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4 , <br /> on January 1, 1994, the Little River and Cane Creek watersheds joined the Upper Eno Critical <br /> Area and the University Lake Watershed as areas where zoning requires minimum lot sizes of <br /> at least two acres. As of April, 1994, approximately 63% of the land designated as "rural" in <br /> Orange County requires a minimum lot size of at least two acres. <br /> The Committee development options would not allow one-acre conventional development as is <br /> currently allowed in 37% of rural areas. The Committee's rationale for moving to a two-acre <br /> conventional lot standard is that the average lot size in rural areas is over two acres, and that <br /> one-acre lot zoning encourages sprawling suburban-style development which is counter to rural <br /> character protection. <br /> The Planning Board, on January 25, 1993, argued for keeping the one-acre lot conventional <br /> development in the package of development options. The Planning Board's expressed rationale <br /> for this was that this type of development was allowed under current zoning (this predated new <br /> watershed zoning for parts of the rural areas), and deletion or modification of the standard would <br /> take away one means of development from property owners. Concerns over affordable housing <br /> and property rights were also raised by Planning Board members. <br /> The Committee's rationale for moving to a two-acre lot standard, i.e., that the average lot size <br /> in rural areas is approximately two acres and one-acre lot zoning encourages suburban-style <br /> development, is strengthened by the implementation of the watershed protection standards. <br /> This issue was explicitly addressed at all three community meetings in January 1994. A strong <br /> preference emerged at each meeting in favor of the Committee's recommendations (two-acre lot <br /> conventional development). A number of reasons were espoused for this preference, principal <br /> among them that two-acre lots were the norm in the rural areas anyway, that they represented <br /> a good compromise between too-dense and too-restrictive zoning, that many areas already had <br /> two-acre zoning, and that two-acre lots would provide an incentive to do open-space <br /> developments. <br /> 2. DENSITY OF OPEN-SPACE DEVELOPMENTS <br /> Many community meeting attendees stated concerns over the density of open-space developments <br /> presented (in both the Committee and staff alternative/Planning Board based development <br /> options). Both versions allowed open-space developments to reach up to a maximum of 1.3 lots <br /> per acre (or 130 lots per 100 acres). This density is provided in both cases as an incentive to <br /> pursue open-space developments which were viewed by the Committee and Planning Board as <br /> more protective of the rural character. <br /> A strong preference at the northern and east-central meetings was voiced for lowering the <br /> density of the open-space options to a maximum of one house per acre (100/100 acres). Meeting <br /> attendees were concerned about the tightly-packed nature of the more-dense clusters, and about <br /> traffic and farm nuisance issues that might accompany OSD's of more than one unit per acre. <br /> A number of persons at the east-central (New Hope) meeting questioned the validity of density <br /> 2 <br />