A Lake Norman developer has significantly trimmed his planned $800 million mixed-used community in Huntersville after months of withering criticism that the project is too massive.

Lagoona Bay Beach Club will no longer include a hotel, convention center, restaurants and other businesses, developer Jake Palillo said on Facebook.

Palillo originally planned a 200-room hotel, a 36,000-square-foot convention center and 210,000 square feet of retail space.

Palillo said he cut the number of homes from 1,182 to 692 and the size of his recreational lagoon from 10 to 8 acres. He removed “all highway commercial” from his plans, “and the 412 condos are gone,” he added.

“Everything else within the Beach club will be staying the same,” Palillo said on Facebook. “We will have 227 single-family and 65 villa/patio homes.”

The part of his property north of Sam Furr Road will have 90 detached patio homes, apartment buildings cut from four to three stories and the number of units from 320 to 300, he said.

The beach club will remain membership-only, he said. But with fewer homes for sale under his latest plan, he expects more memberships to be available to people outside the development “in the surrounding communities.”

On Facebook Wednesday night, Palillo told The Charlotte Observer he cut back on the project “because the town board felt it was too much.”

“It’s not a ‘great project’ anymore, but it’s still a really good one,” Palillo said.

By a 6-to-2 vote June 27, the Huntersville Planning Board urged the town Board of Commissioners to reject a rezoning for the 270-acre project off exit 25 of Interstate 77.

The tract is more than five times the size of Huntersville’s iconic Birkdale Village mixed-use community off the other side of the exit. It’s the last large tract along N.C. 73 (Sam Furr Road) in Huntersville that can be developed, Palillo told the Planning Board.

The development is out of character with the area and would further burden already packed roads, the Planning Board agreed.

The development would be “a total transformation from a rural corridor into a fully intensified one,” board member Stephen Swanick said in recommending the rezoning be denied. “This is a total revolutionary departure from the 2040 plan,” he said, referring to Huntersville’s long-term growth and development plan.

Palillo said he expects his revisions to delay the Board of Commissioners July 17 vote by several months.

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