WILMINGTON — Across from Mayfaire, nestled behind office parks near the boundaries of Landfall, there is a 5-acre parcel of land that the Town of Wrightsville Beach has owned since 1937.
In the 1950s, the property served as a dumping ground for the town’s hurricane debris. Since then the land, which the beach calls the “Old Landfill” tract, has been undeveloped. In recent years, Wrightsville Beach entertained multiple offers from private bidders who sought to purchase the property, but the Town hasn’t found the right offer until recently. Town leaders are now eager to execute a sale, which would create a one-time windfall for Wrightsville Beach’s bankroll, and unburden the beach from the headaches of owning property outside its own jurisdiction.
The most recent offer came in Aug. 2019 from WB Sir Tyler, LLC — which has office space directly next to the town’s Old Landfill property, according to public filings — for $1.05 million.
But before Wrightsville Beach can close the deal, the property — like all former landfill sites — must undergo investigation and remediation work at the state level before it can be sold.
Brian Wright is a project manager at the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. He guides local governments through gathering environmental data on former landfill sites. State regulators then mitigate the environmental concerns on these properties, and if waste can realistically be removed, the DEQ removes land restrictions and green lights a sale.
Throughout past years, Wrightsville Beach, along with contractors, produced environmental investigation reports outlining the aftereffects of the former landfill’s impact on the land — the cost of these reports is reimbursed by the state. Once those reports were complete, Wright said, the DEQ took over and contracted Draper Aden Associates, an engineering firm, to spearhead the cleanup process necessary to approve the sale. This process is paid for with state dollars.
Wright said everything hummed along as expected until January 2020, at which point Draper Aden started asking for additional compensation beyond what the State was willing to pay.
“We said, ‘No that’s inappropriate. You don’t have to do all these things to manage this the way you’re doing it. Take a look at this again and give us a cost that’s realistic, basically, and reasonable for what’s on-site,’” Wright said. “And then they couldn’t.”
In February, a Draper Aden representative sent a letter to its subcontractor, saying that more “asbestos-containing material” was found at the sight than expected, and the project was being terminated to allow for the development of a new remedial action plan.
When negotiations reached a standstill, the Department of Environmental Quality reopened project bidding to contractors for a second time, hoping to finish remediation work at a reasonable cost. Wright said Draper Aden submitted a new bid during this window, and asked for a more reasonable fee; they were contracted again.
In July, Draper Aden reported additional waste was found on the Wrightsville Beach’s Old Landfill site, Wright said.
“We kind of think that they should have known, that somebody should have seen this, but they didn’t,” Wright said. “It was covered with thick vegetation, but we thought they — anyway, it’s nothing you can prove. It is what it is.”
Draper Aden is now selecting a sub-contractor to remove the newfound waste onsite. Wright expects the project will only require a few more weeks of work once things start moving again. A senior project manager for Draper Aden declined a request for an interview, and said all questions should be answered by Brian Wright.
“Basically since 2010 we’ve been working with the state to get it cleaned up. And we’re almost there,” said Wrightsville Beach Town Manager Tim Owens. “I don’t even know how it got titled to us, to be honest with you.”
The Old Landfill
In June of 1937, Wrightsville Beach purchased the parcel of land from the Hanover-Brunswick Investment Company for $25. Board of Aldermen archives said the land was to be used “for placing trash collected on the Beach.”
In 1954, the Board of Aldermen unanimously approved leasing the land to Isaac Barfield — the uncle of New Hanover County Commissioner Jonathan Barfield — for $1 per year.
Construction on the new Landfall Subdivision was well-underway by the mid-1980s. Lawyers for Wrightsville Beach accused Landfall developers of blocking access to the property with a locked chain in 1988, and labeling the property as a “golf course maintenance area” in Landfall site plans. Records maintained by Wrightsville Beach indicate that Landfall developers stopped encroaching on the property soon after.
Darryl Mills offered the Town $100,000 for the land in 2001. It is unclear whether Mills submitted the offer on his own behalf or if he was acting as an agent of another party. At that point, an appraiser had valued the land at $273,000.
