Steamrolled! 

So when Daniel Levine decided he wanted to build a road that could dump more than 6,000 extra cars a day from his business park into the Stonehaven neighborhood, residents of the middle-class Southeast Charlotte subdivision figured their biggest battle would be overcoming Levine's name and family connections.

As it turned out, they were wrong. What they've been fighting for months now is a far greater force, a bumbling and contradictory one whose power isn't derived from money or influence, but from chaos and confusion. That force is the bureaucracy at City Hall and the well-meaning City Council members who take its advice.

If the folks from Stonehaven lose their battle, Levine will be able to build a road connecting McAlpine Business Center on Monroe Road -- which will eventually grow from its current size to a 500,000+ square-foot business development -- to Thermal Road. Thermal and a series of three roads that adjoin it wind through the Stonehaven neighborhood and eventually empty onto Sardis Road. Three of those roads -- typical two-lane neighborhood streets with no sidewalks -- are, to put it mildly, not equipped to handle that kind of traffic.

"All the kids' bus stops are basically on the curb or the gutter of these four streets where the traffic will go," said Stonehaven resident Paul Andrews. In addition, these two-lane streets are in a neighborhood that's home to a facility for children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Stonehaven residents are concerned that daily cut-through traffic won't exactly be sensitive to those children's welfare.

The residents of Stonehaven have learned a lot as they've battled Levine's road plans, but what they've discovered about how city government works has shocked them.

As they pored over ordinances and asked question after question which city bureaucrats either couldn't or wouldn't answer, the Stonehaven residents came to a startling realization: Most City Council members had not read their own policies and didn't understand what was in them. Worse yet, changes to policies had been quietly written by city staff and powerful developers who stripped out parts of ordinances that would have protected neighborhoods like Stonehaven from the kind of traffic Levine wants to run through the neighborhood. The clincher is that City Council members have been rubber-stamping these policy changes without reading them, and without realizing it.

Once the neighborhood understood that their battle was about much more then just their neighborhood, they overwhelmed a City Council meeting in mid-October. The whole thing surprised veteran City Council member Susan Burgess, who, facing a sea of over 200 Stonehaven residents dressed in yellow, remarked that she'd never seen a neighborhood turn out in quite these numbers before to protest something. She'd never seen a neighborhood quite this passionate, she said.

But there's a lot Burgess didn't know that Stonehaven leaders did. Like every other City Council member Creative Loafing interviewed for this story, Burgess had never heard of something called the Turn Around Committee.

The committee, Burgess was surprised to learn, is a subgroup of something called the Subdivision Steering Committee. Neither committee is appointed by City Council. Instead, Planning Commission staff simply invites powerful developers to "informal meetings" that aren't posted for the public to attend, because, well, they're informal. Then, at some of these meetings, these developers quietly helped staff rewrite city policy.

I Voted For That?
Back in 2001, when City Council asked city staff to study cul-de-sacs, Planning Commission Subdivision Administrator Linda Beverly invited developers from companies like Crescent Resources, Pearson Development, Provident Development, Pulte and Yarbrough-Williams to join her. By the time they were done, the group had rewritten the city's policy on cul-de-sacs. In the process, they gutted some neighborhood protections from the city's connectivity policy, leaving places like Stonehaven, and many others, vulnerable to being ruined by excess traffic.

According to the American Planning Association's guide, the point of "connectivity" is to connect neighborhoods by road to adjacent properties like schools, parks, and grocery shopping centers to keep neighborhood drivers off major thoroughfares. The goal of connectivity is not to dump cut-through traffic into neighborhoods, but rather to build new ways for neighborhood traffic to get out. The problem is that it could be a stumbling block for developers who want places to dump out traffic when they're building infill development next to neighborhoods.

So the Turn Around Committee slashed sections of the city's subdivision ordinance that might have protected existing neighborhoods from the effects of traffic that could be dumped onto their streets from new developments. They chopped out sections that said connections should only be made between neighborhoods and neighboring developments when adjacent land uses were similar. And then, somehow, their work wound up before City Council in the form of an ordinance amendment.

"And City Council approved this?" Burgess asked. Not only did City Council approve it unanimously in October 2001, but Burgess voted for it, although she doesn't recall doing so.

Council members Don Lochman, Patrick Cannon, Nancy Carter, Malcolm Graham and James Mitchell also voted for it.

Like Burgess, Carter had never heard of the Turn Around Committee and didn't recall voting for the ordinance change either.

"Oh, Lord," she said when CL read her the changes she voted for.

Lochman, who also voted for the ordinance change and was equally in the dark, says the Council deserves an explanation.

"What we need is a good explanation as to who precisely did it, why they did it, who authorized it and what's the benefit from it and what's the detriment to it," said Lochman. "Someone ought to explain all that."

Linda Beverly, the staffer who brought the Turn Around Committee together, was uncertain why wording that would protect neighborhoods was slashed.

"I can't really react to it because it was three years ago and I can't remember exactly what the thinking was," said Beverly.

Given all this, says Paul Andrews, his Stonehaven neighbors quickly became frustrated when talking to City Council members who often seemed as confused as they were.

"If citizens like us who spend basically 10 or 12 hours looking into this already have more information than every Council member I've spoken to, I think that's amazing," said Andrews. "Actually, I think that's frightening."

Connectivity Policy MIA
Unfortunately, that's not the only problem the neighborhood ran into. For months, the residents of Stonehaven were told that their case would be a test of the City Council's commitment to its connectivity policy. When covering this case, two local newspapers also reported the same thing -- that this would be the test case for the city's connectivity policy. There's just one problem, and it's a big one: the city doesn't have a connectivity policy.

