Planning Board - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everyone. This is a call to order for the Buncombe County Planning Board on July the 20th, 2026 at 936 a.m. And we'll begin with a few announcements. Today we will have two opportunities for public comment. The first opportunity will be our general public comment time after the approval of the minutes. This comment time is for anyone wishing to bring any issue to the board's attention except for concern regarding the ordinance amendment being heard today, which will have its own public comment time. If you wish to speak during either of these comment periods, please be sure you have signed up on the sheets, or at least I guess they're there by the door, under the screen on the table. And they're specifically for this purpose, and each person will have three minutes to speak. And since we will be taking a vote on the text amendment, I will read the conflict of interest statement for appointed boards from the North Carolina Statute 160D-109. Members of appointed boards shall not vote on any advisory or legislative decision regarding a development regulation adopted pursuant to this chapter where the outcome of the matter being considered is reasonably likely to have a direct, substantial, and readily identifiable financial impact on the member. An appointed board member shall not vote on any zoning amendment if the landowner of the property subject to a rezoning petition or the applicant for a text amendment is a person with whom the member has a close familial, business, or other associational relationship. Is there anyone today who feels like they have that conflict? Good to go then. All right. And if there are no further announcements from Well, I guess, are there any staff announcements?

None from staff.

Okay. Then we will move on to approval of the agenda. Do we have a motion?

So moved. Second.

All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Very good. And next, we will approve the minutes from the June 15, 2026 minutes.

Motion to approve.

Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Very good. That's approved as well.

Madam Chair, do we need to have a roll call?

Yes, we do. Did I skip that? You did. I did. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. So we'll start on my right and just state your name, please.

Ken Kong.

Nancy Waldrop.

Liza Shillow.

Carl Kuhn.

Tim Collins.

And that's who's here today. And now we are ready for the public hearing on ZPH 2026-00024, the KOA map amendment. Campgrounds of America Incorporated applied to rezone two parcels of land where the address is 517 Lazy Bear Boulevard and 99999 U.S. Highway 70 further identified as pins 9699-70-6736 and 9699-71-5166 from commercial to R3, which is a residential zoning. I guess we have a staff presentation. Do we have an applicant presentation as well?

Staff for sure. And I'm not sure if the applicant is here. Okay. All right. Great. Thank you. Okay. So my name is Haley Mathis and this is the review of ZPH 2026-00024, the KOA zoning map amendment. This hearing was properly noticed and all applicable parties notified of the meeting in accordance with general statutes and county code. That includes a legal ad in the local newspaper, notices mailed to the property owners within 1,000 feet, a notice on the county's website, and physical postings on the site. The applicant and owner is Campgrounds of America Incorporated. The addresses are 517 Lazy Bear Boulevard and an unaddressed parcel off of US Highway 70. The area to be rezoned is two parcels with a total of 6.77 acres. The current uses are camps, cottages and RV park and a commercial vacancy. The lots are served by MSD and public water They are planning to rezone from CS Commercial to R3 Residential. You can see the current zoning map on the left side at Commercial and the proposed zoning on the right for R3. So the parcels are located in areas identified by the Buncombe County Comprehensive Plan Future Land Use Map as NICS Use 1. here and then mixed use neighborhood to the north, which both align with the R3 zoning district. This chart compares the dimensional standards of the zoning districts. If the rezoning request is approved, the density would remain the same at 12 acres, 12 units per acre. The minimum allowed lot size would increase The required setbacks when the property lines would change with an increase on the front setback and a decrease on the side setback. Side setbacks. And the maximum allowed height of structures would decrease. The types of uses allowed on the property would change from commercial uses to more residential type uses. Manufactured homes, manufactured home parks, travel trailers, and travel trailer parks would be permitted, while most of the commercial uses would no longer be permitted, such as retail trade, nightclubs, restaurants, storage and warehousing, manufacturing and processing, hotels and motels, and more. The surrounding developments include manufactured home sites, commercial vacancy, industrial manufacturing, auto repair, low-density residential, and RV projects. This rezoning has been found to be consistent with a number of the county plan recommendations, such as the FLUM category and description, the proximity to sewer and city water, the density, the proposed rezoning does allow for a transition between higher intensity uses and lower intensity uses, a proximity to a transportation corridor, avoidance of the overlay districts in areas of high or moderate soil instability. And so based on this, staff does recommend approval

And if the board has any questions... And there's one factor that was inconsistent with the plan, right?

