision is ruining Sycamore Creek and is trespassing partly on land owned by their homeowners association.

"The mistake has been made. Somebody needs to own up to it and correct it," Brenda D. Measamer, the homeowners association president, told city officials Wednesday.

Work, which included digging up the creek and placing four 72-inch-wide, 100-inch-long pipes in the middle, has stopped. And the developer and officials are working on moving two stormwater basins, which the state found were too close to the creek, said Ken Schuster, regional supervisor for the N.C. Division of Water Quality. They're also waiting for the City Council to decide whether the road needs to be extended, Schuster said.

On Wednesday, neighborhood leaders met with developer Stephen Eastman, returning City Councilman Benson Kirkman and other officials to start working out a possible solution. Kirkman agreed with neighbors that the pipes need to go and that the creek banks need to be restored. Eastman's attorney, Tom Worth, said the developer is ready to remove them.

Today, Kirkman plans to send neighbors and Eastman a proposal that would allow the developer to remove the pipes and connect to nearby water lines but would give the city the option to revisit the extension of the road, which has been on the books since the late 1980s as part of the city's policy to connect Raleigh's street network. The full council could consider any proposal from Kirkman at its meeting Tuesday.

Harrington Grove also holds the key to a water line connection Eastman needs for his 83-home subdivision. An alternative connection would cost about $375,000 more and would be less reliable and could lead to poor water quality, said Dale Crisp, the city's public utilities director.

"I would like this to move with extreme dispatch," Worth said.

So do the neighbors, who want to know why the road needs to be extended at all.

"Our immediate need right now is to have the culverts out of the creek for environmental reasons," resident Jill D. Allen, 36, who works in hotel product sales, said before the meeting. "The sooner they come out, the sooner we can begin the restoration process."

Meeker also agrees Eastman needs to remove the culverts and restore the creek banks. The new council, he said Wednesday, should take an in-depth look into all the issues, including whether the road needs to be extended and how it could be extended without damaging the creek.

"What needs to happen is for the new council to review all the issues involved in this development and come up with a comprehensive solution to them," Meeker said.

One option would be to require a bridge over the creek. However, Worth said, if Eastman takes the pipes out for a creek crossing he doesn't need, it's not fair to require him to build another alternative. "The linkage," Worth said, "we don't give a fig about."

Other council members are sympathetic to Harrington Grove's concerns, too. At-large council members-elect Janet Cowell and Neal Hunt joined Meeker and Kirkman at an open house hosted by the neighborhood two days before the election.

"I think the main thing is mending relationships with the neighborhood because it's so sour right now," Cowell said, "and making sure that they get some resolution in terms of them feeling threatened with condemnation."

Neighbors said after Wednesday's meeting that they will wait and see what Kirkman proposes today. They were frustrated with the response they got from Mayor Paul Coble and others when they first brought up their concerns.

So as they spent hours sorting through documents about the road extension and notified their neighbors about the issue, some started campaigning for Meeker.

In the Oct. 9 general election, Coble won the precinct where the neighborhood votes, Durham Highway Fire Station No. 1, by only seven votes. The weekend before last week's runoff, a handful of neighbors distributed fliers telling residents about their experiences at City Hall, not finishing until 4 a.m. Allen recorded a phone message supporting Meeker that went out to thousands of voters, she said.

In the runoff, Meeker won by 72 votes, 366 to 294, giving him nearly 7 percent of his winning margin citywide.

"Our 4 a.m. delivery," Allen said, "paid off."

Staff writer Sarah Lindenfeld Hall can be reached at 829-8983 or [email protected]

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