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GREENSBORO — One of the more frequent criticisms of the Urban Loop is that it’s too close to town, that local officials have let parts of the future route get hemmed-in by too much development.

Wouldn’t it be great to push the trajectory farther north, a few miles closer to the county line and beyond the city’s water-supply lakes?

Nice thought, but it could be a tough sell. In fact, there are more than 17 years and 25 million reasons that argue for staying the course.

That’s how long the state Department of Transportation has been buying raw land, houses and apartment buildings for the loop’s yet-to-be-built segments.

DOT has spent more than $25 million  on 147  land deals starting in April 1992  — four years before the loop’s final route became official. Its holdings include more than half the homes in one northwest Greensboro neighborhood.

Moving the loop would set back the road-building project big time, including a lengthy environmental review required before land buying could begin anew on a different route.

“If we said yes, that’s a serious consideration; it would be 25 years,”  said Doug Galyon, Greensboro resident and chairman of the state Board of Transportation.

'A unique situation’

Nowhere else in North Carolina has DOT amassed such an agglomeration of real estate, says Bonnie Tripp Simmons,  DOT administrative agent in Raleigh whose duties include managing all this property.

“Greensboro is a unique situation,” she says. “We have property in other places, not to that volume.”

DOT’s holdings stretch in bits and pieces across the entire 18-mile  spectrum of the unfinished loop. It has spent from $3.7 million  to $9.9  million on land for each of the four sections that are left.

Simmons says she has no clue why DOT accumulated so much along parts of a route that might not be completed until the 2020 or later.

The state even holds title to a majority of the 48  homes in the Cotswold Village  neighborhood off Lake Brandt Road. When the homeowner’s association wants to take action, DOT gets 25 votes — one for each of its  rental units that cost a total of $2.5 million.

“They (at DOT) usually give us their proxy,” says J.T. Foster, president of the Cotswold Village association.  “They do vote.”

In fact, just between Lawndale Drive and Old Battleground Road, the state already owns 75  houses, town homes and apartments bought at a total cost of $6.4 million.

Most of these homes, if not all, are doomed for demolition to make way for the loop. DOT is recovering some of its costs by renting out the homes and apartments until needed for road construction.

Land deals, big and small

How DOT’s huge domain was assembled is partly a story of high finance and powerful land owners who know how to make deals break their way. DOT has bought from more than a dozen people in various segments of the real estate industry, deals with price tags ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars into the millions.

The saga includes a $2.8  million sale to DOT that triggered a big-stakes lawsuit between two prominent Greensboro residents, which ended in a $1  verdict from a jury fed up with what it saw as meaningless quibbling.

But DOT’s loop purchases also are the tale of average folks facing decisions about the future of their biggest asset: their homes, which are either smack-dab in the loop’s bull’s- eye or too close for comfort.

In Foster’s case, he hopes DOT will start taking better care of its rental units in Cotswold Village so the rest of the neighborhood remains viable and attractive after the loop gets built, whenever that might be.

“We never get any solid information about what’s going on,” Foster says of his desire to learn more about the loop’s eventual impact on his neighborhood. “But if you walk through here, you can tell which houses are DOT-owned and which are owned by home owners.”

Then there’s Norman White , a retiree living on his family’s 5-acre , home place on Brightwood School Road  across town. He’s known about the loop for a half-century, ever since his dad showed him a document describing its path across their property.

“When he got that deed, the Urban Loop was penciled in, Painter Boulevard,” White says, referring to the loop by its traditional local name. “I do remember my dad remarking that the loop would go right across there. I was a youth then, I’m 64 now.”

Nowadays, White just wants DOT to buy what it needs for the loop, so he can get on with life. But he was too late asking DOT to make a “hardship acquisition” of his land; now, DOT has slowed such spending because of the state’s budget crunch.

“I can’t build on it and I can’t sell it,” White says of his land. “Nobody is going to buy it, because the state says they just don’t know.”

Hardship, protective buys

DOT’s preference is to buy land no sooner than a couple of years before it’s paved in asphalt and concrete.

“Acquiring land really is the last activity before construction,” said Doug Allison, manager of DOT’s right-of-way office in the state capital.

