PITTSBORO –– Speakers used rhetoric such as “bird holocaust” and “a Chatham Park slum” on Monday to object to Chatham Park’s proposed tree protection element.
In response, the development’s landscape architects pointed to the plan put together and compared it to current levels of tree protection in downtown Pittsboro.
In the end, there was no consensus, and one Pittsboro Commissioner even said he wasn’t convinced.
Monday’s Pittsboro Board of Commissioners meeting stretched past 10:30 p.m., and while not all of it was due to discussion of the tree element, many of the 30-plus public attendees stayed until that agenda item came up.
David Brown and Kurt Pfeiffer, landscape architects with WithersRavenel, spoke about Chatham Park’s proposed plan to preserve tree coverage and canopy area within the 7,000-acre development. Brown stressed a difference between “coverage” and “canopy.”
“Those terms tend to get intertwined and co-mingled,” he said.
“Coverage,” he said, is the percentage of land area or acreage on which the tree and its roots exist. “Canopy” is the amount of land area covered by the tree’s branches and vegetation, which can extend far beyond the coverage. According to the presentation, canopy can sometimes stretch two or three times more than coverage when trees are full-grown.
“You’ve got a fairly small area of land, and the tree grows as it spreads out,” Brown said.
Pfeiffer said the firm studied coverage and canopy in downtown Pittsboro and came up with just 14 percent coverage, a number which lowered to just three percent when taking out trees planted during construction of some of those sites.
That compared to the 20 percent that Chatham Park is proposing for residential lots, 10 percent for non-residential or mixed use lots and three percent for residential urban centers. Non-residential urban centers would not require any tree coverage.
During the WithersRavenel presentation, Pittsboro Commissioner John Bonitz interjected, saying, “That illustration doesn’t persuade me in any way because I don’t see anything in Chatham Park’s plan that resembles the density of a downtown Pittsboro.”
Pfeiffer and Brown didn’t respond to the comment, and there was no further discussion on it.
Pfeiffer also said that residential land, which has the 20 percent tree coverage area minimum, would make up 80 percent of Chatham Park’s acreage, and that land only requiring no coverage or three percent coverage would be “much less” of the land.
The board made no decisions and had no discussion on the presentation, but several members of the public made their voices heard earlier in the evening.
Elaine Chiosso, executive director of the Haw River Assembly, said Chatham Park’s proposal would “affect thousands of people and maybe hundreds of thousands of people” due to the Park’s vicinity to the river.
“Chatham Park has not shown itself to be very concerned about the protection of our environment,” Chiosso said. “I think we know why Chatham Park is not willing to do more,”
She did not say why.
John Wagner said cutting trees would risk “destroying the unique character of this entire area.”
“This development, if they continue in this pattern, will get to be known as a vast Chatham Park slum, because that’s where you usually find this type of tree coverage,” Wagner said. “(It would be) a habitat not fit for humans or animals.”
Liz Cullington of Pittsboro expressed concerns about what she said were areas in the element that would give Chatham Park leeway.
“Chatham Park is proposing rules so filled with loopholes and trapdoors that they could end up with tree coverage way, way, way less than 10 percent,” Cullington said. “I fear Chatham Park will be a bird holocaust.”
A couple public speakers made reference to New York City having a 24 percent tree coverage area requirement.
However, according to a September 2018 report by the U.S. Forest Service, the city currently has a tree canopy, not coverage, that covers 21 percent of the city, Manhattan has just 20 percent canopy, while Queens as 18 and Brooklyn has 16.
Kirk Bradley — a co-owner of the Chatham News + Record and developer of the Mosaic at Chatham Park — defended the park and his development.
“I’ve had to apply all the rules you’ve cooperatively developed with Chatham Park,” Bradley said to the board. “I can tell you that I don’t find these numbers that people are quoting about the tree coverage factually accurate.”
Bradley said his development, which he argued was “one of the densest projects in the region,” is only going to develop 20 of the 65 acres and leave just 35 percent of the land impervious, which means water cannot pass through. Tree canopy on Mosaic, he said, would end up being around “50 percent or more.”
“I appreciate everybody’s passion and why they’re for it,” Bradley said. “You can’t preserve all the trees because you won’t be able to grade all the projects to be ADA-accessible, but you can go back and re-foliate, which our plan requires us to do and which we plan to do. What I am hearing people think they say and what they practically do when you develop the property is different.”
David Delvecchio of Pittsboro said he was “all for” private land owners doing what they wanted, as long as it doesn’t “start affecting the people around me in an adverse way.”
“I’m glad to stand here with other folks for (the trees),” he said. “There’s nothing unique about (Chatham Park’s) plan. They don’t walk their talk. What they do walk is what they’re forced to do as they push against the good people of the county, the state, you all, and what they can get away with.”