Quarry opponents call for new survey of Umstead State Park
Advocates for Umstead State Park in Raleigh are calling for a new survey of the park.
The Umstead Coalition says they've discovered a surveying error made in 1976 that wrongly included 14 acres of park land with an adjacent property purchased by the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority.
Umstead Park itself was purchased by the federal government as a national park in 1934, and then was given to the state in 1943. Under the terms of the deed, it cannot be sold.
The 14 contested acres are just south of what's known as the P.D. Davis Tract within Umstead. They make up the northern edge of the Oddfellows Tract, which was bought by the airport in 1976 and subsequently leased to Wake Stone, Inc., for a rock quarry.
Umstead Coalition chairwoman Jean Spooner says researcher Natalie Lew discovered minutes of airport authority meetings in the summer of 1976 that prove the airport authority board was aware of a discrepancy between the 70 acres the airport believed it was buying and the 83 acres it ended up with.
"The only place that 14 acres could come from is the federal lands," Spooner told reporters Thursday.
"Obviously they knew about it, but they did not tell anybody," Lew added.
Spooner added that the contested area is environmentally sensitive and includes an important tributary of Crabtree Creek.
The coalition is asking the state to re-survey the park and correct the property boundary before the new quarry is built at that site. The re-survey would be the responsibility of the North Carolina State Property Office, but the group has offered to pay for a third-party surveyor if needed.
The State Property Office, which is part of the North Carolina Department of Administration, didn't immediately respond to WRAL's request for comment.
Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority spokeswoman Crystal Feldman told WRAL the state "has not made us aware of any potential issues with the boundary between airport property and park land. We will work with the State to determine what, if any, steps are needed if we receive new information."
The Umstead Coalition has been fighting the proposed quarry ever since the airport authority agreed to lease the land to Wake Stone in 2019.
In 2022, after a prolonged public outcry, the state Department of Environmental Quality denied a key mining permit for the quarry project. But in 2023, chief state administrative law judge Donald van der Vaart, a former NCDEQ secretary in the McCrory administration, overruled the agency's decision and directed it to issue the permit.
NCDEQ granted the mining permit to Wake Stone in Nov. 2023. If the advocates are correct, the change in property boundaries could require the permit to be revised.
Neither NCDEQ nor Wake Stone had any comment on the development.
