Nature Museum plans hit buzzsaw of Myers Park opposition
County will ‘press pause’ on museum expansion after residents object; worries of ‘Festival in the Park every day’
This article first appeared in the Dec. 6, 2019, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, a morning e-newsletter on local business news. Sign up for free here.
County officials are putting plans to expand the Nature Museum on hold temporarily, after getting an earful this week from a roomful of Myers Park neighbors concerned about the size of the project.
In July, the county and Discovery Place, which runs the museum next to Freedom Park, announced that the site would close in 2020 to allow construction of a new building. But as details have been shared with neighbors, some residents have grown concerned about the effects of an expansion that would double the museum’s size to 26,000 s.f. and add parking. That would require cutting down trees behind at least eight homes on Sterling Road by the museum’s entrance. Houses on that section of Sterling are valued at between $750,000 and $2M.
Raucous night at the museum: At a lively meeting Wednesday night at the museum — which is now called “Discovery Place Nature” — officials from the county and Discovery Place attempted to allay the neighborhood’s concerns. But some of the 80 or so residents scoffed and laughed at some of the answers provided by a county parks official and said their worries about increased traffic and cutting down trees had been ignored as plans progressed.
“If you asked somebody in Ballantyne would they like to come to Myers Park and be able to have Disneyland and a destination venue here, [they’d say] that would be great. They never asked us on the street at all,” neighbor Jenny Lou Wright told county officials. “This is a residential street in a residential neighborhood. You’re building a structure that you do not have the infrastructure for.”
Other comments:
- Another resident said building a bigger museum would be like “trying to pack 10 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound sack.”
- Somebody else said he worried that more events at the site would lead to visitors parking on narrow neighborhood streets, “like Festival in the Park every day,” with emergency vehicles unable to get through.
- Several residents at the meeting suggested the county and Discovery Place shift the museum entrance to nearby Princeton Avenue, or move the entire project somewhere else, like to Park Road Park.
Earlier in the week, the Myers Park Homeowners Association sent a notice to residents that said: “Benefits of a new and modern museum are numerous, but so are the potential negative impacts,” such as more traffic, “increased noise, light, and auto pollution” and “elimination of a large area of the tree canopy, and thus reduction of wildlife habitat and the natural aesthetic of the Freedom Park area.”
More visitors: County official said at the meeting that the number of annual visitors to the museum is expected to double, to 160,000. Existing plans call for adding 26 parking spaces, for a total of 87, but they would have to be reconfigured from the existing lot because of buffer requirements. Plans call for the museum’s driveway to remain in its existing location off Sterling, but the museum’s new entrance would face Freedom Park to attract more park visitors.
After nearly two hours of deep skepticism from neighbors, County Manager Dena Diorio apologized to the crowd “for the fact that you have not been heard” and pledged to “fix it.”
“We’re going to press pause and try to work through these issues before we move forward,” she told residents.
Balancing act: The county and Discovery Place are trying to balance the region’s need for a modern nature museum with the concerns of nearby homeowners, who don’t especially like the thought of more cars and people being drawn to their residential neighborhood. The existing museum was built in 1951, about the same time as nearby homes, officials said. The expansion is estimated to cost about $35M, with nearly half coming from the county and the rest from private funds. It is expected to open in 2022.
‘Anomaly’: It’s an unusual situation, Diorio told the Ledger in an interview, because the county parks have a strong record of working with nearby residents, who tend to support the county’s goals. She said she’s confident the two sides can reach a satisfactory resolution.
“Normally, around 95% of the time, everybody is really excited because we are building a park or renovating a park,” she said “To me, this is an anomaly where we have a project where we have neighbors that at this point are not supportive of what we are trying to do.”
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