Huntersville's Newest Greenway Is Coming Through Backyards, and the Fight Isn't About the Trail

"I don't think anybody's got a problem with the greenway, it's just the parking," Doug Kennerly told a local news reporter recently. Kennerly farms a small parcel along Ferrelltown Parkway in north Huntersville, and neighbors in the area say they welcome the trail Mecklenburg County has been planning behind his property. What caught them off guard was the 60-space parking lot attached to it, sited right along his fence line and the small farm next door.

That reaction tells you something the greenway itself doesn't: the argument in north Huntersville right now isn't about whether a trail belongs here. It's about who absorbs the cost of making it convenient for everyone else.

A Trail Residents Already Have, Extended Into One They Don't Yet

Here's the part that gets lost in the coverage of this dispute: a piece of this exact greenway already exists, and nobody fought about it. The first phase of the South Prong Clarke Creek Greenway, running from Huntersville-Concord Highway to Ferrelltown Parkway through Martin Luther King Jr. Park, finished construction and opened to the public back in March 2025. If you've walked a dog or pushed a stroller through that stretch of park in the last year and a half, you've already used this project. It came and went without a petition.

What's under debate now is the next piece: continuing the trail from Ferrelltown Parkway toward Monocacy Boulevard and building the trailhead that would serve it. The full corridor, from Huntersville-Concord Highway all the way to Monocacy Boulevard, is planned to run approximately two miles once finished. County planners are studying two route alternatives beyond Ferrelltown Parkway, and the alignment threads through the Vermillion, Vermillion Front, Vermillion Village, and Mirabella subdivisions, giving households on both sides of the creek a car-free connection toward downtown. Asbury Park, the neighborhood whose backyards and one small working farm would border the proposed lot itself, isn't on that list of subdivisions the trail serves directly. It's the neighborhood that would host the parking for everyone else's trip to the trailhead.

Why the County Picked the One Spot That's Now Causing Trouble

The Ferrelltown Parkway site wasn't an accident, and understanding why the county chose it explains the whole standoff. Officials say the location was selected specifically because it can be accessed directly off Huntersville-Concord Road, which avoids funneling greenway traffic through adjacent neighborhood streets. In plain terms, keeping cars off the interior streets of the subdivisions the trail actually serves meant putting sixty parking spaces at the edge instead, on land next to a small farm and backyards that don't show up on the list of neighborhoods the trail was built to connect.

That's the mechanism worth understanding if you live anywhere near this corridor, because it's not unique to Huntersville. Every greenway trailhead has to go somewhere, and "somewhere that doesn't add traffic to existing neighborhoods" almost always means a site at the edge, next to whoever happens to own the land there. Kennerly and his neighbor Suzanne Lambert aren't objecting to the greenway network's logic. They're the ones who found out, later than they'd have liked, that the logic pointed at their fence line.

"Just give us the trailhead, we're happy to have the trailhead, but to surprise us with a 60 parking space parking lot we feel is excessive."

That's Lambert's summary of where most of the pushback actually sits. Neighbors have circulated a petition asking the county to consider a smaller lot or a different location, and to pause the parking design while those options get a real look.

What the County Hasn't Decided Yet

A detail worth sitting with: the 60-space figure isn't locked in. Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation typically provides between 40 and 60 spaces at its greenway trailheads countywide, and the exact number for this site is still undetermined while design work continues. That range is wide enough that a resident showing up to the county's meeting with a specific ask, fewer spaces, a different configuration, screening along the property line, has a real shot at shaping the outcome. Design isn't finished. This is the point in the process where input actually moves the number.

The county has scheduled a community engagement meeting for Wednesday, September 9, at 5:30 p.m. at the David B. Waymer Recreation and Senior Center on Holbrooks Road, specifically to gather feedback on the parking question before it's finalized.

The Money Behind It Is Real, But It's Not Finished

Here's a nuance that's easy to miss if you only skim the headlines: the segment is currently funded for design only, through Mecklenburg County's Fiscal Years 2026-2030 Capital Improvement Plan, approved by the Board of County Commissioners in June 2025 and structured as a partnership with the Town of Huntersville. That funding covers the plans and the public meetings. It does not cover the ongoing maintenance the trail will need once it's built, and the county's own project tracking lists other nearby greenway segments separately as "in design" versus "in construction," a distinction worth watching here too. If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things closely, whether and when this segment moves from one column to the other is the next real milestone.

There's also a second layer to this project that rarely makes it into the parking-lot argument. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services is running a parallel restoration effort on this same reach of South Prong Clarke Creek, aimed at stabilizing the banks and cutting sediment, which county data identifies as the single largest pollutant in Mecklenburg's waterways. The greenway and the creek work are being designed together, which is part of why the corridor takes the shape it does rather than following the shortest line between two roads.

The Bigger Pattern This Fits Into

North Huntersville's trailhead fight is a small, specific version of something happening across the county. As of spring 2025, Mecklenburg County had completed 74 miles of greenway with another 20 miles under construction, a pace driven largely by resident surveys that consistently name trails as the most requested public amenity in the county. Just across the line in Cabarrus County, Concord set a target in its June 2025 budget to grow its own greenway network to 30 miles by 2030, including segments along the same Clarke Creek watershed that crosses the county boundary. The trail behind Kennerly's farm isn't an isolated local project. It's one link in a network two counties are actively racing to build out, which is exactly why the site-selection tradeoffs matter enough for neighbors to organize around.

Inside Huntersville proper, this greenway sits alongside other pieces already moving. The Vine, the town's downtown connector linking Town Hall to Holbrook Park, is slated to eventually tie into the Torrence Creek and McDowell Creek network, which is itself being extended west toward Beatties Ford Road and north to Catawba Avenue. None of those projects touch Ferrelltown Parkway directly, but they're the reason greenway access has become something Huntersville residents now expect as part of daily life here, not a bonus feature.

What This Means If You're Already Here

If you live in Asbury Park, Vermillion, Vermillion Front, Vermillion Village, or Mirabella, the practical takeaway is straightforward: the design isn't final, the meeting is this week, and the number that matters, how many parking spaces land next to which properties, is still genuinely open. Showing up on September 9 is the highest-leverage thing a resident can do right now. For everyone else in Huntersville, this is worth watching as a preview of how the town's next several trailheads are likely to get sited, since the tradeoff between neighborhood traffic and edge-of-corridor impact isn't going away as the network keeps expanding.

We've written before about how much of Huntersville's daily rhythm now runs through its public spaces, from Birkdale Village's weeknight calendar to its growing trail network. If you want the fuller picture of what's happening across Huntersville's neighborhoods, that's a good next stop.

Whether you're watching this trailhead debate because it touches your own backyard, or you're simply curious what north Huntersville looks like a few years from now, Foster Rojahn Premier Properties keeps close track of the projects shaping this corridor. If you're thinking about what a home near this kind of amenity is actually worth today, reach out for a free home valuation and consultation.