Getting there from Here: Is Carolina Beach Ready to Tackle the Challenges?
By John Prestage

Ward Manning, a major developer in town, invited local business people, builders, realtors—and anyone else who wanted to attend—to a meeting last month at the Marriott Hotel to unveil a multi-state advertising campaign touting what he called the “New Carolina Beach.”

About 60 people attended. With the help of producers from WSOC-TV in Charlotte, Manning treated people to a preview of five television spots portraying a balmy palm-tree filled beach and Caribbean-like waters. The spots also showed his 160-foot Park Place condominium project, which is already approved by the town, and ended with the tag: “Out with the old, in with the New Carolina Beach.” Manning said he’s put up $600,000 to run the spots across North Carolina, and he urged attendees to join him by fronting some of their own money to help support a larger campaign, earmarked to play in states up and down the East Coast and even markets in Alabama and Louisiana.
 

Normally a town government, in coordination with a local chamber of commerce or tourist bureau, handles this kind of town promotion. While Manning certainly has a right to promote the town and his projects, his effort may say much about the state of affairs in Carolina Beach, where a developer finds it necessary to do this on his own and then seek assistance from other business interests in an effort to redefine the town’s image. At the 90-minute meeting a committee of 22 volunteers was put together to discuss the effort further.
 

“The town has left private business people to fend for themselves,” Planning and Zoning (P&Z) Commissioner Dan Wilcox says of the Manning meeting. “None of this is driven by a grand scheme or a shared vision as to what we all see the town to be.”

Birth of a Long Range Plan
Wilcox is one of several current and former members of the P&Z who have expressed frustration and concerns about how the town is handling its growth and planning issues. P&Z Commissioners review building projects and issues related to zoning and planning and make recommendations to the town council. Jim McCulloh, a registered architect, who recently resigned from the P&Z, says he did so because of his frustrations with town leaders and the planning department. Both McCulloh and Wilcox assert that the town needs to begin work as soon as possible on a long-range plan for the Central Business District, a roadmap that can bring all stakeholders (residents, merchants, realtors, builders, investors, and landowners) in the community together and spell out a single vision to revitalize what is an unusual and valuable resource.
 

Lank Lancaster, who served on the P&Z for nearly five years walked away from the commission in the spring and said in an interview in March that the new administration (elected last November) has to “clearly explain to the public what it’s going to do. If it takes the same approach as the last couple of administrations…it is going to have the same problems, because people will not understand, and they’ll therefore become uncomfortable.” It was discomfort about growth issues and a lack of dialogue with citizens that led to the defeat of the previous administration and swept into office the new mayor and two council members, who ran under a banner of “smart growth.”
 

Recent interviews with several current and former P&Z commissioners, town leaders, and others, reveal a rift in this beach community that runs deep. It also reveals town leaders who are indeed concerned about the town’s future but who may not be very close to grappling with the truly monumental growth and planning issues the community faces.
 

One government planner from outside the town says this may not be so unusual. It takes a great deal of courage and leadership for elected officials in a town like Carolina Beach to grapple with these fractious issues, not to mention money and time.
 

“Feelings are running high on either side of these issues. You are likely to find more radical opinions here than moderate opinions right now. We need to bring those people who are far on one side and far on the other side closer to the center, so we can begin working toward consensus,” Wilcox says.

Mainstreet, USA
Meanwhile, the town council and P&Z Commissioners have been meeting together at workshops to discuss growth issues. At a workshop in July the town announced that it was applying for a grant from the state Department of Commerce Community Assistance Main Street Program. Although there is no funding attached to the grant, if the town were accepted into the program, it would receive some consulting help and guidance on how to develop portions of its central business district.
 

“We’re hoping this Main Street grant will supply us with consultants, such as architects, to tell us what we need to do to redevelop our central business district,” Mayor Bill Clark says. “They won’t give us money, but they offer expertise that might be needed. I’m counting on this to get everything kicked off.”
 

