Council permits Duke rezoning
Vote allows building on Central Campus

By Ray Gronberg

A unanimous City Council voted Tuesday to rezone 128 acres of Duke University's Central Campus, clearing the way for the school to spend more than $500 million in coming years to add classrooms, housing and other facilities to the property.

The vote came after Duke officials and the leaders of a "stakeholders group" of neighboring merchants and homeowners told the council that they had reached agreement on a set of 12 conditions that will govern the university's development.

City/County Planning Director Frank Duke said the players in the talks were still tinkering with some of the conditions as late as Tuesday morning. But the changes that resulted didn't affect the most important of them, one establishing limits on campus retail space.

As presented to and approved by the council, the retail condition allows Duke to build up to 50,000 square feet of retail space that would be open to people not affiliated with the school. No single retail space or restaurant on Central Campus can have more than 20,000 square feet of floor space.

Duke officials can build additional retail space -- beyond the 50,000-square-foot cap -- that serves only university faculty, students, staff and alumni. They agreed to give city/county planners the right to scrutinize the location, design and signs of those stores to ensure that they "serve primarily the on-campus population," and reject any that cater to the public.

A point that emerged last week as the major remaining point of disagreement between the two sides -- building-height limits along Erwin Road -- ended with the university's agreement that "occupied buildings" along Erwin between Oregon and Anderson streets won't be taller than 90 feet.

The leaders of the stakeholders group, John Schelp of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association and Tom Miller of the Watts Hospital-Hillandale Neighborhood Association, joined Duke University Provost Peter Lange Tuesday in asking the council to approve the rezoning.

Schelp called the agreement a victory for Duke "and all of Durham," and said neighbors would keep an eye on the implementation of the retail condition, which is meant to protect merchants on Ninth Street from competition from campus-based retailers who benefit from Duke's exemption from property taxes.

Lange said the vote defied what he termed the caricatures the national press corps covering the Duke lacrosse case has floated about the state of the community.

"In this year when so much that has been so unfair, inaccurate and at times downright false [has been said] about how Durham supposedly is divided against itself, overcome by community tensions and driven by supposed town-gown conflicts, it is noteworthy that we can come to you with this consensus proposal, the product of numerous productive meetings, a great deal of thoughtful discussion on all sides, and compromise on issues small and large," Lange said.

Duke's expansion indeed proceeded through Durham's zoning-review process without the sort of public rancor that accompanied neighbor UNC's attempt in 2001 to secure approval from Chapel Hill's Town Council for a similar request.

Elected officials in Chapel Hill went along with UNC's request only after state legislators threatened to revoke the town's authority to impose zoning restrictions on that campus.

But Duke's path to approval did hit some bumps along the way, most notably last summer when leaders of the private school coupled their rezoning application to a largely-blank set of drawings that omitted details about the Central Campus development.

Negotiations over the retail limits were long and drawn out, with the two sides dickering over a disparity of only a few thousand square feet in the size of the eventual retail cap.

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