Isle of Wight County supervisors voted 4-1 on April 17 to approve a zoning ordinance amendment increasing the minimum distance required between industrial-zoned properties and adjacent residential communities.

Limited industrial, or LI, zoning currently requires a minimum 100-foot front yard setback from the property line for uses other than office buildings, which are allowed a 35-foot buffer. The amended ordinance increases from 20 feet to 100 the minimum side- and rear-yard setbacks for a single building when an industrial parcel abuts a residential subdivision of five or more lots recorded on the same plat as of July 1 of this year, and mandates minimum 200-foot side- and rear-yard setbacks if more than one building is located on the industrial parcel. That language would allow the prior setbacks to remain the standard for when an existing or proposed industrial-zoned parcel abuts fewer than five homes.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Don Rosie cast the dissenting vote.

“I think we need to look into it a little deeper,” Rosie told the Times.

The vote came seven months after Isle of Wight’s Planning Commission first discussed the matter. The adopted ordinance is less of a change than the 300-foot minimum buffer Planning Commissioner Jennifer Boykin requested last fall.

Isle of Wight County Economic Development Director Kristi Sutphin told the Planning Commission in January that the then-proposed 300-foot buffer would eliminate just under 20 acres of developable land and just under 380,000 square feet of buildable area across four for-sale Economic Development Authority-owned parcels, translating to more than $1.3 million less in EDA land sales and roughly $200,000 less per year in taxes compared to what the county would have received under the prior setbacks.

Sutphin told the supervisors that the now-adopted ordinance “works to the EDA’s favor” since only one of the four EDA-owned parcels would be affected.

She told the Times in March that the affected parcel is the 82-acre former Grayland Lumber property in Phase II of the Shirley T. Holland Intermodal Park on Old Suffolk Road. The property was depicted in a 2015 concept plan as housing four buildings ranging in size from 260,500 to 294,500 square feet.

Sutphin said her department did not analyze impacts on non-EDA-owned buildable industrial-zoned parcels.

The vote came over the objection of two speakers, both residents of Windsor, at a same-day public hearing.

“It is clear that economic development is ruling in this situation,” said town resident and former Windsor Mayor Glyn Willis, who had been one of the most vocal opponents of the Tidewater Logistics Center multi-warehouse complex supervisors approved in March for 154 acres fronting the four-lane Route 460 adjacent to the town’s Keaton Avenue and Lovers Lane neighborhoods. That project calls for four warehouses totaling 726,000 square feet and a minimum 280-foot distance from the nearest residence, a 9-foot-tall, 60-foot-wide landscape berm and a 14.9-acre public park between the warehouses and the two neighborhoods in place of where an earlier concept had proposed a fifth warehouse.

“We need to do better for the citizens, plain and simple,” said Keaton Avenue resident James Villers, who said the Tidewater Logistics Center was “shoved down our throats.”

Isle of Wight’s prior setback requirements for when industrial uses abut houses already exceeded what’s required in Suffolk, which is competing with Isle of Wight for new warehouse and manufacturing tenants along Route 460 as the Port of Virginia completes a $1.4 billion expansion. Suffolk requires only a 30-foot all-around buffer when M-1 light industrial-zoning abuts a residential area. For M-2 heavy industrial zoning adjacent to residences, Suffolk requires only a 30-foot front-yard setback and 50-foot side- and rear-yard setbacks. Isle of Wight’s new standard is on par with Fauquier County, which also requires a 100-foot minimum setback, according to Community Development Director Amy Ring.