Queens University’s neighbors mull next move

MYERS PARK ─ Just a day after the doors of a new sports center opened to students at Queens University of Charlotte, a state appeals court affirmed a zoning decision that allowed the center and another nearby structure to be built.

Neighbors of the Myers Park campus had challenged the city Zoning Board of Adjustment’s decision to allow Queens to build the Levine Center for Wellness and Fitness, along with a five-story parking deck topped by a two-story dormitory, on Wellesley Avenue between Selwyn Avenue and Queens Road West.

The N.C. Court of Appeals on Aug. 20 unanimously affirmed Mecklenburg County Superior Court Judge Timothy S. Kincaid’s July 2012 ruling that zoning board followed the city’s zoning ordinance in allowing the construction.

Construction of the buildings is complete, and they are bustling with about 2,300 students who coincidentally started class the same day the decision was rendered.

However, Kenneth T. Davies, the attorney who represented the plaintiffs, said his clients may decide to appeal to the N.C. Supreme Court. His clients, the Myers Park Homeowners Association Inc. and Brian Thomas Atkinson, who lives on Stanford Place just northwest of the campus, have 30 days in which to file an appeal.

Davies said that although it’s too late to prevent the construction, a victory there could still provide relief for residents, in the form of a new access road to the new buildings that would divert traffic from Wellesley Avenue.

“That would certainly be one outcome that would be extremely beneficial to the neighborhood,” said Davies.  “Victory would also put a cap on further development in terms of density, what they call ‘intensity of development.’ That’s what really concerns the neighbors.

“This is not a case of the neighborhood disliking Queens as an institution, or of Queens as an institution disliking the neighborhood. It’s just a problem of growth and a real character change from Queens College to Queens University, (and that growth) really impacting the neighborhood in a negative way.”

The university’s vice president of campus planning and services, Bill Nichols, said in an email the university is not considering building an access road. But he said that the university has worked with neighbors over the last several years, changing the design of the Levine Center based on their feedback and suggestions; funding a traffic control officer for carpool at nearby Myers Park Traditional Elementary School during construction; and hiring an arborist to protect trees during construction.

Michael Abbott, vice president of the Myers Park HOA, said the organization’s board members plan to meet early in the week to decide the next move. He said about 150 people have contributed money to the legal battle against the city and Queens.

“Obviously we’re disappointed in this, but Queens is a vital part of our community, and the Levine Center is a fait accompli, and we have to figure out how to best address the continuing neighborhood concerns for traffic and safety and parking and noise and nuisance factors that could potentially compromise the quality of life that we thought was better protected than it was,” said Abbott.

Abbott said neighbors mostly feel let down by the city zoning process.

Attorney Richard Vinroot of Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson, who represented Queens, said he was not surprised by the court’s decision.

“I’m surprised and disappointed by the continuous litigation over something that is good for the community and has always been good for that community,” he said. “I would be very surprised if the homeowners association appealed the matter further.”

The university’s 25 acres lie in the middle of a mostly residential area of Myers Park. But it was here at the beginning of the neighborhood’s development, when the campus of the then-named Presbyterian College for Women was lured to this location 100 years ago from College Street by the Myers Park developer who wanted the five-building campus to be the centerpiece of the community, said Vinroot, Charlotte’s mayor from 1991-1995.

The Georgian buildings and towering oaks of Queens University is now bordered by stately homes which sell for $1 million, give or take a couple hundred thousand. Buildings constructed by Queens since then have matched the same red-bricked Georgian style.

The formerly all-girls Queens College is now a full-fledged coed university, and has been growing steadily. Enrollment has increased 34 percent to about 2,350 this year from 1,754 in 2002, said Lisa Nowak, director of communications, in an email. The number of new students enrolled this year, 410, is up 65 percent from 2002, when it was 248.

The neighbors objected to the construction after the school received site plan approval from the Charlotte Zoning Board of Adjustments in November 2011 for the two most recent additions, the Levine Center and South Residence Hall with an underlying parking deck with 500 spaces. The exits for both buildings are onto Wellesley Avenue.

The campus is zoned as an R-3 single-family district. However, the zoning ordinance allows universities to be located in such areas provided that access is not by way of a local street and that the campus does not exceed the maximum “floor area ratio,” or FAR, for nonresidential buildings in an R-3 district.

The Myers Park Homeowners Association argued that the Levine Center ─ with 142,000 square feet of basketball courts, an aquatic center, locker rooms, a fitness center, aerobics and dance studios and an indoor track ─ was more like a stadium than the “accessory use” under which it was allowed in the zoning ordinance; that sole access to the buildings was from a local road instead of a collector street, which would be expected to handle larger volumes of traffic; and that the university exceeded the FAR by building the Levine Center and other recent additions.

The neighbors asked Mecklenburg County Superior court to review the zoning board’s decision in April 2012, and in July 2012 Judge Kincaid affirmed the zoning decision.

In their appeal to the N.C. Court of Appeals, the plaintiffs claimed the Superior Court erred in upholding the zoning board’s characterization of  Wellesley as a collector street and exclusion of the dorms from calculating the FAR for the campus.

Judge Douglas McCullough, writing for the Court of Appeals, said the zoning board properly weighed and interpreted testimony about the nature of Wellesley to decide that it was a collector.

Judge McCullough wrote that function, traffic volume and speed must be considered when categorizing a road, and that city transportation department testimony at a February 2012 zoning hearing showed that Wellesley connects two major roads, Selwyn and Queens West; that an average of 2,700 cars drive along it each day, compared to between 1,300 and 2,100 on average for collector streets; and that 54 percent of Charlotte’s collector streets have posted speed limits equal to Wellesley’s, 25 mph.

“It is neither the superior court’s nor this Court’s duty to second guess the decision of ZBA where there is a rational basis in the evidence,” he wrote.

The court also said that the zoning board was correct in excluding the dorm from FAR calculations, since it is a residential building.