Orthodontist in Cornelius NC

A retired UNC Charlotte vice-chancellor is taking a new role in hometown, revisiting his entrepreneurial roots as he launches a food truck experience in downtown Cornelius.

David Dunn spent the last few months transforming the grassy area behind his car wash into a 20,000-square-foot community gathering spot called OTC Food Truck Village. (OTC stands for Old Town Cornelius, a new branding for historic downtown Cornelius.)

The space, located on Catawba Avenue directly across from Smithville Park, will be home to up to permanent food trucks and a common area with picnic tables, heat lamps, flower beds, string lights and cornhole boards. The site can accommodate about 100 guests.

“We’ve been in our soft launch phase for a couple of months, and it’s very active,” Dunn said. “It’s an adorable little space that is really resonating with the community.”

The OTC food trucks feature an eclectic mix of international cuisine, with vendor exclusivity to ensure variety. The lineup includes:

In 2019, Dunn bought what he calls an “old school, self-serve” car wash in downtown Cornelius. The car wash takes up about a third of the 1.5-acre lot, so Dunn started brainstorming on how he could monetize the rest of the land and use it to bring more visitors to downtown Cornelius.

He was already working with a coffee truck owner, who had set up shop in front of his business.Soon, other food trucks approached him, giving him the idea to expand.

“There are no real restaurants along this beautiful tree lined, one mile stretch of the OTC on Catawba Avenue,” Dunn said. “I recognized the absence of dining options and did some research. The food truck (village) seemed like a really viable option for this community.”

Dunn, a real estate executive who has lived in the Davidson/Cornelius area of Lake Norman for about 35 years, has more plans for the site in the future. He will soon add a large, covered stage for live music and entertainment.

He also intentionally left open a large grassy area to offer a farmers market in the spring. In the meantime, it’s a good space for the little ones to run and play.

Location: 20833 Catawba Ave, Cornelius, NC 28031

Instagram: @otc_foodtruckvillage

This story was originally published January 12, 2024, 5:00 AM.

Developers are proposing a new pickleball facility with courts and a restaurant.

CORNELIUS, N.C. — Pickleball is one of the most popular sports in the country right now. As the sport continues to grow in popularity, more areas are looking to add courts, including Cornelius.

Developers in Cornelius are seeking to build a facility called, "The Serve Pickleball Club." The Pre-Development Review Committee listened to a pitch on the possible pickleball facility coming to town.

Attorney Larry Shaheen, who represented the development proposal, said Cornelius is the perfect fit for this kind of facility.

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“There is an absolute desire to see more facilities and then the applicants, Jack and Robin Salzman, wanted to fill that need and also be able to continue to do their work in the community," Shaheen said.

While pickleball is popular and enjoyed by people of all ages and skills, some people in communities near the proposed development are concerned about the noise.

“Most of the homes are anywhere between 507 and 100 feet away, so we don't anticipate there being a noise issue," Shaheen said. "But that is something we're continuing to do, the work you're working on is something we're gonna continue to focus on and make sure that there's gonna be zero impact too.”

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The proposed project will include a 51,000-square-foot pickleball club and restaurant located on Chartown Drive. A lot of the space is designed to benefit the area. One of the most important goals of developers give back to the town.

Shaheen said the developers want to "provide a fantastic asset for the town of Cornelius that they can be proud of and that folks will be able to use throughout their time here in the town."

One business already benefitting from the popular sport is Rally, in Charlotte. Barrett Worthington is one of the co-founders of the Rally.

“The biggest sort of rewarding aspect of it for us has been seeing the retention and the return of the regular guests that are coming day after day," Worthington said.

Rally has been going strong in Charlotte since it opened in July 2023. Rally has filled 85% of their classes and welcomed 30,000 players on the courts and 40,000 people in the dining areas.

Both businesses have the main goal of continuing to serve the community by providing access to the popular sport.

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“It's not just providing a place to play, but a place that that you really can find your people and you know, have something of value," Worthington said.

Developers for The Serve Pickleball Club are applying for conditional rezoning with hopes of moving into the process for public community hearings.

CHARLOTTE — Two men from Cornelius who used a fraudulent investment scheme to fund their lavish lifestyles will now have to spend time in federal prison.

The U.S. Department of Justice said on Friday that Marlin Hershey and Dana Bradley were sentenced to 21 months and 10 months in prison, respectively.

According to federal authorities, the pair would push two companies on local investors, and they would lie about how well the companies were doing to get people to invest. The Department of Justice says they also didn’t inform investors that they would be getting “management fees” and “commission-like payments” that could be 10% of the victims’ investments.

One victim told Channel 9 in 2022 that he invested $50,000 in 2012 in one of the companies run by Hershey and Bradley.

He said he was supposed to earn interest and get the money back at the end of a 30-month term, but Hershey and Bradley kept offering to extend the term even after the business he supposedly invested in went under. The victim said he found out about the business’ failure from searching on Google.

