Planning for Growth
          
          Greenville city planner John Schofield summarized in an interview in January 1975 the scant progress that had been made to control development in the area around the hospital. He said that the Greenville Planning Commision had begun in the fall of 1974 to redraft the “Medical District Development Plan” prepared in 1973 for the area where the new PCMH, with its 300 beds, was being built. In the proposed medical district – according to the report, “on the wrong side of town” doctors’ offices, pharmacies,nursing homes and other health-related business had already sprung up around the hospital site. By 1973, 95 percent of the medical practitioners in the Greenville area had offices there. Land prices were increasing rapidly, and developing the medical district would bring water and sewerage to the area. Medical and related services would employ about 2,000 people, and it was likely that there would be a motel, flower shops, restaurants, banks and other businesses that tend to cluster around a hospital.

          In October 1974, the commission reported, “If the decision to locate the medical school in this study area is made, and one assumes that it is the logical area, then the development of the area into a major regional medical center would be assured.” There were too many imponderables, so the project had been postponed, not to be resurrected for nearly ten years.

          In the interim, landowners and developers did not slacken their opposition to the idea of zoning. There was no substantial progress toward controlling development around the hospital and medical school until, in December 1984, the Greenville City Council created a nine-member study group charged to develop recommendations on future use of the 1,790-acre medical district. The study group dusted off the earlier plans, and spent about a month refining them and hearing from opponents to the proposed district.

          The Greenville Planning and Zoning Commission opposed the development plan. Its chairman, Rick Miller, commented on the “unbusinesslike, ill-timed nature of the proposal.” Between the introduction of the proposal and its approval, the Medical District Study Committee and city officials held several meetings to resolve objections. There was considerable opposition in the beginning, but opponents withdrew their complaints before the council acted on the plan.

          On January 16, 1985, after mentioning its satisfaction with the changes the task force had made to the proposal, the Greenville City Council unanimously approved a new zoning classification, MD-4, for the 1,790-acre medical district on Stantonsburg Road. The zoning provisions required shopping centers in the district to provide buffers on their rear and side yards, and to landscape their parking lots. It also placed limits on the number and sizes of advertising signs, and required individual shops to place identification signs on their building.

          Following a year of study, the Medical Arts Land Use Study Committee presented its final recommendations on the development of the district. Its report opened with the prediction that more than 10,000 people would work in the district, and that 2,000 or more would live there. The overall aim was to protect investment in the area, and develop an atmosphere like that of the Research Triangle Park between Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Durham.

          In November, the Greenville City Council approved the final draft of a plan to create the East Carolina Medical Park on 5,300 acres west of the city. The council also passed ordinances setting up new medical district zones and rezoned the 1,800 acres under its jurisdiction that were covered by the plan. Orderly development of the park depended on cooperation from the Pitt County Board of Commissioners.

          The keystone elements of the medical park would be PCMH and the ECU School of Medicine, with surrounding medical and other professional office buildings, medical supply establishments, and medical research laboratories. As the committee envisaged the development, Greenville and Pitt County were being given an uncommon opportunity, if the additional acreage could be made available, to build the second largest medical park in the entire country.

          The committee also recommended the formation of a nonprofit East Carolina Medical Park corporation to seek business that would fit into a medical environment, provide technical assistance to developers, provide liaison with local financial institutions, develop a line of credit for land purchase, and assist the Development Commission in expanding the job market by attracting appropriate new businesses.

          Early in 1990, the ECU Board of Trustees met at the Brody Medical Sciences Building and approved giving a name to the medical complex that included the hospital and the medical school. (The hospital board and the Pitt County commissioners had already approved the designation). The new name was University Medical Center of Eastern Carolina—Pitt County. Its purpose was to present a unified, up-to-date image for the medical center. In March 1990, the city and county appointed a joint task force to recommend a larger district comprising both city and county land. Their recommendations were referred to the city and county managers, to formulate final recommendations before the end of January 1992.

