Carolina Beach: A Town at a Crossroads

by Jon Prestage

There’s been a lot of talk lately about smart growth and master plans in reference to Carolina Beach. There has also been much debate about what is considered desirable development. Are the sides really that far apart? The players weigh in.

   Scott Patten, the developer of the 278-unit Arcadius high-rise condominium project admits that his project has taken a bit of a beating in Carolina Beach, but the cause may have less to do with the scale of the project, its benefits to the town, or even its height, and more to do with a town struggling to find and shape its destiny.

Patten’s upscale project, located on approximately two acres of high-value land in the town’s central business district, is one of several projects that set the stage for the ouster in last November’s election of the town’s previous mayor and two council members. The people who defeated them ran on a platform of “smart growth” and on reducing height limits in the district.

The political turmoil, however, has not stopped Arcadius, and neither has several private lawsuits. Demolition work has begun at the project site, and most of those interviewed for this article agree that there are some good things to say about Arcadius and the likelihood that it will spark some sort of revitalization in the town’s central business district.

The Arcadius project includes condominiums, pools, restaurants, boutiques, parking garages, bicycle paths, elevated walkways, 400 feet of ocean frontage, and boardwalks that tie into the town’s existing arcade. The parking, walkways, and new boardwalks would provide public access to the restaurants, shops, and beach.

A series of interviews this spring with current and former elected and appointed town officials and independent planners from outside the town, as well as with Patten, confirms their view that the town is at a point where it needs to determine and shape its future. Doing this might require a more detailed planning document or “roadmap” than the traditional land-use plan required by the Coastal Area Management Act (CAMA). The process of developing such a detailed plan would need to involve everybody, including all residents and property owners, developers, and town leaders, in a lengthy planning process, according to some of those interviewed.

Identifying and settling on a collective vision for Carolina Beach is anything but easy, and the forces at play emanate mostly from outside the borders of this small beach community. They include continually escalating land values along the entire east coast, which create immense pressures in a small coastal town like Carolina Beach, where land is particularly scarce. They also include the phenomenal growth that’s reshaping the Wilmington region. To sense the actual magnitude, one need only consider the new multi-billion dollar international port, the continued construction of the beltway connecting the region with the rest of the state, the thousands of homes planned for the county, and the Skyway Bridge and highway.

“Over the next five or 10 years, Carolina Beach will have to make difficult choices as to what it is and what it wants to be, and people need to be realistic about it,” says Mark T. Imperial, a UNCW political science professor whose expertise is community coastal planning. “Property values will not go down. Traffic will only get worse. More people will come to the beach. The town and its residents need to come to grips with what they are going to do. As property values rise, developers will want to build higher and higher to maximize the returns on their investments.”

Dr. Imperial works as a consultant to coastal communities like Emerald Isle, Wrightsville Beach, and Carolina Beach. He is currently producing the town’s Harbor Management Plan, scheduled for completion later this year.

 The task of planning for the town’s future is daunting and complicated. It requires a great deal of thought, resources, and interaction between government officials and town residents, according to planners. It requires elected officials who are courageous enough to take a proactive view of growth issues, which means they may need to take stands whose benefits to current taxpayers might be dispersed or not readily apparent.

“It’s easy for public officials to put off costs today for benefits in the future because these issues are extremely difficult to confront,” Dr. Imperial says.

More than six months after the November election, the town is still responding to the political changes it brought about and trying to figure what the changes mean.

“I can tell you this,” Patten says. “I’ve had meetings with the new town leaders and the way they conduct business is exactly the way business was conducted in the previous administration. Did I have relations with the previous guys? Sure. They were honorable people. I’m sure these new people are honorable, too. It’s easy to throw darts at the government and accuse it of operating in the dark.” Patten is responding to what he says are accusations on the “street” that his project was shrouded in secrecy and is the product of secret meetings and deals.

“We didn’t come here and force these things on anybody. We had an ongoing and open dialogue with town leaders and administrators. We went out and talked to people. We conducted a forum for residents. It’s all in the public record,” he says. “There is nothing hidden.”

Even the town’s new mayor, Bill Clark, expresses some support for the project. He says, “Our only complaint with Arcadius was the height issue (130 feet) and its high density. Otherwise, it’s a good project. It is going to spur a lot of good things for Carolina Beach.” The project does seem to run counter, however, to what the mayor describes as his vision for the town, which shuns condominium development.

“We all want single family houses here. We want to maintain that small town atmosphere, but it’s changing, and bigger developments are coming. We’d like to see a place where you know your neighbors, where you don’t have to worry about locking your door,” he explains. “I don’t think it’s possible. It’s probably only a dream, but we will try to hold back high-density land development as much as possible, so you don’t have a two-block area in which a thousand people live.”

