Johnston residents weigh in on proposed UDO

Information stations at the town hall meeting explored
the proposed Unified Development Ordinance in greater detail.

SMITHFIELD — Johnston residents had plenty to say during a town hall meeting on the County’s proposed Unified Development Ordinance.

Becky Carter told Commissioners her family had lived on its land near Princeton for eight decades. “I have a concern that all this development is just out of control,” she said.

Carter pointed to the hundreds of new homes proposed in her community. “We are literally being invaded and taken over,” she said. “We’re being pushed out of our own safe little communities by people who do not think like us.”

The growth, Carter said, was taxing Johnston’s water, sewer, roads, schools, electric grid, and hospitals. “Why are you allowing all these homes to be built when we don’t have the infrastructure in place to even support what we’ve got right now?” she asked.

For the most part, Commissioners listened to speakers during the town hall. But they did respond to Carter, saying Commissioners don’t determine housing demand in Johnston and don’t decide when a farm, pasture or forest becomes a subdivision.

“When you see those houses being built, that means somebody sold that land,” said Commissioner Patrick Harris, the Board’s chairman. “I’ve never knocked on anybody’s door and asked them to sell their land. Never.”

The County adopted zoning years ago, just as Johnston was starting to grow, because it wanted to ensure new development was compatible with existing homes, businesses and farms. Commissioners at the time zoned most land for agricultural and residential use, meaning folks could farm it or build houses on it without the County’s permission. That’s still the case today.

“There has to be a legal reason to deny somebody their right to do something with their land,” Harris told Carter.

The Board chairman defended the draft UDO, which aims to steer denser housing toward the County’s towns and away from its rural communities. “We’ve heard so many people say, ‘We don’t like the way the County’s growing. We don’t like the way it’s going to look in 30 years,’ ” he said. “Well, this is the mechanism to get some control over that and channel that growth into areas that are more appropriate for it.”

If Commissioners had their way, they would zone much rural land to allow houses only on lots of 2, 5, or 10 acres. But state law prevents the County from taking that step, explained Planning Director Braston Newton.

The proposed UDO, however, would allow those large-lot zoning categories to exist on paper, so landowners could request them if they wanted.  

“What that was intended to do was to try to protect the most rural areas of the County to prevent the higher density,” Newton said.

But Cherry Johnson, who owns farmland in the Willow Spring community, said the new UDO would be pointless if Commissioners routinely granted rezoning requests. “If Johnston County approves a UDO but then allows developers to rezone, we are essentially allowing our County and our land to be prostituted for a quick dollar,” she said.

But another speaker, who did not give his name, said the UDO, with its many rules, was stepping on private property rights. “I shouldn’t have one of you guys … tell me that I can’t have a trailer on my property, I can’t have a dump truck, I can’t have a greenhouse of a certain size,” he said. “You’re not on my mortgage. You didn’t help me pay my taxes.”

Meleka Byrd echoed that speaker. “You don’t need to come onto our land, on our property, and tell us what we can and cannot do,” she said. “We purposely live where we live for that reason.”

Byrd said the debate wasn’t confined to bona fide farms, which are exempt from UDOs. “It’s about every single person, whether they own land or they rent land,” she said. “It’s about people having their right to do what they want to do on their land.”

Another speaker faulted recent UDO revisions that reduced proposed buffers between new and existing land uses. 

Harris said the narrower buffers came at the request of Johnston farmers. “Once we rolled it out and had 150-foot buffers … farm owners in Johnston County got together, wrote us a letter and said, ‘That’s too much. We don’t want that much,’ ” he said.

Farm owners were perhaps acknowledging that they might one day want to sell some or all of their land for development. And what a developer is willing to pay for land is determined by the number of homes he can build on it. And wider buffers mean fewer buildable lots.

That puts commissioners in a hard spot when it comes to buffer requirements, Harris said. “We’ve got one group that’s saying make them big,” he said. “Another group is saying, ‘No, that’s too much because it’s eating up too much valuable land.’ ” 

Michelle Benson, who lives on roughly 17 acres near Four Oaks, faulted Commissioners for releasing the draft UDO all at once instead of piecemeal so that folks could more easily digest it.

And pointing to an implausible reference to electric fencing, Benson suggested the County relied too heavily on its consulting firm to draft the UDO. “So if you didn’t review that document before you presented it for us to look at, shame on you,” she said. “And if you did review it and you thought that was a good idea, shame on you again.”