News

Neighbors organize to oppose Crab Creek Road storage unit development

By Bill Moss, Published: April 21, 2021

Neighbors are organizing to oppose a 126,000-square-foot storage unit project on 9.5 acres Crab Creek Road across from Curtis Drive.

"The beauty and serenity of our neighborhood is currently at risk of being lost by the proposal to rezone close to 10 acres of picturesque landscape at the foot of Pinnacle Mountain for yet another self-storage facility in a county littered with so many of these units already," a change.org petition started by Randy Doss said.

"The impacts of this proposal are several fold. There is the negative jolt to nature and our wildlife from the proposed 9+ acres being paved over to support rows of storage buildings are obvious. The additional traffic generation for an already busy, single lane residential road along with new and random customers' accessing their units is an unsettling notion for what we consider a serene environment."

Matthew Cooke, owner of Apple Country storage, has asked for Zoning Board of Adjustment approval of a special use permit in an R2R residential zone east of Camp Blue Star and west of Evans Road. Cooke told a county Technical Review Committee that he is working to accommodate neighbors' concerns on lighting, hours and buffering.

Cooke's site plan shows the buildout in four phases of 39,000, 51,000, 24,000 and 10,000 square feet, an office and a gated entrance. The development would leave 9 percent of the site open and would develop 7.5 acres of it.

Fritz McPhail, who owns 160 acres on Crab Creek Road next to Camp Blue Star, helped organize the successful fight years ago against the Glen at Flat Rock senior development.

"One of the horrible things about this," he said, "is that blind hill on Evans. You can't see on the other side of that hill and traffic flies down that road."

"Certainly traffic," he said when asked about his reasons for opposing the development. "Light pollution, water runoff into Crab Creek. There's certainly a lot of damage being done to Crab Creek, this will just add to it. The loss of the sense of a residential community.

"Hendersonville has to decide what it wants to be," he said. "If it wants to be a nice place to retire and ride your bike, that's one thing. If they want to turn it into a commercial area — they tried to do that with this $100 million deal (for the assisted living development) — that's another. But they are in conflict with one another."

McPhail said he has been working with Conserving Carolina on a conservation easement to protect the land he owns.

"We're into protecting nature, protecting species, whether they're green salamanders or French broadleaf or the Mexican bat," he said. "We want to protect the habitat. We don't want commercial out here."

Around 15 neighbors of the development site attended the TRC meeting Tuesday. The Zoning Board of Adjustment is scheduled to take up the request at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 28, in the Henderson County building at 100 N. King St.