Yes. It is partially in the regulated flood hazard area.

And what effect will that have? But before you answer that, I have also overlooked having the general comment period, so we will go back and pick that up for anybody who came in for that. But yes, I wondered that too. How will that affect anything or...

It's unclear. I mean, so when we're looking at the staff report, it's one of those that is there. The floodplain is there, you know, as a commercial site versus a residential site. The density is the same amount that they could put on the property. I mean, they still need to get a flood permit if they're going to do any work. within the floodplain. The reviews are really similar. I don't know that it would make any major difference for how development would occur. So it's something to notice to note on the property that there is the flood hazard area on part of the parcels. Do you have anything to add to that?

The only thing I would mention is that this would be considered down zoning the property. So it's decreasing the types of uses. And without being able to review a development proposal, we would assume that the purpose of this is to allow one of the lower intensity uses to as part of residential that's not currently allowed as a commercial development. So again, we can't look at a development proposal, but we're looking at lower density, lower intensity uses with a down zoning.

And we can do down zoning? Yeah.

Because this is a request by the applicant, we have their permission, so we could up zone or down zone based on their application.

OK.

Thank you. I apologize for being late. I missed the opening and the conflict of interest statement. I'm going to recuse myself from this as the business that I represent. We do business with the campground. So I will recuse myself.

Thank you. Thank you for that. Appreciate it. I'm glad you're here. Any other questions to the staff? And does the applicant like to speak? No? Were there any questions for the applicant? I would have one, and that would just be if there was any community response to this, I always like to know that. Feedback, positive, negative, whatever. Any concerns?

You hear me good? Yes. Yeah, to my knowledge, there's been a positive feedback. We actually have the manager here as well from the site. Seems like it's a well-enjoyed place. I know of no pushback or any negative feedback. And I think it's important to note that it's pretty much already kind of connected to the site and where the campground already exists. So it's more of just kind of bringing it in line with what's already there, just kind of opening up them to be able to use what they already can use for just storage and other things that they may need.

Okay.

Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Any other questions? So we opened it up for a public hearing at this point. Is there anyone who wishes to address this text amendment? And if there's no one out there, then I guess I can close the public hearing. And then we will continue with the board discussion, if there's any board discussion. And when we're ready, move on to the motion and the comprehensive plan consistency statement and a vote.

I'm happy to make a motion. I would move to approve the rezoning and find it consistent with the growth, equity, and conservation goals of the 2043 comprehensive plan.

Second.

Good. Second. All right. Any further discussion? All right. Then we'll take a vote. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Then the motion passes. And it does go to the county commissioners from here.

That will be the next step. Okay.

Very good. Well, with that done, then we can back up to the general public comment period that we missed. Is there anybody here that would like to address the general public comment? And if not, then we can close that as soon as we opened it. All right. Then that takes us down to... We're ready to adjourn unless there's any other announcements or concerns someone wants to share.

We do have the review of the Swannanoa.

I'm sorry. I am totally off of this today. But my apologies.

You've already seen it. So you're like, I'm done.

She lived it. She didn't have said.

This was really thrilling. And I will say it was a great experience to watch it happen because, and I've said this before, but I'll say it again. The community was just really great with what they did. And the people there were so concerned and so involved. And even though it was impossible for everybody in the community to take part, I really do feel like the community was well represented by the people that got put on that committee. And it was amazing. It's a good plan, and they seem very happy with it, and I think it'll serve them well, what that's worth.

