Henderson County Decision Shows Broad Support for Land-Use Rules. In Transylvania County, a Divide Remains.
A storage facility planned for Crab Creek Road in Henderson was opposed by a range of opponents, while zoning is still seen as partisan in Transylvania, which faces its own big planning decision.
CEDAR MOUNTAIN — In Transylvania County, the issue of land-use regulation divides — right from left and, often, natives from newcomers.
“A line has been drawn in the sand,” said Elizabeth Thompson, a smart-growth activist and supporter of the Cedar Mountain Small Area Plan. “It’s almost like the mask thing. There are people on one side of the zoning issue and there are people on the other side, and there seems to be no common ground and no way to meet in the middle.”
In Henderson County, on the other hand, a wide range of residents bonded in opposition to a massive mini-storage facility planned for Crab Creek Road about four miles east of the entrance to DuPont State Recreational Forest.
“The best thing that happened in Crab Creek is that the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, the reds and the blues, and the people who have been here for nine generations and the people who just got here yesterday — we just forgot about all that stuff,” said Nina deCordova, executive director of the Crab Creek Preservation Society.
As attitudes differ, so does the level of government action.
Last Wednesday, confronted with evidence and experts gathered by the Society, the Henderson County Zoning Board of Adjustment voted unanimously to deny a special-use permit that would have allowed the construction of the 125,000-square-foot facility on a 9.5-acre parcel zoned for low-density residential use.
In Transylvania, the County Commission is scheduled to take up the Cedar Mountain Small Area Plan on Oct. 11. It’s most controversial provision calls for the county’s 2010 zoning law, which now covers only Pisgah Forest, to include Cedar Mountain, a rural community at the eastern entrance to DuPont. Thompson sees little chance that the enthusiasm for growth management will spread across county lines.
“It’s great news that there are folks in Western North Carolina who believe in sustainable development,” she said of the Henderson decision, but as for its impact on Transylvania, “there are no implications at all.”
Maybe not, said Transylvania Commission Chair Jason Chappell.
“I’ve been very up front that I have major concerns about zoning, especially spot zoning, which is essentially what this is,” he said, referring to the Cedar Mountain Plan.
Several other Transylvania County Commissioners have previously expressed skepticism about the zoning provision of the plan, and the only current commissioner who voted in favor of creating the small area planning process, David Guice, did not respond to a request for an interview from NewsBeat.
What’s right for Henderson might not be right for Transylvania, Chappell said, pointing out several differences between the two counties, including Henderson’s vastly larger population.
But the crucial factor is development pressure, which almost “inexorably” drives support for zoning across partisan lines, David Owens, a professor of public law and government at the University of North Carolina’s School of Government, said in an interview earlier this year.
In Henderson, for example, the ubiquitous white-and-magenta signs urging officials to “STOP” the storage units were as likely to be posted on the lawns of Republicans as on those of Democrats, deCordova said.
One of the most popular posts on the Preservation Society’s facebook page came from a longtime farrier in the region who believes in property rights, he wrote, but also in the responsibility of “neighbors to make sure what we do on our land improves the community rather than degrading it.”
“I just couldn’t believe how fast every singe person said, ‘Right on!’ ” deCordova said.
One of the neighbors who spoke out against the storage plan at Wednesday’s hearing was County Commissioner Michael Edney. He’s a Republican. So are all five of Henderson’s commissioners, who preside over a zoning law that has been in place since 2007.
“It was very controversial at the time,” said Henderson Commission Chair Bill Lapsley, “but my sense is that it has worked out for the most part very well
If the issue is not political in Henderson, or at least not defined by party affiliation, neither was the process that led to the denial of the permit application.
“It’s an evidence-based hearing. It’s not a legislative decision, where (board members) can decide anything they want to,” said Henderson County Attorney Russ Burrell.
County law lays out factors that the Board of Adjustment can consider when it decides whether to deny or approve a special-use permit. These include traffic safety and property values, and the Preservation Society raised money for a traffic engineer and real estate appraisers who testified at the hearing.
“You may disagree with an appraiser, but that appraiser is going to give you a number . . . and some support for that number,” Burrell said. “Traffic. Same thing. Those engineers are going to be out there counting cars, and they’re going to be out there measuring the width of the road.”
If petitioner Matthew Cooke files an appeal, it will go to county civil Superior Court, not the County Commission, Burrell said; Cooke did not return a call to his existing storage business, but told the Hendersonville Lightning after Wednesday’s hearing that he had not decided whether or not to challenge the Board’s decision.
The push for zoning in Henderson “bubbled up” in the 1990s, Lapsley said, and ultimately led to the passage of the current law in the following decade. The county has recently embarked on the rewriting of its Comprehensive Plan, which could lead to a reconsideration of the zoning law.
DeCordova said she hopes this will result in clearer rules that will not require an expensive and exhausting opposition to block clearly inappropriate uses such as the storage facility.
But Lapsley said that the process will also take in the view of the considerable number of residents who still believe in “open-ended property rights.”
In Transylvania, that view was repeated in some of the 68 comments to a post about the Crab Creek decision on the popular We Are Brevard, NC Facebook page.
“Too much government control already,” said a comment posted by Angela Toole. “We need less, not more.”
But that view was countered in several other comments supporting zoning and the commonly expressed opinion that it also protects property rights — those of neighbors who might suffer form incompatible land uses.
One pro-regulation comment was posted by Mark Tooley, a member of the Cedar Mountain Small Area Planning Committee who served on the county Planning Board when it helped create the Pisgah Forest zoning ordinance.
There was also strong support for zoning expressed in the results of surveys that guided the creation of the Cedar Mountain plan, Tooley said. Not only did these studies show overwhelming backing for the preservation of the community’s rural and natural features, respondents wanted rules that would stick, he said in an interview.
“The residents were very clear that they wanted something enforceable,” he said, “not just suggestions.”