Can Cedar Mountain control its planning future?

The first community in Transylvania County to take up the job of small area planning faces political challenges, delays and diminished ambitions.

The entrance sign to the Cedar Mountain business district.

By Dan DeWitt

Cedar Mountain’s tiny business district, on U.S. 276 near the entrance of Dupont State Recreational Forest, is home to an inviting, full-service restaurant, an outdoor gear shop, an art studio and a canteen serving up evening brews.

And, really, it doesn’t need a whole lot more, residents said in a survey conducted as part of the county-backed Cedar Mountain Small Area Plan. Wide majorities of respondents, most of whom live or own property in Cedar Mountain, favored preserving the community’s natural resources and rural character, and they opposed attracting large-scale commercial and industrial development.

Without county-wide zoning, Small Area Plans have been touted as one of the few available tools to achieve such goals. And because other enclaves in Transylvania County, including Dunns Rock and Lake Toxaway, are lining up to follow this path, Cedar Mountain’s document will set the county standard.

“You’re the guinea pig,” Allen McNeill, the county’s planning and community development director, said at last month’s meeting of the Cedar Mountain Small Area Planning Committee.

But if this is a test of Small Area planning, it’s far from clear whether the process is passing.

The committee is still struggling to complete a draft after 17 months of meetings. And in the face of powerful anti-zoning sentiment, its aims have been lowered from crafting a proposed Cedar Mountain zoning ordinance to listing planning suggestions and priorities.

Even this can be valuable, for example, in negotiating with developers or seeking public grants, McNeill said.

But it can also be easy to ignore, said committee member Mark Tooley.

“I worry it will just be put on a shelf somewhere,” he said.

The ambitious start

County Commissioners have repeatedly cited the lack of regulatory “tools” to control controversial projects such as the county’s several Dollar General stores. Small Area Plans could change that, former Commissioner Page Lemel said when the commission approved the process to create the plans two years ago.

“What you’ve got is an opportunity for the neighbors who care about their community . . . to define and protect that which they value most about where they live,” Lemel said, according to the Transylvania Times.

This sentiment was backed by a county FAQ document, now being revised, which flatly states that “the purpose of the Cedar Mountain’s small area plan is to allow the community to put stricter restrictions on development in their area if (residents) want them.”

When the Cedar Mountain Committee began meeting in September of 2019, they took this message to heart.

They always understood the plan would be a recommendation for future development in the community, defined as the area on either side of U.S.276 between See Off Mountain Road and the South Carolina line, said Jason Stewart, then head of county planning. But they intended that recommendation to arrive as a fully formed “regulatory document that was specific to Cedar Mountain.”

The committee worked on provisions to concentrate development in designated nodes on the highway. They talked about maximum building heights, buffers, and planting requirements to soften the appearance of new stores and restaurants. They discussed permeable parking lots and other methods of controlling runoff and flooding.

Which was exactly what residents asked for, said Tooley, a Conserving Carolina board member who also worked on the committee that helped write a zoning ordinance for Pisgah Forest.

The survey, conducted early in the planning process, asked whether the county “should regulate the size, design, and usage of new commercial developments.” A whopping 91 percent either agreed or strongly agreed; 94 percent of respondents favored better protection of the water quality in nearby streams and rivers; 83 percent agreed with the need for stricter restrictions on building in floodplains.

These goals were repeated by residents who, pre-Covid-19, showed up to address the committee.

“The citizens who attended meetings when we were having (publicly attended) meetings were pretty emphatic that they wanted something with teeth,” Tooley said.

Course correction

Not only did the public approve, Stewart believed, but so did the commission and County Manager Jaime Laughter.

“The direction was, we were going to do something more substantive, and I talked about that with the county manager during the entire process,” said Stewart, who left the county in May for a job as planning and development services director in Rincon, Ga.

But Lemel, then the most vocal advocate of small area planning, said last week that the committee overstepped its bounds by delving into the specific mechanics of planning.

And Laughter wrote in an email she learned only in the spring of 2020 “that the committee and staff assigned to support their work were drafting modifications to the existing regulatory zoning document in place for Cedar Mountain.”

That’s a job for the commission, not Small Area committees, she wrote, and she quickly met with members of both groups to “course-correct.”

The politics of zoning

Since then, Lemel and another commissioner who supported small area planning, Mike Hawkins, lost their reelection bids, leaving only one commissioner, David Guice, who had voted in favor of the process. The three commissioners who won seats in November all ran as  “property-rights” advocates and zoning skeptics.

