KANNAPOLIS — Two residents of the Oak Crest apartments on N.C. 136 told the city officials on Monday that drug dealing plagues the complex and has increased since a resident manager moved away.
They were two of only three residents who showed up at a Monday-night town hall meeting held by the City Council at Forest Park Elementary School. The other resident came from across town just to observe the meeting.
But Paul Nagy and Tim Kelly, the Oak Crest residents, found themselves outnumbered by the right people. Ten Kannapolis police officers attended the meeting, including Chief Paul Brown.
Nagy, chairman of the recently formed Oak Crest Community Watch, asked for help.
“The residents at the complex are getting tired of it,” he said. “We have a lot of kids, and we just want to see if we can put an end to this.”
Nagy said the problems at the complex are not new, but they intensified after a resident manager moved away to be replaced by a manager who lives in Charlotte.
He said neighbors have observed car after car visiting one apartment in particular, and a security guard the complex employs on weekends saw a drug deal occur.
And a maintenance man recently found a bag of marijuana on the playground.
“I don’t want to send my kids to a playground where one of the maintenance men finds a bag of dope,” said Nagy, who has three children and whose wife manages an after-school program at the apartments for children whose parents are still at work.
The situation has forced some residents to move away, he said.
Brown said the Police Department has done some drug enforcement in that area, and he pledged to do more. He said police officers will attend the residents’ next Community Watch meeting.
But he cautioned that drug-related problems don’t disappear from communities overnight, and when they do leave one neighborhood, they simply move to another.
He said people call his department frequently to report illegal dealings at a particular house or apartment.
“That’s not enough to act upon,” he said. “You can’t go search people and not do the necessary homework.”
The police chief took the opportunity to beseech the council for more help combating drugs in Kannapolis. Only two officers currently serve in the department’s vice unit, he said.
“It’s not that we ignore problems, it’s just that we try to balance the problems with our resources,” he said. Even so, the Police Department targeted the top 12 suspected drug offenders in Kannapolis last year and eventually arrested 10 of them, Brown said.
Mayor Ray Moss told Nagy and Kelly that the city will contact the owner of the apartment complex about the problems. A check of tax records lists the owner as the Oak Crest Apartments of Kannapolis, with a Panama City, Fla. address.
Kelly said Oak Crest residents will take all the help they can get and will be thankful for any relief from the drug dealings that plague their parking lots and playgrounds.
“If we just had a lot, that would be less than we have now,” he said.
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