Readers may have wondered what is happening with the Wake Forest Planning Board and the town’s growth and change. Planning board members have had a very quiet summer.
          In June there was a joint public hearing with the town commissioners about the update to the transportation plan and a presentation about the outline for the proposed unified development ordinance (UDO) which will pull all the town’s development and planning codes and ordinance into one document. There were no meetings in July or August and Town Manager Mark Williams told the town board Tuesday night there will not be a meeting in September.
          However, he added that the meeting in October “will be a doozy,” he said.
          Guessing from afar, it may be that part of that doozy will be a new plan submitted by WRI-Wake Union for a shopping center called Wake Union Place on the site of the former Parker-Hannifin plant along Wake Union Church Road. The shopping center itself is similar or identical to the first plan, but the access to Capital Boulevard and the center’s impact on traffic is new, reportedly changed to a “super-street” with right-in, right-out access only.
          The Wake Forest commissioners unanimously denied a special use permit for the center in December of 2008. Since then a Wake County Superior Court judge has upheld the town board’s decision and WRI-Wake Union, through its attorney Clyde Holt has appealed that decision to the North Carolina Court of Appeals. A date for that appeal has not been set.
          Could The Alexan apartment complex be included in the doozy? There were great concerns about the two streams that meet near or at that site, and when the extension of the special use permit for the 288-unit apartment project was denied two years ago engineers were still working to find a way to build the necessary Ligon Mill Road extension from its current end next to Wal-Mart northward to Caveness Farms Apartments and the Dr. Calvin Jones Highway (N.C. 98 bypass).
          Are there others? Perhaps more development at the Ammons family’s Traditions project? Daryl Cady’s La Scala? Look over The Growth Rate, pick your favorite or listen to the local talk and nominate a new one, then either tune into Channel 10 on Oct. 5 or go to the new rotunda meeting room in the Wake Forest Town Hall and watch what happens.