Mountaire Farms finds rural parcel has vocal neighbors
Sussex County's permissive zoning laws are once again raising tensions between homeowners and big poultry.
In much of the county, housing developments and farms are allowed to co-exist on identically zoned land. It's what makes Sussex look as rural as it does, but it's leading to headaches for Mountaire Farms, a 101-year-old poultry company with operations in Selbyville and near Millsboro that provides work for thousands.
When the company proposed building office space for 100 jobs on 58 acres of land west of Millsboro, it seemed to be an utterly noncontroversial plan.
Instead, Mountaire quickly attracted irritated neighbors. Residents of several housing developments close by say they worry the office park proposal could lead to some kind of chicken plant, something louder, busier and smellier, on the parcel. Mountaire is under contract to buy a total of 305 acres and use only part of it for the offices.
The company, in its filings and public statements, says all it has in mind for the land is office space, nothing more.
But many homeowners are not willing to take the company at its word.
"I find nothing wrong with chicken processing, but I don't find it necessary to put it in a residential area," said Peg Aubrey, 73, who moved from New Jersey in 2007 to a home not far from the proposed Mountaire project. "There are places that are farther out, that are not near developing areas. Put it there."
As businesses scouting for locations know, there aren't many places left in southern Delaware that don't have a close residential component. Subdivision after subdivision have put three-bedrooms-and-a-nice-lawn homes in most of the places where there used to be only farms and farmhouses.
Most of the acreage in Sussex County is zoned AR-1, which allows farms, set-apart homes, churches, chicken houses, public parks and housing developments in equal measure. Nearly all of the land for several miles around the property Mountaire has in mind, as well as its own parcel there, is zoned AR-1.
Because of all the residential growth in those zones, even some areas zoned for agricultural use aren't seen anymore as places where agricultural endeavors should get priority.
"When you have a big conglomerate like Mountaire wanting to build something in your backyard, it's going to affect you one way or another," said Richard Eaton, a longtime Sussex resident whose home is within a mile of the Mountaire site. "You're going to see a deflation of the value of your home. I'm looking at the fact that I spent a lot of money on my house, my property out here."
Eaton lives in Beacon Meadows, a small subdivision of single-family homes about half a mile from the Mountaire land. It's one of dozens of subdivisions in Sussex County built in the past few decades. Most of them aren't inside town limits; they offer rural living, on lots of an acre or more, with private wells and, in many cases, septic systems.
Sussex, to a much greater extent than the other Delaware counties, has shown favor to developers who want to put homes in rural, out-of-the-way places – the same places agricultural interests like Mountaire tend to put their facilities.
The Delaware Office of State Planning Coordination tracks whether local government development approvals match the state's documented priorities for infrastructure growth. Between 2008 and 2013, its data show, Kent and New Castle counties approved only 75 homes in areas marked "Level 4" – places where the state anticipates essentially no investment in new roads or other residential-commercial infrastructure in the near future.
"The state simply doesn't have the money to put roads out in Level 4," said Connie Holland, who leads the state's planning office.
Those 75 homes made up just 1 percent of the new homes approved in those two counties, which land planners say the spending strategy is supposed to work.
In Sussex County, 3,800 new homes were approved in Level 4 areas in that five-year window. Those homes accounted for 34 percent of all the residential development approvals in the county.
In a 2014 report, the planning office called attention to the fact that thousands of homes had been approved for Sussex areas where infrastructure investment is not in the cards.
"The location of these approvals is an indication of the extent to which local governments are following their certified plans," the report said. "There is generally a close concordance with the investment zones, with the exception of intensive activity west of the Sussex County beach communities, in Level 4" – where "growth is discouraged," at least by the state.
And in looking at the parcel it wants, Mountaire did what state policies urged it to do. It found a property designated Level 4 for state spending, an area where "state policies will support agriculture and open-space activities including the promotion of agriculture industry support activities," according to the state's master planning document.
For many new Sussex residents, of course, living in the middle of nowhere is just what they were after.
"I came down from New Jersey, where the taxes are horrible, and I'm in awe of this area," said Aubrey. "I think it's beautiful, with horses and things."
Many have been willing to pay premiums to live among the farms. Some of the Mountaire site's newer neighbors live in relatively well-off communities, on properties they bought for the $300,000-$350,000 range. By Sussex standards, those are solidly upper-middle-class prices, comparable to home prices close to the tourist-magnet beach towns.
Michael Tirrell, vice president of human resources and business services for Mountaire, said the company's plans for the land simply involve the office space mentioned in its Feb. 25 conditional-use submission to Sussex County.
The county has not yet scheduled a mandatory public hearing on the proposal. While Mountaire is the contract purchaser of the partially forested property, for now it's owned by Millsboro's Grace United Methodist Church, which leases it for crop-raising.
"We are interested in that for a commercial office project. It is not our intention to build a production or manufacturing facility there," Tirrell said. "We haven't even decided to pursue it. It is just an investing phase at this point. If the land's not suitable for what we want it for, then we won't proceed."
Maria Payan, an organizer with Socially Responsible Agricultural Project, held a meeting in Millsboro in February to encourage residents to think critically of Mountaire's plans. Payan's group is adamantly opposed to large-scale corporate agriculture firms like Mountaire – "factory farms harm our rural communities," its website states flatly. She is also a key opponent of the Allen Harim Foods proposal to move chicken-processing operations into a former pickle plant just outside Millsboro. That project is still the subject of litigation by opponents.
Payan says the abundance of valuable homes close to the parcel will drive community opposition, along with suspicion that the company will eventually make use of the property's other 242 acres in smellier, messier ways than an office park. "It's a lot of new homes, and some of them are pretty chic," Payan said in an interview. "They don't feel comfortable. They have invested a lot of money into their homes."
The tension between ag uses and new residents is to be expected when both are freely allowed in AR-1 zoning, said Ed Lewandowski, a development specialist in the University of Delaware's Sea Grant Program in Lewes.
"Land is essential for housing and food production both," Lewandowski said. "When you've got these competing environments – suburban environments, that's what it's really becoming in these fringe areas – you end up with social conflicts many times. It's a persistent challenge, particularly in this county."
Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com.
Residences in 'Level 4' areas
Residential units approved in Delaware's "Level 4" areas where state spending is a low priority and agriculture is encouraged, 2008-2013.
Sussex County: 3,817 (34 percent of all approvals in the county)
New Castle County: 75 (1 percent of all approvals in the county)
Kent County: 1 (0.01 percent of all approvals in the county)
Source: Office of State Planning Coordination