          Kramer Jackson, the county manager, declared, “We strongly agree with the concept of establishing a medical district . . . but we’d prefer a smaller one than the proposed 12,000 acres.” On January 22, the task force recommended forming a 1,000 to 2,000 acre research and development park within the larger medical district that would include PCMH and the School of Medicine.

          Task Force chairman Bruce Flye told elected officials that the proposed plan was “… a put-up or shut-up plan. There’s not a lot of wiggle in it. Things have to happen very precisely to make it work. We wanted to do everything we could to make this active.” The task force’s report proposed that research facilities should be included within the park, “controlled through privately-enforced conditions, covenants, and restrictions.”
The officials at the joint meeting in January 1992 wanted more information on what the duties and responsibilities of the commission would be, and how much power it would have. The county commissioners argued vigorously about the proposed western boundary, and about the interference with property owners’ freedom to dispose of their own land.

          Dissension among the nine Pitt County Commissioners almost prevented consideration of a medical district proposal. Jackson outlined a plan he and City Manager Ron Kimble had drawn up from the recommendations of the medical district joint task force. The proposed area would be controlled jointly by city and county officials and zoned for medical and research-related usage. The original proposal to include 12,000 acres had been cut to 6,000 after hearings and much discussion. It would extend from the Tar River to the north and the Southern Railway train tracks on the south. The eastern boundary would run along McGregor Downs Road, and the western boundary would be 3,000 feet west of the US 264 bypass. The extension was intended to give the two governments some control over growth on either side of the roadway. The district would cover 3,400 acres in the county and 2,600 acres in the city.

          At a joint meeting later that month, the local elected officials still further delayed confronting the medical district issue. They postponed considering the problem, instead voting to allocate $25,000 to commission a study of the area.

          At the meeting of the county commissioners, city council, and about 10 citizens, some of the commissioners were out-and-out opposed to the medical district concept, saying that they mirrored the views of their constituency. “These people paid taxes on land that’s been in their families for years, and they don’t want to have to give up the right to sell that property,” was Commissioner Eugene James’s position. Commissioner Kenneth Dews responded, “We’re not talking about doing anything to anybody. We’re just asking for a study.”

          Voting to bring in the outside consultants enabled the officials to postpone by another nine months any decisions concerning land use and zoning in the proposed medical district. The county planners hoped to have their long awaited countywide zoning regulations in place in another year. If the city and county officials decided to establish the medical district, the county’s zoning regulations would not have to deal with the land in the area, since it would already be zoned for medical and research uses.

         On November 19, 1992, consultants on the medical district plan met at the Greenville Teen Center with about 70 county citizens to discuss land use around the hospital and medical school. Jim Haden, from the consulting firm Edward D. Stone Jr. and Associates of Durham, provided the group with background on the project, and asked them to list their concerns and rank them in importance. The audience’s input was recorded and embodied in a draft plan returned to them for review later that day.

          The landowners’ main concerns were protection of the medical school and hospital, property owners’ rights, building railroad overpasses across roads leading to the hospital, preservation of lifestyles and land values, and the need for long-range planning to make current development decisions.

          One of the landowners in the proposed district, Dean Stocks, had owned a farm there for more than 20 years and was very aware of the pressure from development around the hospital and medical school. He expressed a common sentiment when he said, “I’m not really in favor of zoning. I would prefer that it would remain in the hands of the landowners, but it appears inevitable. I recognize that change is here, and I have to accept it and deal with it.” He said that he preferred controls rather than unregulated development.

City and county officials were faced with the prospect of being overwhelmed by unregulated growth if they failed to control development of the medical district. Employment in the hospital, Pitt County’s largest employer, and the medical school, had increased from 1,100 to 4,600 in 15 years. The combined annual budgets of the two had gone in the same period from $30 million to about $400 million.

Land Use Proposals

The plan the consultants recommended covered about 5,000 acres. The new zoning proposal included several classes of land use, among them residential, commercial, and medical and technical use. Haden, presenting the plan, noted that the term “medical district” had led some landowners to believe doctors’ offices would surround them. He emphasized that the fact that the district was near the hospital did not mean that only medical and medicine-related uses would be permitted.

