Chapel Hill residents want BP station to live on

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. For some Chapel Hill residents, that place is the BP Service Station in Eastgate Shopping Center.

Eastgate, which houses Trader Joe's and other businesses, is located between East Franklin Street and North Fordham Boulevard.

Christine McGuirl of Federal Realty Investment Trust submitted an application to the Town of Chapel Hill to redevelop the service station into a one-story, multi-tenant retail building.

But Ed Harrison, member of the Chapel Hill Town Council, said residents are upset about the change. 

“If they’ve lived around here for a while, they’re letting me know they aren’t at all happy,” Harrison said.

Because this land is in a zone that requires a form-based code for redevelopment, there is no public review process.

Chapel Hill resident Ann McCutchan said she has been using the service station since the 1960s.

“When you need something fixed on your car, they’ve always done a super job,” McCutchan said. “I think this service station should stay here for little old ladies like myself. I’m very angry with the man who’s gonna do this.”

Chapel Hill resident Daniel Heuser said he thinks there isn’t anything special about the station, but he uses it because it’s the only station on his way home.

“It’s not the prettiest, but we are short on service stations,” Heuser said. “We already have this shopping center here, and the parking lot is pretty crowded. We don’t need any more.”

P.D. Kirkman, a mechanic who has worked at the service station for 17 years, said he doesn’t like the development.

“We don’t need (any) more restaurants here,” Kirkman said. “They don’t care about the little people here.” 

He hopes the station will be moved to another location, but doesn’t know if that will happen. He said he doesn’t know what he will do once the service station is closed.

“It’s just a bad deal,” he said.

The application states that some space will be dedicated for town and state-sponsored improvements to the intersection of Ephesus Church Road and Eastgate Shopping Center Road with Fordham Boulevard. 

“We are currently in the exploratory stage to see how we can better align Eastgate with the exciting improvements being made at the Ephesus Church-Fordham area and the business district," Deirdre Johnson, the vice president of asset management for Federal Realty Investment Trust, said in an email. "There are no specific details to share at this time.”

Harrison said this was not an area that was originally considered for redevelopment, but to get the extra room for these improvements, the town needed to get approval from the owner.

“The owner of the property said they were not comfortable allowing that unless they were able to redevelop the land,” Harrison said.

He said for over 25 years there has been no attempt to redevelop this site, and now with the form-based code it’s happening.

“As a council member, it really frustrates me that we don’t have a say in it,” Harrison said.

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