April 1. The Planning Board has delayed plans for the proposed 215-room Bojangel’s Hotel on three acres in Kenton Place. An adjacent egg-production plant proposed by Winnie’s Eggs LLC is also on hold until the outcome of the chicken-buffet hotel is determined.
Which comes first to Cornelius is anybody’s guess. The Planning Board is deadlocked 3-3 on whether the Judd egg plant should—or can—be built before the big chicken hotel goes up.
Planning Board Chair Simon Bryant said Bojangel’s 14-story plan is not bold enough. Architectural drawings for the egg facility were “all over the place,” he explained.
”Three acres of land can support thousands of rooms,” he said, arguing that a 40-story hotel makes more sense. The Bojangel’s hotel is actually a prototype concept with a chicken buffet 24-7 on every floor. The buffet, though, is apparently a logistics nightmare, according to Bojangel’s.
A Bojangel’s spokesman said there’s a big difference between having fried buffets on 14 floors vs. 40 floors when chicken coops must be at ground level to satisfy top egg-layers. “You can’t pulletout of thin air; you have to fry it in,” he said, explaining that drone technology cannot yet carry Bojangel’s trademark ”chunky legs” and fries more than 30 feet in the air.
Business leaders were brooding about what looks like another lengthy incubation period for first-class overnight accommodations, not to mention egg-laying, in 28031.
Winnie Ruth Judd, the newly installed, newly dead chair—sadly—of the Cornelius Businessman’s and Businesswoman’s Merchants & Manufacturers Association, said she would give someone’s “arm and a leg” to get the Planning Board to go ahead with either project so the other could get under way soon thereafter. She incorporated Winnie’s Eggs when she was appointed to the Planning Board last year.
She is—or was, at this point—developing the high-tech chicken coop and egg-laying facility on the western end of Robbins Park Park, adjacent to the proposed hotel in Kenton Place.
Bryant mourned Judd’s untimely accidental beheading. “She may have croaked and all, like in the weirdest ironic way, right? But her egg thing is scrambled and Bojangel’s plan is poultry,” he said.
If you are interested in filling Judd’s unexpired term on the Planning Board, call the town at 704-892-6031.
