Struggling with explosive growth, Cornelius is planning its future

It doesn’t look good for Cornelius in the next 10 years.

According to a report by the Urban Resource Group, which in September finished a study of Cornelius, the north Mecklenburg town’s population could peek at about 37,000 by 2020.

“That’s more than we can handle,” the town’s mayor, Jeff Tarte, said.

As officials worry about the town’s services and infrastructure reaching capacity within the next decade, a process has begun to plan for and manage growth — and, in essence, mold the town’s future.

“And we need to figure it out now while we still have a chance,” Tarte said.

The master plan process launched this summer, when a steering committee first met, said the town’s senior planner, Jason Abernathy. The six-member committee, made of town commissioners and residents, appointed five “theme” committees who, since November, have been meeting weekly to identify goals for the town in areas such as economic development, transportation, land use, zoning and community services.

Abernathy said the projected population would overwhelm the town’s finances, so that Cornelius would not be able to adequately fund schools, utilities, roads, firefighters and police without some other type of tax base.

“We want to slow growth down and look at more ways to diversify our tax base and not necessarily just focus on residential growth,” he said. “And that’s the purpose of the comprehensive plan. I have a feeling we’re going to change direction, but what direction we don’t know yet.”

Residents say the town’s infrastructure is already overwhelmed.

Last summer, Cornelius resident Ron Kelley became trapped in his neighborhood after a truck wreck on Interstate 77 near Cornelius.

As traffic stacked up, the interstate and the town’s secondary roads became clogged. Kelley, who lives on the east side of Cornelius in the Patrick’s Purchase neighborhood, needed to run some errands but couldn’t even get onto Catawba Avenue, the town’s main east-west thoroughfare.

“After about 30 minutes I just gave up and went back home,” said Kelley, who is on the mobility “theme” committee working on the master plan. “If you look at major roads around here, they’re roughly the same size they were 25 years ago, yet the population has more than quadrupled. You keep pouring that much traffic into the same roads you’re going to get congestion. And if people can’t get out of their neighborhoods, that means fire trucks, medic and police can’t get in. So it’s also an issue of public safety.”

Population boom

Of all the towns in the Lake Norman area, Cornelius has experienced the highest percentage increase in population over the past decade.

While Huntersville has more residents, at nearly 45,000, Cornelius’ population skyrocketed 106 percent from 11,969 in 2000 to 24,738 in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Mecklenburg County’s population increased by 31 percent during that same time.

Town officials in Cornelius say that growth has resulted in a nasty bout of growing pains. They say development has been done piecemeal, lacking a unifying vision.

Still, the town is expected to continue to grow at runaway speed.

Helping guide the master plan is the Urban Resource Group, part of Kimley-Horn & Associates, a Charlotte engineering and land-use firm that Cornelius hired as part of the master plan process. URG studied the town’s current and future market conditions and how they will impact development activity through 2020.

According to the report, there are 12,281 housing units within the town’s limits. More than half, 61 percent, are single-family homes. Multifamily developments make up the balance.

Under an “aggressive scenario,” the report expects demand for 16,455 units by 2020, a gain of 5,557 from 2009 to 2020. Cornelius has already approved 2,096 residential units that have not been built, split evenly between multifamily and single-family. Based on that, Cornelius would still need to build an additional 3,464 residential units to meet 2020 demands.

Annexation and growth

According to the report, much of the population growth in Cornelius can be attributed to annexation.

Total land area grew by 2.3 square miles, or 27.4 percent, between 2000 and 2009. The new land area accommodated 61.4 percent of the total population growth of Cornelius, accounting for 7,350 new residents. The growth rate of the existing urban area during that same period was about 38 percent.

Thanks to the rapid growth, Cornelius has nearly tripled its percentage share of the county’s population from 1990 to 2009, from 1.1 percent to 2.7 percent.

Cornelius is about 15 square miles, of which roughly 25 percent is still available for development, Tarte said.

“Our objective is to appropriately dole out the remaining open spaces,” he said.

Town Commissioner Jim Bensman said that in the years leading up to the recession, Cornelius was getting three to four development proposals for residential, office and commercial projects at each of the bimonthly town board meetings and approving each one individually.

“It’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle but you don’t know what the puzzle is going to look like when it’s done,” he said.

The puzzle put together so far leaves something to be desired, Commissioner Lynette Rinker said.

“The existing land use policies missed a step,” she said. “It stated the preferred uses, but then stopped. So what you have is a patchwork of development. There’s no cohesiveness. It doesn’t give you a sense of place. It could be any suburban development anywhere.”

To help curb out-of-control growth, the town enacted a six-month moratorium about four years ago, during which multifamily developments were removed from a lot of zoning districts, Bensman said.

“But the town has still more than doubled in size,” he said.

‘People went freaking nuts’

Rinker said that in the early stages of the master plan process this summer, focus groups consisting of residents, business owners and property owners were formed to create an overall vision to guide the plan’s goals.

Town officials created a giant map of Cornelius indicating which areas were available for development under existing land use codes and which areas were protected, such as golf courses, parks, greenways and lake buffers.

Rinker said the process was educational but frustrating.

“People went freaking nuts,” she said. “They were pulling their hair out. There was a lot of handwringing, and a couple of people got up and left in frustration. It gave them firsthand experience of some of the challenges we’re facing. It was like a big slap in the face.”

Abernathy said the theme committees will present their goals and recommendations at a Jan. 4 town meeting and work with officials to develop a plan to implement the goals by the spring.

Time-consuming process

While it may be cumbersome and time-consuming, the master plan process is necessary and long overdue, Bensman said.

“The current land use plan was done in the late 1990s and was never comprehensively updated,” said Bensman, who is also on the plan’s steering committee.

And now is a good time to work on the plan, said officials such as Tarte, who say the recession has given the town a break from the flood of development proposals.

“It allowed us to take a step back and breathe,” he said.

Rinker, who was elected to the town board this year, ran for office with the master plan as part of her platform. She now serves on the plan’s steering committee.

About five years ago, she was also appointed to the town’s growth-management committee.

“It was apparent back then the town really needed to stop and take a look at where it was going,” she said. “But this was in the midst of the boom. Everyone was struggling just to keep up.

“Now our infrastructure is near the saturation point, and with only 25 percent of our inventory of land left to develop, we don’t have the luxury to say we’ll fix it later.”

Sam Boykin can be reached at [email protected].