The beautiful Elizabethtown Industrial Park that was at one time so full of promise, sits unfinished and suspended in the midst of a feud between Bladen County and the town of Elizabethtown. Elizabethtown, once on the map for a being a community on the grow is now on the map for a war that rages.
CRISIS CONTINUES
ELIZABETHTOWN – The Russo-Ukrainian war has been raging since 2014 and is still raging today in spite of promised peace talks and cease fires.
It makes you wonder how long the conflict in Elizabethtown is going to go on in spite of promises of peace and cease fire.
“We haven’t been on the same page in a long time,” Cameron McGill, Bladen County District 3 Commissioner and Pastor of Lake Church in White Lake said. “The first meeting we had in the basement of the courthouse was just kind of formalities. Fast forward to the second meeting we had at the airport. There are pictures all around the room of these homes that are going to be built. Nice homes. Mayfair-style homes like in Wilmington. Admittedly it creates a sense of excitement. I’m an observer at this point. They talk about the number of homes, the scale of the construction; and a couple of key things stood out.
“One, they said were going to be built as workforce housing. This will help us recruit people that we need in the industrial park. Engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, professional tradesmen, everybody.
“There will be different homes for everybody. They said, ‘now understand, because it’s going to be built in the industrial park, this is not going to be a kid-friendly community.’ My radar went up. I asked what the price point of these homes were going to be. They said, the low to mid to upper three-hundreds. Different styles and different sizes. I thought, hmmm. Bladen County, that’s pretty high end.”
When McGill asked if the professionals would have kids, or if they planned on having kids, would they not be eligible to live in that development.
“At that point they said, ‘it’s just not safe for kids,’” McGill said. “The next meeting they had airbrushed kids on bikes and playing in yards and I asked what changed? It was an indication to me that things were changing. Then all of a sudden, the pictures of the houses started changing until there’s no foundation, no crawl space, there’s no eaves on the houses and it looked like glorified military houses. The next time we saw the pictures; they didn’t look nearly that nice as they looked like a doublewide with no windows.”
McGill couldn’t sit back and proceeded to ask more questions. He got a confirmed answer that the town would own the land, a nonprofit builds the homes and people are going to buy the homes.
“How can you sell a home that is built on municipally-owned land?” he asked. “It didn’t make any sense. They said, ‘Well, there’s going to be some challenges and we’re going to have to get some new legislation. I asked who is going to pay the taxes? They said, ‘Oh, everybody pays taxes.”
McGill is open and not afraid to speak what has been spoken in those early meetings, but admits that things have changed. Whether the Town of Elizabethtown knew all along it was going to change or whether it altered the plans midstream, it has people confused.
“From the county perspective, we’re unclear,” McGill said. “I told them about the time I was traveling to Goldsboro and my GPS messed up and I ended up in Beulaville. I’m sitting in the middle of Beulaville and I asked, ‘How did I get here?’ Folks, I’m in the middle of Beulaville again and I want to know how did we get here? How did we possibly get to this point?”
McGill said that he would not speculate as to any improprieties, but also said that that there was a general lack of understanding. He did talk about a quote from another commissioner who spoke, looking back at a bigger picture.
“He made a great point,” McGill said. “’People who have just moved to this county in the last few years have turned people against one another who have been lifelong friends. We grew up together, went to school together; how has that happened?’ And that’s where we’ve got to figure it out and get back because the community is too valuable.”
Bill Horner III from Business North Carolina magazine dropped a second in his series on the happenings in Bladen County May 1. The article was entitled, “A DIVORCE IN BLADEN: A rural southeast N.C. County, praised for its job recruiting efforts, is fractured by disagreements.”
He began with his lede which read, “If you’re curious why economically distressed Bladen County owns a quartet of new airplanes, acquired during a three-day, $2.5 million buying spree last August, buckle up. That’s part of a larger story with as much turbulence as a willow in a hurricane.”
As he did in the first article, he reported objectively the “he-said, he-said” of the feud and cited Chuck Heustess as the director of both the Bladen County Economic Development Commission and its wonderfully named nonprofit real estate developer, Bladen’s Bloomin’ Agri-Industrial Inc. who actually walked Horner through the emptiness which is the Elizabethtown Industrial Park.
He also mentioned Dane Rider as the prizefighter for the other side and said he was “a former West Point garrison commander who serves as Elizabethtown’s town manager, is the prime target of Heustess’ angst.”
In another portion of the article that he subheads, “Taking the gloves off,” he wrote, “In recent years, Bladen County has received praise for its rural economic development efforts, buoyed by a strong relationship between the county and Elizabethtown. But Charles Ray Peterson, the county commission board chairman and acting county manager since the end of 2023, characterizes it differently.
“‘There is no relationship,’ says Peterson, a commissioner since 2002. ‘They’ve been dragging, they’ve been putting us off on things, and we’re not waiting another day. I took the gloves off on this one.’
“On March 28, Bladen’s Bloomin’ filed a civil suit against the town of Elizabethtown for failing to comply with an Oct. 18 public records request. The same day, Elizabethtown issued a press release blaming the county and Bladen’s Bloomin’ with “misinformation” and “divergent views” that have stymied projects.”
Further questions arise within the article as Horner wrote, “Some of the more egregious concerns for Heustess are $15 million in state DEQ grants that Peterson says are in limbo; $1.3 million in lost Golden LEAF funding, and another $1 million in road, water and sewer funds from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and Golden LEAF that were lost because, as Heustess says, “Elizabethtown just didn’t do what they said they were going to do. That helped lead to the airplane purchases. In early 2024, the county announced Vulcanair North America would use a 36,000-square-foot building at the Elizabethtown airport to manufacture its four-seat Vulcanair S.p.A-Model V1.0 trainer aircraft. Bladen’s Bloomin’ planned to invest $3 million to build the facility, but Heustess says the town decided it would handle construction instead. Subsequent delays threatened the project’s viability, he says. The company says the plant will open in September, though no construction had started as of mid-April.”
The complete article in Business North Carolina can be read by going to: https://businessnc.com/siler-city-a-lionized-piedmont-town-embraces-transformational-change-while-grasping-to-retain-its-charm-2/
And the conflict continues to rage.
Mark DeLap is a journalist, photographer and the editor and general manager of the Bladen Journal. To see more of his bio, visit him at markdelap.com or email him. Send a message to: mdelap@bladenjournal.com