Late in January 1993, Haden met with more than 100 citizens, many of them concerned landowners, to present a plan for zoning the medical park. The final proposal encompassed an area of more than 6,000 acres of land around the medical center. Haden described the consultants’ proposal, and answered questions from those attending.

Some landowners questioned whether the medical park idea would work, and whether their land might not be locked in by a project that would fail. There were many questions about setting aside 790 acres in the district as a research and technology park. Other concerns of the audience were property owners’ rights, land values, and the need for long-range planning to guide current development decisions.

Haden recorded the input from the meeting, to be used to further refine the proposal before presenting it to the Pitt County commissioners and the Greenville City Council.

On November 11, 1993, the city council and county commissioners met and approved the plan, encouraged by endorsements from the hospital and medical school administration. They were also assured that the plan would not immediately affect property owners. The action finally brought to a close nearly 18 years of discussions, meetings, and public hearings.

Even at this long-delayed meeting, three county commissioners, Jeff Savage, Tom Johnson, and Eugene James, still needed guarantees that the plan would not take away the rights of property owners, and would not put size requirements on lots or add new zoning restrictions. Jeff Ulma, the planning director for the county, and Andy Harris, director of city planning, assured them that the plan would not put into effect any immediate restrictions. Harris said, “This is a land use plan. We’ve said it many times. But this is not zoning or any zoning changes. This can be viewed as a resource, along with any other planning documents we may have on hand, but this is not zoning.”

The plan included 15 land uses covering a mixture of medical use, office, commercial space, and residential space. It had an overlay plan for a technology and research park as a possible land use for a portion of the area. The next step would be for the city and county managers to meet with their respective planning directors to work out the details of land development that the plan prescribed.

The cycle of proposal, disagreement, support, and opposition began again in January 1999. The Medical District Task Force held a public hearing to discuss expanding the 5,300 acre area to about 10,000 acres, and setting up a seven-member commission to oversee planning and zoning in the district. The negative reactions were immediate and vociferous. The proposed district took in too much land, and it would take more than a small seven-person commission to govern such a large area.

Lester Turnage, Jr., a local real-estate appraiser, met with loud applause from the more than 200 people in the audience when he told the task force, “That you have not read what the medical district zoning is, is evident. You’re jumping way over what we ever expected to do, so just calm yourself down.”
J.T. Manning, Jr., a stockholder in the Greenville Industrial Park, remarked, “Now you’re talking about 10,000 acres. All I see is control, control, control.”

A landowner, Jolly Dail, added that it might take 50, 60, or 70 years before they got around to zoning his land, but that he did not agree with the proposal.

One local farmer complained that farming was tough enough without having his hands tied behind his back when it came to doing what he wanted to with his own land.

Phil Dixon, a notably public-minded local attorney, answered all the objections by saying, “Our community is an oasis in the desert… and we’re going to have to do something to accelerate our economic growth. We have a niche to encourage specialized development. I think we would all benefit from a sound plan, because that growth is going to happen anyway.”

One item in the proposal was that a part of the medical district be set aside for a 1,000 to 2,000-acre park dedicated to research, development, manufacturing, and recreational facilities. In the expanded district there would be space for light manufacturing, residential, commercial, and support facilities, or open space. The advisory commission would be responsible for all planning and zoning but would report to the elected officials of the city and county. The zoning proposal was as always particularly controversial. It was not at all agreeable to some attendees that unzoned land outside the city’s planning jurisdiction should be put on hold until land use plans for the medical district had been formulated.

The Greenville Utilities Commission, Pitt County Development Commission, Greenville Economic Development Corporation and Pitt County Memorial Hospital were all in favor of the proposed expansion. John Chaffee, executive director of the development commission, said, “This could be, if done properly, one of the best things in Pitt County.”

The proposals to expand the medical district to include 10,000 acres and to establish a commission to manage it had still not been approved at the time this was written.