News

County commission scheduled to take up 2045 comp plan Wednesday

By Bill Moss, Published: March 18, 2024

The Henderson County Board of Commissioners could vote on adoption of a  2045 comprehensive land-use plan during its regular mid-month meeting on Wednesday morning, setting the stage for goals and policies designed to manage growth over the next 20 years.

Three years in the making, the comp plan and the commissioners' changes to the draft they received is widely believed to be one reason two incumbents lost their re-election bids two weeks ago.

The county started drafting the comp plan in July 2021 and, over the next two years, thousands of residents expressed their views in person and on line about their vision for the next two decades.
Commissioners received the Planning Board’s recommended draft of the plan on Dec. 5, 2022, and held a public hearing. The board decided a month later to review the plan's goals and action steps one by one and in July 2023 began to review the draft Future Land Use Map.

“The Board responded to public comment and strengthened recommendations related to agricultural preservation and edited the FLUM in the Etowah area,” a staff review of the process said. “The latest version of the 2045 Comprehensive Plan reflects these changes along with other changes the board discussed over several months.”
The board was initially scheduled to take up the comp plan adoption on Feb. 21, 11 days before the primary election during which the two incumbents on the ballot lost their jobs. Commissioners at that time booted the agenda item to this week because, board Chair Rebecca McCall said, they agreed they needed more time to review it.
Critics have excoriated commissioners for what they described as a significant retreat from the recommendations on land conservation, farmland preservation and urban sprawl prevention that more than 7,000 survey respondents supported.

"If I were still a county commissioner, I would vote no on this plan and I urge you to vote no," Chuck McGrady, a former county commissioners and five-term state House member, told the board in April 2023. "First, the current draft fails to establish a vision for 2045 that is consistent with the views of the residents of the county," he said. "You've largely ignored what they asked you to do. Second while the surviving goals are consistent with the desires of your constituents, you pretty much deleted most of the action items by consistently replacing actionable verbs by a bunch of weasel words, rather than saying what you want staff to do following the adoption of the plan."

David Weintraub, an environmental activist who is director of the Center for Cultural Preservation, urged residents to turn out to speak against the plan's adoption.

"This is the same comp plan that contradicts everything citizens have been asking for," he said, calling the draft "a recipe for sprawl which would encourage the destruction of tree canopies, the filling of open space with more residential developments and McMansions, the continuation of inappropriate development in rural areas."