The Town Approved the Parking Shortage

Every story written about Annie Mae Scott this month has started in the same place: a 71-year-old woman on Humie Olive Road, roughly fifty cars in her yard, $300 a head, and a Town of Apex lawsuit demanding she stop.

Start earlier and the story changes.

On September 18, 2012, three years before Apex Friendship High School opened its doors, the Apex Town Council held a quasi-judicial hearing on the school's site plan. During that hearing, a council member said out loud that the school was being approved with too little parking, and that the result would be students parking in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The Town approved it anyway, 4-0.

The documents behind that decision were released last week by the Town's own Planning Director. They tell a story no one has reported.

What the Town's own file shows

Apex's development ordinance in 2012 required 10 parking spaces per classroom. West Apex High School — the name the project carried through approval, before the school board renamed it Apex Friendship — was designed with 63 general classrooms, 47 specialty classrooms, and 6 mobile units.

Counted straight, that is roughly 1,100 to 1,160 required spaces.

The school proposed 849.

Closing that gap took two separate acts by the Town.

First, Planning Director Dianne Khin issued an interpretation. General classrooms would count at full weight. Specialty classrooms would count at half, on the reasoning that they are not occupied all day. Mobile units would count in full. That arithmetic produced 92.5 classrooms and a requirement of 925 spaces — roughly 235 fewer than a literal reading of the ordinance.

Second, Khin granted a formal parking reduction of 76 spaces, or 8.2 percent, under Section 8.3.9 of the ordinance. That provision capped administrative reductions at 10 percent. The reduction came in just under the ceiling.

Together, the two decisions removed about 27 percent of the parking the ordinance appeared to require. Only the second one was subject to the 10 percent limit.

To grant the reduction, Khin had to make a specific finding. The ordinance required her to determine that the plan would do at least as good a job of protecting surrounding neighborhoods, maintaining traffic circulation patterns, and promoting quality urban design as strict compliance would.

Planning staff visited Holly Springs High School, spoke with an assistant principal, and concluded that the .36 ratio there worked well. West Apex would open at .38.

The approval memo also recorded a contingency. Until the planned middle school was built, the school system could seek a temporary use permit for overflow event parking. The middle school, the memo said, would eventually provide additional permanent parking.

The consultant did the math in writing

Three months before the hearing, the school system's own design consultant put the problem in an email to Apex planning staff.

Christine Hilt of CLH Design wrote that if the Town counted every teaching space, the requirement came to 1,100 spaces. If it counted only general classrooms, 62. Neither number worked. And then she added a figure that has gone unmentioned in every account of this dispute since:

There are only about 750-800 students on any given campus that are even eligible to drive.

The 849 spaces the school proposed were not 849 student spaces. Hilt's breakdown, drawn from Wake County's design guidelines for a 2,350-student prototype school, allocated them: 556 student spaces, 267 staff, 20 visitor.

So the school system's own consultant told the Town of Apex, in July 2012, that a campus of this size would hold roughly 750 to 800 licensed drivers, and that it was being built with 556 student spaces.

The gap was not discovered later. It was disclosed at the front end, in writing, by the applicant.

The Town's fair point, and its limit

There is a defense in this file, and it should be stated plainly.

Apex's parking code was the strictest in the region by a wide margin. In September 2012, Hilt sent Town staff a comparison prepared for a Rolesville high school project, applying each jurisdiction's standard to the same 114-classroom prototype: Cary 641 spaces, Durham 707, Raleigh 710, Wake Forest 752, Garner 820, and Apex 1,140.

Apex required between 39 and 78 percent more parking than any of its neighbors. Even after both reductions, the Town extracted more parking from this school than Cary, Durham, Raleigh, or Wake Forest would have.

That is a real answer to the question of whether Apex caused a shortage relative to regional norms. It is not an answer to what happened next.

The promise

The single most consequential sentence in the material the Town released last week was written by Khin herself, on August 26, 2026, in an email to a reporter at The News & Observer.

Describing the assurances the school system's landscape architect gave the Council in 2012 — that additional parking could be added when the middle and elementary schools were built — Khin added a parenthetical:

(note that no additional parking for the high school was ever built by WCPSS)

The Planning Director of the Town of Apex has now confirmed in writing that the mitigation the Council was promised in 2012 never happened.

Rowe named that risk at the hearing. Nothing in the material the Town has released shows Apex asking Wake County Public Schools to keep the promise in the fourteen years since.

Where 556 came from

Wake County Public Schools has told reporters that Apex Friendship has 556 student parking spaces, that 28 of those are reserved for students on half-day schedules, that about 100 students were on the waitlist as of August 18, and that 556 is the maximum allowed at the site.

That last claim does not survive contact with the 2012 record.