Commissioners who responded to requests for interviews said they would wait until they receive an upcoming “status update” with the latest details. And Vice Chairman Jake Dalton, who had earlier posted a social media message urging residents to oppose the plan, said he has since had a productive meeting with Tooley and will “try to keep an open mind.”

Regardless, committee members feel a political headwind, said Vice Chair Lucia Gerdes. “There’s not a lot of interest in this moving forward.”

 And along with having been “disabused of the notion” that it should write a zoning document, as member Tom Oosting put it, this perceived opposition has resulted in a softer working document.

One of the growth-control “tools” it lists, for example, is a suggestion that commissioners consider amending current land-use ordinances so they can “better ensure properties in the Cedar Mountain Area are developed responsibly.”

And a vestige of the document’s earlier harder edge -- a proposal to include Cedar Mountain in the zoning ordinance covering Pisgah Forest  -- generated the sharpest discussion of last month’s meeting.

Should it go? Oosting asked. “Do you not agree that this is not a happy declaration of what we’ve been working on and is going to attract a whole lot of fire?”

“No,” Gerdes said, “it’s the only way that any of this is going to have any teeth.”

“Zoning” doesn’t have to be a dirty word

So she still hopes that’s possible. Once public opinion comes from residents speaking in packed meetings rather than on Zoom calls, commissioners will see the strength of the support for meaningful planning rules, she said. And along with other committee members, she agreed in January to cancel this month’s meeting to allow such direct input by the time a draft is completed later this year.

In the meantime, she and Tooley said, they can work to convince commissioners and the public that zoning is hardly a radical concept.

Transylvania and other small counties in Western North Carolina are among the few in the state without countywide zoning, according to a map created by the University of North Carolina school of government, and Stewart said zoning laws are an accepted standard even in rural Virginia counties where he previously worked.

Neither the Pisgah Forest zoning ordinance or any measures discussed for Cedar Mountain would have controlled residential land, which committee members say is a persistent fear of residents. Nobody is trying to tell people they can’t have an outbuilding or wood pile in their yard. Zoning laws also cannot discriminate against national chains, including Dollar General stores.

But zoning can determine where stores are built, limit their environmental and aesthetic impact and provide clear rules that developers appreciate, said Gerdes, owner of the Cedar Mountain Cafe.

It’s easier to build according to county law than it is to satisfy demands of residents sending “hundreds upon hundred of angry emails,” she said. “That’s terrible public policy. We want to create a business-friendly environment, and that is not an anything-goes environment.”

She doesn’t have to convince Margaret Napier, a longtime Cedar Mountain resident who said she would be “thrilled” to see zoning in her community.

“I think a lot of forward-looking people are bewildered by the lack of zoning in the county,” she said. “It’s been kind of a don’t-tread-on-me philosophy and it’s been a winning issue for conservatives . . . ‘zoning’ is the bugaboo word that conservatives threaten with and I think that’s a great shame.”

Not to Oliver Skerrett, 75, a Baptist minister who has lived in Cedar Mountain most of his life. Standing on U.S. 276 a few yards from the house where he grew up, he said he’s a firm believer in property rights and doesn’t think further regulation is necessary.

The sparse infrastructure in this part of the county makes large-scale  development unlikely, he said, and much of the property south of the business district has been owned by the same families for generations.

“Land is so hard to get around here that people tend to hold on to it . . . That’s the reason I smiled when you told me about” the small area plan, he said. “I don’t see much change. I personally think they’re wasting their time.”

Moving ahead

And it’s taken a lot of time. The committee’s job has been prolonged by the months spent writing now-scrapped zoning provisions, by the difficulty of generating public input during the pandemic and by the challenge of creating a plan from the ground up, said McNeill, the county planner.

“There’s no template,” he said, and “there’s not a state textbook for how you do these things.”

But this time and effort is not wasted, McNeill said.

Even if commissioners decide not to impose any firm development rules, the plan will be valuable as a clear statement of community vision and goals.

If the state Department of Transportation, for example, knows the community wants a bike lane on U.S. 276 — a request now in the document — the agency will be more likely to award a grant for such a project. And if developers of new stores or restaurants see a clear picture of a community preferences, they’ll often comply to suit the market.

Oosting agrees. “If the plan is limited to just an articulation of goals and aspirations and recommended ways of accomplishing things,” he said, “then I think what I’ve done for the past year and half has been worthy.”

Tooley is less convinced. Will what amounts to a wish list really help guide development?

“Maybe a little,” he said.