The Town of Cary Land Use Plan

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

The Land Use Plan is the product of a two year effort by Town staff, a Citizen Advisory Committee appointed by Town Council, and by elected and appointed officials. The Committee consisted of 20 citizens representing a wide range of interests and occupations, including two representatives from Town Council, two representatives from the Planning and Zoning Board, two representatives from local civic organizations, a rural representative, and an equal number of citizen and business representatives. The Committee met regularly for 18 months with Town planning staff to develop the Plan. Their work included evaluating the issues facing the town, agreeing on a common vision for Cary, developing goals and objectives for the Plan, developing the Plan’s basic concepts and text, and drafting the Land Use Plan Map.

This Plan is the product not only of Town staff and the Citizens Advisory Committee, but also of Cary’s citizens. In meetings held with citizens in May 1995, approximately two hundred citizens participated in focus groups to determine what Cary’s citizens liked and disliked about their environment, and their vision for Cary’s future. An open house was held in May 1996 to determine if the draft Plan developed by staff and the Committee had achieved the community’s vision, and to get feedback on the draft Plan. Over three hundred citizens participated in this open house meeting, and their input was used to develop the final draft.

This Land Use Plan is very different from prior plans. The following features make it unique:

  1. This Land Use Plan has a very strong emphasis on urban design. Meetings with citizens revealed that, more than anything else, Cary’s residents care passionately about the appearance, design, and form of their community. Thus, this Plan provides design guidance, clearly defining the vision for future development desired by citizens.
  2. This Land Use Plan provides a great deal of flexibility in the arrangement of future land uses, while avoiding strip development and promoting a pedestrian- and transit-friendly community. Strip development is avoided by encouraging the creation of a number of "village centers," termed activity centers, at certain locations throughout Cary. Activity centers are intended to be mixed-use nodes, having commercial, office, institutional, and high-density residential uses clustered together in a pedestrian-friendly, village-like manner.
  3. This Land Use Plan provides very strong guidance for the development of Cary’s roads, sidewalks, and bikeways. Citizen focus groups revealed profound concern among residents for attractive and pedestrian-friendly roads and sidewalks. In response to residents’ desires for safe, convenient travel ways that make all points in Cary safely accessible to motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists, the Plan encourages a higher degree of connectivity for roadways and pedestrian and bicycle paths.
  4. The design and landscaping of roadways is also addressed by the Plan, since many citizen comments were received on this subject. This Plan recognizes that roadways serve many functions in addition to the movement of traffic. Their design can either promote or impede nonresidential strip development, enhance or degrade local property values, improve or detract from the community’s appearance, and either increase or decrease the Town’s livability.
  5. The Land Use Plan provides guidance on the preservation and protection of Cary’s natural resources, including wetlands, streams, forest areas, and water resources. The Plan also provides guidance for enhancement of the landscape in developed areas.
  6. The Land Use Plan provides strong support for transit-friendly development. While Cary does not currently operate a municipal transit system, as Cary grows to over 200,000 people it will be important to establish a development pattern at this early stage that offers the potential for economical and efficient transit services at a later date. Further, the Plan provides support for the planned Regional Rail System for the Triangle area.
  7. The Land Use Plan reserves prime employment areas for future office and industrial development, to ensure Cary’s continued economic growth and vitality.

1.2 Definition, Usage, and Standing of the Plan

This Plan is actually the growth management, or land use, component of a larger Comprehensive Plan that will ultimately include a number of additional components that address growth-related issues, including elements covering transportation, parks and recreation, housing, public services and community facilities, economic development, and natural and historic resources. The Land Use Plan consists of both this Plan document and an accompanying Land Use Plan Map. The Map illustrates the location of future land uses and types of development. This Plan document defines the types of land uses specified on the Map, and provides design guidelines for different types of development. The Map and this document must be used together to understand the Land Use Plan.

As the other Comprehensive Plan components are completed or revised, they will be inserted with the Growth Management Plan or included by reference to form the Comprehensive Plan for the Town of Cary.