The 556 figure is not a limit the Town of Apex imposed. It is an internal allocation, drawn by the school system's consultant from Wake County's own design guidelines for a 2,350-student prototype school, and submitted to Apex as part of the 849-space total. Apex approved a total. How that total is divided among students, staff, and visitors was the school system's design choice.

We asked Khin directly for the case number of the 2012 site plan approval so we could compare the 849 figure against the 556 the district has been citing. She did not answer either question. Nothing in the documents the Town produced establishes 556 as a ceiling set by Apex.

June 8 and August 24, 2021Nine years later, it changed back

The Town Council held that authority for the next nine years. Apex Friendship opened in 2015. Annie Scott's yard began filling with cars the same year.

On June 8, 2021, the Council held a work session on removing quasi-judicial hearings from its own agenda. The minutes describe a Planning Committee recommendation to follow Raleigh's model, with staff reviewing major site plans and the Board of Adjustment handling special use permits and appeals. Holly Springs and Garner were cited as moving the same direction. The Town Attorney said either approach would be legal and described the advantages of keeping quasi-judicial decisions away from the elected body.

Then this, from the approved minutes:

Conversation ensued about the town possibly being sued if something was voted down, the problem handling site plans in relation to schools, and the desire for a level playing field.

And this:

There was concern expressed because of the timing of this and perceptions because of a pending project. Staff stated the named project has been voted on, so it would come back as a new project.

A council member said the change would look like it was being done for a pending project. Staff did not say otherwise. Staff explained that the project in question would return as a new application — which is to say, under the new rules.

Another member urged caution: the Town would miss things if it moved fast, and needed to bring in an equity tool. Another asked why the Council was involved in the process at all if it had no say.

The Council then went into closed session with the Town Attorney to preserve attorney-client privilege.

At the time, Apex was being sued by the Wake County Board of Education. In April 2021 the Council had denied the site plan for Felton Grove High School after hearing testimony from a neighboring property owner. The school board's suit argued that the Council had violated state law by relying on lay testimony.

On August 24, 2021, planning manager Amanda Bunce presented an omnibus package of ordinance amendments covering quasi-judicial proceedings, major site plans, minor site plans, and special use permits. The public hearing drew no comments. Killingsworth moved. Stallings seconded. It passed 5-0.

The staff presentation for that amendment lays out what it did. Decision authority for Major Site Plans moved from the Town Council to the Technical Review Committee. Decision authority for Special Use Permits moved to the Board of Adjustment.

And the parking provision changed hands again. The redline strikes the Town Council paragraph from Section 8.3.9 entirely, adds the words "and Major" to the Planning Director's paragraph, and deletes "and Town Council" from the list of who weighs the factors.

The standard itself was never touched. The finding required today is word for word the finding Khin made in 2012: protecting surrounding neighborhoods, maintaining traffic circulation patterns, promoting quality urban design.

Only the name of the official holding the pen has moved, three times in fourteen years.

Felton Grove High School came back to Apex under the new rules and was approved administratively in 2022. It opened in August 2025 with roughly 800 students, ninth and tenth graders only — the two grades least likely to drive.

The numbers today

Apex Friendship reports approximately 2,550 students for 2025-26 and 111 classrooms. Parking on the site is still 849 spaces.

That is a ratio of .33 — below the .36 at Holly Springs that Apex planning staff visited and judged workable, and below the .38 the Planning Director relied on to justify the reduction.

Under a literal reading of the current ordinance, 111 classrooms would require 1,110 spaces.

Wake County's 2026-27 enrollment plan lists Apex Friendship among the schools where enrollment is now capped and new families are assigned elsewhere.

Felton Grove opened in August 2025 with ninth and tenth graders only, the two grades least likely to drive. A year later, about 100 Apex Friendship students remain on the parking waitlist.

Meanwhile, the Town has told Annie Scott three times that her remedy is to rezone. It has taken her to Superior Court over $3,700 in penalties and $100 a day. The Mayor has said outside legal fees ran to nearly $15,000 through June, before the case was even filed.

What we asked, and what comes next

We asked Planning Director Dianne Khin for the case number of the 2012 site plan approval, so we could compare the 849-space total against the 556 the school district has been citing, and whether any condition of that approval limits student parking. She sent the 2012 document packet described above, which she had assembled a week earlier for The News & Observer. She did not answer either question.

The record raises more, and we are pursuing them: whether the 2021 amendment removing Council from major site plan review was adopted in response to the Wake County Board of Education litigation; what process Wake County Public Schools would follow today to add parking at 7801 Humie Olive Road, and whether the district has ever applied; whether the Town ever asked the school system to build the additional parking discussed on September 18, 2012; how many parking spaces were approved for Felton Grove High School, and at what capacity; and who determined that 556 is the maximum allowed at the site.

We will publish the answers.