Today arguably the Town of Davidson’s most famous park, BEATY PARK has a special relationship with the community: a legacy and impact that extends far beyond simply being located next to and including open space land donated by the developer of Hobbs Hill Neighborhood, or being the first and only Town (publicly) owned, natural open space/community park in the Town’s 180+ year history that was purchased independently and protected by a permanent conservation easement in all of Davidson!
VISION:
Beaty Park has a uniquely complicated legacy with several chapters in the more recent history of Davidson. In 1980, Town Parks & Recreation staff, elected officials and other community advocates first publicly broached the concept of their vision to identify natural open space in the greater historic downtown Davidson area to acquire and conserve for a “future Park.” This was notable because at that time, much of that area outside the historic downtown Main Street district remained largely undeveloped – but even then, those visionary community members realized the concept of land conservation and the urgency of “acquiring land now, while it is still available.”
By 1981, the Town proceeded to identify and solicit six (6) different private landowners scattered around the East and West sides of downtown Davidson. All but one of those landowners rebuffed the Town and indicated no interest in selling their land for a community Park. Ms. Venie Clontz and her late husband Ralph had acquired a fairly significant parcel of land (approximately 50 acres) in the Northern end of downtown Davidson during the mid-century, land that historically dating back to the 18th century had been owned by key figures including the Armour family. It was prime property for future development, given it bordered Lake Davidson (Norman), North Main Street and was located just blocks from Davidson College and downtown Davidson. But Ms. Clontz and her son Ralph Clontz, Jr. were the only property owners to respond to the Town and indicate an interest in selling their land for a future public Park.
THE SALE AND DONATION OF PARK LAND:
By 1985, after several years of further delays by the Town following initial offers and agreement in principal, Ms. Clontz and the Town of Davidson, under the administration of Mayor Russell Knox, finally contracted for the sale of the Eastern half of her family’s land (which had been bisected since its original acquisition by Beaty Street) to the Town for the future Park. This land conservation transaction remains historically significant because based on extensive public records research, it represents the first (and only) land parcel EVER purchased autonomously by the Town of Davidson specifically for open space/Park conservation purposes dating back to the Town’s founding in 1837! Later in 1991, developer Michael Johnson acquired lands historically owned by the Hobbs and Armour families adjacent to “Beaty Park” and began development with partner David Mayfield in 1993 of the “19 Hobbs Hill” neighborhood. In 1995, they planned to complete Hobbs Hill with a “phase 2” comprised of 5 additional lots; as a condition for Town approval, Johnson and Mayfield agreed to donate land that ultimately comprised approx. 1.5 acres of their private property to the Town expressly as open space (today known as the “Johnson parcel”), on behalf of Hobbs Hill Neighborhood. Both Johnson and Mayfield would later confirm that donation was expressly agreed to with the Town in order to serve as a buffer between Hobbs Hill and Beaty Street and be included with the Clontz property as part of the future town park. That land gifted to the Town of Davidson on behalf of Hobbs Hill Neighborhood represents the only private land donated for Beaty Park. Hobbs Hill is also the only Davidson neighborhood directly abutting Beaty Park. And as explained below, residents of Hobbs Hill started the citizen advocacy and subsequent founding of the Save Davidson non-profit that led community efforts in 2017 to save and conserve Beaty Park. So it’s easy to see why the legacies of Hobbs Hill Neighborhood and Beaty Park are forever intertwined!
DEVELOPER SPECIAL INTERESTS, RFPs & COLLUSION:
Unfortunately, over the course of the next 30 years and thru numerous changes in elected/hired Town officials, that conservation vision, agreements with the property owners and public records on the Clontz and Johnson land acquisitions for the Park were buried in town files and faded memories. Town officials in the 1980’s and 1990’s also failed to properly memorialize the defined purposes of the Clontz and Johnson land purchase and donation in legal documents filed on the parcels at the time of acquisition or thereafter as well. And as development pressures and high demand for property in Davidson escalated, development industry-skewed persons even got elected to the Town Board. The “Beaty Park” property sat completely ignored for years (other than some NCDENR-ordered repairs to the Beaty Pond/dam) while also suffering thru various Town officials’ attempts to induce development rather than fulfill the Park in its intended form; that included a “small area plan” in 1996, the first ever for the Town not coincidentally and a resulting residential development “request-for-proposal” (RFP) in 1996 that citizens protested and the Town eventually abandoned, and later a 2009 Town staff-led study targeting the property for “Eco-Industrial” development that was later not published for public knowledge. Thru all of those efforts, public records show that citizen public input on various Town studies/plans [including the most recent “Station Area Plan” (2012) and “Parks & Rec Master Plan” (2014)] consistently reiterated that the collective Clontz, Johnson and other minor adjoining land acquisitions by the Town were public property whose purpose was a community Park, with any notion for “development” to be for “public purposes” limited to the property’s NE corner (which was at the North entrance to Town of Davidson and Mecklenburg County).