But in such massive projects  as the loop, the state protects future rights of way years in advance by filing an “official corridor map.” That prevents  local officials from allowing any construction on literally hundreds of properties within that 300-foot-wide  swath extending — in the loop’s case — for 43 miles.

DOT recognizes this can be a hardship, Allison says, both for the big-time developer and for the average Joe suddenly stuck with a medical crisis, a job transfer or some other burden that makes it imperative to sell property tied up in DOT’s road plans.

So the owner can petition DOT to make an early, hardship purchase as happened in many of the 147 local sales.

But the state also does what are called “protective” buys, Allison said. These aim to save  the state money in the long run by purchasing land about to be developed in the path of a future road.

DOT made its first protective buy on the incomplete part of the loop in mid-1994 as developers were poised to expand Muirsfield, then a townhouse complex on Lawndale Drive in a spot there was no way for the loop to avoid.

Developer Barry Siegal  and his business partners approached DOT, offering to sell the undeveloped land before they built another 20 to 30 units that could cost the state millions of dollars to acquire once finished.

“We just sat down with DOT and said, 'Hey, guys, here’s what we’ve got and we need to make some decisions,’ ” said Siegal of the $234,000 transaction.

Big sale, big lawsuit

DOT made its largest purchase on that part of the loop from Greensboro lawyer Walton McNairy and his family, who owned a former farm near Lake Jeanette that stretches almost to Lawndale.

The state paid $2.8 million for 59 acres in a deal hastened by McNairy’s knowledge of state statutes and that of his law partner, Charles Melvin,  who represented the family in its sale.

They knew of a law that Allison said is seldom used against DOT, one that says the state can only stop a property owner from developing land inside a future road corridor for three years after he’s denied permission to build on it.

So in early 1997,  after the loop’s final route was approved, McNairy served notice that he wanted to build on the land and was rejected because of its location in the path of the road.

“We just started the clock ticking,” Melvin said. “If you have your land tied up, they ought to either buy it or relinquish their hold.”

The clock struck midnight in February 2000: The McNairy family wanted $3 million for its land, DOT wanted to buy a smaller tract for $2.3 million and they settled on the larger piece at $2.8 million.

Melvin says DOT got a good deal: A mile of loop land in the middle of what then was one of Guilford’s priciest real-estate hotbeds.

But the sale triggered a bitter court fight between the McNairys and local builder Gary Jobe,  who was building an upscale development on land he bought from them with the understanding it would be shielded from the loop by a 50-foot, wooded buffer.

Instead, the alleged buffer was part of what the McNairys sold to DOT for the loop, forcing Jobe to spend thousands of dollars on a brick noise wall behind the Bluffs at Richland Creek,  his new neighborhood.

'Not worth the hassle’

The trial went on for two weeks in June 2004  before ending in a novel verdict: Yes, the McNairys had breached their  contract with Jobe, but only owed him $1.

“I remember we felt both of those guys were multimillionaires and they were arguing over something we felt wasn’t worth the hassle,” jury foreman Stephen Hall  said in an interview earlier this year. “We felt there was a lot of greed involved and didn’t think either one of them deserved to win.”

The McNairy land will remain undeveloped, which is the way DOT prefers to buy its road rights of way.

But when it buys homes and apartments, it often makes financial sense and good public relations to leave them standing until needed, Simmons said.

The state contracts with private property managers to lease, supervise and maintain the properties. The contractor has to walk a fine line between keeping the places livable and in good repair, but not wasting taxpayer money, said Kerri Person of Rent-a-Home,  one of DOT’s local contractors.

“It would be silly to spend a lot of money on something we’re only going to have for one or two years,” Person said.

Developer Siegal said a homeowner definitely could do worse than have DOT for a suitor: The state usually pays more than fair market value,  simplifies the transaction in ways that can save sellers a lot of money, and then pays their moving costs.

But don’t tell that to Barbara Huffman,  who has lived comfortably for 30  years in a Battle Forest Village  townhouse slated to be cleared away for the loop. Hers is one of two homes in the seven-unit building that are not yet owned by DOT.

“The state has called me quite a few times wanting to buy,” Huffman said. “I told them I wasn’t interested in selling until I found out more about when that road is coming through.”

She’s been waiting more than a decade. And she still might have a good, long wait.

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com