Commissioners pledge to get UDO right
Johnston's agricultural community wants time to study the proposed
Unified Development Ordinance to determine its impact.
Could Johnston County’s proposed Unified Development Ordinance produce unintended consequences?
Developers think so, arguing that proposed buffers and setbacks would mean fewer buildable lots, which would make housing scarcer and even more expensive.
Farmers, meanwhile, wonder if the proposed development rules would make their lands less valuable should they decide to sell one day. At the very least, they want time to study the rules before Johnston adopts them.
County Commissioners, after hearing from developers and farmers during a public hearing on Jan. 20, said they would take the time needed to get the rules right.
A developer’s perspective
Rob Bailey is part of the group developing Cattail, a low-density, high-end subdivision on Cattail Pond north of Selma.
Already, the project faces environmental constraints, he told commissioners. “We have the lake, a lot of wetlands, streams,” Bailey said. “Combine that with the perimeter buffer, the setbacks and then some of the open space changes, it impacts this neighborhood significantly.”
“Just alone, on the buffers, based on this current design, we would lose 50 lots,” he said.
The proposed UDO also increases setbacks, or how far a home must be from the street and neighboring houses, Bailey noted. “The proposed setback changes alone will result in approximately 25 lots lost,” he said.
Finally, Bailey said, the proposed UDO says open space features such as wetlands cannot be part of a lot. “That takes up 44 acres,” he said of such features. “So I’m projecting a 15-lot loss throughout the neighborhood.”
Add the lot losses up, Bailey said, and the 296-lot Cattail shrinks by a third. “That would leave me with 206 lots on 575 acres, which is very impactful to the price that I can pay for the land,” he said.
Bailey argued too that the proposed rules would have environmental consequences. “If I built these buffers, I’d have to clear 40 acres of wooded land,” he said. “Then I would have to import 115,000 cubic yards to build an 8-foot berm around this property. That entails erosion control, land disturbance, all the other things that go along with that.”
Bailey called the buffers excessive and unprecedented. “I’ve never seen anything like that in other jurisdictions,” he said.
“In my opinion,” Bailey added, “some of the proposed changes don’t improve the outcome. They have a negative impact on land values and introduce environmental disturbance that could otherwise be avoided.”
Bailey said the development community was calling for flexibility in the UDO. With flexibility, developers can design creative solutions that still meet the intent of the rules, he said. “That’s critical.”
Farmers are concerned
Speaking for several farmers, attorney Lew Starling said they had not seen the public notices about the proposed UDO, perhaps because they “were too busy focusing on other things.” But his clients are aware of the UDO rewrite now and “are very concerned,” he said.
More than anything, Starling said, the agriculture community wants time to study the proposed UDO to determine its impacts. “My folks are here to say, ‘We want to be a stakeholder,’ ” he said.
Starling likened the UDO to what President Trump called his “Big Beautiful Bill.” “Once people read it, they said, ‘Well, I didn’t know this was in here for the good,’ or ‘I didn’t know this was in here for the bad,’ ” he said.
The same is true for the proposed UDO, Starling said. “People now are finally seeing this and saying, “Explain this to me. Explain that to me,’ ” he said.
Their questions will take time to answer, Starling said. “The staff is doing all they can possibly, humanly do,” he said of the folks in Johnston's Planning Department. “But our people are not engineers, are not builders, are not sitting by the computer.”
Development has already remade the landscape of northern and western Johnston County, Starling said. The UDO “is going to really affect the folks in the south, the folks who are actually farming each and every day, that have their family farm, that are trying to make a living,” he said.
And those folks are asking for a seat at the UDO table, Starling said. “This is still an evolving document. We understand that,” he said. “We’re not saying there’s anything wrong. We’re just very concerned about some things, and we want to be a stakeholder.
“We want to, as things evolve, help tweak it and make it a better ordinance. That’s our plea.”
‘We want to do the right thing’
Commissioners Chairman Patrick Harris said the board was committed to adopting the best possible UDO. “This is not something we were going to vote on tonight,” he told a crowd that filled the Commissioners’ meeting room and the hallway outside. “We needed to hear from the public and hear from the stakeholders, and it sounds like we’ve got a lot of work left to be done. We want to do the right thing, and sometimes, we just have to figure out what that is.”
Commissioner Ted Godwin said the board faced the challenge of balancing development and farming interests. Developers “think we’re taking away from the subdivisions because of the buffers,” he said. “The farmer wants to see the buffers because they have so many problems with the developers or the people living in the development. There’s got to be some middle ground somewhere. Let’s work together and try to find that middle ground.”
Commissioner Butch Lawter is the board’s vice chairman. “I think we heard a unified voice on all sides that more time is needed,” he said.
But Lawter also said fast-growing Johnston needed a UDO sooner rather than later. “We can’t afford to take a lot of time to look at this,” he said. “I think we need to keep the foot on the gas.”
Commissioners said they would meet with stakeholders, including farmers and developers, and hold a second public hearing on the UDO.
Page last updated on: February 13, 2026