Mountain Creek Speedway is a very small dirt track in the woods of Catawba, NC. Been there 43 years according to their social media page. They run various kart classes for adults and kids, little winged karts, Legends i think, and a couple years ago they started hosting 600cc micro sprints a few times a year. There's a couple tracks that run micro sprints in NC and they said they'd come to Mountain Creek if they built a proper catch fence. Mountain Creek built the fence several feet higher than requested. It's a good micro track. They don't race every week as it's a family run track run by a farming family. They don't have the time. All in all they got a good thing going and things were going in the right direction. Suddenly in October they got a cease and desist order from the county. They had to close immediately. They appealed and ran a couple more times this year. The appeal hearing was Tuesday night at the county municipal complex. 7pm, 2nd floor. I arrived at 7 as a show of support and to see what the problem was. The council room was already full so i had to watch on a monitor with others in another room on the 1st floor. I assumed it was noise. There's been some large custom homes built out there in the middle of nowhere. Turns out the zoning for the land was changed from light industrial to residential in 2007. The track was grandfathered in provieded they never went more than 180 days without running a race. Go more than 180 days and no more race track. Now it gets interesting... The county representative spoke first going over the zoning changes and the 180 day obligation. She then spent approximately 15 minutes showing aerial photos of the track and describing each photo. The photos were from 1998, 2002, 2009, 2012 and 2016. Or something like that. You could see the progression. In the first photos you could see an active track. Then the photos from 2009 and 2012 showed a track with an overgrown infield and grass on the track. Uh-oh! 2016 showed an obviously open track that had been upgraded. Her argument is that the track was closed for more than 180 days in the 2010's. The tracks lawyer then started asking her questions. He asked her if she knew the exact dates of the years all the photos were taken. She did not. He asked her if she knew when the track sat idle for more than 180 days. She did not know. He asked her what kind of racing needed to take place for it to count as a race. She didn't know. He asked if people racing Go-Karts, 4 wheelers or dirt bikes was enough to consider it a race. She didn't know. I think he was being sarcastic when he suggested to her that a 1500 meter foot race may have been good enough to meet the 180 day rule. He asked her if the county had any evidence of non-compliance other than half a dozen or so aerial photos taken over a span of almost 20 years. They do not. So the county says the track broke the rules but cannot say when the rules were broken, has no way of proving the rules were broken, or what would have been required to meet the minimum threshold of the rules. Having not read the statute, I'm guessing it was written so vaguely that their lawyer picked it apart and just drove a bus thru it. I told a friend he made the county representative look very unprepared. But someone really wants that track gone. To be continued....
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