Still time to protect our rural spaces
I know a lot of people would rather get a daily colonoscopy than focus their time on the finer points of setbacks, design standards, infill development and more. But no one needs to have a PhD in planning to know that our community is changing fast and unless action is taken now, the rural character of our community will be no more. If we are willing to preserve what we love, it's important that county residents let their commissioners know that the current Comp Plan proposal has serious flaws that unless fixed will lead to uncontrollable sprawl which is the death knell of communities like ours.
The county is finalizing its 2045 Comprehensive Plan whose goal is to protect our community’s rural character and farming traditions and guide growth and development for years to come. Too often land planning is guided not by what will be preserved and protected, but by monetizing it. When we focus only on dwellings per acre, and not preservation, we often see a goldrush of undeveloped land as developers “cash in” on large tracts of land, turning our greenspaces into someone else’s gold in the name of “conservation.”
There are certain things that we know are almost always true. Our past 2020 Comprehensive Plan made it clear that lines of infrastructure such as water and sewer should not be brought into rural communities because like flies to honey, building this would accelerate development wherever it is installed to the point where those areas become unrecognizable. Yet this proposed Comp Plan appears to take us backwards instead of forwards.
Based on recent GIS evaluation, many of our rural communities such as the Jeter Mountain area have one dwelling per 10 acres and in the Green River area it’s as large as one dwelling per 25 acres. Yet this draft plan would allow subdivisions as dense as one unit per two acres which take the countryside atmosphere and turn it into cookie cutter segmentation. This is bad for maintaining our sense of community, bad for natural habitats that depend upon stable ecosystems for survival and bad for our economy. The maps above show what the Green River Valley could look like in a few years if the current Comp Plan proposal is implemented.
If we want to protect farming and rural landscapes we need to maintain the density as it is. By enabling rural communities to become suburbia, we encourage the infestation of skyrocketing infrastructure such as roads and water and sewer, then come the dollar stores, MallWarts, strip malls and alas, we turn around and wonder, when was the last time we heard the cry of a red shouldered hawk, the howl of a coyote, green frogs in summer? Instead, they’ve been replaced by jack brakes, truck exhaust, polluted rivers and streams and what made our community beautiful only resides in history books and our faltering imagination. Is this what the citizens asked for when they said in large numbers in a recent Comp Plan survey that protecting open space and forests and natural areas and farmland was their priority? Definitely not!
Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma these past several years knows that many of our communities have been under attack by commercial development that had no place being in their community. Saluda, Edneyville, East Flat Rock and Green River have had to fight off gun ranges, a massive storage facility, a commercial hotel, asphalt plants and more. And who paid for these battles? The Crab Creek community alone shelled out nearly $90,000 to defeat the storage facility and the final chapter in this saga has yet to be written. Given this history, the Comp Plan of course restricts inappropriate commercial development in rural communities, right? Wrong. The only solution the Comp Plan offers is the possibility of enhanced design standards, the “lipstick on a pig” option. So, what are we going to do? Have loudspeakers play Beethoven's 5th Symphony to hide the sounds of gun firing from sunrise to sunset? Trees to hide the eyesore of storage facilities? In short, this is not a solution. Prohibiting commercial uses that are incompatible with rural communities would be the answer and this is glaringly missing from the proposed plan.
I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating, the Urban Services Area where the county would encourage most of our future growth is so large that it would become a roadmap for sprawl, the very thing that Comp Plan says it was designed to prevent. When asked, commissioner and planners alike have thrown up their hands and said they can’t do anything about this because water and sewer are the domain of the city and the Metropolitan Sewerage District and private sewer providers.
However, that doesn’t leave the county without options. The county can empower itself to work together with the City of Hendersonville and other municipalities given that we already have enough space in the county with existing infrastructure to service newcomers for at least 20 years to come. The result of these negotiations would be a much tighter urban services boundary that becomes a win-win for all parties involved. This also remains true for Edneyville that is grappling with sewer expansion that everyone knows would seriously damage the integrity of the farming and rural community. Because the county has access to money to build a sewer doesn’t mean they should. Promoting explosive growth in a community that is the mainstay of our apple farmers is the last place we want to urbanize. Otherwise, get ready for subdivisions such as McIntosh Mansions, Honey Crisp Hills and Jonagold Junction.
If we care about the future of our community and want to protect its future, please contact the commissioners today and tell them that the Comp Plan should reflect what we all care and it should be rewritten with the points above in mind. Tell them: 1) we need to ensure the density of rural communities are maintained, 2) that we need to arm communities against inappropriate commercial development and 3) we need to encourage the county collaborates with the city and MSD to shrink the Urban Services Area to prevent explosive growth. Tell them to keep their eye on the prize—protecting the rural character of our collective home. Contact commissioners at www.hendersoncountync.gov/boc or you can attend the upcoming Commissioner meeting on Dec. 5 at 5:30 pm at the Historic Courthouse and make your comments then. Thank you.
David Weintraub is a cultural preservationist, filmmaker and local environmental troublemaker who runs the Center for Cultural Preservation. Contact him at SaveCulture.org or (828) 692-8062.
This article originally appeared on Hendersonville Times-News: Still time to protect our rural spaces
