SAVING SLEDGE FOREST: Community advocates to present petition at Oct. 6 County Commissioner meeting

If you’ve driven around New Hanover County, particularly the northern parts up near Castle Hayne, you’ve probably seen the green signs on the side of the road, entreating you to help Save Sledge Forest. The future of the biggest chunk of undeveloped forest left in New Hanover County is uncertain, but this week, that could change.

If you, like me, have been cosplaying as an ostrich to survive the near-constant onslaught of bad news these days, here’s the basics of what you need to know:

The tract of land known as Sledge Forest is in northern New Hanover County, caught in the lasso of the Northeast Cape Fear River due west of Castle Hayne. It encompasses around 4,000 acres, approximately 3,000 of which are wetlands, and is currently home to wildlife and old-growth trees. The wetlands, like all wetlands, also act as a buffer for flooding, giving floodwaters a place to spread out during storms before descending on our city of Wilmington.

Roughly a year ago, a Charlotte developer—Copper Builders, led by Wade Miller—proposed a development called Hilton’s Bluff (presumably named for William Hilton, the first Englishman to make it up the Cape Fear back in the 1660s). Using something called a performance development application, which does not require rezoning or public input, the application made to the county proposes to build around 4,000 homes on the remaining 1,000 acres of the forest that is not protected wetlands. This would require sewer and power lines to run out to the site, and presumably a widening of the only road that leads to the acreage (a two-lane) or building of additional roads which would cut through established neighborhoods. An estimated 30,000 additional car trips per day are expected if the process goes forward. By the way, the county will have to pay for this upgrade, not the developer, so even if you live downtown or in Monkey Junction, it’s still your tax dollars.

During the last year Mr. Miller has attracted a certain amount of local infamy when his enormous luxury houseboat was anchored out for several weeks in Banks Channel at Wrightsville Beach, causing the town to issue him fines and demand it be moved. The houseboat in question now floats on the Northeast Cape Fear, the very river that borders Sledge Forest – you can see it from the Isabella Holmes Bridge. Additionally, in April he was fined by the county for an unpermitted structure on the Sledge Forest land (he argued it was a “pre-manufactured, mobile and temporary office”), which has led many to question the developer’s good faith in following the rules.

The forest also borders a hazardous waste site, owned by GE, and it’s unclear as of now how development could expose homeowners to known hazardous materials. And speaking of potential hazards to the river, later phases of construction show plans for a horse farm and a golf course on the property, bordering the Northeast Cape Fear. I need hardly mention—no, I definitely should mention—the seriously detrimental effects that the fertilizers and chemicals necessary to maintain the lush velvety greens that duffers adore have on wetland ecology.

I spoke with Carrie Bogart, a Castle Hayne resident who has been involved with the effort to Save Sledge Forest for the last year after hearing Andy Wood and Kayne Darrell speak at a community meeting in a Castle Hayne park. She moved here five years ago from New Jersey to the River Bluffs neighborhood. “Castle Hayne’s a very different vibe than the city—it’s a lot more rural – and that’s why we wanted to live here,” she said in a phone interview. “If we wanted to live in the city, we would have done that… I couldn’t believe something of this scale, and something so inappropriate for the land, could happen here. I feel very strongly that this is a terrible idea for this land. It’s very destructive.”

Bogart, like many in the area, enjoys kayaking, and has seen the forest from the river side. “It’s gorgeous,” she says. “Once you’re a little ways up the creek, you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere. All you can hear are birds. You can’t hear any traffic. You’re just surrounded by grasses and the sky. It’s beautiful. And there’s so little undeveloped land left in the Wilmington area now.”

Save Sledge Forest has around 12,500 signatures on their petition which they will present at the County Commissioner’s meeting on Monday, October 6. “If I were a county commissioner, I’d think of it as 12,500 votes,” Bogart notes.

The Save Sledge Forest organization wants to see the land, recently designated an area of national significance by the NC Heritage Foundation, in preservation. “It’s the only appropriate use for it,” continues Bogart. “There are 500-year-old cypress trees in there, and 300-year-old pines.”