Okay, so you all should have received a copy of this last week and been able, hopefully been able to look through it and see if you have any suggested changes or caught any weird typos or things like that. So we're not going to go through it page by page, but I will ask if anybody had any general or specific changes and grammatical concerns. We also need to populate the glossary section. So if there's any particular words that you feel like we should be explaining in that section, we would love to know what those are. Otherwise, staff will go through it and generate a list. And then just general review of the plan, anything that you see missing or questions. But maybe we could start off with what you found if you did have time to go through it last week.

I went through it reasonably carefully, but not with an eye for typos.

That's okay.

There may not have been any. I thought it was great. I had seen something like this for Lions Colorado back in 2013 at a similar catastrophic event, and the community came together. It wasn't so much the planning process. plan folks. But I have nothing but praise for this. The only question now is if this serves as a template for future small area plans. I'm not asking you to answer this question now, but let's say Emma was next, just as an example. It'll be a different process to a certain extent. You want to wind up with something like this, but the very nature of each small area is going to be some flexibility about how you approach it, I think.

It will. This plan definitely had more of a resilience focus than what we thought when we were going into it and a lot of recovery discussions. and each community is gonna have their own unique needs that we'll have to look at at the forefront of it.

I know it's buried in here somewhere. How successful do you feel like we're getting community input from a large representative swath? Because that's always going to be one of the tricky parts.

Yeah. Our numbers look great on paper. It's never going to be as many people as we wish we would have reached. But we have reached our technical targets of how many people we would reach. ideally want to have to feel like it was representative. And we, we did look throughout the different phases to make sure that we weren't just talking to people all in the town center or, you know, in one specific neighborhood. So we did a pretty good job on making sure we had rural communities represented from all the different corners of Swannanoa, because we're looking at, I think like a 40,000 acre swath of the community, a lot of which is, is not, developed area, but we did check and made sure that we were getting the representation and checking in with nonprofits in the area to make sure that they were reaching out as much as possible. We're pretty pleased with it, but you know, it'd be nice to talk to everyone. Yeah.

Anybody else?

did see one thing on your map, and I'm looking specifically at the future land use map. What page is that on, Carl?

16 and 17.

16 and 17, yes. And you may want to update the area that Warren Wilson recently put into the conservation easement And note that as a conservation working land, just for, since that is one of the goals of the county is increase the conserved areas.

Thank you.

That's a good catch.

Can I follow up on that? Do you know how close we are to our goal with open space?

I'd have to check.

Gotcha.

I had a few things, just some questions. So it looked like the time horizon for septic and sewer kind of management and mitigation was long-term. I was curious, is there a water quality monitoring plan in the interim within 10 years or at five years or?

Which act, you're looking at one of the actions in, is it infrastructure section or? It's on page 27.

Action 113, kind of prioritizing sewer extension. It's long-term and I just wonder the impacts on the community between now and then.

So that one in particular is long-term, not because it's not something that the county is working on, you know, in the next couple of years, but because sewer extension itself, the Between feasibility and construction and funding, that is going to be a very long-term process. And that particular action comes out of the Helene Recovery Plan. So it's not something that the planning staff worked on or that we're going to be managing. It's really something in another department. But it is such a high priority for this community. We have a lot of failing septic systems throughout Buncombe County, but it's also an issue in Swannanoa. So they wanted to reference that, but it is technically out of another planning document. So long-term doesn't mean we won't look at it for 20 years. Long means this is something that is going to have to be worked on over a long period of time because of how long construction will take for extensions like that. Does that answer your question?

Well, I guess I was just wondering, is there anything accompanying that to monitor water quality in the meantime? But if that's a part of a separate plan, then maybe you don't.

Yeah, we don't have anything that I remember in here about water monitoring. But that really wouldn't be something we'd put in a small area plan. That'd be more of a countywide plan. And I'm sure there's something in the comprehensive plan that we could point back to.

