In 1998, a prior Smithfield Town Council voted to adopt a massive overhaul of its zoning ordinance that set a 5-unit-per-acre maximum density for the downtown neighborhood residential zoning that overlaps with much of the town’s historic district.

It’s why developer Vincent Carollo, who purchased eight lots spanning just over an acre at Washington, James and Clay streets last year, recently sought a change in that verbiage that would allow him to apply for a special use permit for the 10 homes he hopes to build at the site. It’s also the reason Smithfield’s current council voted 4-2 on March 4 to deny Carollo’s requested text change.

“It’s time for the Town Council, starting with this project, to stand up to developers and say, ‘Adhere to our zoning requirements,’ not ask us to rewrite them,” Councilman Darren Cutler, who campaigned for his seat last year alongside Mayor Mike Smith, Vice Mayor Bill Harris and Councilwoman Mary Ellen Bebermeyer on a shared platform of reining in growth, said at that meeting.

That vote, which overturned a 6-1 recommendation by the town’s Planning Commission to recommend approval of Carollo’s request, prompted some members of the advisory body on March 11 to question how and why their predecessors on the Planning Commission and Town Council settled on five as the limit for DNR zoning when some areas of the historic district already exceed that density.

“The way your towns are supposed to work and especially the way the small town needs to work you want to build your town and keep your downtown charm and your businesses in town … by building your density within that town so people can walk to and from the businesses,” said Commissioner James Yoko. “You make yourself a walkable community and you pack your density in tighter so that you get more people in that density in order to keep your businesses flourishing. … Meanwhile, we’re building plenty of density in the county outside our borders, which means the only way all of these people are going to get to the businesses we have in town is to drive, which means you’re going to have what everybody’s complaining about, which is more traffic in town. So it seems like we’re actually fighting ourselves to do what we want and what we say we want to have.”

“I don’t know where five comes from; maybe we ought to look at revamping that,” Yoko said.

Vice Chairwoman GiGi Smith said she too would support a review of whether the 5-unit-per-acre hard limit should remain in place.

“The zoning for that was done a long, long time ago as Ms. (Community Development and Planning Director Tammie) Clary has told us,” Smith said. “It definitely does need to be looked at again. For a long time there was nothing in town where anything could be built because it was all kind of, it was farmland and it was taken up. … So what we’ve got is … an opportunity for the corner of James and Washington, we’ve got an opportunity at the Grange and so there’s not that much left in town that isn’t already spoken for.”

The land at Washington, James and Clay, which Carollo purchased from developer Joseph Luter IV last year, is one of the last unbuilt areas in the historic district. Luter is proposing to develop another 57 acres at Route 10 and Main Street as the Grange at 10Main. Luter received mixed-use rezoning approval in 2023 to build up to 267 homes and a commercial phase anchored by a home for the town’s farmer’s market, but has since returned with a revised plan that calls for less density, at 93 homes, and 16.6 acres to be deeded to the town.

Cutler urged his fellow commissioners to trust that there was a reason behind the 5-unit-per-acre limit, even if no one remembers how the limit came into being.

“I personally think there was a very wise body sitting here at one point that wrote the zoning ordinance. It is a very thorough ordinance that was written by people who were very well intentioned,” Cutler said.

He also urged his fellow commissioners to consider the “lived experience” of voters who elected him, Bebermeyer and Harris and Mayor Smith in last year’s election over then-incumbents James Collins and Raynard Gibbs.

“They’re living an experience in this town, whether it’s traffic, whether’s watching the growth that they don’t like because they’ve been here forever in a small town. … That lived experience every day that our citizens have is a fact, right, and they live that and they look around and they see what their town government is doing and they have a right to object to it,” Cutler said. “And what we heard on the campaign rail over and over again was the density of these developments is too large.”

Commissioner Charles Bryan said the 1998 Planning Commission that adopted the 5-unit-per-acre limit probably based it on similar ordinances at the time in other localities across the state and nation.

“It’s something that over the years has been overlooked simply because there has been no development in that district until recently, so now we see it,” Bryan said. “We’re focusing on this number, five. We’re focusing on it now.”

According to the Times’ 1998 reporting, the zoning ordinance was adopted 6-1 on Sept. 1 of that year following a summer of controversy over impacts on property rights.