SNOW HILL – A rezoning request for property near Route 113 in Bishopville will be forwarded to the Worcester County Commissioners with a favorable recommendation.
The Worcester County Planning Commission last week voted 6-1 to provide a favorable recommendation for a rezoning requested for slightly less than nine acres on Jarvis Road. The property, which is near the Jarvis Road and Route 113 intersection, is proposed to go from A-1 to A-2.
“As an A-1 property there’s really not much you can do with it,” said Hugh Cropper, the attorney representing the property owner.
Cropper told the commission his client, Nick Borodulia, wanted to reclassify 8.9 acres of property he owned on Jarvis Road. While rezonings can be requested based on either a change in the character of the neighborhood or on a mistake, Cropper said in this case the request was being made based on a mistake.
He said that when the parcel was designated A-1 during the last comprehensive rezoning, that was when the county was predicting a lot of growth in the Showell area. That growth didn’t occur.
“I know mistake can be difficult to prove but you have to keep in mind hindsight’s 20-20,” Cropper said.
He said there was a small house on the property though much of it was used for farming. He said about six acres of the property was tillable but that there were access issues and multiple wet spots.
“To say this is poor farmland would be an understatement,” he said.
Cropper said the A-2 zoning would give his client more options for the property.
“It would be some productive use of this property other than a little 1,500 square foot rental house that he has to kind of nursed along and a nonperforming nonproductive little bit of farmland,” Cropper said.
He added the property was near a large swath of industrially zoned land.
“It’s directly across from the biggest contiguous industrial zone in the county,” he said. “If that becomes developed this is going to be even less suitable for a single family residence.”
Commission member Phyllis Wimbrow objected to Cropper’s criticism of the site as farmland.
“Your argument that an eighty-acre property is not big enough for farming, I can tell you right now that’s baloney,” she said. “My husband and many farmers till properties that are that size or smaller.”
Cropper said his assertion was not that the property was too small but rather that it had poor soil, ditches, and access issues.
“To me that’s no justification for a rezoning,” Wimbrow responded. “The same conditions exist in other places in this county, and they are successfully farmed.”
Commission member Mary Knight said she’d reviewed the uses allowed in the A-1 and the uses permitted in the A-2 and had found few differences. Cropper agreed and said that of the 41 special exceptions in the A-2, 34 were already permitted in the A-1.
“I have no problem with this rezoning,” Knight said.
Wimbrow said what Cropper proposed would constitute spot zoning, when a piece of property has different zoning than other neighboring properties.
“I believe a rezoning could be compatible with the comprehensive plan and still not be a good one,” she said.
Cropper maintained that the property was not good for farming or residential.
“He bought the property with full knowledge of that,” Wimbrow said.
Cropper said Borodulia bought the land in 2006 when there was no difference between A-1 and A-2.
Commission member Ken Church said he understood the reasoning behind the rezoning request.
“It bothers me to limit him for something that in my mind changed after the fact,” he said of the A-1 designation.
Bob Mitchell, the county’s director of environmental programs, said the land was clearly farmed.
“This should remain A-1,” he said. “There’s no reason for this to go to A2 right now.”
He added that the neighboring industrial property that Cropper referenced had not yet been developed. “We haven’t realized any of this industrial zone. We don’t have the sewer capacity…,” he said, adding that the development landscape in the area had been different in 2009. “Was there an actual mistake by the legislative body in keeping this A-1 at the time? I don’t think there was.”
Wimbrow said there was no mistake and made a motion to that effect. When it failed to get a second, Knight made a motion to send the rezoning request on to the commissioners with a favorable recommendation. The motion passed 6-1 with Wimbrow opposed.