“The Google search revealed that they had sold the business almost a year earlier from when I had signed my note extension,” the victim said. “So, I immediately picked up the phone and called my attorney.”

Channel 9 learned that Bradley and Hershey made millions from investors, and public social media photos showed Bradley traveling across the world. One post said he had a quest to “visit the Seven Wonders of the World” and as of 2019, he had visited six of them.

According to the Department of Justice, the pair would also use new investors’ money to make payments to existing investors in a “Ponzi-style” scheme.

The feds say both companies, Performance Retire on Rentals, LLC and Distressed Lending Fund, eventually failed, causing losses for the investors.

Hershey and Bradley pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy last June, but they were just sentenced to their prison terms on Thursday. They’ll also have to serve two years of probation after their release.

The DOJ said that the pair will have to pay back more than $333,000 in restitution to victims, and they’ll also have to pay more than $600,000 in combined forfeiture and fines.

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Wyatt Maxey and friends at his Cornelius apartment complex love kayaking on a hidden-in-plain-sight waterway that locals call Lake Cornelius — one of North Carolina’s tiniest lakes.

On any given day, truckers on nearby Interstate 77 honk-honk friendly hellos.

Drivers in stopped traffic roll down their windows and ask, “Can I have a ride?”

Maxey instantly fell in love with the 125-acre Lake Cornelius when he moved to an apartment complex along its shores, off I-77, Exit 28.

The 27-year-old Charlotte native invited this Charlotte Observer reporter to kayak the lake after reading my Aug. 2 article about neighboring 341-acre Lake Davidson.

“Is Lake Davidson part of Lake Norman?” the headline asked. “Contrasts abound.”

The same question could be posed for Lake Cornelius, I quickly concluded after launching onto the lake, with Maxey and his friends who live there too, on a bright, 95-degree Sunday earlier in August. A slight breeze cooled us.

First, I was astounded to meet someone in their 20s who considers this nationally award-winning hometown newspaper an essential daily read. We hire only the best, I said.

Second, he’s a native Charlottean, just like my brother Jimmy, who was born at the old Mercy Hospital way back in 1955, making my brother older than these lakes!

“You’re as rare as that bald eagle I saw above Lake Davidson,” I told Maxey.

But back to the story.

Like Lake Davidson, Lake Cornelius is separated from massive Lake Norman by Interstate 77.

Maxey has kayaked through the tunnel-like culvert that connects Lake Cornelius with boat-packed Lake Norman and then through a separate tunnel to Lake Davidson, a roughly 2-mile trip.

Duke Energy says Lake Davidson and Lake Cornelius are part of Lake Norman, which at 32,475 acres is the state’s the largest human-made lake.

Under federal license, the company manages the lakes it formed along the Catawba River last century. So Duke Energy, more than anyone, should know if the smaller lakes are sections of the larger one.

Still ...

Lake Norman seemed a world apart when I kayaked the calm waters of Lake Davidson and Lake Cornelius this month.

I saw more wildlife than humans on each of the smaller lakes and only a couple of motor boats.

And that’s what Maxey and friends admire about their little lake, too.

“I love the quietness,” Macey Hess, a 24-year-old registered nurse at Lake Norman Regional Medical Center in Mooresville, told me on Lake Cornelius that Sunday. “It’s calm. I just like to be with our little group here.”

Lake Cornelius has no public boat launch, only a town of Davidson kayak launch located on the Davidson part of the lake, Maxey said. The lake is about half in Cornelius and half in Davidson, he said.

Hess’ boyfriend, 23-year-old Jonathan Nagle, highlighted the wildlife on Lake Cornelius.

“Anything from deer on the (unpaved) trail” that rings Lake Cornelius for 1 1/2 miles, “to owls, to osprey diving down into the water picking up fish,” said Nagle, who works for custom home builder CBUSA.

Plus turtles and herons, he said.

Nagle and Hess moved from her hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia,— exactly a four-hour drive from Lake Norman — after Nagle visited here on a job assignment.

“There’s a lot of great wildlife out here,” Nagle said after the group hooked their kayaks to a floating dock they installed on the lake. “And a lot of fish, for humans and for birds.”

“The herons will stand on the shore as stealthy as can be until they see something in the water” to lunge for and devour, said Patrick Rallings, a 29-year-old software engineer at Ally Financial in uptown Charlotte.

Rallings joined us with his girlfriend, Emily Naviganuparp.

And a beaver has flapped its tail swimming past their dock to its home in another part of Lake Cornelius.

The animal inspired the name of their dock: “Beaver Island,” Maxey said.

“We like to sit out here on the lake, drink beer and watch people stuck in traffic,” Rallings quipped at the dock.

Said Nagle: “I’m glad that we’re cut off by 77, because we couldn’t do this right here if there were boats. And everyone could just come over here (from Lake Norman). It would just be part of the bigger lake.”

Maxey said he’s also enjoyed learning the history of his lake, including through chats with longtime homeowners.