A pivotal turning point in the long Beaty Park backstory occurred in early 2015, when the Town of Davidson approved a sweeping rezoning of the Beaty property and surrounding land. The change expanded allowable uses to include high-density development, including commercial, retail, and hotel options, despite questions raised by nearby residents and the fact that multiple town-sponsored small area plans over the prior decade had documented public input consistently saying the land was to be conserved as a public park.
A key precursor to all of the community activism in 2017 that saved Beaty Park occurred in 2014, when Hobbs Hill resident Eric Giangiordano began independently investigating the Beaty property. He was curious why the Town had ignored the land for decades, then rezoned that area as part of the mass planning area changes adopted quietly by the Town in early 2015. His initial investigation work included reviewing public town planning documents from the previous twenty years, the legal codes known as Davidson Planning Ordinances (DPO), and town board meetings. His early work identified that various town planning documents and exercises related to the Beaty property between 1996-2014 conflicted with each other, as well as public input. The widespread assumption of local citizens (including residents of Hobbs Hill) was “the Town just hadn’t gotten around to building the park.” Armed with his initial research, Giangiordano concluded that after thirty years, that explanation seemed “illogical”, and developed an alternative theory; that Town of Davidson officials had purposely ignored the Beaty property due to some non-public agenda for the disposition of that land, and possibly one that did not involve conserving it as a public park, but for what purpose?
Giangiordano’s research took a more ominous turn in the spring of 2015. To correlate his growing concerns, he contacted another long-time resident well-connected to Town politics, whom he could trust to keep his research confidential. He asked them to quietly explore what the town officials’ behavior and intentions were internally regarding the Beaty property. After more than a month passed, he received an email that plainly stated “town officials had no plans to make the land a park, instead it was on a list of available land parcels that were being privately shopped to developers interested in Davidson.” That “smoking gun” substantially proved his suspicion that the Town had done nothing with the parkland, because it was keeping its options open for the tacit agenda to sell/develop the land, rather than ever create a public park: conduct that had never been disclosed to citizens, and contradicted prior public input from Town planning exercises for the prior twenty years.
In the middle of that period of research, the situation inside Town Hall of Davidson regarding the Beaty property secretly began escalating. A local Davidson-based church, Lake Forest Church, privately approached the Town about purchasing approximately five acres at the northeast corner of the Beaty property for a new home, based on the new 2015 land rezoning, while also expressing support for the long-promised creation of a public park on the remaining land. But instead of advancing that vision, Town officials shelved the church’s proposal and used their inquiry as a springboard to formally pursue town officials’ broader development agenda once and for all.
In August 2016, the Town managers, under the direction of the Mayor and Board, publicly announced and issued a formal “Beaty RFP (request-for-proposal)” seeking proposals from developers to purchase and develop the Beaty property. That RFP included extensive firm requirements, including high-density, mixed-use development to “maximize commercial and residential use” of the full 20-acre property. Town leaders asserted that the plan would “still include a park,” yet residents argued any such “park” would largely consist of minimal land already restricted by watershed and open space laws, centered around the existing Beaty pond—areas that were impractical or legally impossible to develop anyway.
A “VOCIFEROUS NEIGHBORHOOD” AND CITIZEN UPRISING TO “SAVE THE PARK… AND TOWN”:
In response to the Beaty RFP, Hobbs Hill residents organized and mobilized. In September 2016, Giangiordano organized neighbors into the Hobbs Hill Neighborhood Alliance (HHNA) and led a series of meetings with Town officials to question the RFP and better understand the Town’s now-clear intent to sell and develop the land. Hobbs Hill neighbors also began communicating with nearby neighborhoods, including the adjacent North Main (NoMa) area.
After initial neighborhood and citizen pushback to the RFP slowly built, the Town then formed a “Beaty RFP Selection Committee,” composed of staff, elected officials, and citizens. Giangiordano and NoMa resident Stephanie Amadio were appointed to the committee after firm requests were made, in part because Hobbs Hill and NoMa were the two neighborhoods directly adjacent to the property, and at that time, represented the citizens with the most familiarity with the Beaty property.
As that committee process unfolded, serious concerns emerged about speed, transparency, and fairness. Giangiordano reported that 4 of the 6 RFP proposals were eliminated in the first 2-hour meeting. The process moved quickly toward selecting a finalist by the third and final meeting, despite widespread objections. Subsequent FOIA public records requests later revealed extensive private communications and even in-person meetings that occurred between Town officials and representatives of their favored developer, Davidson Development Partners, including coordination on messaging and responses to citizen criticism. One particularly infamous email communication from a DDP partner referenced Hobbs Hill residents as “vociferous,” reflecting the growing adversarial posture between Town leadership and developers, collaborating against concerned citizens.