Sure, "connectivity" is loosely defined and referred to a couple of times in the city's subdivision ordinance, but the city doesn't have a formal policy defining what kind of development you can connect to what.

That, again, was news to Council members who say they've voted on at least 12 rezoning cases in which they thought they were applying the city's connectivity policy.

It's easy to see how they could have become confused. City and planning staff often refer to whatever they're doing in regard to connectivity, which at this point isn't entirely clear, as the "connectivity policy." City planner Tom Drake even called the Stonehaven case the "poster child" for the policy. But that doesn't mean the city actually has one.

When CL asked the seven City Council members we interviewed for this article if they had actually read the city's connectivity policy, four -- Lochman, Susan Burgess, Warren Turner and Patsy Kinsey -- initially said they had. Council members John Lassiter and John Tabor said they hadn't read the policy, but thought the city had one. Only Carter said she was aware that the city didn't have a formal, written connectivity policy.

"I feel sorry for them," said Stonehaven resident Jonathan Alix, who has spent a lot of time studying city ordinances related to the case. "I don't know how City Council members can wade through all the material they are expected to consider. Council asks the staff, "What do you think?' and they say, "Oh yeah, this is great,' and they vote on it. They don't understand what they're voting on. They give staff the benefit of the doubt. The way things are done there just seems to leave a lot missing."

Kinsey said she ran into a similar situation during a controversy in Plaza-Midwood over sidewalks the city wanted to install.

"City staff said our policy is five-foot sidewalks with four-foot planting strips and this was on a street where houses are very close to the street," said Kinsey. "So we all met out there, the neighbors and engineering and the Charlotte Department of Transportation, and finally, point-blank, there were two of us that said, "What is the city's policy? Is this the city's policy? Where is the policy?' Well, come to find out, there is no written policy."

Who's In Charge Here?
Because of the way the system is set up, the final decision on whether Levine can open a driveway to his business park in the middle of the Stonehaven neighborhood will ultimately be made by one person -- a person who, because the Planning Commission and the city have almost no formal rules on the matter, has virtually no rules to guide her.

Ironically, that person is Beverly, the same staffer who convened the "informal" group of developers on the Turn Around Committee in the first place. That means that, in simple language, the same staffer charged with enforcing the rules wound up working with the developers she is supposed to enforce them upon to rewrite and loosen them without public input -- which ultimately gave Beverly and the developers more power.

That is, again, because there are no formal rules governing whether it's OK to connect a neighborhood to a business park, regardless of the size of the business park.

Sometimes Beverly and staff ultimately decide to allow it, she says, and sometimes they don't. At other times, the decision is made for them by City Council when it does conditional rezonings. In this case, City Council could vote on Nov. 15 to approve the zoning change Levine is seeking without a road connection -- and Beverly and the planning staff could allow Levine to add it in later when he brings his building plans in for approval.

That leaves one person with an awful lot of power, says Andrews.

"This could come down to one person making a decision without any written guidelines at all," said Andrews. "If that one person doesn't come out to the neighborhood, or isn't required to do any kind of cost-benefit analysis, how do they know how this will affect us?"

What particularly bothers Stonehaven residents about this is that when the Levines bought the land along Monroe, they knew it was land-locked. At the time, it was a sore spot for development because it was bounded on two sides by neighborhoods, by a greenway on the third side and by railroad tracks along Monroe Road. Today, there's only one way to get into the McAlpine Business Center. Customers must turn off Monroe Road and cross the railroad tracks. If a train is coming, they have to wait. The business center already employs an evening rush hour traffic cop who stops traffic on Monroe Road to let the crush of traffic out. So to successfully expand the square footage of the business park, Levine needs another way for the traffic it would generate to move in and out. That's why the Stonehaven connection is so important to Levine.

But is it fair to this well-established neighborhood?

"They bought the property knowing it was land-locked," said Alix. "The developer has repeatedly said there is nothing going into that development that would be considered a neighborhood service. The retail in there is going to be showrooms very similar to what he has at the Greylyn Business Park. I don't see why this would be connected to the neighborhood. I don't see why our safety and our peace and quiet and our enjoyment should be put in jeopardy for his financial gain."

So far, however, it looks like the city's policies are working in Levine's favor. According to the planning staff's analysis, none of the traffic that winds up on Thermal Road can be considered "cut-through traffic." That's because a few years back, planners and the city's traffic department got together and picked out a smattering of roads across the city and designated them as "major collectors" and the City Council approved the map. According to the subdivision ordinance, traffic on major collector roads is never considered cut-through traffic.

The four streets in Stonehaven were among those that were designated major collectors on the map. By way of comparison, Morrison Boulevard is also a major collector. Morrison, however, is a striped, four-lane road with turn lanes, a median, sidewalks and traffic lights. Thermal and the four roads it adjoins with to carve a path through Stonehaven are all typical two-lane residential streets you would find in any subdivision: three of the four roads don't even have sidewalks. But incredibly, they were given the same classification as Morrison Boulevard. The City Council members CL spoke to for this article weren't too sure why that was, either.

Charlotte Department of Transportation Manager of the Planning and Design Division Norman Steinman says the major collector designation is part of a classification system that's been around since the 1960s. Steinman says he is currently working with the city's Transportation Committee to come up with new designations for roads that will take into account the number of cars a street can carry. Eventually, Steinman hopes the committee will be able to use this information to craft a formal connectivity policy. But given that the city has been "studying" connectivity since 1998, and paying consultants for studies on connectivity whose findings it has subsequently ignored, there's no telling how long it will take the city to actually come up with a policy.

Residents of Stonehaven are hoping it won't be too late for their neighborhood -- and for the rest of the neighborhoods to which the city applies its supposed "policy."

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com