Cedar Mountain plan moves ahead on "compressed schedule"
Though several of the members of the area's planning committee questioned the accelerated process, they strongly urged residents to offer input.
By Dan DeWitt
Brevard NewsBeat
BREVARD — Residents will have a chance to say what they think of proposals for the Cedar Mountain Small Area Plan starting at the end of the month.
And even that’s sooner than the people drawing up the plan had expected — and sooner than several of them wanted — they hope as many residents as possible will show up to express their views.
“Folks, you are our neighbors. You are our friends. Please come out and speak to us and voice your opinion,” Curley Huggins, chair of the Cedar Mountain Small Area Planning Committee, said at the end of the group’s Tuesday meeting.
“We need to hear from folks whether you are in favor or you are opposed.”
At the previous meeting, in January, committee members agreed to slow the progress in hopes that, once the threat of Covid-19 had passed, this feedback could come in a conventional public hearing.
But Transylvania County Commissioner Jason Chappell requested at the March 8 meeting that the commission receive a draft in 30 to 60 days. And after meeting with County Manager Jaime Laughter, County Planning and Community Development Director Allen McNeill offered an accelerated, less formal process to gather the required public input.
On March 31, he said, he and other county staffers — as well as any committee members who want to attend — will host a workshop from 10 am to 3 pm at the Cedar Mountain Community Center.
To allow social distancing, only 25 residents at a time will be able to enter the forum. They will view “story boards” featuring different elements of the small area plan and use stickers to register their opinions.
That will be followed by an online forum at 6 pm on the same day and another in-person workshop on April 1, from 5 to 8 pm, at Rocky Hill Baptist Church.
In surveys conducted as part of the planning process, 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.
Though the plan will cover only Cedar Mountain — an unincorporated community on either side of Greenville Highway in southern Transylvania — such plans are among the few tools the county offers to control development. The model created in Cedar Mountain is also expected to be followed by other communities that have expressed an interest in writing small area plans.
The group started meeting in September of 2019, but has been slowed by the lack of a state guidelines to direct the process and limited in receiving public input by the pandemic.
Also, committee members have said, they spent much of the first year under the guidance of a previous planning director, working on a what amounted to zoning ordinance for the community before being told to draw up more general recommendations.
“We’ve only been at this for eight or nine months in earnest,” member Mark Tooley said Tuesday.
After the meeting, he questioned why county staff had pushed for an accelerated process without a vote from the commission.
“The (commission) appeared to be in agreement with” Chappell’s recommendation, McNeill wrote in an emailed response to this question on Wednesday. “So I regrouped with (Laughter) to use that feedback to map a path forward.”
The goal, he wrote, is to present a draft to the commission at its May 12 meeting.
Though the committee voted unanimously to accept what Huggins called a “compressed schedule,” he added that the group had already been on track to wrap up its work in June or July.
The additional time “would have given us more time to talk to the community, a little more time for the staff to provide information,” he said, “but it just ain’t going to be so.”
Vice Chair Lucia Gerdes said the accelerated process seemed “arbitrary,” and Tooley said “I’m disappointed we have been put in this predicament all of a sudden.”
“I think we all share that feeling,” Huggins said.