Thank you. I was also wondering, in the neighborhood centers, and I might have missed it, but I didn't see any, in the focus on making the neighborhood centers more densely populated, I didn't see any impervious surface limits or tree canopy requirements. And just given that those are really important for flood management, that kind of raised a red flag for me. I was curious if there is something I missed.

I know that we have those recommendations in the comprehensive plan. Um, I would have to go back through and see if we, there's not a lot in here about specific standards other than for some of those hazard goals that we have and resilience building goals. But I don't remember that we have tree canopy standards in this document. Um, particularly because that would be something we would want for countywide. action. And then you said impervious surface limits. We are looking at that for text amendments in general, not just specific to Swannanoa. And I don't believe that there's a specific action in here related to that. Is there something that you would want to propose that would be specific to just Swannanoa, not something that we'd want to see countywide?

If it's being applied at the county level, I think that's... that ought to be good enough unless, well, if it were specific to the higher density areas, I think that would be important. But does that exist in the county level plan?

It's something that we could specifically mention in, I don't know if you can see the blue and the pink, those are the land use character descriptions for what we would add to the comprehensive plans land use map. And so that's one place where we could talk about wanting to prioritize those type of standards. There's many different ways we could do it, but that's something staff could look into and see where it might fit.

Great. Anything else? We had so many, but I think, I guess I'm curious how you're feeling. A lot of this is tied to the planning department. Do you feel appropriately resourced? We talked about that a little.

So if you look at some of these actions, we have an hourglass next to them. And then in the very end of the plan, there's an implementation section. And those implementation actions that we pulled out, the ones that have the hourglass next to them, that was our staff sitting down and saying, all right, what can we do with the money we know we have, with the staff that we have now, with some of the other resources that we know are available? What can we realistically say that we could start and finish within the next five years? So there's a lot of actions in here that we would love to work on. But they might not fall into that five-year implementation window without additional staff or without knowing whether or not we're going to be able to get a grant for a certain action or other type of funding source allocated. So we tried to be really transparent in what we think we can do right out the gate. And that's what that kind of hourglass is meant to convey. And a lot of them end up being text amendments because you don't need a lot of money and you don't need extra staff typically for a text amendment. There's some exceptions to that. But for the most part, when we're doing zoning text amendments or some of our other ordinances, we can do that in-house.

Okay, great. I'm glad that was thought through. Any questions?

But those changes would need to be made countywide. You couldn't just take Swannanoa and say we're going to put an impervious ordinance in that particular area, is that correct?

It depends. There are some tools where we can use overlay districts if we want to have something specific happening in just one area, but we try not, you know, we're trying to limit how complicated we make the ordinance. Actually, our staff is looking at ways to make our ordinances less complicated as we move into doing text amendments. But an overlay district is a tool where we could impose additional requirements over just a specific area. So that's something that we've been talking about for River Corridor. You know, should that be an overlay? Should that be a different zoning district? There's lots of different ways that we can move forward with that. But that's going to be one of the questions is if there's an action in here that's also a priority for the comprehensive plan, then that might be a countywide action that we take. But if it's very specific to Swannanoa, then we might look at, would an overlay be appropriate? And is there a way to do an overlay that does keep it simple so that we're not adding a bunch of new zoning districts or things that are going to make it harder to understand the regulations? So it depends.

Any other thoughts?

I did have another question you mentioned the river quarter um it said on 16 that low density residential was permitted and that felt a little bit concerning just my first thought was predatory developers I don't know I'm curious how we're defining. low density residential and what restrictions exist for building in the River Quarter when that's concerned?

So typically low density, we're looking at single family development, maybe duplex at the highest end. Right now, most of our zoning districts permit up to 12 units per acre. Lower density districts like RLD, I think is a 10. So that would be the density that would be you know, more appropriate or at the upper limit for river corridor. And your second question,

protections in place.

