By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com
Yet another large housing development proposed for Sanford’s southern edges was the subject of a public hearing at the city council’s first meeting of the new year last week.
The 85-acre site is located near the intersection of Lee Avenue and Wilson Road on a lot that lies to the southeast of the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles office. The development has frontage on both roadways that are NCDOT-maintained. Lee Avenue had an Average Annual Daily Traffic Count in 2019 of 3,600 vehicles per day, and the most current count for Wilson Road was in 2018 when it had an AADT of 8,800 vehicles per day, so the site will be located in a high-traffic area of the city.
To be known as Adams Village, the development would contain 211 single-family detached houses and 84 townhomes that would be constructed in phases over the next two to three years. The project is jointly owned by Adams Village LLC, William Chad Adams, and M&R Entitlement LLC of Sanford, and is being led by developer Mark Lyczkowski.
The public hearing’s purpose was to consider the owners’ request to have the site zoned as the Adams Village Conditional Zoning District, a designation that would create a stand-alone district with its own conditions, giving the developers greater freedom in developing their own unique lists of permitted uses and design standards. The trade-off that developers make with conditional zoning requests is that the site must be developed according to the plans approved by the city council at each stage of construction.
Lyczkowski described Adams Village as “another exciting project that I am blessed to be a part of.”
“This is an in-fill project that we try to do as many as we can of, to develop some of the larger vacant tracts of land inside the city instead of having to go through the costs of annexation and all the expenses of extending water and sewer lines,” he said.
Included among the project’s details are 34 acres of open spaces that contain reserved areas for playgrounds, a dog park, and mulch-covered trails. The village is designed with a focus on walkability, a feature that drew quick support from Mayor Rebecca Wyhof Salmon. It will have a paved walking path that will connect it to a separate planned Adams Village commercial development that would be located along N.C. 87 in the future.
Lyczkowski told council members that “Sanford is still very much a blue-collar community” and many of the houses will be built at a price point that would make them affordable for young families wanting to purchase their first home. Beth Blackmon, a senior project manager with the Timmons Group in Raleigh, who is assisting Adams Village with the rezoning request, echoed that sentiment, saying that “having a variety of product gives buyers more choices and makes the neighborhood more attractive.”
The council took advantage of Lyczkowski’s presence to ask his opinion about opinions being voiced throughout the community recently about the possibility of stepping up Sanford’s ability attract new retail establishments.
Lyczkowski has been involved with many residential and commercial projects both inside and outside the city limits for the past five years or more. He told the council he believes this kind of growth is literally just on the horizon for Sanford within the next few years, and that developments like Adams Village are key for the community to collectively become ready for stepping up to this level of broader business involvement.
“Sanford will see this next level of new stores and restaurants that you are talking about and when it comes, it will elevate the city in ways that people have been asking for,” he said. “All those things are already in the works, and it won’t be long before people will see things start to happen.”
City receives FEMA grant funding for fire department air packs
Sanford Fire Department Chief Matt Arnold was on hand as the council officially received federal FEMA grant dollars to fund the purchase of new self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBAs), or “air packs” that can be used by the city’s firefighters in dangerous situations.
Arnold informed council members last year that the city’s existing air packs were badly out-of-date and that it had become dangerous for firefighters to depend on them in emergency situations. The council approved submission of the proposal last spring and the city received word in July that FEMA would fund the request through their Assistance to Firefighters Grant program.
The federal portion of the project will pay $338,176.19 of the total costs. The remaining $24,862.16 will be paid by the city. Salmon expressed delight in receiving the grant, saying, “it’s wonderful that we have a grant of this amount to provide a major contribution to the safety of our firefighters. They protect our city day and night, and it’s a genuine pleasure to be able to help protect them.”
The council also held a closed session that lasted for about 45 minutes. The motion to engage in that discussion suggested that it related to the potential purchase of real property and the maintenance of its attorney-client relationship, but no action was taken when the open session of the meeting resumed to indicate what the subject matter surrounding the discussion was.
I think the better story here would be, how Mark LyczkowskI went from being a Sanford police officer to a developer…
SPD is lucrative, same way a detectives wife embezzled over 100,000 from SECU and he didn’t notice and still has a job SMH
Over 200k and he got a promotion
Not here to defend Mark but pretty sure he worked for Bobby Bracken for a few years doing survey work where he learned about where the larger development friendly tracts of land were located. He is a smart guy that listened to some of the local developers and became good at prepping these large tracks as to make developers interested in buying them. Pretty simple.
Development outside the Triassic Basin is pretty simple in Lee County. All you need is a water line and the topography designs itself. If you want density or are in the clay, you need City Sewer. Anyone with a computer can access the Lee County GIS.
What I see in Sanford is that a number of folks who have lived there all their lives no longer see Sanford and Lee County as they would a city or county in another part of the Country so they are blinded to some things. That can cause you to miss an opportunity.
But the success of developers in Sanford these days comes not from their smarts so much as it comes from the hard work of City, County, and State of NC economic developers and the elected folks who have allowed Sanford to participate in the Triangle’s bounty.
The collapse of the Tobacco Price Support program has also spurred residential development as large tract holders are no longer paid to grow cancer sticks.
While not intentional, Farming interests helped to destroy Jonesboro after WWI as it withered compared to Sanford.
I’ll go one step further opining: In 30 years only the Buckhorn area north of Broadway to the Deep River, Little Lick Creek over to Lower River Road, Pocket west of Tempting Church, and Villanow, and the sandhill/scrub south of Swanns Station Road will be the only largely unurbanized parts of the County.
Now what’s neat about what will be left is that each area is unique from a geological and botanical standpoint. But there will very few large farms remaining just the construction of 10-12-20-30K houses and that accompanying commercial that will cluster in 5 bid nodes – Downtown Sanford, Jonesboro/421 to Trace, US 1 from Riverbirch to Tramway, and new North Sanford old Northview from the 1/15/501 interchange to the Colon Road interchange.
Leave now for Eastern Randolph, Southern Chatham, or NW Moore County if you want to avoid urbanism.
Appreciate your insight Old Planner. When Mark started a lot of the things you mentioned as tools were not available. Heck, much if not all the county was not zoned until the early 90s and water was not ran through the county until the mid 90s. Even with the GIS and other available tools a person still has to sell the city council on rezoning or annexation which can be tricky. I watched Mark selling the council on zoning changes on tv and he is very good.
With all due respect you could not be any more wrong on this. Being a fast talker and crooked doesn’t make you good. As a land owner and dealings here in town I’d stay as far away as possible.
I should be more clear. That is not towards that mark guy. That is a comment about land in general