Owners Tommy (top) and Anna Barbee with farm manager Brent Barbee, whose home could be lost. (Barbee Farms photo)
Public hearing is
Thursday in Concord
By ALEX GREGOR
DavidsonNews.net
Just over two weeks ago, Cabarrus County farmers Tommy and Anna Barbee received a letter from the N.C. Department of Transportation announcing a public hearing on Thursday, Oct. 1. It mentioned a project to widen I-85 to an eight-lane highway, connecting I-485 in Charlotte with NC 73 near Poplar Tent in Cabarrus County.
Mr. Barbee had learned of the project more than a year ago when an earlier public hearing gave landowners the chance to speak with project engineers from NCDOT. But this letter was his first notice that the DOT plans are calling for Pitts School Road, which currently runs close to his farm, to be re-routed straight through his land.
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“Their proposed route basically cuts us in half,” Mr. Barbee told DavidsonNews.net this week. “It completely separates our retail and washing and packing facilities from the rest of the farm. Those facilities will be on one side of the road. Where we grow 90 percent of our crops will be on the other side of that road.”
While NCDOT’s proposal for Pitts School Road affects only two landowners, it would remove 5.4 acres of Barbee Farms from agricultural production and require the relocation of the home of Farm Manager Brent Barbee, Tommy and Anna’s son.
“Brent’s house will be right in the middle” of the realignment, Mr. Barbee noted. “That was my grandfather’s house that’s been on that farm ever since it was built, so that’s part of us. We’d rather not lose that if we don’t have to.”
The DOT also has been considering another possible alignment for the road, which would not cut through the farm. “One (option) probably has more impact on the [agricultural] property. The other minimizes some of the impacts for the property but at the same time is not as safe of an alignment,” said Barry Moose, the N.C. DOT’s regional engineer.
AGRICULTURAL DISTRICT
All 75-acres of Barbee Farms are part of a Voluntary Agricultural District, a designation intended to provide protection from development and economic incentives for agriculture. The Barbee family’s farm is also designated as a Century Farm—one that has been farmed by the same family for at least 100 years.
Map shows alternate alignment for Pitts School Road, which would not cut through Barbee Farms. To read more about the plan and see additional maps, click on the image)
The realignment of Pitts School Road is intended to accommodate a larger interchange for I-85 at Poplar Tent Road and would move the intersection of Pitts School Road and Poplar Tent Road farther away from the highway than it is at present.
The new plan also aims to improve the safety of Pitts School Road, which currently features a hairpin turn near its intersection with Poplar Tent Road. This curve has a speed limit of 20 miles per hour and has been the site of numerous accidents. The proposed realignment would do away with this sharp bend in the road.
But Mr. Barbee does not believe that the proposed realignment will make the road much safer. He estimates that he and his workers would have to cross the realigned Pitts School Road 20 to 25 times per day, either by foot or with heavy machinery. In his view, crossing the 45 mile-per-hour road so many times will make Pitts School Road “an extremely unsafe habitat for us and for drivers. It will affect us both.”
TWO OPTIONS
The realignment endorsed by NCDOT was just one option for moving Pitts School Road evaluated in the I-85 project’s Federal Environmental Assessment. The Environmental Assessment notes that “a shorter realignment of Pitts School Road was also considered.” This option “would reduce overall project costs slightly as compared with the recommended realignment of Pitts School Road, avoid the displacement of homes and businesses, and reduce impacts on the Voluntary Agricultural District” by several acres.
But the document goes on to note that the shorter realignment was not endorsed because it does not make Pitts School Road as straight as the recommended option.
Mr. Moose explained that the alignment recommended in the Environmental Assessment significantly softens the sharp turn that exists in Pitts School Road. The Plan B option is less appealing to NCDOT because “it’s certainly not making a large improvement over what’s there now.”
He said that because of public interest in the issue, including phone calls and letters to NCDOT offices, he intends to meet with property owners later in the month in order to discuss their concerns and see the farm himself.