Cary’s Land Use Plan is a policy document that describes Cary’s official vision of the physical form and appearance desired for the town as it continues to grow over the coming years. That is, the Land Use Plan attempts to answer the question "what do we want Cary to be like ten or twenty years from now?" Thus, the Plan provides a long-range vision for:

As a policy document, the Comprehensive Plan has a different standing -- and serves a different purpose -- than does a town ordinance. Both ordinances and policy documents are officially adopted by Town Council. However, ordinances and ordinance amendments, codified into the Town’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), are legally-binding procedural rules and statutes governing the municipal government and its citizens. That is, ordinances set forth law. A policy document, on the other hand, is not law. Rather, it is an official statement by the municipal government of its growth management vision, policies, and intentions. The Land Use Plan, then, is the Town’s official declaration of the desired characteristics and pattern of future development in Cary. But beyond being simply a declaration of the Town’s official vision for Cary, the Land Use Plan is actively used to guide growth in the following ways:

Section 4.1.1 of the Town’s Unified Development Ordinance states:

"The Comprehensive Plan for the Town of Cary, as adopted by the Town Council and amended from time to time, shall serve as the basic policy guide for the administration of this Ordinance. The Comprehensive Plan serves as the statement of goals and policies to guide new development and redevelopment in the town and its extraterritorial jurisdiction. It therefore is the intent of the Town to administer this Ordinance in accordance with the Comprehensive Plan." (emphasis added)

and furthermore, Section 4.1.2 states:

"...all development within the Town and its extraterritorial jurisdiction shall be in accordance with the applicable provisions of the Comprehensive Plan, as adopted or amended by the Town Council."

Thus, all aspects of the Town’s Unified Development Ordinance having to do with growth, development, and community appearance are administered in accordance with the Comprehensive Plan. When a new annexation, rezoning, planned unit development (PUD), subdivision, or site plan request is filed with the Town of Cary, the town planning staff reviews and evaluates the application and prepares a formal recommendation regarding the application to the Town Council. This report includes an evaluation of the degree to which the proposed action conforms with the Comprehensive Plan.

This forms a very powerful connection between the Comprehensive Plan and the pattern and character of development that occurs in Cary. The potential exists through this mechanism alone -- namely the requirement for administration of the Ordinance in conformance with the Comprehensive Plan -- to achieve the community form and vision set forth in the Comprehensive Plan.

The Town of Cary’s departments, including Development Services, Public Works & Utilities, Parks & Recreation, Police, Fire, and so on, use the Comprehensive Plan to guide planning for their own long-range public facilities, services, and infrastructure needs. For example, the Engineering Division and the Public Works & Utilities Department use the Comprehensive Plan to guide the development of plans for water and sewer service expansion and for developing the Town’s Thoroughfare Plan and other roadway improvements. The Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources Department uses the Comprehensive Plan to anticipate where new growth will occur and where new parks will be needed. Similarly, the Police and Fire Departments use the Comprehensive Plan to anticipate where new growth will occur in order to determine staff requirements and the location of new stations.

As a result of this wide-spread internal reliance on the Comprehensive Plan, long-range facilities, infrastructure, and services reflect the direction of the Comprehensive Plan. And, since development tends to follow infrastructure and public facilities expansion, new development springs up most readily around new and widened roads, new parks and community centers, and new and expanded water and sewer lines. In this way, the Comprehensive Plan strongly influences the course of private development.

The Comprehensive Plan is the town’s strongest official statement of both where growth and development should occur in the future and the types of development that are desired -- in terms of land use, design, and appearance. As such, considerable reliance is placed on the Comprehensive Plan by landowners, the development community, businesses, and citizens alike. Landowners and property buyers rely on the Comprehensive Plan to inform them of what type of growth may occur around them in the future. Businesses choose site locations and formulate business plans on the basis of the type, nature, and arrangement of future land uses delineated in the Comprehensive Plan. Subdivision developers and home builders select locations for new development that will be convenient to future public facilities and supporting future land uses, such as future grocery stores. Likewise, commercial developers select sites and plan projects on the basis of the location and type of expected future residential development, as identified by the Comprehensive Plan.

In this manner, the vision embodied by the Comprehensive Plan becomes "institutionalized" in the assumptions of the community. As more parties move forward with plans based on the vision and assumptions provided within the Comprehensive Plan, that reliance on the Plan can become a "self-fulfilling" prophecy. Reliance on the Comprehensive Plan also helps to avoid or reduce potential conflicts between citizens and developers, since both parties can proceed from a common vision and set of assumptions about future development in Cary.

In addition to providing a clear vision for future growth in Cary, the Comprehensive Plan also makes recommendations for actions that will help to make that vision a reality, including recommendations for new ordinances and revisions to existing ordinances. The Plan also makes recommendations for specific Town projects, policies, and initiatives that are not in the direct purview of the Unified Development Ordinance. Lastly, the Plan makes recommendations for follow-up studies and projects deemed necessary to effectively implement the Plan.

