Pack Square Battle heats up in Raleigh

From the Asheville Citizen-Times

By Jordan Shrader, published May 19, 2009 11:34 am

Raleigh - State Court of Appeals judges today heard a lawyer argue that the developer who bought Buncombe County land beside City Hall should be allowed to keep it.

Stewart Coleman's company want the court to overturn a Superior Court judge's ruling that the sale was invalid and the land should remain a place for public use.

Joe Ferikes, an Asheville attorney who challenged the sale, told the three judge panel that the land is the site of decades of music, preaching, politicians' speeches, festivals and celebrations marking the end of two world wars.

“This may not seem to be a large tract of land to my opponents, but it is a very important piece of land to all the citizens and residents of Buncombe County," Ferikes told the three judges. "It is a place and a space that needs to be preserved.”

George Pack donated the property in 1901, intending it as the site of a courthouse, which was built but torn down when the present courthouse went up.

The longtime use of land as green space for the public is not enough to legally protect it as a park, Patrick Kelly argued on Coleman's behalf.

“There have been no maps that have been introduced into evidence showing it as a park," said Kelly, a Charlotte lawyer. "There's no evidence that the county has put in park benches" or given the area a name.

Coleman wants to build condominiums and retail space on the property and the lot next to it where the Hayes & Hopson Building stands.

Kelly said nothing in the 1901 deeds say what happens if the property is not used as intended. Without such instructions, legal precedent allows for the conditions to be ignored, he said.

The Court of Appeals often takes months to hand down its rulings.

I, for one, am going against the crowd on this one. I think this is a good idea. I've seen that building on many occasions and it's either in desperate need for renovations or something entirely new, like condos and offices, needs to be built. Although this Coleman guy seems to have no sympathy with the people of Asheville, in this climate almost any development should be looked at with renewed interest. Additionally, in order to curb urban sprawl, which is increasingly becoming a problem (especially in south Asheville, i.e. Arden, Skyland, Fletcher), we need to build higher density, mixed-use projects in the city center and encourage a stronger, pedestrian-based society. Every time we push a developer away from Asheville's urban core, we are sending a message out to developers to build on the outskirts while we "protect" our city center. We are forgetting growth is inevitable and this would only result in the mushrooming of population density rather than containing it in a smart, forward-thinking kind of way.