The final months of 2021 were a charmed time in the lives of Andrew Poole and his wife Anna.
With a hale, three-year-old son and a bouncing baby girl on the way, the couple were living through what others remember in hindsight as parenthood’s halcyon days. Just as promising was the couple’s search for a new home, and as the year drew to a close, the Pooles found what they thought was the ideal dwelling within a brand new subdivision called Holt Farms on the outskirts of Snow Camp.
As red hot as housing market was at the moment, Andrew and Anna Poole knew they’d have to act fast to secure this new dwelling, which was still under construction along Mt. Hermon-Rock Creek Road. So, by the end of October, they had the house under contract.
“Our first flood event was at the end of the month in [January 2021]. Our well was completely engulfed, and since then, it’s happened again and again.”
– Andrew Poole
“We moved in in January,” Andrew Poole went on to recall in a recent conversation, “and our first flood event was at the end of the month. Our well was completely engulfed, and since then, it’s happened again and again.”
The periodic inundation of this artisan well has been more than a minor aggravation to Andrew Poole and his wife. Due to the presence of coliform bacteria in their water supply, the couple have become concerned about the health of their two children, who are now four and seven years old. In the meantime, they’ve grown increasingly frustrated with Cimland, the limited liability corporation that developed Holt Farms, for its failure to address the well’s problematic location.
Andrew Poole admits that he got his first inkling of the trouble ahead shortly before he and his wife closed on their home. It was then that they noticed that the well, which had originally been slated to go in front of the house, had been moved to the rear of the property. It wasn’t, however, until the subsequent floodwaters arrived that he and Anna began to lose faith in the developer’s judgment.
Over the next four and a half years, Poole and his wife have delved ever deeper into the rules and regulations that govern the location of wells and other aspects of residential development in Alamance County.
A one-time law enforcement officer who now handles security for a school system in another county, the 35-year-old Durham native concedes that this research has been an eyeopener for himself and his elementary school teacher wife. For starters, the experience has given the couple some new insights into the laxity of land use regulations in areas outside the county’s cities and towns.
“I’ve talked to a lot of experts about zoning and subdivisions, and people keep telling me that Alamance County is the Wild, Wild West.”
– homeowner Andrew Poole
“I’ve talked to a lot of experts about zoning and subdivisions,” Andrew Poole added, “and people keep telling me that Alamance County is the Wild, Wild West.”
During the course of his investigations, Poole would discover some apparent omissions in plats for Holt Farms that are on file with Alamance County’s register of deeds. According to the homeowner, these documents fail to include a drainage easement for the flood-prone area behind his home. He also believes that his lot and several others fall below the county’s minimum area when factoring out this “marginal land,” which the county’s unified development ordinance explicitly deems extraneous to that calculation.
Poole recalls that his complaints to county officials have elicited personal visits from both the county’s planning director Matthew Hoagland and Steve Carter, the vice chairman of its board of commissioners. Poole admits that he hasn’t been particularly impressed by the follow-up to Hoagland’s field trip.
“He came out; he took some photos; and he supposedly wrote a report,” the homeowner added. “But he told us that, unfortunately, there wasn’t anything we could do.”
Hoagland has since told The Alamance News that the experiences of the Pooles and other homeowners have prompted him to draft some proposed county-level restrictions on stormwater runoff.
“I understand that the real pain point for them is stormwater,” Hoagland went on to stress in an interview. “DEQ regulates stormwater quality. They don’t necessarily regulate stormwater quantity…So, this issue has convinced us to put down some draft regulations that would allow us to look at stormwater quantity on a county level.”
Hoagland conceded that any new rules that the county enacts won’t benefit people who live in existing developments, which will remain under the county’s old regulations.
The Pooles, for their part, have taken their fight against Cimland to Alamance County superior court.
On October 11, 2024, the couple filed a lawsuit against Cimland and Cimarron Capital – an affiliated entity that sold them their home in Holt Farms – as well as the third-party contractors C3 Design & Engineers and Triad Drillers. Then, on January 3, 2025, the plaintiff’s expanded their complaint to include Piedmont Environment Associates, which had been hired by the developer to help find a site for the well.
In an amended version of their original suit, the Pooles accuse these five defendants of deliberately misleading them about the presence of an “existing waterway” at the northern end of their property. The couple go on to contend that this “waterway” had “curiously disappeared from site maps as construction commenced,” and they accuse Cimland and Cimarron Capital of failing to disclose the state and county-level restrictions that pertain to this drainage area.
POOLE LAWSUIT:
“Cimarron’s failure to disclose these environmental and regulatory restrictions. . . constitute fraudulent concealment. Fraudulent concealment of the property’s location within a critical watershed area is particularly egregious given the heightened risks to vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children.”
“Cimarron’s failure to disclose these environmental and regulatory restrictions…constitute fraudulent concealment,” the couple’s attorney declares in the amended complaint. “Fraudulent concealment of the property’s location within a critical watershed area is particularly egregious given the heightened risks to vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children.”
The Pooles go on to accuse each of the defendants of negligence and fraud while they fault Cimland and Cimarron for breach of contract, unfair trade practices and – in tandem with Triad Drillers – violations of North Carolina’s Sedimentation Pollution Control Act. The couple goes on to seek punitive damages should their case go to trial, which they insist should be tripled against Cimland and Cimarron in view of their allegedly deceptive trade practices.
At the moment, the case filed by the Pooles in 2024 is still slogging its way toward trial, which has been tentatively set for December 14, 2026. In the meantime, Cimland and Cimarron have submitted a formal response to the Pooles in which they contend that they’ve consistently dealt “in good faith” with the couple.
The brief that the co-defendants filed in March of 2025 also blames “the negligence of another individual” for any hardship the Pooles may have suffered, and they take particular exception to the potential assessment of punitive damages as “cruel and unusual.”
In the midst of this ongoing court battle, Cimland and most of its co-defendants have incurred another lawsuit from Melissa Primbs, who also owns property in the Holt Farms development.
On October 1, 2025, Primbs took action against the same group of defendants – save Piedmont Environmental – as well as the realtors who were involved in the sale of her home. Her legal complaint centers on the same “undisclosed waterway” that the Pooles had invoked and accuses various defendants of “unfair and deceptive trade practices” for allegedly omitting to disclose the stream’s presence.
In all of these court filings, one party that has been conspicuously absent is Alamance County. Poole is nevertheless adamant that the county’s relatively lax land use regulations are, at least in part, responsible for his family’s predicament.
Hoagland insists that the only thing that the county can do at this juncture is to tighten its runoff controls to ensure no one else is caught off guard in the future.
“We’re not like some counties where the federal and state regulations require them to do stormwater control. We’re right on the cusp. . . I wish we could fix it for them. But I don’t know how. The only thing I can do on a county level is put in some safeguards moving forward.”
– Alamance County planning director Matthew Hoagland
“We’re not like some counties where the federal and state regulations require them to do stormwater control,” he added. “We’re right on the cusp…I wish we could fix it for them. But I don’t know how. The only thing I can do on a county level is put in some safeguards moving forward.”
Poole, meanwhile, is emphatic that the best lesson his own experiences have taught him is not to put too much stock in the advice of self-described experts.
“We have literally been living with this for coming up on five years in December,” he said, “and I’d say that, if your gut is telling you that something is wrong, you need to look into it even if everyone from the county is telling you they can’t do anything about it.”
