The incident that really solidified things for me was the county wide R1 zoning. The planning board was near finalization of a county wide use plan that should have been done first, but the Dumbs wanted to take advantage of their electoral win and cram it through. It was highly protested by much of the county. The planning board commissioned a zoning subcommittee to look at the options. I managed to get onto it as the zone 5 (Walter Petty’s) representative. It was obvious that the fix was in and this committee was supposed to just confirm the need for zoning. The “threat” was things like Chatham Park putting up an asphalt plant and the rock quarry near a Goldston. Zoning “we” were erroneously told was needed to stop it. (There is the damned quarry about 2 miles from my house). The big boogeyman was the Megasite. I and a few others kept arguing more for a compromise, zone east of hwy 87 where it was wanted and let the rest of the county decide what works for them, such as an ordinance that excludes certain nuisance types of business by default unless explicit permission is given after proving that it won’t have negative impacts.
In the end, the subcommittee opted for this approach, as did the planning board. I think this pissed off the The Dumbocrat commission, lead by Hales and her two side kicks (Crawford and that black female) and they put it to a vote to blanket the county R1 everywhere unless already designated otherwise. When this created an uproar she declared , “its called a Democracy and WE voted.”
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Then there were things like the statue, and the whole Chatham Park being driven by a Durham billionaire. They were sold, more like swallowed, a bill of goods about R5 zoning (high acreage), building businesses, schools, etc, as part of the project, and now they want to clear cut the area west of lake Jordan and put up a bunch of houses on small lots.
Oh, and they just passed a property tax increase to pay for all the infrastructure that this project will need - on everyone else. Keep in mind they’ve been reevaluating UPWARD every damned year instead of the normal 10 year re-evaluation.
The western parts have little to no representation and don’t have the population density to achieve it.
