Neighbors say the county’s own planners already agree with them — so why is a rezoning request still headed for a vote?

By Miles Layton

ELIZABETH CITY — Dale Hoak doesn’t need a map to show you where this fight starts. He can walk it.

From the fence line of one of his horse pastures at Hoak Haven Farm to the edge of the land a developer wants rezoned for houses, it’s about 30 feet. Thirty feet of open ground, for now, standing between a working farm and what could become a 30-home subdivision.

“For my family, the proposed rezoning on Mill Pond Road is not an abstract debate about growth or property development,” Hoak said. “It is happening literally in our backyard.”

Hoak Haven Farm is where Hoak and his family live, work, and raise horses — the kind of operation that depends on quiet roads, clean drainage, and neighbors who understand what a farm actually needs to keep running. Rezoning Request #26-03, now working its way toward the Pasquotank County Board of Commissioners, would convert roughly 33.43 acres at 1305 Millpond Road from A-1 Agricultural to R-25A Residential. County staff estimates the property, once rezoned, could eventually hold as many as 30 homes.

For Hoak, the number that matters isn’t 30. It’s 30 feet.

“Part of the property being considered for rezoning comes within approximately 30 feet of one of our horse pastures,” he said. “That means replacing agricultural land next to an active farm with residential development and everything that comes with it — additional traffic, noise, lighting, runoff, drainage demands, and inevitable conflicts between residential expectations and normal agricultural operations.”

He isn’t alone in raising the alarm. A grassroots petition, posted at stoprz26-03.netlify.app, is asking commissioners to reject the request outright, or at minimum hold off on a vote until the county answers questions about drainage, septic capacity, traffic, and the property’s compatibility with the farms around it. Before agricultural land is permanently converted, the petition argues, the public deserves a full accounting of the consequences — stormwater, groundwater, road safety, and the long-term effect on the county’s own land-use plan.

“The Road We Take Home”

Hoak’s objections start with zoning philosophy, but they end somewhere much more immediate: the pavement outside his front gate.

“Pasquotank County’s own agricultural zoning recognizes the importance of preserving the open and agricultural character of these areas,” he said. “There is a reason for that. Once agricultural land is converted and development begins pushing into working farms, getting that rural character back is nearly impossible.”

Water is the part of the equation he keeps returning to. Horse country runs on drainage — pastures that flood are pastures that can’t be used, and roads that wash out are roads that cut a farm off from everyone who keeps it running.

“Anyone who lives and works in this area understands how important drainage is, particularly after significant rainfall,” Hoak said. “Adding roads, rooftops, driveways, grading, and other impervious surfaces changes how water moves across the land. If that water is not properly accounted for, the consequences do not stop at the property line.”

Millpond Road itself is the lifeline. “It is not simply the road we take home,” Hoak said. “It is the road our customers, horse owners, veterinarians, farriers, feed deliveries, trailers, and emergency vehicles depend on to reach Hoak Haven Farm.” If added runoff overwhelms the drainage system and causes flooding or erosion, he said, it could directly threaten the farm’s ability to operate — and he wants those questions answered before the rezoning happens, not after.

The comparison Hoak reaches for is one that keeps surfacing in the debate over Millpond Road: Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, cities that grew by paving over the farmland that once defined them.

“I do not want Pasquotank County to follow the same path,” he said. “Growth is necessary, and I am not opposed to responsible development, but there is a difference between responsible growth and placing residential development in the middle of an established agricultural area simply because land is available.”

What’s at stake, for the Hoak family, isn’t just a pasture fence. “My family chose to build our life here because this is a place where people can still work the land, raise animals, run agricultural businesses, and look across a pasture instead of another subdivision,” he said. “If we do not make deliberate decisions to protect them now, we should not be surprised when one day we look around and realize that the very reason people wanted to live here in the first place is gone.”

Staff Got There First

What’s given the petition its momentum is that the county’s own planners reached a similar conclusion before any resident wrote a letter. The Planning & Inspections Department’s analysis found the rezoning inconsistent with the 2023 Pasquotank County Land Use Plan, which classifies the Millpond Road property as Agricultural/Rural and states that most of Newland Township should stay that way. Staff recommended the Board find the request “not reasonable and not in the public interest.” The Planning Board later recommended denial as well. See the staff’s letter at the end of the story.

That finding anchors the case Ben Barnhill has been making to the county. Barnhill, who lives on Blindman Road, sent a letter to the Board of Commissioners on Aug. 28, addressed to Chairman Griffin and copied to Planning Director Shelley Cox and Clerk to the Board Lynn Scott.

“Staff found the request is not consistent with the 2023 Pasquotank County Land Use Plan,” Barnhill wrote, noting the plan classifies the site as Agricultural/Rural and calls for most of Newland Township to remain that way. He isn’t persuaded by the argument that one nearby subdivision justifies another: “One neighboring R-25A tract (Oak Ridge Phase 2, 2013) does not justify expanding residential zoning into additional Agricultural/Rural land.”

What worries him most is what approval would set in motion. “Approval [of] the rezoning of this parcel sets a horrible precedent,” Barnhill wrote. “It would for all intents and purposes invalidate the Land Use Plan and the UDO. It would create a ‘loop hole’ that would allow developers to incrementally develop parcel after parcel until Newland Township becomes unrecognizable, looking like Chesapeake or Virginia Beach.” A rezoning here, he warned, could hand future developers a legal argument for high-density projects elsewhere in the county.