Mills was elected Mayor of Wrightsville Beach in 2011, and has won two more mayoral elections since then.
Brian Eckel, a partner at the real estate firm Cape Fear Commerical, offered the Town $100,000 for the property in 2004. He submitted the offer on behalf of Raiford Trask, Jr. — the patriarch of Wilmington’s Trask family.
“Land is so valuable there. To have it sit there and just be an old landfill — cleaning it up to sell for higher and better use certainly made a lot of sense,” Eckel said. “The Town wasn’t ready to move forward with it, just a different time. They weren’t pursuing a sale at the time, I was just pursuing a purchase.”
Property records show that some land adjacent to the Old Landfill was held by the Trask family at certain points over the years.
Hank Miller joined Cape Fear Commercial in 2002. His LinkedIn profile says he is a senior vice president. Miller was elected to the Wrightsville Beach Board of Aldermen in 2013. He was reelected in 2017, and was chosen by the Board to serve as Mayor Pro Tem in 2019. He wasn’t involved in the 2004 offer, he said.
“Everyone’s always said that every house on Wrightsville Beach is buried over there from the storm. Growing up, I grew up with Raiford [Trask] III, and we used to duck hunt over there, and it was always ‘the trash dump,’” Miller said. “But you never could find anyone that was around that actually knew what they were talking about.”
The Old Landfill tract gained value over the years, especially after the Mayfaire shopping center, as well as residential and commercial projects in the area, increased the price tags of surrounding properties.
The appraisal value of the parcel has more than tripled in the past 20 years. Wrightsville Beach’s former landfill on the Wilmington mainland is now worth $912,100, according to public property records.
Owens, the town manager, recalled that Wrightsville Beach ramped up its work on the state-mandated environmental investigations around 2010. In December 2016, he presented a new offer to the Board of Aldermen. DPJ Residential Acquisitions, LLC had offered $1.3 million for the land.
“If I recall, the board rejected that offer because of some of the contingencies, some of the language within the contract. It just didn’t meet our needs,” Owens said. “It just wasn’t to our liking.”
“I don’t recall doing any due diligence on this,” DPJ founder Porter Jones said in an email. “I recall this land had environmental issues that we felt was not something we could overcome.”
The Town received the $1.05 million offer from WB Sir Tyler, LLC in Aug. 2019.
“The second offer might have been less, but it was cleaner, and it basically was: ‘once it’s clear, we’ll buy it’ type thing,” Owens said.
Dan Smith — whose company has a hand in the ownership of the building next to the Old Landfill site — signed the offer on behalf of WB Sir Tyler. In an email he said his company does not discuss deals until they are closed.
The Wrightsville Beach Board of Aldermen approved the contract in Aug. 2019. The Town has since conducted and submitted necessary environmental investigation reports to N.C. regulators with the Department of Environmental Quality. If the state can successfully mitigate the remaining environmental concerns on the former landfill, Wrightsville Beach will have a green light to move forward with the sale.
According to DEQ Project Manager Brian Wright, there was a hiatus in the process while the state and its contractor worked toward getting on the same page, but work is now back underway.
“Draper Aden is finding a new subcontractor to remove the waste,” Wright said. “They just had financial issues that they had to overcome, and it took a long time to get that done.”
Wright said Draper Aden, the state’s firm of choice for the remedial phase of the project, expected a far higher fee than the state was willing to provide.
“They were going to tack almost a million and a half dollars onto the project, which was just not appropriate at all,” he said.
In Board of Aldermen meetings, Town leaders have tossed around the idea of what to do with the money once the sale goes through. The consensus seems to be that the money would be added to the Town’s general fund, based on comments made at past Board meetings.
“If everything works out and it is sold, the Board would have to decide what to do with the funding,” Owens said. “Put it away for a hurricane or a rainy day. Put it away for sand, put it away for whatever they believe needs to happen with it.”
Send tips and comments to [email protected] or (910) 478-6511
