Durham Planning Commissioner Resigns in Protest

A Durham planning commissioner has resigned in protest of the way in which some Durham city council members have, in his words, “dismissed, at times ignored” and “even denigrated” the work and expertise of the planning commission.

Anthony Sease, a civil engineer and adjunct assistant professor at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, was appointed to the planning commission in 2021. He submitted his resignation letter to the city council via email on Wednesday, a day after announcing his imminent exit at a planning commission meeting. (“This is going to be my last meeting,” Sease said Tuesday night.)

Sease’s second term on the commission was set to expire in 2025. In response to a request for comment from the INDY, Sease shared his resignation letter but declined to comment further on the matter.

The planning commission serves as an advisory board to the city council on land use and development cases. Durham city council members and county commissioners appoint planning commission members to weigh in on rezoning and annexation proposals before those cases come before council. The planning commission can approve or oppose proposals, and leave comments on them, but doesn’t have real voting power.

In remarks Sease made during the commission meeting Tuesday night, which closely resemble the contents of his resignation letter, Sease stressed that his discontent is not related to the commission’s lack of a final say in land use cases: “It’s perfectly fine if the council opts not to adhere to our recommendations,” Sease said. “There will be a lot of cases where they shouldn’t; where things change before they get to the final vote.” 

Sease’s issue, he said, is that “there’s been a bit of a tendency for the work of this commission to be diminished, and not only that, but just flat out called into question and attacked” by members of the city council.

For example, a council member recently called the expertise of the planning commission into question, saying it is the role of elected officials to “be the experts” and that planning commissioners “are not experts,” Sease said.

Sease is likely referring to a comment mayor pro tem Mark-Anthony Middleton made at a city council meeting on April 15. At the meeting, council member Chelsea Cook referred to planning commissioners as “appointed experts” and Middleton responded that while he has “high regards for the planning commission’s” work, “all of our boards and commissions are volunteers, and when we put them on, they’re not all necessarily experts.

“Our boards and commissions can allow you to become an expert. You can get on the planning commission, and if you apply yourself and read all the stuff, you can become an expert. Oftentimes these planning commissions and boards allow people who just want to volunteer to get expertise and experience in areas that they have none in. We don’t ask for experts in planning to go on the planning commission. Some of them are. Some of them are not.”

“They are certainly not 100 percent all experts,” Middleton added.

Sease refuted these assertions in his remarks Tuesday night and in his resignation letter.

“Expertise is not required to serve, yet everyone on the Planning Commission is an expert at something,” Sease wrote in his letter, noting that the commission is currently made up of people with expertise in city and regional planning, residential real estate sales, commercial real estate brokerage and development, corporate finance, civil engineering, engineering project management, site planning, and law. 

Sitting members include a PhD “whose dissertation research was planning and development practices in Durham,” Sease wrote, as well as an executive leader who manages “hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate for one of our state’s public institutions” and a site planner who has helped “implement thousands of housing units across a dozen states, and hundreds of affordable units in North Carolina.”

In an emailed statement to the INDY, Middleton reiterated that planning commissioners are volunteers and that through their service on the commission, they can become experts in land use.

“Commissioner Sease seems to be attempting to manufacture a controversy out of a demonstrably non-controversial statement,” Middleton wrote. “In the context of a land use discussion, asserting that ‘everyone is an expert at something’ is a non-sequitir [sic]. We’re not talking about some things, we’re specifically talking about land use. My comments had nothing to do with any commissioner’s general base of knowledge.”

As another example of disregard for the planning commission’s expertise, Sease cited the way in which some city council members explained their votes during a recent annexation hearing. 

The case involved a proposed development of more than 500 single-family homes on a 200-acre parcel along Virgil Road in Southeast Durham. The planning commission’s 10 members unanimously opposed the proposal in January, with nearly every commissioner citing the development’s projected environmental impact, especially on the water quality of Falls Lake, as a reason for their dissent.

The proposal and associated proffers—community benefits that developers tack on to make projects more amenable—that came before the city council on May 20, and that the council approved in a 4-3 vote, “did not substantively change” from the one that the planning commission had opposed unanimously, according to Sease.

Sease wrote that the Virgil Road development will be in an “area carrying the heaviest burden at present in terms of rampant suburban-style, disaggregated, environmentally degrading, almost exclusively residential, auto-dependent development. 

