By Andrew Barksdale
Staff writer

 

Eastover leaders have begun a drive to make their community a town, but they will face a battle in the state legislature.

Community leaders say incorporation would give them more control over Eastover’s destiny and stave off annexation by Fayetteville a mile away and the traffic and crime associated with urban living.

“Eastover cannot leave its future to chance,” said Sara Piland, chairwoman of the Progress Eastover Committee.

The committee is a group of about 20 people that formed last month from the Eastover Civic Club. She also is the club’s president.

The committee has scheduled two public forums next month in Eastover to gauge the community’s interest in incorporation and begin getting signatures on a petition, which the legislature requires before considering whether to create a town.

State law makes it harder for an area to incorporate into a town if it’s within five miles of a major city such as Fayetteville. But the law makes exceptions if the larger city blesses the incorporation.

Whether the Fayetteville City Council will give that blessing remains to be seen.

Mayor Tony Chavonne said he hoped to avert incorporation by holding a meeting early next year on development in Eastover.

“I’m not sure there aren’t other ways to get what they want, which is to primarily protect the rural nature,” he said. “I want to see them map that out — and to see how we could win short of incorporation.”

The Eastover Civic Club has been a rallying and social arm for the community east of the Cape Fear River for 45 years, meeting in a community center that has served as a town hall of sorts. The club held its first Heritage Day in May to raise money to repair the building.

The community of about 1,500 homes has pastures, farms and big yards where a lot of the land has remained in the same families for generations. Until 1929, the area was known as Flea Hill. According to tradition, hogs and goats that slept under a tavern attracted fleas that annoyed customers.

In the 1990s, the civic club pushed for a public water system to replace foul wells. That effort led to the formation of the Eastover Sanitary District, which has a three-member board elected by the community.

Two of those board members, Morgan Johnson and Benny Pearce, are on the committee pushing for incorporation.

Since the 1970s, talk of incorporating Eastover has sprung up occasionally.

This month, the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners approved a plan by John Koenig to develop 149 acres off Middle Road in Eastover into about 140 houses. His original request last year was to develop more than 500 lots, to the horror of many Eastover residents who want to keep their bucolic setting.

This past fall, when it appeared Koenig might not get his plan approved, he threatened to have the 149-acre site annexed by Fayetteville — action that the county commissioners and Eastover residents opposed.

Piland said the incorporation drive is not meant to be adversarial toward Fayetteville or developers, but she acknowledged that the Koenig case brought a greater awareness of the need for more local control.

Piland, who is 63, has experience tackling issues and holding public forums: She retired last year as an associate superintendent in administration with the county school system. At home, she has a cache of printed information she has researched on incorporation and works on a laptop in her bedroom with a view of her 40-acre wooded estate in Eastover.

“It’s totally consuming me at times, but it’s definitely worth the effort,” she said.

She said the committee will hold a private meeting Thursday to discuss the town’s proposed boundaries and how to spend the minimum 5-cent tax rate per $100 in assessed values that municipalities must levy.

The 5-cent rate would be half what property owners now pay to support the Eastover Fire Department, which collects almost $300,000 annually in taxes.

If Eastover gained town status, it would initially rely on the Sheriff’s Office and the county for planning, zoning and inspection services, as other small towns do.

Some people, including Joe Byrum, who manages a convenience store, say they wouldn’t mind the small tax rate. Byrum, who is 49, lives off Dunn Road, Eastover’s main street.

“Anything would be better than to be part of Fayetteville,” he said.

Bryan Hall, who is 24 and lives on Beard Road in Eastover, said incorporation would not be so bad if it kept Fayetteville away.

“I just like it the way it is,” he said. “It’s nice and quiet. It’s not in the city.”

County Commissioner Tal Baggett and Register of Deeds Lee Warren, who both live in Eastover, support incorporation.

“That is an identifiable community with a rich tradition and history well over 100 years,” Baggett said.

Warren and others point out that the area has a history of organization and self-governance through its sanitary district, which completed a $5.5 million water system three years ago.

In fact, the sanitary district has powers similar to those of a town. Both can levy property taxes, enter into contracts and condemn land for public purposes.

Additional advantages of towns are that they cannot be annexed by other cities and they get a share of the state’s sales-tax revenues.

Piland said she was working with county officials on a formula that would ensure that Cumberland County and its eight municipalities would lose none of their sales-tax revenue if Eastover became a town.

Piland said the proposed town probably would have between 3,000 and 6,000 residents and fit within the sanitary district, which stretches from east of the river to Interstate 95.

Organizers will need to get at least 15 percent of the registered voters within the proposed boundary to sign a petition in favor of incorporation. The petition then must be submitted to the Joint Legislative Commission on Municipal Incorporations 60 days before the General Assembly’s next regular session, which starts May 9.

Since 2000, eight towns, with an average population of 2,143, have formed in the state. The most recent was Wallburg last year in Davidson County just south of Winston-Salem.

Jack Craven, who led the effort for incorporation and was the town’s first mayor until November, said the Wallburg community feared it would be gobbled up by Winston-Salem and High Point and lose its identity.

Craven said Winston-Salem, High Point and Kernersville blessed the incorporation, helping Wallburg gain town status. It has a grammar school and a plant that makes electronic connections and switching devices.

David Lawrence, a professor of public law and government at the N.C. Institute of Government in Chapel Hill, said most communities seek town status to get better service or to regulate zoning more to their liking. Some areas just want to avoid being swallowed up by other cities — an excuse frowned on by the General Assembly.

State Rep. Rick Glazier, a Democrat from Fayetteville whose 45th District includes Eastover, could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman for his office said the legislative commission on municipal incorporations has no appointments now, but that would change next year.

State Sen. Larry Shaw, a Democrat from Fayetteville who has criticized the state’s annexation laws as too liberal, supports Eastover’s incorporation.

“These people want to live there and raise their families there,” he said. “They want to protect their investment and control their own destiny.”

Bills calling for local action, such as forming a town in Eastover, generally need the unanimous support of the local delegation to pass the legislature.

A bill to incorporate Eastover would require a three-fifths majority vote by the legislature to pass.

If Eastover gets the green light, the town could be running by next summer with an interim governing board and its inaugural elections in the fall.