Newspapers / State Port Pilot (Southport, … / Dec. 6, 1995, edition 1 / Page 10
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Good planning paved the way for the Caswell we know today ►Mayor Continued from page 1 while seated in the sun porch of his Arboretum home, overlooking the Elizabeth River marsh. Jack and Cora Cook’s Alyssum Drive home is the fifth they have oc cupied in Caswell Beach since leav ing Portsmouth, VA, in 1976, he to work for Carolina Power and Light Co. Fresh from coastal Virginia, the couple looked far and wide for a place to live, but was drawn repeatedly to Caswell Beach. “I had looked at areas I liked,” Cook said. “Cora Mae came down a few weeks later and spent, I would say, six months, every day, looking at areas from Hampstead to Myrtle Beach. “We kept coming back to Caswell Beach. It was the peace and quiet. At that time, with nobody here, there was peace and quiet.” “At that time,” as Cook puts it, means before the Arboretum, before OceanGreens, before Caswell Dunes, before Oak Island Beach Villas, be fore many of the stately homes that grace the Caswell Beach strand. Caswell Beach in 1976 was in its infancy, both as a municipal corpora tion and as a place to live. Only a handful of seasonally utilized beachfront homes dotted the strand, .comparatively speaking. “I decided I’d like to build on Caswell Beach,” Cook recalled. “The only question was: What kind of house?” Cook says he found a house he liked down on Long Beach and local builder Norman Perry assured him he could draw designs, alter the floor plan slightly, and reproduce it sub stantially. The Cooks enjoyed a little bit of luck when a Caswell Beach Road lot was located and bought from an estate. “We got it. We built and we stayed there until Hurricane Diana,” Cook said. Hurricane Diana in 1984 blew out a window and dumped some 19 inches of rain water into the first of the Cooks’ homes. While rebuilding, the Cooks took to their second Caswell Beach home, renting in the Oak Island Beach Villas, the town’s first such development. During that stay, the home on Caswell Beach Road was repaired and the Cooks also bought a new con dominium at Caswell Dunes, which was by then under construction. Eventually, the Caswell Beach home was completely restored and the Cooks moved back, but it just didn’t seem like home when the Cooks re turned to it. “It never felt the same after the hur ricane,” Cook said. “It was not like Jack Cook will end 16 years as mayor of Caswell Beach Thursday to enjoy life at his home overlook ing the Elizabeth River marsh and the Intracoastal Waterway. Development of Caswell Beach meant long hours for those in municipal government throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. Cook says he’s happy to have been a part of making Caswell Beach “the best coastal town in North Carolina.” home anymore. It was just a place.” So, the Cooks placed the Caswell Beach Road place on the market and moved to Caswell Dunes, the third of the four neighborhoods in town in which they have lived. Eventually the desire for a lifestyle change hit, and the Cooks were on the move again — this time to Green View Drive and a patio home in the Caswell Dunes development. A few years ago the Cooks pur chased their lot and built their fifth and present home on Alyssum Drive, consolidating the best of all the liv ing arrangements they had enjoyed in Caswell Beach. “We really took the parts that we liked about all the houses and put them in this house,” Cook said. The Alyssum Drive home features a great room surrounded by two bedrooms on each outer side, a kitchen up front, sun room and patio to the rear. All rooms are accessible by wrap-around hall ways. “You can get everywhere in the house without cutting through some Multi-family housing looked good on paper By Richard Nubel Municipal Editor Faced with preliminary plans for Caswell Dunes in the early 1980s, Cook and others saw a need for high quality, multi-family housing, but had a tough sell con vincing fellow commissioners Duncan Stuart and Bob McCracken. A simple display, drawn on a sheet of scrap paper, led to the town’s most important development deci sion: Development density would not exceed one unit per 10,800 square feet of available land. “I sat down and I drew up a map with 40 single-fam ily houses” that could have been placed in the front 20 acres of what is now Caswell Dunes, Cook said. “Then I drew a second map of seven multi-family clusters with 42 units on five acres in that front 20.” McCracken by that time had already come to accept the multi-family concept, but Stuart had been more stubborn. “Duncan jumped on it,” Cook said. ‘“My God, is that what I’ve been opposed to?’ he said. From that day on, Duncan never opposed multi-family development.” As Caswell Dunes grew, and its quality became apparent, few in