1.3 Jurisdictional Boundaries, Planning Areas, and Study Areas

In total, the Land Use Plan Map encompasses an area of approximately 60,600 acres of land. The following geographic areas are covered by the Land Use Plan, and together make up the Land Use Plan Study Area (see Figure 1.1):

  1. The area inside Cary’s existing town limits.
  2. The area inside Cary’s Extra-Territorial Planning Jurisdiction (ETJ), which is an area outside of Cary’s official town limits where Wake County has granted authority to Cary to zone land and control development, in anticipation of future town limits expansion.
  3. The areas inside Cary’s Perimunicipal Planning Area (PPA), which is an area outside of Cary’s official town limits and ETJ. This area is currently under Wake County’s development control, but is planned for jointly by Cary and Wake County. Perimunicipal areas represent areas into which Cary’s ETJ may be allowed to expand, given County approval.
  4. The Chatham County Study Area, which is an area of Chatham County bounded to the east by the Chatham-Wake County line, to the west by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land around Jordan Lake, to the north by the Chatham-Durham County Line, and to the South by an arm of the Corps land surrounding White Oak Creek. This area is included in the Plan because Cary is the only municipality that can feasibly provide urban services in this area, and because of Cary’s rapid growth toward the west.
  5. The Upper Middle Creek Study Area, lying to the south of Ten-Ten Road (S.R. 1010), north of Middle Creek, west of Bells Lake Road, and east of Kildaire Farm Road and Sunset Lake Road. This area is included in the Plan because the area abuts Cary’s southern PPA and is rapidly urbanizing in a suburban manner, with traffic spillovers affecting Cary. Further, Cary’s South Wastewater Treatment Plant is located on Middle Creek, and a major Cary sewer line traverses the Middle Creek Area, from Cary to the treatment plant. These facilities could enable municipal gravity-flow sewer service in this study area. In addition, the planned Outer Wake Expressway will cut through the area, and is expected to include two local interchanges.

The Land Use Plan is an enforceable policy document in all areas within Cary’s corporate limits and the Town’s Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction. The Plan’s treatment of the Perimunicipal Planning Areas will be used to guide Cary’s position with regard to requests for municipal development within the PPA, and as a basis for updating the joint Cary-Wake County Master Plans for the PPA. The Plan’s treatment of the Chatham County and Upper Middle Creek Study Areas will be used to guide Cary’s position with regard to: (1) requests for Cary municipal services and annexations within those areas; (2) the development of joint plans with other planning agencies; and (3) the development of the Wake County Master Plan.

1.4 Regional Geographic Context

Cary is located in the center of the Research Triangle metropolitan area, which includes the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and the Research Triangle Park (See Figure 1.2). As the most centrally located municipality in a rapidly growing area, Cary provides businesses and residents with easy access to key services and facilities. Cary is also favorably located within North Carolina and the Southeastern U.S., both in terms of accessibility to other urban markets and important cultural and recreational opportunities. Charlotte and Atlanta are only 150 and 350 miles to the southwest, respectively, and Washington, D.C. is approximately 270 miles to the north. The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Outer Banks are each within easy driving distance.

Cary’s proximity to Interstate Highways 40, 85, and 95, as well as U.S. Highways 1 and 64, provide superb access to other urban centers in the southeast and the country as a whole. In addition to high accessibility to the national and regional roadway network, Cary is at a crossroads for passenger and freight systems served by Amtrak and the Norfolk-Southern and CSX railways. Raleigh-Durham International Airport, on Cary’s northern border, provides access to urban centers world-wide.

1.5 Governmental Entities Affected by and Affecting the Plan

The Plan’s consideration of lands not within Cary’s jurisdiction, and the need to coordinate Town plans with those of other jurisdictions, required that this Plan be prepared in consultation with a number of governmental and other authorities. The governmental authorities that provided consultation on the development of Cary’s Growth Management Plan include: (1) Wake County; (2) the City of Raleigh; (3) the Town of Morrisville; (4) the Town of Apex; (5) the Town of Holly Springs; (6) Chatham County; (7) the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; (8) the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority; (9) the Triangle J Council of Governments; (10) the Research Triangle Park Foundation; and (11) the Triangle Transit Authority.