Wes Hunter: 9th generation farmer

June 2.  By Dave Yochum. The last time this 36-acre parcel of farmland on Bailey Road was farmed was four years ago. Since then it’s been under contract and enmeshed in controversy. The Town Board is expected to vote on its fate—whether it will be rezoned from Rural Preserve to Conditional—at their June 2 meeting.

Instead of soybeans, what would be planted is 188,100 square feet of flex office buildings targeting the small business market, which has few options in Cornelius apart from retail.

Developer Greenberg Gibbons Properties would invest $39 million which would include adding a left-turn lane from Bailey heading south on Hwy. 115 and safety improvements in the road near the entrance to Bailey Road Park.

New jobs come too, 175 to 250 of them, according to Greenberg Gibbons not to mention $300,000 in new property tax revenue.

On the other side of the issue are residents in neighborhoods on Bailey Road including the Bailey’s Glen retirement community where concerns have been raised about unmanageable traffic during school drop-off and pick-up times at two different schools—and a third one is planned—all on a two-lane road.

Hough High and Bailey Middle were built before there were requirements to contain drop-off and pick-up traffic on-site, as opposed to the road. Cars stack up along the road trying to enter and leave. According to town officials, CMS has not been responsive around fixing the problem.

To make matters worse, CMS will be moving some students from Davidson K-8 this fall.

Agrarian past

In the middle of all this are property owners Gene Hunter, 71, and his son Wes, 54. Gene owns the land which is adjacent to the Potts Plantation. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998 and has been in the Potts family  since before the Revolutionary War. The bulk of the property—more than 500 acres—is more or less behind Mt. Zion United Methodist Church and to the south of the Antiquity neighborhood.

Over the course of two centuries, the plantation was broken into multiple owners before being substantially put back together again by Gene’s grandfather, Clifton Eugene Smith, a cotton broker who developed the Smithville neighborhood for former slaves more than a century ago.

The parcel on Bailey Road was owned separately by Gene’s late mother, Lilyan Smith Hunter. In Mecklenburg County records, it’s valued at $2.98 million. Not disclosed is the contract price Greenberg Gibbons will pay, but it will allow Gene to retire, according to Wes.

The Hunters are working farmers, even as farming becomes less and less a profitable enterprise in what was once a predominantly agricultural community. A key customer, Archer-Daniels-Midland is permanently shutting down its soybean processing plant in Kershaw, S.C.

This is the first year since the 1750s that the Potts-Smith-Hunter family is not farming their land, as well as adjacent and nearby farms—which are virtually all gone.

“It just got to the point where it is not profitable any more,” Wes said.

So it’s time to sell.

The situation

Some people have called for them not to sell, which is not exactly an option when you’re sitting on 500-plus acres with taxes to pay. Others say the land should become a park, but no one from the town has ever approached them with such an offer, Wes says.

New multi-family residential is not on anyone’s wish list either.

The town has also sent mixed signals. A planning staff report recommended against the Greenberg Gibbons plan which was downsized from their original proposal two years ago in an effort to overcome objections about its size and impact.

“While the proposed flex space use is recommended as a potential primary land use in the Business Campus area, staff finds the relatively small unit footprints, proposed service tenant mix, and overall scale of the development to be inconsistent with the vision for this area of creating a cohesive employment-generating center,” the planning staff said.

Planning Board votes 7-1 in favor

Bailey runs across the bottom of the site plan

The Planning Board over-rode staff and recommended in May by a 7-1 vote that the project should be approved by the Town Board in June.

It’s really anyone’s guess as to how the vote will go, but going out on a limb in an election year isn’t the norm.

“If you’re not allowed to do anything there [on the Bailey Road property], what is the value,” Wes asked.  “We’ve brought a developer who meets the land use plan and we would just like the town to follow through with that plan.”

If the Greenberg Gibbons proposal fails, will “something worse” be built there? Paul Herbert, a nearby resident and critic, says “In the opinion of many, this is the something worse.”

It is zoned currently as “Rural Preservation” which allows one house per three acres of land or 12 houses.

Drew Thigpen, vice president at Greenberg Gibbons, said “the town has said for years now that the only rezoning they will support at this location is Business Campus,” which means no single-family homes on three acres.

“They have turned down the Hunters’ offers for residential projects and said the only option that is allowed is Business Campus, because that’s what the land use plan has called for for decades,” Thigpen said.

“Now they are potentially saying that even that use is not allowed. If that is the case, they are effectively saying the Hunters cannot rezone their land for any potential use,” he explained.

Drew Thigpen

Two years ago Greenberg Gibbons withdrew similar plans for a larger business complex in the face of vigorous opposition.

The Greenberg Gibbons plan includes seven figures worth of road improvements which would not be funded without the town footing the bill.

“If anyone is looking for real infrastructure improvements, the only immediate tangible solutions are with this project,” Thigpen said.

The Town Board meeting will begin at 6 pm in Town Hall. It will also be live streamed on the town web site: www.cornelius.org.