Planned Lowe's divides residents

FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

BANNER ELK - Plans for a 120,000-square-foot Lowe's building supply store are dividing residents of this mountain resort community.

"People come up here to find a place away from the hustle and bustle of big cities," said Mary Thompson, who operates a stained-glass studio that stands next to the proposed site of the store. "People from Florida don't come here for Lowe's, they come for the natural beauty of the area."

At 3,700 feet, Banner Elk - at the crossroads between Beech Mountain and Sugar Mountain - has 811 permanent residents. The area attracts skiers in the winter, mountain vacationers in the summer.

Locals who support the store say it will add $35,000 a year in property tax revenue and create new jobs. Since Lowe's closed a small store in Banner Elk two years ago, residents have had to trek 20 miles to the nearest store, which is in Boone.

"Everybody who's against this are outsiders. They come in here and buy places, and in a few years they're gone," said Mike Eggers, whose construction firm will bid on grading the Lowe's site. "I've been here all my life. We own probably 80 acres and we're not going anywhere."

The planned store would be almost four times larger than Banner Elk's largest existing commercial space. Developers plan to give it a facade of faux cedar shakes and cultured-stone, and to locate it 900 feet off N.C. 184, which is the main entrance into town.

Town Manager Bill Cook said developers Collett & Associates of Charlotte began meeting with the town planning board about four months ago.

Collett developed the River Hills Shopping Center in Asheville, home to the city's first Target store. The developers are also bringing second Target, slated to open off Airport Road in fall 2005.

An official application for the Banner Elk Lowe's was filed 10 days before a Nov. 3 meeting of the town planning board, with notices published in the area's three weekly newspapers, Cook said.

Dozens of people, most of them opposed, attended a four-hour meeting. More crowded into a Board of Adjustment meeting on Nov. 17.

In approving the project, the board reduced the number of parking spaces to 384 and the store's sign from 300 to 110 square feet.

Collett & Associates did not return calls from The Charlotte Observer seeking comment on the project. Lowe's said it does not comment on new store sites until it has closed on a property.

Critics believe the plan violates the town's Architectural Review Guidelines, which discourage "large, massive buildings" and flat-roofed structures like Lowe's.

"This just opens the floodgates - Wal-Mart is next, you just know it," said Greg Barrow, a whitewater rafting company owner and former planning board member.

Construction on the store cannot begin until Collett & Associates gets a federal permit to fill about an acre of wetlands and 1,200 feet of stream channels on a 29-acre site for Lowe's and an additional commercial building, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said. The company is proposing to relocate streams, protect buffers and create and preserve other wetlands on the site as compensation.

A Corps official said none of the details appear likely to kill the project.

Mayor Deka Tate said she thinks Lowe's will blend into the community and set a good pattern for future commercial development. She added that the town might need a better long-range zoning plan in the future, and stricter architectural guidelines.

Eggers, who plans to someday build his dream house on a peak overlooking Banner Elk, said the naysayers are unrealistic.

"If you could turn back time, if you could keep Banner Elk as it is," he said, "we'd all starve to death."