By Jessie Burchette
Salisbury Post
The county’s Land Use Steering Committee will get its first look this week at draft recommendations for future land development in western and southern Rowan County.
Jason Epley with Benchmark, the Kannapolis-based planning firm assisting with the plan, and Ed Muire, director of county planning and development, will present the recommendations to the committee during a meeting Thursday evening.
The study area includes all unincorporated land west of Interstate 85.
The draft mixes input from county staff and the public with guidance from the committee.
The draft comes after two public input sessions during February that netted strong anti-development sentiment and overwhelming support for farmland preservation.
One participant at the workshops wrote that the county needs to preserve farms, not encourage house farms.
Summaries of comments from workshops at South Rowan and West Rowan high schools have been compiled by the county’s Planning and Development Department and e-mailed to the steering committee.
Comments include calls to make farmland preservation a top priority. Several suggest the county should buy development rights to ensure that farmers don’t sell land for housing developments.
One supporter of preservation said farmland should be viewed as a precious commodity.
“Give landowners an option, as most don’t want to see their land developed. Now they have to sell to the highest bidder ó mostly likely not a farmer,” wrote one participant.
Another wrote, “Provide incentive for property owners not to sell for development. Give farms the opportunity to farm the land at a reasonable cost.”
“Promote organic farms,” wrote another. “Offer incentives to young farmers to keep farming as you offer to industry to come to Rowan County.”
As strongly as workshop participants endorsed keeping farms, they were adamant that the county should control, limit or outright ban housing developments.
One suggested that a moratorium on housing developments in western Rowan would solve the problem. Another concluded that industrial and residential development is “the tragic fate of the county.”
Another suggested enacting impact fees to pay for growth.
Other suggestions included adding appearance standards for businesses in the rural agricultural zoning district and making the minimum building lot size 5 acres as a way of halting or slowing development.
The steering committee will also meet again this month to complete work on the draft recommendations.
The first session is at 7 p.m. Thursday in the J. Newton Cohen Sr. Meeting Room, County Administrative Offices Building, 130 W. Innes St.
The second session will be April 24 at 7 p.m. in the Hurley Room of the Rowan Public Library, 201 W. Fisher St.
Contact Jessie Burchette at 704-797-4254 or jburchette@salisburypost.com.