10-07-08: Craven planner: New runoff rules won't be burden

NEW BERN -- The county planning director says new state stormwater rules that took effect last week will have "relatively minimal impact on Craven County."

Don Baumgardner, the planning director, gave a briefing to the Board of Commissioners at its meeting Monday night.

"The biggest thing will be people who want to put a large house on a small piece of property," he said.

Baumgardner said such development is not common in the southeast section of the county around Clubfoot Creek and Adams Creek, where the regulations would be most likely to come into play.

There, builders will have stricter requirements for development within a half mile of shellfishing waters. They will have to put rain barrels, cisterns and permeable pavement on small lots on which they plan to put a structure larger than 10,000 square feet that covers more than 12 percent of the land, Baumgardner said.

In that area, however, he said, "most have 50- to 100-foot setback from the river and a lot of times that area can used for calculating the building area."

The new regulations increase the minimum setback from 30 to 50 feet.

Baumgardner said the new rule that there be no new points of discharge into waterways may be the most difficult to comply with and enforce. Discharge from any new development would have to flow into already-existing ditches or canals.

Commissioner Steve Tyson, a developer who also lives and plays on area waterways, said he thinks the new rules will work to improve water quality without undue hardship on development.

"I personally believe that the system worked," said Tyson. "The government regulators and the government legislators listened to the stakeholders on both sides - the developers and the environmentalists.

"All of their voices were heard. And nobody won a clear victory. There were compromises made on both sides and the results are a pretty fair plan for both sides."

Tyson said most new developments will be in subdivisions that have stormwater rules imposed for the most part anyway. He agreed with Baumgardner that it would have to be a large structure to meet the threshold for these stormwater regulations on a single lot.

Commissioner Perry Morris said new rules for determining wetlands will take a lot of property out of development.

After local leaders became aware of the proposed changed last fall, they met with state Department of Environment and Natural Resources staff who provided more information.

Leaders of the 20 coastal counties affected by the new regulations were spurred by groups such as the Craven-Pamlico Homebuilders Association. The leaders lobbied their legislators for some relaxation of the stiff rules first suggested.

"When it started out there were some pretty tough regulations that would affect a lot of people including owners of mobile homes," Tyson said. "I felt pretty pleased that everybody's side was heard, some measures were relaxed, and we still moved more closely toward better water quality. I'm sure as we move forward we will see other things we can do."

The North Carolina Division of Water Quality will be in charge of enforcing the rules. The state has a design manual with hundreds of plans to deal with stormwater runoff.