While the town has submitted its ten-page grant application, only two additional communities the size of Carolina Beach will be accepted into the program this year. There are some who say the grant is a long shot for the town, while others point out that the administration has no alternative plan in mind, if the Main Street grant is not approved.

The Business District
Everyone agrees however that the future vitality and character of Carolina Beach is tied to its Central Business District (CBD). The district runs from where St. Joseph Street connects with Lake Park Boulevard south to just beyond Charlotte Street. It then runs east to the ocean between Charlotte and Dolphin Streets. The district takes in the main business center along Lake Park Boulevard, the boardwalk area, Marriott Hotel, and runs north to the Arcadius project. A portion of the marina is considered in the Central Business District.
 

Nearly everyone interviewed for a series of Snow’s Cut Monthly planning and growth articles agrees that the district needs to be revitalized. Steve Harrell, the town’s planner, who has been on the job eight months now, says there is currently no plan to guide development in the area and more than 50 percent of the buildings in the Boardwalk area sit vacant. Many people confuse the town’s land use plan, which is required by the Coastal Area Management Act (CAMA) with a comprehensive long-range plan, but this is not the case.
 

Mark T. Imperial, a UNCW political science professor, whose expertise is coastal community planning, says that a long-range plan is a lot different than a land-use plan. The land use plan is a broad overview of growth planning, while a long-range plan is a blueprint or roadmap that captures a vision and describes “how to get there from here.” “You’ve got to have a long range plan to revitalize the Central Business District in Carolina Beach. Such a plan would look very different than a land-use plan. Many communities hire consulting groups to build these kind of plans,” he says.
Typically with this approach, a consulting firm will come in and engage the town in an intensive planning process that could last days or weeks, involving economic leaders, business leaders, developers, property owners, citizens, in intensive planning meetings and consultations. The consulting firm brings into the town design and transportation consultants, and anyone else appropriate to the project.
 

“Literally within four or five days of intensive work and consultations with all the stakeholders, the group can come up with architectural and general plans and schematics for how a town might redevelop an area. This is a proactive highly controlled kind of effort, where basically government becomes a partner with property owners and businesses and uses the planning process to make sure that whatever plan is developed is palatable to the citizenry ” he says.
 

But even this effort is only the beginning. The process will probably lead to some winners and some losers, and no one will get all of what they want. “If you do this kind of grassroots, bottom up planning, it’s probably going to produce stuff that is very different than what some people may currently have in mind. If everyone is not willing to compromise then ultimately it will all unwind,” he says.

Height is the Magic Word
Once this kind of plan is undertaken and accepted by a town, then a roadmap needs to be developed and finalized on just how to implement the plan over a period of years, perhaps decades. Ordinances need to be revised that support the plan. Tax incentives or other innovative approaches may need to be developed to help direct development and make it economically feasible for investors and builders to buy into the vision.
 

“The advantage to taking a comprehensive and targeted approach is that it offers something more than just how tall buildings are. You need to think about how people are going to move around in cars and on foot. How do you avoid bumper-to-bumper traffic? How do you develop infrastructure? If you want to develop the downtown area, there are a lot of interconnected issues that have to be thought out. There are practical restraints. It’s not like you can build a new bridge in Carolina Beach to get trucks to the north end beach without going through residential areas,” he says.
 

Dr. Imperial is not alone in this thinking. P&Z Commissioner Wilcox puts his feelings this way: “This is a more substantial task than bickering about a height limit. We need to address every aspect of growth—water, sewer, traffic, both town and small business economics, safety, light and air issues, parking, height, architectural design, as well as natural resources, tourist appeal, flood requirements, and even our own ordinances, which sometimes conflict with our own best interests.”
 

McCulloh, in a written statement puts it this way: “Height may be what we are talking about here in Carolina Beach, but it is not what we should be talking about. We should be talking about land use and demographics, height, bulk, and density; open space, sunlight, and pollution; infrastructure, traffic, parking, and so forth. Height is an important consideration but it is hardly the sole consideration and shouldn’t be looked at apart from the other aspects of the built environment.”
 

