The truth is that the biggest obstacles to businesses in Oriental are:
1. Real estate is too expensive, resulting in business rentals that are too high;
2. We don't have enough customers - a permanent population of 900 just doesn't support many businesses.
Still, one of our present commissioners has emotionally charged a previous board with failure to adopt "the one thing" that would allow us to recruit more businesses, namely conditional zoning.
Balderdash!
Actually, when I first read the provisions in North Carolina General Statutes about conditional zoning, I thought it was worth investigating. We arranged to have a professional urban planner from the Easter Carolina Council brief us on the purposes and procedure. All of his examples came from larger towns and cities.
It pretty quickly became apparent to me that conditional zoning may be a good thing in towns with a number of specialized business districts with restrictive zoning categories. That isn't characteristic of Oriental.
We have only five zones, three of which are residential and two multi-use zones, with both business and residential uses. Scrutiny of the allowed uses within MU and MU-1 reveals that neither is very restrictive. For that matter, neither are our three residential zones. We allow business use in residents, so long as the use does not exceed 400 square feet.
So why the push for conditional zoning? The only possible use of such zoning would be to convert some portion of our residential zones to commercial use. Do we have such a critical shortage of commercial space that we need to expand into our residential zones?
I just rode my bicycle up Broad Street to the town limits. back down Midyette Street to the water and across Hodges. That route takes one along most of the area set aside for MU and MU-1 uses.
What did I find? At least four dozen properties for sale or lease and vacant lots. We seem to have no shortage of places to do business.
What we need are more customers. And lower rents.
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