The new mayor’s vision may seem idyllic to some. It is offset by the views of other town leaders, like former Councilman Jack Lynch, who was defeated in the last election after one term on the council, or former planning board member Lank Lancaster, who recently stepped down from the board to pursue other interests.

Lynch explained his vision this way: “Our boardwalk needs another major hotel, like a Holiday Inn to join the Marriott, because there is a huge market for another major hotel in the area. I would like to see more upscale restaurants, and I think they will come as people buy duplexes and townhouses that cost between one million and two million dollars. These people will spark more upscale restaurants and boutiques.
I envision a Carolina Beach in the next five to 10 years that will become a year round tourist attraction drawing people from Wilmington and Raleigh.”

Former Mayor Tony Loreti has a less gentrified vision of Carolina Beach:

“The forces here will tear down all the mom and pop motels and turn them into modern high rises,” he says, pointing out that Carolina Beach was once a vacation spot for blue collar families. He says he’d like to see it become that again.

“Progress is inevitable,” Camille Loreti says, affirming her husband’s views. “You don’t have to have 12 or 15 story buildings. You can have maybe seven-story buildings and development that protects our small town environment. If people here wanted to live in a city, they’d move to Raleigh.”

It is probably not an accident that the recent political upheaval in the town has at least part of its roots in the boardwalk area and central business district. From a planning perspective the district is the key to the town’s future. A revitalized central business district and boardwalk will help to shape the town. But what would revitalization look like there? That’s the rub. Most of those interviewed agree that the district is not very healthy at this time. Businesses struggle there to survive and many businesses fail.

Dr. Imperial points out that it is a rare coastal town in North Carolina that has a central business district at all, so the area is an asset for the town

Lynch says that he had hoped to revitalize the business district while he was in office.

“I’m passionate about that area because it can be the heartbeat of Carolina Beach if we build some good stuff there that attracts people to come. I see a community center there, a place for people to gather year round,” he says. Lynch easily admits that he made some mistakes while in office. He says that the previous council should have put a definite height limitation in the district of 130 feet and also should have done a better job communicating with residents.

Most of those people interviewed do see the central business district as an area with mixed-use development, with residential units and commercial and retail shops. Patten points out that mixed use and the “new urban” concept like his Arcadius is the way to go there. You can imagine, he points out, how irked he was when those opposing the project chose to run for office under a banner of “smart growth,” a national planning movement that embraces some of the notions and design concepts behind Arcadius.

UNCW professor Tom Barth, chairman of the University’s Department of Political Science says smart growth came into existence as “a set of principles designed to control the negative impact of sprawl and unplanned development. It is growth that follows a plan whose ultimate goal is a balance between economic development and sustainability.”

“Smart growth and the new urbanism,” says Dr. Imperial, “is planning that tries to have people work where they live and gets them out of their cars. The idea is that they can interact in common areas. It’s analogous to recreating the old downtown areas of many cities. The question is how to recreate this through mixed-use development concepts. Many communities do it by acquiring all the land in a district like the central business district, but this is an intensive participatory process.”

Councilman Alan Gilbert, one of the two new council members, says that he “coined” the term for the campaign without fully realizing there was a national planning movement called “smart growth.”

“No, we weren’t referring to a movement. We meant it philosophically. I coined the phrase not to correspond to what’s happening anywhere else. What I meant was what was going on in town was not intelligent. I wouldn’t call it dumb, but it wasn’t intelligent, either,” he says.

Meanwhile, Steven L. Harrell, the town’s new Director of Planning and Development says that the town is undertaking a one-year project to put together a “unified development ordinance.”

“Basically this takes all of the development standards in the town and puts them all together in a cross-referenced unified document. This makes the codes easier to enforce and easier to understand by both residents and builders,” he says.

Additionally, the town is approaching work on a new land-use plan, but whether this plan can provide enough detail to help the town control its future is a matter of debate.

“I think the major impediment here in Carolina Beach is that there is no plan for growth,” says Lancaster, who was a high-level planner in the U.S. Air Force and for the Pentagon, and who, until recently, served on the town’s planning board. “Over the past few administrations there were certainly some good ideas among those groups, almost none of which was published and available to the public,” he says, calling for a detailed master plan or redevelopment plan that looks ahead 10 or 15 years and offers a vision for the future and a roadmap on how to get there.

“Generally speaking, there is a lot of resistance to long term planning in this whole region,” Professor Barth says. “It may not be a problem when an area is not booming, but when things are exploding, a lot of communities find themselves playing catch up.”

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