Community Recreational - What is it?

Some of the Davidson County Commissioners seem to have convinced themselves that they have been transparent with the public in the planning of the $65 million Sportsplex boondoggle that they want to put in Southmont.
So let's take a look at just one small aspect of the project, the newly created Community Recreational zoning, and see how transparent the county was in attempting to roll it out for the Sportsplex property. CR as we'll call it won't just apply to the Sportsplex though. The county says they are going to try to rezone ALL park properties in the county to CR in the Spring of 2026.

CR was approved by the Commissioners on April 28th 2025. [here's the video from April 28 on YouTube] In that meeting some of the new "rights" that would be permitted on land that is zoned CR are described and specific examples of new uses are given. Some use cases are very reasonable and would clearly add to a park, but in addition to those A DRAG STRIP, A RACE TRACK, A CONVENIENCE STORE, A HOTEL, and other uses are mentioned. It's a VAST expansion of use for park property. CR, if applied to all the park property in Davidson County will drastically change what can take place on the property and therefore will impact a large number of people yet there was hardly any audience at the meeting to hear it and the video on YouTube of that meeting currently only has 217 views.

Now fast forward to June 9th when the county tried to rezone to CR the 358 acre property in Southmont that it had purchased in 2024 for a Sportsplex. Because the county was seeking to rezone the property they were forced by law to notify adjacent landowners. The result was a standing room only crowd at the County Commissioners meeting and the rezoning request was defeated. Tellingly, here's how the Community Recreational zoning was described to the standing room only audience and Commissioners at this meeting:

"....the reason to for doing that is well back in April of 2025 we adopted a brand new zoning district called community recreational district. It's kind of an acknowledgment that people who live here or are moving into the county can look at our zoning map and we're going to go through a process where we change every single public park in the county to this district. These are just the first two um first two parks to go. We're also going to hear the Yadkin River Park tonight as well. So, this will be an ongoing probably over a year-long process where we'll see Hughes Park, we'll see Lynwood Park, we're going to see all of the existing parks that are that are there now turned to community recreational district as a way to acknowledge that these facilities are here. So, folks moving into the county can see these facilities. They may want to live next to them. They may not. They may want to, you know, not not be close to them. So, um, that that's somewhat the premise of why the process is taking place. So, I guess a lot of other folks do this already because when you're pulling up Google or something, it shows green spaces in in different cities."

and

"So the main reason is just that way people moving in here if they don't want to live near a site near a facility like that it basically just lets them know. Well, it's just a acknowledgement of that's the type of facility that's located on that property."

Notice there's no mention of the CR zoning expanding the use to allow building restaurants, hotels, or stores on the park property? The county clearly didn't want the members of the surrounding community to know how the CR zoning the Commissioners were voting on would expand the use of the 358 acres and if they did they failed MISERABLY at informing them.

The argument that the county was doing this so that the park would show up as "green" on google is also false. As you can see below parks in Davidson County already show up as a darker highlighted green on google maps.

X = allowed by right
CZ = conditional zoning
SB = special use with approval

The table below shows what CR zoned property can be used for vs Rural Agricultural land and Residential.

There's another aspect of the creation and application of CR that should be brought up. Why did they do it? In the June 9th meeting they said that they didn't actually need the zoning change to put 16 fields, 3500 parking places, and a 4.5 acre water park on the property in Southmont because building a "community center" on Rural Agricultural land has been allowed since 1990.
The Commissioners approved the creation of the new CR zoning district on April 28th - AFTER the Commissioners approved $65 million to build the sportsplex. If they could build it using zoning that had been in place since 1990 why did they create a whole new zoning district and base it on what they thought the Sportsplex project would need?