Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103030277
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By FELICITY BARRINGER/ THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NAGS HEAD, N.C. LENGTH: Long
Bill and Betty Logan came from New Jersey for the memories: the dunes and marshes of the Outer Banks were the landscape of their honeymoon.
Francis Rogallo, an aeronautical engineer who developed the hang glider, came for the winds, just as the Wright Brothers did 80 years before.
The Reids, the Logans, Rogallo and 2,000 or so others who move like them are part of the Outer Banks' newest industry. All retired, all with some money put away and all besotted by the timelessness of these elongated islands, they are a driving force behind the boom that brought about 9,000 new residents to Dare County, making it one of the fastest-growing rural counties in America.
Dare County is a prime example of one of the demographic trends reshaping the country: retirement to the scenic corners of rural America. While half of the country's 2,383 rural counties lost population during the 1980s, the decade was a period of robust growth for new retirement and recreation areas.
"Some towns that might have gone after a shirt factory before to boost their economy are now looking for retirement communities," said Calvin Beale, a senior demographer at the U.S. Agriculture Department who follows rural population trends. "It's a clean industry. It's a renewable resource."
Beale, who estimated the population of rural retirement areas grew by nearly 16 percent during the decade, calculated that "movement of older people into rural and small-town areas has become so common" that a fifth of all rural counties are classed as retirement counties.
The Outer Banks did not have to seek people. As the sands of the Atlantic seaboard were being covered with people from New Jersey to Virginia, the Outer Banks began to inherit the overflow.
While Beale classifies the county as "recreation-retirement," the retirees are only the leading edge of an influx of urban refugees of all ages.
According to the new census figures, Dare County grew by 70 percent in the past decade, its population rising from 13,400 to 22,800.
About one in four residents is 55 or older, as against a national average of slightly more than one in five. But school enrollment, a reflection of the migration of younger families, also rose by 51 percent in the decade, from 2,150 to 3,250.
The passionate attraction that brings people here to cast for bluefish in the surf or to soar from high dunes in a hang glider makes the town's inevitable growing pains all the sharper. As each new person arrives to enjoy the tranquillity, a little is lost.
"It was only supposed to be a one-year thing, my staying here," said Carl Curnett, 26, an actor who first visited the Outer Banks as part of the troupe that performs a summer play about the first English colony in America. "Now I'm planning on a second year. Eight people from our company have stayed on here.
Now he is a tour guide on the "Elizabeth II," a model of the 16th century ship that brought the first colony that brings tourists to its dock on Albermarle Sound. But the tourists, like the new residents, are changing the landscape. Each new septic tank strains the marshy, sandy soil. The more the fishermen, the fewer the fish.
Development divides the county's residents into smaller and smaller interest groups with often conflicting financial and emotional attitudes about growth.
Michael Daniels, a fisherman and scion of one of the oldest and largest families on the Outer Banks, remembers "when you got boats coming in with 80,000 pounds of fish. Now on a big day you'll get maybe 15,000." He suspects runoff from the newly paved areas is carrying chemicals into the offshore waters.
But his family and other natives, owners of vast tracts of the area two generations ago, were among those to profit from the growth when real estate prices soared.
Sybil Basnight, a cousin of Daniels and the president of the environmental group Friends of Roanoke Island, said many natives used to feel restrictions on growth were an intrusion on their property rights. Now, she says, some are not so sure.
If there were no controls, development could leave wells dry. Army Corps of Engineers maps indicate 85 percent of the county is marshland. But there are controls, but they have not always been effective.
"We have a coastal management program approved in Washington, D.C.," said Basnight. "These are public trust waters. There's a tolerance level. You can take only so much development without real severe deterioration."
There are strong - and mixed - feelings among the newcomers, too. Some 10-year or 15-year residents wince at every new mall that goes up. But other newcomers are busily building malls, or selling imported kites to the summer tourists who flock here by the tens of thousands.
The one binding force is opposition to tax increases. But some newcomers have arrived in once-rural North Carolina with a taste for the public services available in the suburbs they left behind.
A gleaming new adult services center was built about two years ago at a cost of more than $500,000, so retirees have a place to make pottery or do low-impact aerobics. Staffing and maintenance of the center cost the county about $150,000 a year. And two new schools have been built; officials are now looking for the money to furnish them.
The county's overall budget has climbed fourfold since 1980. Expenditures for 1990 were $37.6 million, up from $5.6 million in 1980. The great percentage increases have come in planning, now $632,000, up thirteenfold from the $48,000 cost in 1980; sanitation costs, up eightfold, to $1.84 million from $227,000; schools, up thirteenfold to $11.2 million, and emergency medical services, up sevenfold, to $1.87 million from $246,000.
There is no local hospital. State health authorities have turned down two requests for a certificate of need, said Ray Sturza, the county's planner.
Emergency cases are taken either by ambulance to Elizabeth City, more than an hour away, or by helicopter to Norfolk, Va. The helicopter service costs the county more than $1 million a year.
Although the pace of growth has slowed in these days of recession, the demand for services has not slackened.
But Sturza says the county government's ability to raise revenue is limited. "Dare County is mostly publicly owned," he explained. "We have the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and the Army and Navy bombing range. We have to get 100 percent of the real estate tax revenue from 16 percent of the land."
The squeeze became intense two years ago and a property reassessment sent taxes soaring. The anger from that change exploded during the last election, and Michael Daniels, chairman of the county board, was voted out of office. "I said, `If you're going to continue with the services you've got, this is what you're going to have to do,' " he said.
Opposition to new taxes is something all factions in the county can agree on. Development is not.
"I don't know that there's that much terrible opposition to development," said Louise Dollard, the new chairman of the county's governing board. Like Oliver and Reid, Dollard moved here when she retired. "Frankly, when I first arrived, there wasn't a doctor and you couldn't get your teeth done. When all these people started moving in, it improved our life."
But she has become concerned about overbuilding. "It hurts for the county commissioners to issue permits for what shouldn't be. Certain regulations should be tighter."
Some newcomers are among the most adamant of those who want to slow the pace of new growth.
"A developer couldn't be elected to the city council in Southern Shores," said Bob Oliver, 81. How does he feel about the man who built his home? "He is an artist."
by CNB