After some quick playing around on New Hanover County’s GIS map, I found that most of the land of Sledge Forest is low-lying, which has been reported elsewhere. I also discovered it’s designated AE on the flood map, which is a FEMA designation that means the area has a 1% annual chance of flooding, and a 26% chance of flooding over the life of a 30-year mortgage. That’s about the same chances as drawing a random card from a deck and having it be a spade. AE, funnily enough, is the same designation as the land around the Battleship North Carolina, whose flooding problems have been reported elsewhere and who just spent millions of dollars raising their parking lot. I can add a personal anecdote that I once floated a dinghy around in their parking lot during the high tide after a rain event. Not even a hurricane, mind you, just a normal spring tide after we had gotten some rain inland. Hardly sounds like a place I’d want to build a house, especially as anthropogenic climate change predicts we’re going to receive more frequent and more intense storms as the planet warms. We’ve been exceptionally lucky this year, with several major hurricanes spinning offshore of us and giving us only surf, but what happens if the track shifts slightly to the west? Anyone else remember how bad Hurricane Florence was?

The crux of the issue seems to lie in balancing business profits with community impacts, which seems to be increasingly difficult to do in our coastal little county. Copper Builders bought the land from the Sledge family, fair and square, and claims to be doing things by the books. In a letter to the NHC commissioners from this February past, released publicly by WHQR, Mr. Miller argues that the development he proposes is consistent with the county’s code, that wetlands will not be filled in for home sites nor will old-growth trees be cut down, and that they have no intention of building homes on contaminated land (remember the GE hazardous waste site next door?).

Strikingly, he claims that the proposed development should be classified as “low-density,” as there will technically be one home per acre, admitting the homes will be “strategically clustered to protect sensitive environmental areas,” i.e., the wetlands. While this may technically be true, I took the liberty of reviewing the preliminary site plan submitted to the county, and looked at the setback requirements. In phase one of development (233 houses, by my count, packed onto a narrow triangle of land with wetlands and Prince George Creek in its backyard) the distance the houses could be from the property line were only 5 feet on the side. If the homes were built as big as they could be—only a guess, but by my count it's a pretty good one, based on trends in residential architecture we’ve seen elsewhere in NHC—there would be only 10 feet between houses. I’d hate to see what is considered “high density,” presumably you could reach out your window and shake hands with your neighbor.

Harkening back to my previous point regarding AE floodzones, Mr. Miller continues in his letter that “the vast majority of home sites… are outside of AE flood hazard areas,” and that anyways, it is not illegal to build homes in a floodzone, so long as “specific improvements and safeguards to maintain flood safety” are met. Lots of other nearby developments, contends Mr. Miller, including Castle Lakes, Tall Oaks Drive, and Carrington Woods, are substantially AE zones. Even so, it begs the question: is this a precedent we want to continue to follow? Mr. Miller is from Charlotte, far away from the effects of hurricane flooding, and anyways, his house here floats. Let the rains come.

So if this is all by the book development, and there is this much opposition to it, my question is: do the books need updating to reflect the current feelings and desires of the citizenry? When were these flood zones designated, and have the maps been updated to include the latest science, taking into account the predicted effects of climate change? Or am I not the only one playing ostrich? Are the profit-focused developers and pro-business county commissioners going to take a chance and build low, and cross their fingers and cover their ears as the storms rage around us?

We’ve seen this before, over and over in Wilmington, and in America more broadly. Wilmington is the seventh fastest growing metro in the country, per the US Census Bureau. The demands of business and profit, of widening the tax base and ensuring growth at whatever cost, are often far louder than the quiet needs of the citizenry, of the forest, of the river.

So what can you do about it? Get loud. Save Sledge Forest, as mentioned, will present their petition to the county commissioners at the 4 p.m. meeting on Monday, October 6, and will hold a rally on the courthouse steps starting at 3 p.m. Attendees are encouraged to dress in green to show their support for the forest, and can expect to hear speeches from Roger Shew, Andy Wood, and Kayne Darrell (who will also speak at the commissioner's meeting). Nothing is decided yet, but the waters are starting to rise, and once again the Loraxian task of speaking out for the environment falls on our shoulders. What will you do about it?