Duke Encounters Mistrust at City Hall With Recent Rezoning Requests

Last week, a Durham City Council discussion about a Duke University rezoning request took a bizarre turn.

“It’s like your uncle who paid for you to go to college but molested you. It’s a difficult relationship,” said mayor pro tem Mark-Anthony Middleton, borrowing a quip from comedian Chris Rock, to describe the town and gown connection.

Middleton’s comments came as lawyers for Duke petitioned the council to rezone chunks of campus to the city’s University and College (UC) designation. That unique zoning, which already applies to most of Duke’s campus, allows the university to build essentially whatever it wants without having to go back through the lengthy council approval process for developers. 

While Duke has owned many of the parcels in question for years, the university’s lawyers said that the rezoning would help with future campus-wide planning. 

The council, reluctant to provide that blank check rezoning for Duke without more details, decided to postpone a vote on the rezoning until their October 7 meeting and requested that Duke’s lawyers come back with a more detailed plan for development for the parcels.

That hearing marked the second time this year that Duke’s rezoning requests have run into skepticism at City Hall. 

The August rezoning request was only the second half of a two-part bundle that had originally included several parcels in the Burch Avenue neighborhood. Duke withdrew those Burch Avenue requests after the planning commission, at a meeting in April, recommended that the council deny them. The planning commission, however, did recommend the city council approve the request that landed before it in August.

At both meetings, officials pushed for more details from Duke.

In April, Burch Avenue residents questioned what Duke would build on sites, like the Old Laundry building at 400 Gattis Street, that are in the middle of narrow residential roads.

“We made three specific requests of things we wanted Duke to exclude from the list of possible developments: a parking deck, a bus depot, and a sewage and waste-water treatment plant. Duke would not commit to excluding any of those possible uses,” Russell Lacy, who lives in the Burch Avenue neighborhood, told INDY at the time.

At the August 19 meeting, council member Javiera Caballero specifically worried that the university could obstruct city plans to build a 10-foot-wide pedestrian and bike path near Duke Hospital, while council member Carl Rist questioned the lack of sustainability commitments, especially given Duke’s recent climate commitment.

“[The rezoning] makes sense from just a land use [perspective],” said Caballero. “But we all know that Duke has also not been the best actor sometimes. And so there is community distrust, and there’s certainly distrust on this council.”

Nil Ghosh, the attorney representing Duke for Morningstar Law Group (and who previously served on the planning commission), argued that such conversations could take place when the university actually began developing the areas, and that Duke could not provide plans “because they literally do not have plans” yet. Ghosh had made similar arguments before the planning commission in April.

That vagueness clearly frustrated council member Chelsea Cook.

“There will be no enforcement mechanism at that time once the zoning has changed,” said Cook. “You’re asking us to make a change without having any idea what the plan is.”

Middleton, though, said that while he has his fair share of beef with Duke, he was not going to “use the particularities of this case as a cudgel.”

“I mean, it’s a university … they’re not gonna build a strip club,” Middleton said. “I don’t see how that’s gonna forward their mission.”

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].