Alamance County’s elected leaders have apparently not heard the last of a contentious plan to increase the minimum size of residential lots in the county’s rural reaches.
This plan, which the county’s planning board had proffered to raise the bar for residential lots from 30,000 to 65,000 square feet, was an utter nonstarter when it came before the county’s board of commissioners earlier this month. Yet, the principle behind the proposed change seems to have had a lingering effect on some of the commissioners, who found their curiosity further reinforced by one resident’s comments at a subsequent meeting on Monday.
Henry Chandler, who addressed the commissioners during a designated public comment that evening, spoke up in defense of the planning board’s recommendation, which had been roundly panned two weeks earlier by homebuilders, realtors, and others in the residential development trade. Chandler recalled that some of these critics had even questioned the planning board’s motives when they addressed the commissioners.
“Two of them said that the planning board is pushing a personal agenda,” he recounted. “I attend many of those meetings, and that is just not the case…You certainly heard a personal agenda, and it that was from the individual contractors; the more houses they pack onto a piece of property, the more revenue it generates for them.”
(The planning board ultimately gave its unanimous nod to this change as part of a package of proposed amendments that it endorsed on July 11. Even so, Matthew Hoagland, the county’s planning director, recalls that one of the board’s members had initially dissented when the lot size proposal was individually discussed earlier that evening.)
Chandler went on to share some photos of a new subdivision in the northern part of the county, which he said “sticks out like a sore thumb” because the lots there are considerably smaller than they are in the surrounding area. He went on to raise some concerns about the dilemma that will face the subdivision’s residents in the event that their wells or septic tanks fail, and they find they have no room to develop new ones.
Although the planning board’s recommendation effectively died two weeks ago for lack of a motion from the commissioners, Chandler’s remarks made it clear that some of the commissioners aren’t entirely opposed to a new threshold for residential lot sizes.
Commissioner Bill Lashley acknowledged that he found Chandler’s presentation “very informative” when he reflected on it later that evening.
“I think a lot of people in this county agree with you about the lot sizes,” he went on to reassure Chandler. “As I said at the last meeting, it depends on what your goal is – if your goal is to put as many houses on a piece of land as you can, then that’s what you’re going to do. If your goal is to not, then you won’t.”
Meanwhile, commissioner Craig Turner recalled that, after the demise of the planning board’s recommendation, he and his colleagues had instructed the county’s planning staff to throw together a “more detailed” alternative to that ill-fated plan. Turner went on to ask the county’s administrators to estimate when they’ll see a response to this request.
“I think, in the best case scenario, we’d be able to bring it to the planning board in October,” replied assistant county manager Brian Baker. “It will take the planning board until November, at a minimum, to make a recommendation. So, I don’t expect it to come back to this board before December or January. But we don’t have to do it in that order; we could bring it to both board’s simultaneously.”