town objected. “That was when we had to do some real planning,” Cook recalled. “How can we make development realis tic, yet allow for multi-family development?” What the mayor and the board of commissioners of the early and mid-1980s did to secure acceptable multi-family development was devise a formula. They would allow development no more dense than one unit per 10,800 square feet of available land, a formula embodied in the town’s planned unit development ordinance — a first in Brunswick County — which stands today. “That restriction — one unit per 10,800 square feet - that was determined from the average density of the second row of Caswell Beach Road," Cook said. “Not many people realize that.” FREE Report Reveals Secrets Of How To Get The Highest Price When You Sell Your Home If you are selling your home, or thinking of selling your home, get a copy of this FREE Report today. You could profit, saving thousands of dollars and time, too! The Report highlights an eight-step system to get your home sold as quickly as possible...for the highest price! OAK ISLAND, NC - A FREE Report has just been released that shares the little known secrets of how to get the highest price for your home when you sell it. Don't make mistakes that can cost you thousands! Just call 1-800-566-6094,24 hrs., for a FREE Recorded Message to get a copy of this Report. Call NOW and find out what homebuyers are hoping that you'll never bother reading about! where, Cook said. Cook even has a detached get-away on pilings where he can go to think, or lodge occasional house guests. He calls that backyard get-away his “dog house.” “With the exception of OceanGreens — that is the only neigh borhood we haven’t lived in,” Cook said. “I’ve always tried to be fair to all the neighborhoods in town. I’ve got roots in Caswell Beach Road, the Villas, Caswell Dunes and The Arbo retum.” Taking office in 1979, in year four of the town’s infancy, one of the first projects to command Cook’s attention was completion of the town water system. Ironically, it was the Baptist Assembly’s desire to buy water from the town, rather than supply it, as it had prior to 1979, that forced town leaders to construct the oversized eight-inch water main down Caswell Beach Road. The ability to deliver water through that oversized line al lowed the town to grow in ways that had not yet been imagined at the be ginning of the 1980s. The story of Caswell Beach in the 1980s is a story of a coastal town seeking to control its destiny as the pressure to develop mounted, seem ingly by the day. Hard choices were made. With an inadequate zoning ordi nance in place, multi-family develop ment first came to Caswell Beach with construction of the first phase of Oak Island Beach Villas in the early 1980s. The villas were developed in a section of town the first board of commissioners had set aside for com mercial development. It had origi nally been targeted as a spot for a small strip shopping center, hence there were no setbacks for the area described in the zoning ordinance and, more importantly, no descrip tions of what kind of residential con struction could be built there. With no other sizable tract of land available on the oceanffont, the temp THE CLOCK SHOP CK REPAIR ?* RESTORATION Large selection of heirloom timepieces avdnbtoT IT.D. Puckett, Sr. • NAW.C.C. 103377 2230 E. Dolphin Dt, long Beach, tation to develop too densely was ir resistible on the villas’ 12 acres. Eventually, after Cook and the board of commissioners called three “building moratoriums” while the town's zoning ordinance was changed in mid-construction of the villas, set backs were put in place and construc tion density was scaled down. “They had put something on the town that was not in anybody’s best interest,” Cook said of the initial vil las developers. Later developers of that project, however, would come to the town’s aid, first by offering a condo unit to serve as temporary Town Hall, then by donating the land on which the present Town Hall is sited. But, Cook and the board of com missioners had learned something about multi-family development from the villas and were ready when ap proached a couple years later with plans for Caswell Dunes. It was over the development of Caswell Dunes that the community - - residents and property owners at Caswell Beach — was initially tom and later mostly reunited by the ac tions of the mayor and board. “When Caswell Dunes was first planned, Norman Perry was the spokesman and the initial plan called tor 1,200 units, Cook recalled, can you imagine what 1,200 units at Caswell Dunes would look like? “We had several people in town that were just adamantly opposed to multi family housing anyway.” Among those were Duncan Stuart and Bob McCracken, who were elected to the board of commission ers in 1981 on staunch anti-multi family