“I’m a big believer in having the public engaged. With a lot of our projects, it’s difficult to get the public engaged so I’m glad that we’ve gotten them engaged early in this project,” Mr. Moose said.
“The difficult task for us is trying to find that balance of a design that has the least impact on the adjacent property” but can accommodate increasing traffic through the area, Mr. Moose said.
“In the long-term, this area is still poised to be a high growth area for the state. A lot of times we have one chance to do it right so we have to be extremely careful that our decisions [about planning and infrastructure] are sustainable for the future.”
The project is not set to go to construction until August 2011 at the earliest. Mr. Moose said a decision about the final realignment of Pitts School Road “has not been made yet. The whole purpose of this process is to let the public know what our preferred alignment is. But until we get public comments and take into account public comments the decision for the alignment is not an official decision.”
Mr. Barbee said the realignment recommended by NCDOT would have a negative effect on traffic flow and road safety. “We can affect travel flow just crossing the road with farm equipment,” he said.
When asked about the hazard that daily farm traffic across Pitts School Road would present to drivers and farmers, Mr. Moose acknowledged that “there’s certainly merit to that.”
WILL IT SLOW BUSINESS?
Moreover, Mr. Barbee expects that dividing the farm in two will almost certainly slow down work and hurt the farm’s business. “We’ve got a pretty good flow the way we operate now. Any time you affect that flow, you affect production, pricing, all the way down the line.”
A number of people have rallied around Barbees, including local food and land-use activist Christy Shi, who runs Davidson business Know Your Farms LLC and works with the Barbees through her business. Ms. Shi has created a Help Save the Farm website with information about the issue and is organizing supporters of the Barbees to attend the public hearing on Thursday night.
Ms. Shi, who plans to speak at Thursday’s hearing, said that in supporting Barbee Farms, “We’re not trying to go against DOT. We’re trying to say, you have delineated two options. Why don’t you go with Plan B?”
Carol Mayes, a land use consultant with Mayes Wilson & Associates, LLC and chair of Davidson Farmers Market, emphasizes the value in conserving operational farmland. “Our farmland is not cheap and it’s of real value to the community. We wish it were given a little more priority” in state planning processes.
She said North Carolina leads the nation in rates of farmland loss. Farms throughout the state are under increasing pressure from development and multi-generational farms such as Barbee Farms are increasingly rare, Ms. Mayes said.
Development does not always take a holistic view of communities and their infrastructure needs, she said. “In my thinking, the farm and local food network is just as important a form of infrastructure to make a whole community sustainable” as roads, Ms. Mayes said. “We just wish that our elected officials and our government officials took that as seriously as we the people of North Carolina do.”
UNCERTAINTY AHEAD
As part of a Voluntary Agricultural District, the Barbees’ land cannot be appropriated for any non-agricultural project until after a second hearing. While plans for the I-85 project and the Pitts School Road realignment are finalized, however, a degree of uncertainty will hang over work on the farm.
Said Mr. Barbee: “We’re in planning stages right now for crops next year. The acreage that they’re talking about affecting, I don’t know whether to plant crops for that acreage. We apply a lot of our fertilizers in the fall. I don’t need to plough fertilizer if there’s going to be a road through there. I don’t need to plant anything in there next spring if in the middle of the summer they’re going to come in and destroy it.”
Regardless of the project’s outcome, the Barbees hope they will be able to continue farming as they have now for six generations.
“The generation before me have given me the opportunity to make decisions,” Mr. Barbee said. “I want to do the same thing for the generation after me.”
WANT TO GO?
NCDOT will hold a pre-hearing open house about this project on Thursday, October 1st from 4:30-6:30pm in the cafeteria of NW Cabarrus High School, located at 5130 NW Cabarrus Drive, Concord. The open house will be followed by a public hearing at 7:00pm, to be held in the school’s auditorium.
More information about the project is available on the Help Save the Farm website.
See also the Barbee Farms website.
