Growing Chatham gets pushback over zoning

Briar Chapel, a subdivision under construction off U.S. 15-501 in northeastern Chatham County, is at the peak of its home sales – attracting 26 new families per month to an area already bursting with new residents.

A few miles away, a 7,000-acre, mixed-use development called Chatham Park, which is expected to eventually add 60,000 residents plus shops and offices, has begun to take shape.

Residential growth is spilling into Chatham County from Chapel Hill and Durham to the north and Cary and Apex to the east, and commercial development is beginning to follow, making the county one of the fastest growing in the state. Chatham’s two biggest towns – Pittsboro and Siler City – also are growing, and the county’s traditionally rural landscape of farms and forests and crossroads communities is beginning to disappear.

In response, the Chatham County Board of Commissioners began crafting a new comprehensive plan early last year to guide growth and protect what it can of the area’s rural heritage. Then last August, the board established county-wide residential zoning, covering 388 square miles of previously unzoned property, to regulate land use before the plan is complete.

The decision to join the majority of North Carolina counties with county-wide zoning highlights Chatham’s shift toward a more populated place, particularly in the eastern third of the county, said Commissioner Diana Hales, who lives on a nearly 70-acre farm between Siler City and Pittsboro.

“It was the absolutely explosive growth of Wake and Durham and Orange that was driving all this,” said Hales. “It’s growth on steroids.”

But while everyone concedes that growth is coming to Chatham, not everyone supports county-wide zoning, at least not yet.

“I think everyone agrees that we need to make sure we have some good land-use planning and we have some good zoning in place, particularly with Chatham Park,” said Brian Bock, a planning board member and former commissioner who lives in Briar Chapel. “But there’s a lot less pressure on the western side of the county, and the folks who live there – the farmers and the residents that spoke out – didn’t see the need to rush to zone everything.”

County-wide zoning

The hand-wringing over growth in Chatham County goes back decades. In 1990, as the 1,600-acre Governor’s Club development was taking shape just south of Chapel Hill, many residents acknowledged that the inevitable had begun, even as they fretted about the loss of the county’s rural character. “It’s one of the worst things that could happen to Chatham, to be swallowed up by Chapel Hill,” County Commissioner Earl Thompson said at the time.

In 2003, after Briar Chapel was proposed, competing citizens groups argued over the impact of large subdivisions on the county. One took out newspaper ads with themes such as “Bigger is Better” and “New Homes = New Jobs,” while the other predicted higher taxes for schools, roads and other services.

Chatham’s population has nearly doubled since 1990, to more than 71,000. But what spurred the interest in county-wide zoning last summer was the 15 mining permit applications recently submitted to the state for land in the county, said Jason Sullivan, the county’s planning director. Without zoning, these operations didn’t require resident feedback or commissioner approval, Sullivan said.

The board – with a 3-2 vote – decided to move forward with zoning rather than wait for the comprehensive plan to be completed. The split vote followed almost a year of discussions about alternatives, with the planning board and board of commissioners divided on how to proceed.

Under the new zoning, the entire county – except areas already zoned by municipalities – are zoned only for residential construction.

Most of the land is zoned for no more than one home per about an acre, while homes must be on larger lots along the Deep and Rocky rivers.

Farms are exempt from zoning regulations under state law, but any other type of development that doesn’t involve a single-family house would need commissioner approval. Hales said this kind of zoning allows residents and businesses to know who their neighbors will be and gives them a chance to provide input if a new use is requested nearby.

“This board of commissioners is looking forward,” she said. “We believe in planning. We just can’t close our eyes and pretend (growth) is not happening. It’s happening.”

Hales said leaving the area unzoned left the county vulnerable to even more industrial uses like shooting ranges, mines and quarries.

“We were vulnerable because we were surrounded by fully-zoned counties ... except for Alamance,” she said. “We were concerned with everything else around us zoned, all eyes would be on Chatham.”

Some residents agreed, but others believed they were losing their property rights.

Linda Moquin, the owner of a trade show consultant business who lives outside Pittsboro, worried about the hurdles county-wide zoning would create for small businesses. She said she believed the county should have been left unzoned with only high-impact uses like landfills requiring commissioner approval.

“By changing everything, they actually really squelched the ability of this area to grow properly because everybody has to go through the government and the people sitting in power to try to get a business” zoned, she said.

Commissioner Walter Petty supported a similar approach, saying commissioner concerns could be addressed through open-use zoning, where a majority of uses are permitted except for a small set that are banned or would require a permit.

Others, like Bock, the planning board member, supported zoning as a land-use planning tool but believed a decision shouldn’t have been made until after the completion of the comprehensive plan. He also thought the county should have listened more to residents affected by the zoning.

“They should have just waited for the comprehensive plan anyway, particularly since it made so many people in the western part of the county very angry,” he said.

Hales said that once the comprehensive plan is completed in April or May, the board would make a few changes to zoning.

Growth is coming

While most of the growth pressures are focused on the eastern third of the county – closest to the booming Triangle – some officials don’t believe that the western and southern portions of the county are immune to growth, particularly as the county works to lure large manufacturing companies to megasites in Siler City and Moncure.

A majority of residents are interested in commercial growth because it will bring more jobs to a county where 55 percent of the workforce leaves the county for work. It also will pull some of the tax burden off residents, says Kyle Touchstone, president of the Chatham County Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit that supports business in the county.

“The Chatham EDC is striving to create jobs to meet our population growth,” Touchstone said. “Without additional private ... investment through attracting new companies and growth of existing companies, we will remain a bedroom community.”

Sixty-seven counties in North Carolina have county-wide zoning while 13 have partial zoning and 20 have no county zoning at all, said David Owens, a professor of public law and government with the UNC School of Government.

Owens said general zoning is usually put in place when there are a lot of changes taking place within the county, like when farmland sells and gets developed.

Next door to Chatham, Randolph County, which is home to Asheboro and the N.C. Zoo, faced similar growth in the past, leading to the county being fully zoned by 1987, County Manager Hal Johnson said.

“In the 1980s, growth began to really take place, almost overnight,” he said. “We had a lot of farmland that was changing hands. Areas that had used to just be open to agricultural properties were being sold, and they were being turned overnight into large subdivisions and large mobile home parks and all sorts of commercial land uses that weren’t always appropriate.”

In response, residents in the northern towns near High Point and Greensboro began requesting zoning. Before long, residents from the more rural areas were asking the commissioners why they were being left out of zoning efforts, Johnson said.

While counties are usually willing to hold off on county-wide zoning if residents fear the loss of some of their property rights, eventually if the population continues to grow, it will move forward, Owens said.

“There’s a strong sort of libertarian sense of ‘I should be able to do whatever I want with my property,’ ” he said. “Counties are generally willing to go with that until how you use your property affects how your neighbor uses and enjoys their property.”

This story was originally published February 11, 2017 at 1:11 PM with the headline "Growing Chatham gets pushback over zoning."