By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
Salisbury City Council has approved a Phase IV site plan for the Pinnacle Office Park along Jake Alexander Boulevard.
The phase will be built near the intersection of Jake Alexander Boulevard and South Main Street. The site plan includes six buildings encompassing up to 50 office condominiums and covering some 75,000 square feet. It will have about 365 parking spaces.
The main access to the site will be off South Main Street by Dodd Street, which was determined to be a private drive, not a public street. It will be maintained by the condominium association.
There will be no access to the rear of the property from Rosemont Street, but the phase will be connected to the rest of Pinnacle Office Park, the other phases of which extend toward Mooresville Road (N.C. 150).
Fisher-Harriss Development is the developer and will build the office condominiums in phases. John Leatherman is the property owner. He said this newest phase will offer a park-like setting with high visibility.
He predicted Phase IV could have a significant medical presence. Fisher-Harriss will be able to offer spaces from 1,500 square feet to 20,000 and 30,000 square feet, depending on the need, Leatherman said.
“The flexibility is the key thing,” he said.
Mayor Pro Tem Paul Woodson said he was happy to see a site plan approved for the development after a couple of years of various discussions, reviews and negotiations.
In another city matter, the council has delayed designating the downtown area as an Urban Progress Zone.
As part of North Carolina’s Article 3J tax credits program, the Urban Progress Zone program provides economic incentives to stimulate new investment and job creation in economically distressed areas.
Only a municipality with a population in excess of 10,000 may request Urban Progress Zone designations from the N.C. Department of Commerce’s Division of Community Assistance.
Councilman Bill Burgin expressed some reservations about offering tax incentives in the downtown for certain uses such as manufacturing, warehousing and motorsports racing team operations ó all of which would be eligible under the program.
Those kinds of uses may not be what Salisbury wants in the 100 and 200 blocks of Innes and Main streets, Burgin said as an example. He noted that the main focus in downtown has been retail, office and residential uses.
“We don’t want to tax credit ourselves into something we don’t want,” Burgin said. But he and others recognized that tax incentives for businesses such as company headquarters, information technology operations, call centers and small manufacturing operations in certain sections of the downtown might be welcome.
Councilman Mark Lewis said many of the questionable uses eligible for the tax credits might not be allowed by the zoning covering most of the central business district.
Burgin said he would feel better if Downtown Salisbury Inc.’s board agreed that an Urban Progress Zone designation was what it wanted. Council delayed action until it could have DSI’s opinion.
Meanwhile, the council had no problem designating a Park Avenue area as an Urban Progress Zone.
In general, that zone would stretch from Long Street to Interstate 85 and from East Horah Street to Bringle Ferry Road.