County says it wants to prevent building in 'risk areas'

UPDATE: The Pender County Planning Board meeting planned for Tuesday, Oct. 1, has been canceled.

PENDER COUNTY -- Proposed changes to Pender County's unified development ordinance (UDO) has some wondering if it goes too far in limiting development possibilities in the fast-growing county, especially along the U.S. 17 corridor by the coast.

But county officials said the proposed changes would promote smarter development in an area that's growing rapidly -- with problems to show for it from localized flooding to stormwater runoff.

After a presentation on the proposed changes last week in Hampstead, developer D. Logan cried foul.

“These people paint pretty pictures and say a lot of words,” Logan said from the audience, “but there is one thing you need to know: This UDO is going to shut down 85 percent of the entire county. If you own a 100-acre tract of land, on average you are only going to be able to develop 15 percent of it.”

This UDO, Logan said, “will destroy your property values, it will destroy the tax base in Pender County.”

Logan said he would be in the back corner of the parking lot to explain to anyone interested what he had learned, through his land-use engineering and legal contacts, about what the revised UDO might do to the future development of the county.

"This latest UDO proposal is so grievous that something has to be done before they regulate and encumber the land so much that it essentially renders its value over to the people for conservation and parks, and its control over to the county and those who run it,” Logan had written in an earlier email to large-scale Pender County landowners and real estate professionals. “I know several of these commissioners and do not believe they understand the magnitude of what staff is putting in front of them. Whether you are pro development or not -- this is just wrong,” he wrote.

In his parking lot remarks, Logan asserted that the updated UDO is an extreme example of a government overreach, with local officials preparing to take land without compensation. The land grab will be accomplished through both new and more demanding conditions in new developments, especially roads; through new -- and, he claims, illegal -- imposition of additional buffers in relation to some natural resources; and, most significantly, through rezoning that, by killing construction in 100-year and 500-year floodplains, makes fully 85 percent of Pender County land undevelopable.

“They are taking people’s property, and they are misinforming the public,” Logan said outside the annex auditorium. “It is, quite frankly, appalling.” The day may come, Logan insisted, when tiny lots will have to command prices in excess of $500,000 to make development even feasible.

“And at the same time, they say they want affordable housing,” Logan fumed. “Affordable housing is gone under these pretenses.”

Most of those who wandered to the back were supportive of developers’ rights.

But not all.

“Don’t you think we need to do something about our infrastructure before we just continue to build for ever and ever,” asking a critic who, though pressed repeatedly, declined to give his name. He said he owned considerable land in Pender County, and built and sold homes.

Rampant building in the county is driving up the tax rate to keep pace with the need for new schools and other services, he argued.

“But to encumber developers with that responsibility is wrong,” Logan said. Doing so “devalues land."

Developers, his opponent countered, “are a finite group compared to everybody else who lives here and has to pay for what you guys do. We have people on fixed income here whose taxes went up 34 percent because we had to expand the school system. We are outstripping our resources, and I understand that you want to build and build ... It’s about money, but it’s also about the people who live here.”

“What we are trying to do is reduce … placing development in risk areas,” said county Planning Director Kyle Breuer. “One primary objective that we are working on is the identification of areas that we are calling resource conservation areas, that include not only our 100-year floodplain, but also our 500-year floodplain, wetlands, riparian buffers and CAMA setbacks so that we can adequately provide the density within a project, but not impacting those hazard areas.”

The proposed revisions won’t change allowable building densities, Breuer said. What they will do “is focus the densities in areas that are not subject to the risk areas. For example, we will allow someone to cluster that density within a certain piece of property.”

The planning commission will have a look at the revision proposals to the UDO on Tuesday and will likely vote on its recommendation at the board’s following meeting on Nov. 5. The Pender County Commissioners will get their first look at the document on Dec. 2.

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