At tonight’s meeting of the Buncombe County Commissioners, some land was up for initial zoning. Commissioner Miranda DeBruhl established that the county was only zoning the property because new legislation said could, and not because it had to. Brownie Newman and Ellen Frost wanted to zone the property because without a zoning, the steep slope and high elevation overlays did not apply. Residents consistently asked for R1 instead of R3 zoning, but the commissioners ended up voting to make it R3. Chair David Gantt at least requested a friendly amendment to waive the $250 application fee for affected property owners who wanted to appeal the zoning that was about to go down.
A gentleman, whose name sounded like Michael Parrish, was incredulous. He said he had gone to two public meetings, and nobody listened to the public. Almost everybody had wanted R1 zoning, because they didn’t want trailer parks bringing down their property values. So, they were zoned R3. It was nice of the commissioners to let them rezone their own property, but nothing had been done to prevent somebody wanting to set up a trailer park from doing so. The vague staff reports for the public hearing may be reviewed here.
