NO-ZONERS REPENTING IN BUNCOMBE

"I did cut my nose off to spite my face, and I guess I'm paying the price. I don't think any of us realized … what the future was going to be."
Buncombe County resident Beth Woody, who voted against county-wide zoning in 1999 and who now regrets that vote, quoted in the Asheville Citizen-Times

The 1999 public vote for/against zoning in Buncombe County was a non-binding referendum. Some 55.6 percent of those who voted said no to zoning, impelled partly by a no-zoning scare campaign not at all unlike the scare campaign that carried Watauga County over a cliff in 2001. The people who benefitted the most in both counties were big-time developers.

Now looky here ... at how some of those no-zoners in Buncombe are ruing the day that they decided that planning for the future was a communist plot. Apparently, development is even more out of control in rural Buncombe than it is in rural Watauga. But both locales are getting exactly what they asked for. Now they'll have to BEG for land-use planning.