platforms. A determining vote to accept a pre liminary proposal for Caswell Dunes came before the board in 1983 with McCracken out of town on business. It was at that meeting Cook cast the only tie-breaking vote of his 16-year mayoralty. “George Kassler voted for it, Duncan Stuart voted against it. That is the only time I exercised the tie breaking vote,” Cook recalled. Stuart fumed. He and McCracken said they had been sold out. Finally, both were brought on board when the town’s single most impor tant development decision was made: There would be no more density of development than one unit per 10,800 square feet of available space in Caswell Beach. That’s a rule that holds to this day. This develoment rule made supporters out of many opposed to multi-family development ui any iv 111 u. The formula has worked and the town is better for the multi-family development the town at once sought to allow, yet control so stringently. “That was when we all decided that multi-family could be good, if done properly,” Cook said. “I think we’ve gotten a good bit out of Caswell Dunes. We’re not crowded and we’ve got a good tax base for such a small town.” Cook and commissioners were oc cupied with development questions related to the various subdivisions and with formulation of a land use plan update throughout most of the 1980s, but by 1990 most of those questions had been settled. A host of would-be developers had come and gone. Project ownership had changed sev eral times and it became hard for ob servers — including newspaper report ers — to tell the players without a scorecard at times. Most of the development questions had been answered. The workload of local government slacked off some. “This is one of the things the new comers don’t understand,” Cook said. “We met constantly in those days. My last four years have been relatively quiet. The first ten of them were hec Wastewater disposal top Caswell issue What will be the important issues m the post-Cook years at Caswell Beach? Wastewater management, the mayor says. He says waste water reuse plans like the one advanced by neighboring Yaupon Beach and the Oak Island Golf and Country Club must be fine tuned and accepted by the pub lic. “Everyone is questioning environmental impact,” Cook said of the Yaupon Beach plan. “I would think the environmen talists would be the first ones standing up and supporting this type thing. They should be ask ing themselves, ‘What can we do to make it better to where we can support it?’ instead of just saying‘no.’ “We recycle aluminum cans and newspapers, we’ve got to find a way to recycle water.” tic.” As Cook prepares to leave the post he has held for the better part of two decades, he sees wastewater manage ment and beach renourishment as the two biggest issues his successors will have to address. “Wastewater treatment is the num ber-one big thing I can see,” Cook said. “All our property has been plat ted and zoned. It’s all spoken for. Eventually we are going to have to have a wastewater treatment system. “That’s all I can see, except for a good erosion control program. We’ve got to find some way to get back the sand the corps (of engineers) takes out of the channel. We need to make the corps show us where that sand comes from. If they can’t, maybe we shouldn’t dredge any more. It’s easy for them to haul the sand out to deeper waters and dump it, but we’re paying a price for it.” Beach maintenance and renourishment is an expensive propo sition, but without an attractive beachfront the very economy of Caswell Beach and the tax base shaped by the development decisions of the Cook administration in the 1980s could be shaken. ii we aon i una a way 10 renounsn the beach, we won’t have to worry about wastewater treatment or any thing else,” Cook said, “because we won’t have that many houses left.” The Cooks plan to take it easy for a while. Although Cook recently re tired from CP&L also, Caswell Beach will remain home for the foreseeable future, yet a move farther south may be in the cards later on. The couple has established a pat tern of three or four visits to the Ba hamas each year and looks forward to the coming days when schedules will be less hectic. Sixteen years in local government is a long time, but, for Cook, his long stay in the mayor’s chair has been gratifying. “1 think we’ve got the best beach town in North Carolina. If it weren’t, 1 wouldn’t be here. I’m glad to have been part of making it the best.” ISLAND CRAFT Oak Island Craft Consignment Shop •Crafts by Kids‘Handcrafted Angels. Over 40 crafters items for sale. FREE Gift Wrapping HOURS: Thur.-Sat. 10-6,Sun. 1-5 5414 E. 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State Port Pilot (Southport, N.C.)
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Dec. 6, 1995, edition 1
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