Local Planners Outline Growth Issues in Moore County

This article was first published in The Pilot on March 18, 2022.

Planning directors shared details about the inner workings of development in Moore County at a panel meeting Wednesday at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club.

Filling a packed room were private and public sector leaders gathered together as members of Moore 100, a relatively new group created by the county’s economic development arm, Moore County Partners in Progress. The mayors of Aberdeen, Pinehurst and Southern Pines attended the panel discussion, as well as Frank Quis, chair of the Moore County Board of Commissioners.

However, taking center stage were not the politicians but those who work for them “in the trenches everyday,” said Adam Kiker, as he introduced the panelists. These planners don’t often get the spotlight, but they are responsible for doing much of the legwork when it comes to managing developments within the county and its municipalities, Kiker said.

The planning directors featured on the panel included BJ Grieve of Southern Pines, Darryn Burich of Pinehurst, Justin Westbrook of Aberdeen and the county’s head of planning, Debra Ensminger. Each took turns answering various questions about the increasing demand for development opportunities in the county.

This planning discussion comes as Moore County has seen a substantial uptick in development interest, particularly in the past five years. Partners in Progress has seen a 35 percent increase in businesses looking to develop in the area since July 1, 2021, according to its latest quarterly progress report from the end of last year.

The largest common area of growth was residential developments, with subdivisions being popular pretty much across the board.

Grieve said that, most recently, Southern Pines is seeing significant interest from developers for apartment complexes and townhomes. He noted that his department is seeing proposals for 1,300 to 1,400 apartment units across six different projects.

On the other hand, Westbrook has been processing a lot of applications for single-family residential homes in Aberdeen. If permits weren’t an issue, he estimates that 2,000 single-family detached homes, including some subdivisions, could be built in Aberdeen today. That number, he added, excludes “a lot of the larger subdivisions that haven't been built out such as Legacy Lakes.”

Pinehurst continues to see a similar interest in single-family residential developments. Burich said his department has two or three subdivisions currently under review and one under development. Space for residential developments, especially large subdivisions, is getting harder to come by these days, and higher land costs make such projects less feasible.

“There's an immense demand for single-family residential in our market, and we are starting to run out of developable lands,” Burich said. “There's not a lot of large land tracts left out there that are zoned appropriately.”

With space filling up in the denser municipalities, many developers are looking toward annexing county land to build subdivisions, Ensinger said. The county is also dealing with a major increase in residential subdivisions on the fringes of incorporated municipalities in the past five years. Developers, she noted, want to expand into the county proper, but certain rules and regulations make that a challenge.

“We do have those that would like to develop in the county,” she said, “but that’s not an option.”

Ensinger explained that one of the main factors why the county isn’t seeing major commercial development is because the county doesn’t require developers to connect their buildings to public sewer. This leads to a reliance on septic systems, which Ensinger says are unsustainable and difficult to get approved in a timely manner.

As a way to spur future development, Ensinger said that the county is thinking about updating its long range development plan to include a requirement that major subdivisions connect to public water and sewer.

“And so that would guide the growth, where growth needs to go,” Ensinger said. “And that’s to the towns out, instead of out to the towns,” Ensinger said.

In addition to discussing shared areas of development, the planners talked about how they work with each other to manage the tremendous amount of growth in the county. They communicate on a regular basis, seeking help when zoning issues come up and helping each other with routine inspections when one municipality is short-staffed.

There are also more formal ways in which the planning staff collaborate, including an agreement where Pinehurst, Aberdeen and Southern Pines have to alert each other to developments that occur within half a mile of the adjacent municipality.

Westbrook said that communication is key when it comes to planning staff collaborating across the three towns and with the county. This means not only talking to each other, but also keeping the lines of communication open with public entities like the state transportation and watershed departments and private partners such as the engineering firms and developers.

“It’s not an us vs. them mentality,” Westbrook said. “What’s good for the county is good for everybody and vice versa. . . . It’s very much a symbiotic relationship as long as we can keep those conversations open and honest.”