The Henderson City Council met Monday, September 13. The areas around two congested intersections appeared on the agenda. In both cases the understanding of the parties involved led to Council decisions.
For a couple of years, there has been interest from a developer to do something with the parcels of land at 1337 and 1343 Dabney Drive at the corner of Lynne Avenue. Unlike in 2019 and 2020, Councilman Garry Daeke said the City agreed to go ahead and rezone the property this time. He said it was made very clear a forthcoming site plan from the developer could not include ingress and egress from the residential side of the property onto Lynne Avenue. A cul-de-sac will be built to close off Lynne Avenue from Dabney Drive.
Daeke said, “I still worry about in the future as we do this. The exits from this property will turn into a lane that turns back into the mall, so I’m not sure how people will be able to exit and leave and do it safely but certainly DOT will be involved in this. We hope this works out. I’m still a little apprehensive about the traffic flow of it, but I think we’ve got what we want to have in terms of not moving traffic into a neighborhood.”
It’s believed at this point, the existing property owner will sell to the developer, the developer will raze the property for redevelopment, sell a portion of the land back to the city for the cul-de-sac and as a result of the process additional development will occur at that location on Dabney Drive.
Across town a piece, the former Henderson Laundry building stands vacant at an intersection, Chestnut Street and Andrews Avenue, that sees 20,000 cars a day go by. Councilman Daeke says Vance County has given it’s portion of the property to the City of Henderson.
In order to apply for the North Carolina Dry Cleaning Solvent Cleanup Act (DSCA) funds, a single owner needed to be listed. It’s an understood the County will stand back up on the matter later.
A lot of expense could be lurking. Chemicals and cleaning products are in the ground there and in the building.
Daeke said, “It’s going to be tricky. We won’t know until we get in there. We know there are some chemicals that have got to come out. There are some machines still in there that have the same chemicals in them. They have to come out. And then the remediation of the property is where the costs may be. It could be as simple as trying to clean it up … It could be the building cannot be demolished because of some issues, and we’ll have to remodel it. That was a real throw to me the other night. I didn’t know that, and that could be very expensive, so it’s going to be tricky to get that done. But that’s such an important corner, entry into the city as we try to move traffic into downtown from Highway 39 and from the interstate. And that’s such an eyesore, and we want to clean that up and do something there or make it available for development. But there are going to be some costs to do that.”
The plan is – Proceed in such a way that the DSCA program limits the City/County exposure for outside remediation of the solvents to $16,000. The City Council Agenda packet information indicates it is estimated $15,000 is needed for equipment and chemical removal from inside the building alone. The next step in what could be a long process.