“I’ve lived here eight years and have witnessed change, but it seems to be happening parcel by parcel unconnected by any organizing principle. Carolina Beach seems to be a town in search of itself. Last fall’s elections were bitterly contested and decided on this issue. On the one side are those who see Carolina Beach as a real estate speculator’s paradise, on the other are those who see it as a paradise in which to live. The speculators lost the election but are winning the struggle,” he says.
 

He goes on to say that he sides with those who see the town as a place to live, but there is some irony in his comments and a glimmer of consensus, when combined with those of Wilcox. Both have staked out similar positions calling for a comprehensive approach to planning in the community, both express disappointment with the efforts of town officials, but Wilcox is a builder in town and McCulloh is a semi-retired architect, who once worked for Donald Trump in New York City. Although the two may have very different perspectives and vantage points, they have much in common in what they say needs to be done in the town they’ve both come to call home.
 

Both Harrell and Mayor Clark defended the town’s recent efforts to alter height limits in the residential areas of the town and to seek a consultant to look at height issues in the CBD.
 

“I think a height study is a start,” Harrell says. “The reason I say that is because if we start with a vision that had certain kinds of heights and the height study comes in after the fact and says, ‘your vision can’t be accomplished with these heights,’ then we needed to know that going into it. I think the height study should really be the first piece of it.”
 

When asked what criteria would be used then, to come up with height limits, if not elements of a larger plan, he said: “That’s the question. There are different answers to that and that’s what a height study will help us to determine. What should be the criteria for determining what the heights ought to be? I don’t really know at this point, because I’ve never been through a height study…”
 

Mayor Clark says he sees height as simply a matter of density. “How many people can you put in a square area? The more you go up, the more people, the more traffic, the more beach problems.”

The Next Step
Some planners say that without comprehensive planning, town growth restrictions or piecemeal planning can lead to unintended consequences in years to come. One example of this phenomenon may be the town’s boardwalk area, which today is clearly run down and neglected.
 

The town’s grant application to the main street program describes the boardwalk today: “Original family-oriented amusements and shops have given way to empty, dilapidated buildings that harbor criminal and drug activities. Absentee ownership of buildings runs at about 80 percent. Buildings and streetscape conditions reflect this absentee ownership with inadequate maintenance…”
 

Perhaps the conditions also reflect something else. Wilcox explains it this way: “We didn’t help ourselves years ago, before the Marriott Hotel, when the general concept was to force those people (boardwalk businesses) out of there and through ordinances try to make it so they couldn’t rebuild, so they couldn’t improve their properties, and basically blight the area. It is common knowledge that this is what happened.”
 

“I’m the kind of person who says, well, if we wanted them out of there, then we should have bought them out,” he says.
 

Mayor Clark says that his goal in seeking election was” to bridge the gap between people on all sides” of these issues. He says that he does not mind putting himself out on a limb. “I don’t mind standing up for the right thing and weighing out the facts…what I’ve learned in the last eight months is that things don’t happen quickly. People want instant answers and instant fixes,” he says.
 

There are others in town that feel positive about what the new mayor and council are doing. One of those is Jerry Hall, a retired CIA intelligence analyst, who lives on Canal Drive. He has been a resident of the town for ten years and has owned a home in the town since 1980. He is neither a planner nor builder. He is a year-round resident. He supports the height study because, he says, he is looking for some immediate clarity. He supports what he perceives as efforts by the current administration to make everyone play by the same rules and take a deep breath.
 

“We have had turmoil in planning and zoning for so long that there needs to be some immediate stability in our neighborhoods. It looks to me like the administration is looking at issues of density and trying to balance out these issues after a time when people did whatever they wanted. I’m a guy who lives here and appreciates what we got,” he says.
 

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