Fayetteville City Council members voted 7-0 on Tuesday to shelve a proposal to remove a small strip of Tanglewood Branch after they learned the property ownership lines aren’t clear.
The council decided to hold off on moving forward with a revised conceptual plan for Camden Court, a mixed-use building proposed southwest of Center Street and Gregg Avenue, until their next meeting in January. The specific item on the chopping block was a request to remove about 290 linear feet of the creek along the property’s western boundary, a significant detail for a site that sits entirely within the flood plain.
Camden Court is pitched as a residential building designed to handle valet parking for the recently announced Ramble hotel. That hotel is the centerpiece of a larger push to redevelop the downtown area, bringing high-end retail and lodging to a corridor that has seen a lot of heavy lifting over the last decade. If you’ve been walking around the Southwest Quadrant lately, you’ve probably seen the construction fences going up, and the Ramble is at the center of that activity.
The hold-up wasn’t about the building’s footprint or the curb appeal. It came down to a fundamental bureaucratic snafu involving the creek. Council members couldn’t verify who exactly owned the strip of land along the water, making it impossible to approve the permit to clear trees and grade the bank.
What this means for Camden Court
The project developers have proposed turning the lot into a mix of residential units and parking, recognizing that the Ramble won’t exactly be a walkable destination without a place for guests to leave their cars. The design includes a conceptual rendering showing a four-story building with ground-floor retail or amenity spaces and three levels of parking stacked on top of that, saving the street level for people living there.
By pushing the item to Jan. 5, the council acknowledged that they can’t rubber-stamp grading permits without knowing if they are touching a neighbor’s property. The Tanglewood Branch is a sensitive spot in Fayetteville’s infrastructure; when not flooding, it serves as a quiet green belt in the middle of the city, occasionally getting its banked areas mowed.
Jan. 5 is roughly when city staff expects to have the deed research finished and the ownership questions resolved so the council can make a final call on the environmental work.
This doesn’t mean the project is dead, or even that it’s stalled permanently. It just means the city needs to get its legal ducks in a row before digging into the dirt. As the Ramble district matures, these smaller edge cases regarding property lines and creek buffers
Source: Fayetteville Flyer