Bruce Andersen: Planning chair micromanages the micrograms

HUNTERSVILLE – On the Level knew we had to meet Bruce Andersen in person after he described himself on the phone as “a Republican conservative tree-hugger.”

He is that and a lot more.

Most significantly for readers of The Mecklenburg Times, he is the long-time chairman of the planning board in the area’s fastest-growing municipality, Huntersville, a board he’s been appointed to by the town’s Board of Commissioners since 1998.

Andersen, 74, is also confident enough to poke fun at himself and his fellow board members, calling them “micromanagers.”

He notices and remembers things in great detail, but says he can’t remember what he had for breakfast.

It’s a trait he picked up from being an electrical engineer, retired after 35 years with Duke Energy, and now the proprietor of LKN PC TuneUps, which he runs out of a basement workshop in the 1987 house his wife designed on the shores of Lake Norman in the Lookout Point subdivision, off state Highway 73.

Finally, Andersen is a long-time Huntersville resident who takes community involvement seriously. Before moving to the lake, he and his wife, Joan, lived with their two daughters in the Long Creek section of Huntersville, where he helped lead resistance to the development of Northlake Mall.

Here he is, in all his exacting detail.

You’ve been elected chairman of the planning board by the other board members a lot of times. A couple of people have said, “I’m going to run against you,” but I keep hanging in there. I’ve been running meetings too long. Sometimes the town Board (of Commissioners) says I left them run on too long. But I just like to let all the members have their say. Because I’m an engineer, I sometimes like to micromanage.

I saw that the board recently had to consider a request by a funeral home to add a crematorium. Did you micromanage that? A little bit. I started asking about the nanograms – or maybe it was micrograms; whatever it was, it was small – per cubic meter of benzene released in the air, averaged over one year. The crematorium passed the safety level, but I just wanted to find out why and how they averaged it over a year.

Benzene comes out of you when you get cremated? Apparently. That’s the second crematorium that came up while I’ve been chairman. We spent hours and hours over that one, making sure that people felt comfortable with it. We micromanaged that one. This time, we just let the experts tell us.

Despite all the cremations, Huntersville’s population almost doubled between 2000 and 2010, to 53,000, and it’s supposed to almost double that again by 2030. That decade was a scary growth time. We overbuilt and approved too much high-density residential. So much is already approved that we could grow by 60,000 without anything else being approved. And yet we just approved the Park Huntersville apartments. One member of our board said, “We already have enough apartments already approved, but you want more?” But it comes down to a matter of location. Where do you need apartments? Where the people and the infrastructure and jobs and shopping are. It makes good sense to put ’em there, not out here. So we approved it.

The Park Huntersville was already entitled for apartments, right? It was just a sketch-plan approval, right? The Park was approved back in the 1990s as an office park, as a package. Later, they diversified a little bit more, which I read as, “They can’t sell what they have.” They were allowed to have two apartment complexes that could not exceed more than 8 percent of the park. The first one is now under construction, and this one is the second and last one. Unless they ask to change it again. It was a sketch-plan approval, but we did have a long discussion with them about trees. There were 582 trees removed, and 47 of them were over 24 inches in diameter – or what the planning staff calls “caliper” – at chest height, which is how the tree ordinance calls for them measured.

Whose chest? Jayne Mansfield’s? Ha. Our members hassled them a little bit, and they are going to pay a little more into the mitigation fund.

The what? The mitigation fund. That’s how it works. And I don’t think it works very well. I tell people I’m a Republican conservative tree-hugger. It’s a little counter-intuitive. The tree-mitigation thing goes like this: They say they will – not that they want to, but will – cut down 582 trees, including 47 nice, big trees – and their only responsibility under the current ordinance is to pay $2,834 into the mitigation fund. For them, tree mitigation is just a cost of doing business. The penalty is not really a penalty; it’s too little.

So the ordinance doesn’t have any teeth? It’s got teeth, but they’re little teeny teeth. There’s no incentive not to clear cut. Now I don’t want to make it so you can’t cut and fill. Cut and fill has to be done in many cases, or you’d have subdivisions where every house has to have retaining walls, and you have houses in ravines. But there ought to be a way to save big trees. The penalty ought to be enough to make the developer at least think about it.

What is the biggest growth challenge facing Huntersville? The one thing that stands out alone from the others is traffic congestion. You ask the average citizen to come up with a list of what they like about living in Huntersville, and you get a wide array of answers because there is so much to like. But ask what they don’t like and at the top of all lists is congestion. I have to take a left onto 73 to get out of (Lookout Point), and it is terrible sometimes. I drive a BMW and will pull out fast. By the time (the other driver) has hit his brakes, I am gone. But to be honest with you, Southern hospitality, Southern courtesy, is what makes Huntersville navigable. But we need to fix the problems. At certain times of the day, if you drive west from here on 73 toward West Catawba Avenue, it can be backed up one-half to 2 miles east of the light (at West Catawba). You look beyond the light and all four lanes are wide open. You’d think maybe it’s the light-timing, but it’s not. It’s the left-turn crossover just west of the light. The left-turn stacking lane gets filled up and people are stopped in the left through lane, so there’s only one through-lane that’s open.

You have a great planning staff in Huntersville, led by Planning Director Jack Simoneau. Jack tells a funny a story about when he first got here. I took him out first thing to Stone Hollow, that subdivision up by Stumptown Road and St. Mark’s Church. It’s a poster child for bad development. There’s a 30-foot-wide gulley that runs through the place. They put the mailboxes behind the sidewalks so the U.S. Postal Service carriers can’t reach them from their vehicles. We’re still working with neighbors to fix it. My first challenge to Jack was, “Don’t ever let this happen again.” I pick on Jack a lot about writing ordinances they don’t have the staff to enforce, that are just too onerous to enforce. There’s one that says you can’t sell cars out of your front yard, but there’s a guy up the road from here who basically runs a small car dealership out of his yard. He does it all the time, runs a business, and we don’t stop it. But if my neighbor lets me park my car in his yard with a sign so I can get rid of it, he’ll get fined, but not the guy who runs a business out of his yard. It’s not right. We just have too many serious issues to be messing around with that.

Thanks for your perspective. Wisdom comes from staying alive long enough to get it. I tell people that when I came to Huntersville, you could eat wherever you want, which was at the Ham and Eggs in Cornelius. Then you could come to the Tastee Freeze in Huntersville for dessert. The only pollution problem we had was when the cow farmers put out the manure twice a year.