Save Lake Crabtree County Park

What is happening?

RDU Airport Authority (RDUAA) has been leasing the land to Wake County for $1 a year for the last 45+ years. Wake County and surrounding towns have invested millions into the park over the decades, including building the lake, extending utilities, creating trails, connecting with greenways to name a few. RDUAA now wants to destroy the park in the name of building “entertainment facilities or hotels” after taxpayers have paid for all the infrastructure improvements to the park and surrounding areas.

Example image

The full proposal is available here.

Who is doing this?

The RDUAA board is pushing this agenda.

Why is this a bad thing?

This will destory one of the most popular set of mountain biking and hiking trails in North Carolina. Lake Crabtree County Park is home to 6 of the 14 miles of adaptive trails in Wake County and is the “go to” location for novice and intermediate mountain bikers.

What can be done?

  1. Leave comments here for the RDUAA Board, “Submit a comment” above the board member listings.
  2. Talk to your representatives for Wake County, Durham County, City of Raleigh and City of Durham since they each appoint two board members to the RDUAA board.
  3. The Umstead Coalition put together a letter campaign that can be used to send messages to all the commissioners, council members and board members involved.

Why does RDUAA say the FAA is forcing them to do this?

The RDUAA is taking a very narrow reading of FAA Order 5190.GB, Chapter 17, (original). A full reading of chapter 17 will include section “17.13. Exceptions to the Self-Sustaining Rule: General” and section “17.14. Exceptions to the Self-Sustaining Rule: Providing Property for Public Community Purposes”. These sections detail exceptions to the Self-Sustaining Rule, and in particular calls out parks as a community use. Furthermore, footnote 3 on page 17-4 says

“3 FAA will not find airport sponsors in non-compliance if a community use agreement existed prior to February 16, 1999, providing the sponsor is acting in accordance with the conditions set forth in 49 U.S.C. ยง 47107(v).”

Lake Crabtree County Park has been in existence since 1988 with the mountain bikes trails added in 1994.

Historical Information & Documents

To learn more about how we got here, please see this site and this document