pretty much the same arguments used in bug #170049 Please remove all %{_libdir}/lib*.la files and static libs from the -devel package. This will reduce libtool/library bloat. Further, it will (mostly) solve the problem of needing to add extreneous Requires: neon-devel to other (-devel) packages built against neon-devel (to account for the references to /usr/lib/libapr.la in their own .la files). (mostly Library) packages with .la files of their own that BuildRequires: neon-devel will need to be rebuilt after this modification. Notably subversion. If you insist in still including the .la files (and static libraries), please package them separately into something like apr-static.
The .la files are part of the APR interface and are needed by dependent packages. The .a archive is referenced from the .la files and I don't particularly want to mess with that. (APR cannot be e.g. built with --disable-shared since the bundled libtool script needs to support both shared and static libraries)