Two bridges and a couple of road beds lie at the bottom of Lake Cornelius, his research revealed.

The kayakers met for the first time while standing outside their complex after an apartment fire in May.

They all kayaked, they discovered.

And Rallings and Maxey learned they worked for the same company. Maxey is a data engineer at Ally Financial.

Maxey graduated from Providence High School in 2014 and North Carolina State University in 2018. He ran cross country for N.C. State.

Like most who live in the Lake Norman area, he wondered when he moved here whether Lake Cornelius was its own lake or part of Lake Norman.

Lake Cornelius sure seemed different than Lake Norman, he said. And it connected with Lake Norman only through the culvert beneath I-77.

“How do you get a boat from side to side? Because I just assumed (this section) was an arm of Lake Norman,” Maxey said. “But you notice there’s no bridge to drive over it. I just never quite understood.”

“Before 77, it was Lake Norman. But now?” he said.

Water in the culvert flows from Lake Cornelius to Lake Norman, not vice-versa, he observed.

Still, his apartment complex, while on Lake Cornelius, is named Bexley Lake Norman.

“Live Life by the Lake,” Bexley Lake Norman touts on its website. “Luxury Apartments on Lake Norman in Cornelius NC.”

So Maxey was curious what I thought: Is Lake Cornelius really Lake Norman, or not?

I’ve wondered the same thing since moving to the Lake Norman area in 1989 — actually, well to the west for my first seven years here in Lincolnton.

I figured a quick Google search would settle the issue before this month’s expedition, but no.

Only one of the first nine sites that surfaced when I plugged “Lake Cornelius” into my search acknowledged its existence.

And that was in a headline of part of a Duke Energy federal re-licensing document.

The other sites ignored Lake Cornelius, mentioning Lake Norman instead.

As we kayaked silent Lake Cornelius and then relaxed on Beaver Island, I blurted out my opinion on whether the lake was Lake Norman.

By then, I had temporarily blinded myself when I scratched an itch on an eyelid and inadvertently smeared sunscreen lotion onto my eyes. It stung big-time for several hours, but I tried to remain coherent.

“I think it’s its own lake, but I think it’s whatever you want it to be,” I told the gang, prompting chuckles. “That’s what I concluded with Lake Davidson, but even more so with this.”

I was about to elaborate when I spotted something rare on Lake Cornelius despite my burning eyes.

“Look,” I said. “A boat!”

This story was originally published August 22, 2023, 6:00 AM.

704-358-5067

Joe Marusak has been a reporter for The Charlotte Observer since 1989 covering the people, municipalities and major news events of the region, and was a news bureau editor for the paper. He currently reports on breaking news.

Name: Susan Johnson

Age as of Nov. 7, 2023: 49

Campaign website or social media page: facebook.com/electsusanjohnson1

Occupation: Realtor

Education: B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.A., Queens University

Have you run for elected office before? (Please list previous offices sought or held)

No

Please list your highlights of civic involvement

Current Chair, Cornelius Planning Board

What are, in your view, the most important issues facing Cornelius, and what would your approach be to handling them if elected?

The most important issues are traffic, public safety and improving affordability for workforce housing. I am passionate about listening to residents and making decisions so that Cornelius is a place where people want to live, work and play. As Cornelius has grown, so has traffic, which has created congestion related issues that impact citizen safety and overall quality of life. I plan to identify solutions for needed infrastructure projects that will mitigate congestion, enhance safety and improve walkability. Additionally, I want to move forward the existing projects that have already been approved and to create a strategic plan to implement balanced solutions that support smart, responsible growth to attract new businesses that will enhance overall quality of life and still maintain the small town feel.

Communities across Mecklenburg County have seen growth and development as well as a hot real estate market in recent years. How should Cornelius approach development and housing issues?

Currently there are a number of projects that were previously approved, and only one of which has actually started construction. These projects equate to over 1400 residences in which, In my opinion, our already congested roads can’t support. Cornelius needs to focus on implementing infrastructure projects and improvements now to allow for these and future housing projects.

What separates you from your opponent(s)?

My local government experience sets me apart from other candidates. I have served Cornelius over the past 10 years on many committees and boards including Planning Board, Land Development Code Advisory Board, Growth Management Task Force, Mayoral Housing Committee and Pre-Development Committee. Understanding the nuances and intricacies of local government will allow me make decisions more quickly and effectively once elected.

What one professional or political accomplishment are you most proud of?

I am proud to have been appointed to serve on the Growth Management Task Force. As a member, I was able to utilize my town government experience along with my real estate experience to make changes to the Land Use Plan. In addition, I am proud of the efforts that we made to ensure citizen engagement was prioritized and citizen input was considered when decisions were made for all of the proposed updates.

This story was originally published October 9, 2023, 6:00 AM.

Mary Ramsey is the local government accountability reporter for The Charlotte Observer. A native of the Carolinas, she studied journalism at the University of South Carolina and has also worked in Phoenix, Arizona and Louisville, Kentucky.