At the final one-hour committee meeting, Giangiordano and Amadio publicly abstained from voting in protest. The committee nevertheless hastily voted 3–2 to endorse DDP’s “Luminous” proposal – the most aggressive plan submitted, involving high-density housing, roads, commercial development (including a hotel), and only minimal open space around the pond (which would be used as a stormwater control for the development) to meet town and County environmental ordinance requirements. Following the committee’s conclusion, he noted numerous flaws with the entire process; for those interested, a breakdown of that and many other more complicated topcis including planning code, historical documents, and legal process behind the entire Beaty RFP and Park controversy, was discussed in this Save Davidson podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH6LWXQAgYE&t=1713s.
Giangiordano, recognizing their efforts were at a crossroads, and the dire nature of situation, then circulated an email warning to neighbors that HHNA and NoMa’s good-faith attempts to work with the Town since fall 2016 had failed, that the entire RFP and Town official’s conduct was grossly flawed, and that only broader Davidson community awareness and involvement would stop the inappropriate sale and redevelopment of Beaty Park (the Town stated an intent to sign a binding contract quickly in less than 90 days). Within days of that email, Hobbs Hill residents Denise and Ben Beall made a fateful decision that changed the course of the battle to save Beaty Park, and change the culture in Davidson’s Town Hall: they created a Facebook group called “Save West Davidson’s Tree Canopy” in February 2017 – soon shortened to “Save Davidson” – which rapidly became the primary public platform for organizing citizen awareness and activism.
Their “Save Davidson” group grew quickly, fueled by both concern over Beaty Park and frustrations being shared via social media over Town Hall behavior and decision-making more broadly on numerous other controversies, including the Mi-Connection town-owned cable debacle that cost taxpayers over $70M in losses, and the highly controversial Interstate 77 NCDOT-Cintra toll lanes, both municipal projects endorsed and led by Davidson officials. Other Save Davidson organizers, including Hobbs Hill resident Donna Pollack and East Davidson activist Jana Watt, joined the Bealls in more formally organizing Save Davidson. Longtime Davidson community advocate Rick Short and numerous regional County, Parks & Rec, and State leaders also lent support. Citizens across Davidson from all walks of life, from children to retirees, were coming together to march in protest and pack town board meetings on a scale that hadn’t been seen in the Town of Davidson in generations. In early summer, the Save Davidson principals, realizing the upcoming 2017 elections represented perhaps the best opportunity to truly “Save Davidson”, formally registered the organization as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit with a mission of civic education, transparency, and citizen engagement.
Public opposition to the Beaty RFP and other controversial Town decisions intensified throughout 2017, thanks to Save Davidson’s initiatives and growing community activism. Another pivotal moment occurred during this period when attorney Ralph Clontz, the grandson of Venie Clontz, was contacted by Denise Beall and Heidi Dietrich about the RFP and Town’s plans to sell and develop the land his grandmother (Venie Clontz) had sold to the town three decades earlier expressly for a public park. Clontz, an accomplished Charlotte attorney, attended a packed town hall meeting and provided powerful and transparent testimony that directly refuted numerous public statements by Town officials. Town officials attempted to appease critics by finally organizing the first “public input session” regarding the Beaty property, the most highly-attended such event in modern Davidson history. Citizen feedback overwhelmingly rejected the RFP sale/development agenda and affirmed voters’ desire for the property to be the public park it had always been promised. Unfortunately, Town officials refused to acknowledge their misdeeds and mostly disregarded even the results of their own public input session.
Meanwhile, Save Davidson’s entirely volunteer group continued to organize weekly innovative public education, fundraising, and voter registration events throughout the summer and fall of 2017. The non-profit later organized the Town’s largest and most well-attended 2017 Mayoral/Commissioner candidate forums. Save Davidson motivated numerous first-time candidates to enter the Davidson elections. Of the two (2) new Mayoral candidates and nine (9) new Commissioner candidates, in various forms, ALL opposed the RFP and proposed sale/development of Beaty Park, noting the flawed process, lack of public input, and overwhelming citizen support to honor the original Park promise. Public opposition to the Beaty RFP and other controversial Town decisions intensified, while the public protests and other advocacy led by Save Davidson were making news headlines across the Lake Norman and Charlotte area.
