Courthouse project to move forward after Scarborough & Hargett decamps to Carolina Times building

The long process of getting the Durham County Courthouse's new site underway took a big step forward this week with the announcement that African-American community institution Scarborough & Hargett has vacated its site at the corner of Dillard and Roxboro near the county jail.

The historic funeral home is making its third move in its long history; it was notoriously impacted by urban renewal, which brought the Hayti fixture to its 1960s-era site downtown.

"Skeepie" Scarborough, the latest in a long line of family owners and managers of the business, expressed his concerns and frustrations over the impact eminent domain had had on Durham's black community in the community activism forum at the Hayti Heritage Center a couple of weeks ago:

My business is 137 years old, fourth generation. We have been eminent domained three times. 1914, 1968, and now. We are all sitting in the area of Hayti, the cradle of society as we call it. 1887 is when it became known. The people who moved here, who had homes here, who had businesses here -- all of a sudden, by 1968, 1969, was wiped out by eminent domain. I can just remember, as I heard, having thoughts, having seen things in the past....

For my people, how can we have a mechanism, how can this be worked with in order to help other blacks not succumb to this?

Scarborough_10-25-2009

The political sensitivities around Scarborough & Hargett reverberate deeply in Durham. Heck, during Scarborough's comments at the Hayti Heritage Center forum, City Councilman Mike Woodard quietly shifted from his pew on the east side of the onetime St. Joe's sanctuary and sidled up to chat with deputy county manager Deborah Craig-Ray.

Similarly, the ongoing delays (and lease extensions) by the County towards the business has almost certainly been an uncomfortable matter for county leaders, due both to the business' historic role in the black community -- and due to the number of times that Scarborough & Hargett has been relocated already.

The business was to have opened its new site at the UDI Industrial Park off of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pkwy. in south Durham, but construction there has been stalled over a year. Scarborough had no comment for the Herald-Sun's story today (though he did speak with ABC 11's Anthony Wilson), with UDI's Ed Stewart telling the paper that he keeps hearing the construction will resume "any day now."

Even the temporary location for the funeral home has been up in the air. The business told the BOCC a few months back that they'd hired former county manager and architect George Williams to upfit the recently-closed Johnson Chrysler by the DBAP to be a new, temporary home. But BCR got word shortly thereafter that it would be the Carolina Times newspaper building on Old Fayetteville St. near St. Joe's that would house the business.

Scarborough did not respond to a request for comment several weeks ago from BCR.

One thing that the longtime business owner is willing to talk about: the price received for the taking. 

Scarborough told ABC 11's Anthony Wilson the County's price for his land, in Wilson's words, "was a figure much lower than he wanted."

A Herald-Sun report from 2007 highlighted a difference in the compensation received by S&H versus that given to the neighboring U-Haul site -- though that delta didn't exactly work in U-Haul's favor:

The former U-Haul property was one of two parcels condemned to make way for the construction. The other was a 2.2-acre site occupied by the Scarborough & Hargett Funeral Home on Roxboro Street, for which county officials agreed out of court to pay $3.75 million.

It has never been made clear why the county agreed to pay only $1.375 million for the slightly larger former U-Haul property.

UNC's Small Business and Technology Development Center noted in a past annual report that they engaged NCCU law students to research the value of the business and to prepare a case for why the initial offer from the County -- which had been much closer to the price proffered to U-Haul -- was unfair. A legal team that included Butch Williams was also assembled.

And while conservatives have groused that the price paid for S&H was too high, it's hard to deny the pain a family business faces upon going through upheaval for a third time in its history, especially given the historic challenges surrounding urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s in Durham.

Still, we at BCR are hard-pressed to see a trebling of the monies given Scarborough & Hargett from the County's original offer -- or from the neighboring U-Haul site -- as being reasonable to think of as "much lower" than what the business wanted in the first place.

Comments

[Todd P]

This story has been up for 24 hours with no comments. I'm not sure why, but BCR is asking some good questions.

The funeral home got $2,375,000 more than the U-Haul business - for a smaller piece of land. While its regrettable that this business has had to move twice before due to public projects, it is safe to say that no one involved in the siting of the new courthouse had anything to do with 1914 & 1968 decisions. Even Becky Heron hasn't been on the BOCC that long.

The most unfortunate thing about this is the opportunity cost - what else could Durham County have done with that $2,375,000 to benefit the entire community, rather than this one business? DPS has hundreds of millions of dollars in unfunded capital needs, from new roofs to energy efficiency improvements to basic renovations of 50 year old restrooms. There are certainly more important uses for that money than paying triple the value for that plot of land.

[Bull City Rising]

@Todd: To be clear, I'm not 100% sure that S&H didn't deserve the extra funding. I harangued Jon Ham over this a couple of years back.

It's not clear whether the County was low-balling both U-Haul and S&H, and S&H was just better at fighting it; whether S&H had a business case that justified the higher amount; or whether it was a smooth political power play by an influential family business.

My particular interest in this one is, based on Scarborough's comments to ABC 11, and his concerns over eminent domain at the Hayti Heritage Ctr. a couple of weeks ago -- what did he think his business' facility and land were worth? I could see $1m being on the low side, but was surprised to hear he still wasn't happy to hear the higher offer.

If anyone out there has a copy of the report prepared for the case, I'd be curious to see it.

PS -- the low comments on the story are entirely consistent with BCR's Second Law of Commenting. :)

[Natalie]

I just didn't have anything nice to say :)

[eah919]

I can pipe up with a controversial comment:

It seems to me S&H should be glad to be getting bailed out of an eyesore building in a lousy location (that is, a lousy location for a funeral home, a low-density-with-plenty-of-parking use best sited within the neighborhood it serves, but a very good site for a high-density downtown use, like the Justice Center).

I am sure they ARE glad, although they obviously understood their strong baragining position as the Last Man Standing on a site that there's a lot of pressure to move on....

[GreenLantern]

The controvery would rage if any of us commented on how certain black-owned business got special, costly favors from the city/county government that serve both the black-dominted council/commission's most powerful constituency, and liberal white apologists' agenda for correcting wrongs that were done before most of us were born (Durham freeway). If S&H were white-owned, the courthouse would have been under construction by now. But then again, the overpayment by the DOT for the old Pan Pan Diner showed just how weak our government is when faced with extortion.

Whatever, it will be nice to finally see more courtrooms, and possibly more judges and jail cells, to keep from releasing parole violators back on our streets to become repeat offenders. Perhaps that would be too much to expect.