Zoning is a major issue for the citizens of Chatham County. The county is currently in a minority of counties in the state that don’t have county-wide zoning regulations. Zoning is a practice put in place to restrict the types of buildings that can be built in particular areas. Most of the Eastern side of the county has been zoned since 1968, while the Western side has not. The Towns of Pittsboro and Siler City have their own zoning, which encompasses approximately a three-mile radius from the towns’ centers. The Alternatives to Open Use Zoning Sub-Committee is a part of the County Planning Board and is headed by George Lucier, himself a former Commissioner.
“Only about half the county is zoned,” Lucier said. “[Zoned] means that when you apply to put a business in or something in the zoned part of the county, you have to get approved.”
There are different categories for different areas. Some may be zoned residential, industrial or commercial.
Those who are against county-wide zoning have concerns that can best be summarized as limited freedom. Some residents of western Chatham express their fears on the Chatham Chatlist, a local online forum—like one poster, who wrote about his fears of a “Chatham Property Rights Death Squad.”
Those with more moderate views against zoning are often farmers who own large areas of land. At an April 21 Alternatives to Open Use Zoning Sub-Committee meeting in Pittsboro, committee member Tandy Jones commented that many of the farmers he’s spoken with would mostly prefer to remain unzoned, though there is “no consensus.”
“One [concern] is that there seems to be a big rush, and they don’t understand why the rush,” Jones said. “Second of all, they don’t think there’s enough public input. They feel that there should be more opportunities for public input. And then, thirdly, they feel that there’s this effort to treat all the county the same. And like there’s not an effort to recognize that there are different interests and different threats. … I think we need to search for something that comes as close as possible to working for everyone.”
County commissioners are widely said to be supportive of county-wide zoning. However, residents of west Chatham are more skeptical and resent the heavy representation of east Chatham in county leadership positions.
John Alderman is a “businessman in the environmental arena” and a long time Chatham County resident who is supportive of county-wide zoning. In 1988, he and his wife brought and won a lawsuit against the county for ignoring the zoning laws adjacent to his property in eastern Chatham County, which had been zoned since 1963.
“Zoning actually protects everybody in the county, and particularly as we have growth increasing in Chatham County, we need zoning everywhere,” Alderman said. “There’s no place in Chatham County that is not vulnerable to that kind of activity. And we definitely do not want to become like Atlanta, Georgia or the Charlotte Metro area, where it’s projected for example that the build-out of that area is 13 counties becoming urban-suburban. That’s horrible—if you care anything about a pleasant place to live, you don’t want that.”
The need for a decision is pressured by the looming Chatham Park development.
“Just in the last year, we’re the second fastest growing county in North Carolina out of a hundred counties,” Lucier said. “So we’re already growing fast, and then with Chatham Parks investors coming in, they’re going to bring in—and the project isn’t complete now, it’s gonna be 25, 30 years—but they’ll bring in over 50,000 people. So that in itself will double the size of Chatham County.”
Jones said at the same meeting that those opposed to zoning are “concerned with right now, not two or three years down the road.”
“We’re on the cusp of major growth,” Lucier said. “It makes sense to make sure we have a plan for how to best manage that growth so it works for the benefit of the citizens rather than against.”
– By Frances Beroset