Protection. So whether or not someone is going to develop the property, if it's in a regulated floodplain, they're still going to have to get a flood permit. So that would be potentially having to elevate above base flood, building the foundation and openings to certain standards. So whether or not someone were, you know, chose to build in a high hazard area, they're still going to have to get a flood permit for the hundred year floodplain. Um, we do know in a couple of years, those maps could change. So the boundaries could change. Um, but the idea is that we, we want to try to prevent future high intensity development from going into those, those most dangerous areas, but we don't want to prevent someone from being able to develop their property that they already own. That's already plotted. Um, so trying to find a balance between that and, um, kind of the intensity and the density that we want to keep out of those areas.

Thank you. So just to go back to Liza's question about are you well sufficiently resourced? Am I wrong or is your slide on page 55, this is what you think is reasonable given current resources, current environment, the five-year action plan?

You're asking if we think this is what is reasonable for...

without anything major changing in terms of the staffing levels or or environment, this is your stake in the ground.

Yeah, so the only thing that is in the five-year action plan that kind of contradicts what I said would be B, joining the CRS program. That's something that we are really committed to and we very much want to do within the next five years. That's the only one, as far as I know, that really will require additional staff. So it's possible that for whatever happens with resources, it's possible that might have to get kicked further down the line. But because it's such a high priority, we put it in here saying that this is something we want to try to do if we can.

So all the, excluding item B, A through L, are these going to help give you the points that you might need to improve your CRS status?

Some of them will give us the additional points to help us get to that, yes. So for example, F, creating that river corridor standard, there's ways that we can do that that would give us points in the CRS program. H, for updating flood standards in the zoning ordinance. Those are kind of the big two that would get us what we need to be able to qualify or get to a higher level of CRS rating.

And the CRS program, at the town level or the small area, does that affect insurance rates for the people affected by it? Generally, if you have a CRS rating?

So one of the major goals of getting into that program is that it does reduce the community-wide cost for flood insurance. I'm sure there's probably other benefits to the program. I'm not a floodplain manager though, but the lower rates is like the main reason why people want to join that. other than increasing safety, of course, but.

There's that too. There's that too, yeah.

Any other thoughts? There's a lot to look through.

So just so you know, this will now be working its way for the millionth time through some of our technical expertise and agencies just for a final look over before it goes to public hearings. I believe we have it scheduled or at least in our minds for November 16th. Is that a Monday for the planning board's public hearing for it to come back to you for official public hearing? And then the very next day for board of commissioners where they would review and choose whether or not to adopt or make changes. And then once that happens, staff can move into the implementation phase.

Those are the right dates, 16, 17. Okay. Yep.

Oh, I'm sorry. In August, this is also super important. We have one more round of public engagement. So the public has seen all the recommendations in the plan. They've seen all the maps at several rounds over many months. But in the first two weeks of August, we'll be going back out to the community with this draft where they can kind of see what it all looks like put together. We'll be holding several exhibits in Swannanoa where people can drop in and they can They'll be able to walk through this exhibit and see what we worked on, what people said through different phases, and really dig into all of the different recommendations. Also look at a copy of this and then tell us if they have proposed changes or questions. And so we can get you those dates. Ileah can send you those dates after this meeting if you'd like, but that'll be our last big push to get any big feedback before it goes to public hearing.

I'd just like to add that one of the reasons this looks as good as it did and that it was as successful in the community meetings as it was is because of the planning staff and all of the energy they put into it. And they deserve a huge amount of credit for that, just like they did on the 2043.

Thank you, Nancy. All right. Well, if no one has any other comments or questions, then we can take it to the community.

Very good. All right. Now, I think we are finished with the agenda for today. Did I leave anything else out? Sorry for all of that. But anyway. I'm hoping to adjourn. That says it.

As I find it incomplete here since the 2024 plan. The 2040 plan. All those in favor?