“Those words are not jargon,” Sease wrote. “They are qualitative and technical descriptors – choices – choices being endorsed favorably by Council.”

Middleton, mayor Leonardo Williams, and council members Carl Rist and Javiera Caballero voted yes on the proposed development.

In explaining his vote, Durham city council member Carl Rist said nutrient pollution and algal blooms are a “serious issue for Falls Lake” and seemed to suggest that clear-cutting hundreds of acres of trees and vegetation would alleviate the issue.

“Fifty-six percent of nitrogen that gets into Falls Lake comes from forest and agriculture,” Rist said at the May 20 meeting. He cited data from a study that a board member from the Upper Neuse River Basin Association (UNRBA) presented to council members during a work session on May 9. 

“[But only] one percent of nitrogen comes from stream bank erosion,” Rist, who is the council delegate to UNRBA, continued. “For phosphorus, the other nutrient we measure closely, 54 percent comes from forest and agriculture. Fourteen percent comes from stream bank erosion. So we have to be clear about what the impacts are in Falls Lake, and the data shows that there is some erosion that happens, but that much more is coming from forested land and agriculture.”

Sound Rivers, an environmental conservation group that monitors the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico River watersheds, debunked Rist’s argument in a Facebook post.

“Unfortunately, councilman Rist left out one key part of the picture,” Sound Rivers wrote. “Forests perform a key role in water filtration. In fact, according to the University of North Carolina’s Falls Lake study, forests are responsible for filtering out 81% of nutrients that would otherwise make their way into the lake. The science agrees that one of the most effective strategies for protecting water quality and drinking water use of Falls Lake is to protect the remaining forest areas in the watershed.”

In a statement to the INDY, Rist doubled down on the assertion that “the largest source of nutrients in the lake (ie, nitrogen and phosphorus) comes from unmanaged lands and ag,” but emphasized that he “at no point” suggested that “getting rid of natural forests and natural areas would somehow make the lake better.” He noted that UNRBA staff expressed its own issues with Sound Rivers’ post and directed the INDY to a presentation that said, in the group’s opinion, that the post provided incomplete context about how development affects Falls Lake.

Rist said his comments during the debate were misrepresented in the Facebook post, adding that “the same group of opponents” that opposes development in Southeast Durham opposed the Virgil Road case in suggesting that development in that part of town is destroying Falls Lake.

Sound Rivers also posted a response to a remark Mayor Williams made while discussing the Virgil Road annexation at the May 20 meeting. In explaining his ‘yes’ vote in the wake of pushback from environmental activists, Williams said, “Falls Lake is a manmade lake. It was made, what, back in 1981? And it was jacked up when it was created. If it was made then, it will be made again. I don’t think the lake is going anywhere.”

“Mr. Mayor,” Sound Rivers wrote on Facebook, “Falls Lake is the drinking water supply for half a million people. It is not ‘jacked up,’ and it is not your dumping ground.” 

In a phone call with the INDY on Thursday, Williams, who acknowledged his remarks at the meeting “could have been a little bit animated,” said they were in response to council member DeDreana Freeman’s comment that Falls Lake is “disappear[ing]” in part due to the impacts of overdevelopment. 

“The lake is not going to disappear, it’s not going anywhere,” Williams says. “There are a lot of claims that the development is the cause of Falls Lake being the way it is, and my point was, no, it is not the only cause. Falls Lake has been an issue for decades.” 

He says Sound Rivers “found it to be quite convenient to only take a segment of what I said and put it in one of those scary political videos.”

Regarding Sease’s resignation, Williams says “it’s unfortunate, but I think it’s a misunderstanding.

“We have to take [the planning commission’s] information and let it inform us, but it does not dictate our decisions. That is also fact. And facts cannot be offensive.”

Williams says, ultimately, developers will build on properties they own whether the council approves a proposal or not.

“You’re gonna either build by-right, or we’re going to approve the zoning request and we’re going to build for what they requested,” Williams says. “But there will be building. There seems to be this misperception that if the council says ‘no,’ then the [developer] can’t build. No. It just means that they’re going to build less.”

Williams says in his prior term as a city council member, he called a meeting between the city council and the planning commission due to a “lack of communication between the two bodies.

“I need to do it again,” Williams says. “I’m going to do it again.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to provide input from the UNRBA on information contained in Sound Rivers’ Facebook posts.

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