In “Flim-flammed by the FLUM?” the subject of a new Future Land Use Map for Raleigh — a FLUM — was introduced and some of its shortcomings, as listed by neighborhood leaders in the Northeast part of the city, were noted. This report was based on the first of two “City Council listens to the public” sessions scheduled on the proposed new comprehensive plan, held Monday night at Eastgate Community Center. The FLUM has been presented by Raleigh’s planning staff as a critical piece of the comp-plan. Others, however, wonder.

So last night, the second “Council listens” session took place at City Hall, with the focus on issues in the Southwest part of the city. Once again, Council members got an earful, and — just like Eastgate — it was all about the FLUM.

The most graphic concerned the old Bolton Corporation property at the intersection of Hillsborough and Morgan streets (shown above –for positioning, the blue area at the top is St. Mary’s School, located on the northwest corner of Hillsborough and St. Mary’s streets; the Bolton tract is catty-corner to St. Mary’s on the south side of Hillsborough Street).

In the FLUM, the 6.7-acre Bolton tract is designated “Central Business District,” or CBD. Since the Bolton tract is not actually in the central business district, saying that is — or that it should be — causes the dark red CBD area of the FLUM to take on the shape of a large body (the real CBD, located to the east) with a slithering neck to the west and a “dragon’s head” (the Bolton property), to borrow from the colorful description of it offered by Pullen Park neighborhood leader Paul Shannon. Shannon predicted that, if the Bolton property is developed at the scale allowed in the CBD — unlimited building heights, little required parking — the dragon’s head will eat his small-scale neighborhood, a place of modest houses and artsy folk.

Pullen Park and the other neighborhoods represented by the Hillsborough CAC have been trying since December, when the FLUM was unveiled, to get the Bolton property removed from the CBD and designated as some other, more reasonable level of mixed-used development. The property owner, a Charlotte firm which bought it from the Bolton family, has pushed hard the other way. While insisting that it doesn’t plan to develop the property at anything like a CBD scale, firm principal Jim Zanoni and his attorney, Mack Paul, have argued with great intensity that it belongs in the CBD anyway.

I should note that I live in Cameron Park and I’ve attended a number of the very contentious Hillsborough CAC meetings. They’ve underlined two fundamental, and related problems with the FLUM as it relates to the Bolton tract and other strategic locations in Raleigh.

One problem is that most of the land-use categories in the FLUM (the CBD designation is an exception) do not correspond to the categories in the existing zoning code. Thus, saying that a property’s future land-use should be “community retail — mixed use,” for example, is to imagine a zoning classification that does not currently exist and may never exist. And unless it exists, a lot of the FLUM designations simply invite a rezoning to higher density under the current mess of a code, which to say the least — and without going into chapter and verse about why the current code is mistreated enough without creating a new way to mistreat it –is highly problematic.

The second problem is that, below the CBD category, within which just anything goes, there isn’t a FLUM category that really fits what the Bolton property should become. The closest is HDR (high-density residential), which allows from 28 units an acre to — uh, oh — an unlimited number, with unlimited building heights, but only limited ground-floor retail. Where’s the category that says 28 units to — let’s pick a number — 50 units, and the other category that says 51 units to 100 units? But again, it’s all fantasy, because whatever the FLUM imagines, the current zoning has no such categories anyway.

Hillsborough CAC resolutions have asked the Raleigh planning staff to create such an intermediate category; to spell out transition rules from higher-density development to adjacent neigborhoods, and/or to treat the Bolton tract as a special study area — all in an effort to get the tract removed from the CBD while also recognizing that it’s an important location in between the CBD and the neighborhoods around N.C. State University. Planning Director Mitch Silver has resisted, and following his lead, the Raleigh Planning Commission did as well