Facing overwhelming public protest and rebuke, in August 2018 the Town of Davidson finally abandoned their attempts to execute a contract with their chosen developer for the sale of the property – Davidson Development Partners, thus temporarily “saving the Park.” But those Town officials again shocked citizens by attributing their issues to an “inability to reach mutual agreement with the developer on the contract” (rather than citizen protests about errors/misdeeds), and stated that “other uses/future development remained a possibility.” That behavior simply reinforced to most citizens that major changes were necessary in Town Hall, and further eroded citizens’ trust in the existing entrenched leadership of Davidson.
Three months later in November 2017, led by Save Davidson and an extensive public advocacy and engagement campaign, the voters of Town of Davidson turned out in historic numbers (over 300% higher voter turnout than the last election), and ousted the long-time Mayor John Woods and four of the 5 incumbent Board of Commissioners who voters deemed responsible for the Beaty RFP and other highly controversial decisions (Rodney Graham, Brian Jenest, Beth Cashion, and Stacy Anderson, all except attorney Jim Fuller who had voted against the sale of the Park). Cashion and Jenest chose not to run for re-election after it became clear citizens were intend on “saving Davidson, along with Beaty Park.” Voters had spoken clearly through our democracy, demonstrating an overwhelming mandate for substantive changes in how the Town Hall of Davidson conducted the business of its citizens. Voter turnout and activism were also significantly higher in other Lake Norman towns, thanks to Save Davidson’s efforts.
BEATY PARK – 4 DECADES IN THE MAKING:
Following that historic 2017 election and citizen mandate for sweeping changes in Town Hall policy and core values, new Mayor Rusty Knox (notably the son of Mayor Russell Knox, who had signed the Town’s original contract to purchase the park property from Ms. Venie Clontz) and the new Board of Commissioners (David Sitton, Matthew Fort, Autumn Michael, Jane Campbell and Jim Fuller) promptly appointed a diverse citizen-led “Park at Beaty Street Task Force” that worked in partnership with the Town’s Parks & Rec Director to oversee an unprecedented year-long public input, analysis and design process for the Park. Several residents of Hobbs Hill served on that committee. In February 2019, that task force presented a final master plan and comprehensive strategic recommendations, including calling for a permanent conservation easement to protect/conserve the Park in perpetuity. Several citizens, including leaders of Hobbs Hill, lobbied the town and task force for the conservation easement, noting “case law proved that was the strongest legal measure to permanently protect the Beaty property, and ensure that regardless of any future politics and special interest agendas, Hobbs Hill and the rest of the community would never have to fight to save the park again.” On March 19, 2019 the Board unanimously voted to approve the task force recommendations, marking the first time since 1985 that the Town of Davidson had officially recognized the original stated purpose of the Clontz property as publicly-owned open space and a Park, and placing the property under the responsibility of the Town’s Parks & Recreation Department. In July 2019, the Board voted with citizen input to officially name it “Beaty Park”, with a dedication to the Clontz family, and in August 2019, approved and executed a proper permanent conservation easement for Beaty Park with the accredited Davidson Lands Conservancy, a leading local conservation group.
LOOKING FORWARD:
Finally protected from further threat of sale/development, Beaty Park was promptly identified as a “priority” Parks & Recreation project for the Town of Davidson and community – engineering, site work, design, budgeting/grants and numerous other projects are underway jointly by the Town and Davidson Lands Conservancy to restore the Beaty Pond, improve the property, add sidewalks/multi-use paths on Beaty Street for pedestrian mobility and begin implementing public amenities across the approx. 20-acre property – a legacy conservation and ecological asset just minutes from downtown Davidson that can be enjoyed by citizens across the community for generations to come! Beaty Park had to be saved twice by the community; in the process of finally making it the “promised Park” (as referenced by Save Davidson member and resident Barbara Hauser), citizens led a historic movement to save the Town from losing sight of its own adopted core values, improve public process and transparency, and uphold principles that make Davidson such a special place to live – or more simply in the words of Mayor Knox, “Do the right thing!”
On July 8, 2023, the Town held an official Beaty Park grand opening and ribbon cutting following completion of major Phase 1 improvements. Phase 2 additions have continued, including work on Beaty Pond, ADA access, a fishing pier, and the installation of the outdoor art feature “Bouquet for Davidson” by artist Andy Dunnill.
Today, Beaty Park stands as the only dedicated public conservation park within greater downtown Davidson and the original historic town boundaries. It has become both a valued community resource and a lasting example of what can happen when residents demand transparency, accountability, and follow-through on public commitments. As former Commissioner and attorney Jim Fuller later remarked, Beaty Park represents something akin to “Davidson’s Central Park.” And while Beaty Park exists today, and for future generations, thanks to community-wide efforts over 40 years, without the foundational work of Hobbs Hill Neighborhood and its residents from 2014-2017, the park and its natural assets would have been lost forever.