Barnhill has also run the numbers on what a new subdivision would cost the county to serve — schools, sheriff’s patrols, EMS, road maintenance, water and power — against what it would bring in through property taxes. Using the county’s current tax rate of 62 cents per $100 of assessed value and a median home value around $220,000 to $225,000, he estimates a new house typically needs to be assessed well above that median — somewhere in the $400,000 to $700,000 range, depending on how many children it sends to Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools — before it pays the county more than it costs in services. A starter-home subdivision assessed in the $250,000 to $325,000 range, he argues, is likely to run at a loss for the county once school costs are factored in, meaning existing taxpayers would quietly make up the difference.

Not Anti-Growth, Organizers Say

Resident Brittany Taylor White raised a parallel concern in her own letter to the Board, framing the request as a test of whether the county’s land-use plan carries any real weight. “If individual parcels can be routinely rezoned from agricultural to residential despite being designated Agricultural/Rural in the adopted plan, the effectiveness and credibility of that plan are seriously weakened,” she wrote. “That is my primary concern with this request.”

White was careful to draw a line between opposing this particular rezoning and opposing growth altogether. “I am not opposed to residential growth or responsible development,” she wrote. “I am asking that growth occur in the locations identified by the County’s own planning process as appropriate for that growth.” Approving rezonings one at a time, she argued, risks producing exactly the kind of scattered development the land-use plan was written to prevent, as developers conclude that the easiest path into agricultural land is simply to ask for it, parcel by parcel.

She also echoed the practical fallout neighbors like Hoak are already describing — changes in traffic, drainage patterns, and compatibility with existing farm operations if the land is converted.

It was White who, separately, had pressed the county’s planning department directly about many of these same concerns — not about the Millpond Road rezoning specifically, but about the draft Unified Development Ordinance now being written to govern growth countywide. And it’s in the county’s answer to her that some of the clearest evidence emerges of just how seriously officials are treating the underlying worries.

The County Responds

In an Aug. 27 letter addressed to White, Planning & Inspections Director Shelley L. Cox, AICP, thanked White for her “continued participation in the County’s planning process,” writing that her concerns “reflect many of the same issues the UDO update is intended to address.”

That letter is posted at the end of the story.

Cox’s response walked through the seven areas White had raised, tying each back to specific sections of the draft ordinance. On infrastructure capacity, Cox pointed to Article 5, which carries forward existing requirements for utilities, fire hydrants, streets, and stormwater management for new subdivisions, and Article 7, which sets up review procedures for site plans, subdivisions, special use permits, and rezonings. Cox acknowledged that White’s call for an explicit infrastructure-adequacy review before major developments are approved aligns with the ordinance’s broader goals, and said staff and outside consultants “can consider whether additional language addressing infrastructure capacity assessments should be incorporated into future drafts.”

Stormwater and drainage — the same issues Hoak raises about his own pastures — are addressed, Cox wrote, through subdivision standards and the county’s existing Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance, which will be carried into a new Article 6 governing flood hazard reduction, floodways, and floodplain development permits. The draft ordinance also keeps the county’s A-1 and A-2 agricultural zoning districts in place, while floodplain rules would limit development in designated flood hazard areas.

On protecting existing neighborhoods from conflicting land uses, Cox said Article 4 consolidates landscaping, bufferyard, screening, and property-line buffer rules into a single article, meant to make the standards “easier to locate and administer.” On traffic, she noted that the North Carolina Department of Transportation sits on the county’s Technical Review Committee, and confirmed a new standard requiring a Traffic Impact Analysis for any development expected to generate more than 500 trips a day.

On the harder question — how the county accounts for cumulative growth pressure across many small approvals, rather than one project at a time — Cox was more measured. The current draft has no standalone section on cumulative impact analysis, she said, though existing review processes offer some avenue for it, and she called White’s suggestion “a policy issue that may warrant additional discussion as ordinance drafting progresses.”

Cox closed by noting that the UDO’s broader goal is to replace aspirational language with “clear, objective, and enforceable standards,” and that White’s comments “will remain part of the public record,” available to officials, staff, and the consulting team as drafting continues. The UDO remains in the drafting phase.

What’s Next

The record the Board of Commissioners will vote on for Rezoning Request #26-03 runs four pages — covering the zoning request, surrounding land uses, flood-zone status, land-use classification, and projected density — but it stops short of the detailed studies petition organizers say a project this size warrants: how stormwater would be handled once roads and rooftops replace open fields, whether the site can support 30 homes on septic without groundwater problems, what added traffic would mean for a rural road never built for subdivision volume, and what would protect existing farm operations from the noise, dust, and complaints that tend to follow when new rooftops go up next to old pastures.

Under state law, commissioners must adopt a plan-consistency statement and a reasonableness statement before acting on any rezoning request, guided by the county’s Future Land Use Map. Petition organizers say they intend to keep collecting signatures ahead of that vote.

“I respectfully ask the Board of Commissioners to deny Rezoning Request #26-03, uphold the Planning Board’s recommendation, and respect the Agricultural/Rural designation in the adopted Land Use Plan,” White wrote — a line that has become something close to a rallying cry for the petition drive.

For Hoak, the stakes are simpler to state than they are to resolve. It isn’t really about a line on a zoning map. It’s about whether a horse can still stand thirty feet from a subdivision fence and have that be normal — or whether, a few years from now, it’s the pasture that looks like the anomaly.