This spot of terra firma is a decidedly narrow parcel of about 20 acres — 20.62 acres, to be precise. It's encircled by trees, and dry cornstalks and soybeans serve as an autumnal blanket. Silence is interrupted only by the call of birds or the whoosh of an occasional car.

Neighbors call it the welcome mat to the prettiest rural land in James City County and it's easy to agree. Behind the small prairie waits the heart of Toano, a pastoral community serving many as a vestige of a simpler life. Local builders say it'll be tough to develop the wider area without planning this piece, one of the area's biggest undeveloped tracts.

So it isn't terribly surprising the property isn't intended to stay open farm fields — not at this vital intersection. While the land is zoned for agricultural uses now, James City's Comprehensive Plan — the county's all-important growth blueprint — has designated that area to switch to moderate-density housing, up to 12 units per acre.

And yet, last year, the Board of Supervisors nixed plans for such a project. And the year before, a similar proposal didn't even get to supervisors, falling at the ax of county planners.

Those defeats, while disappointing to some who had hoped for the homes, hit a little harder to Rose Bunting, Jessica Burden, Jack Ferguson and Elsie Ferguson. Owners of these 20 acres, they've ached to sell to a developer for well more than a decade now.

Desperation led them to meet with residents in the spring, at a sparsely attended discussion in a back room inside the James City County Library. At that gathering, the owners' developer, Michael Pintz with Virginia Real Estate and Development, pitched a concept to the land's neighbors.

The preliminary rendering wasn't more than a sketch, something you'd expect to see on a cocktail napkin. Labeled "The Toano Center," it included a grocery, a medical building and a large structure for something like a movie theater or a bowling alley.

One wonders if Pintz would have had better luck suggesting a nuclear waste facility.

A tense back-and-forth boiled over into a few moments of frustration, and the conclusion was cordial but firm: the assembled Toano residents wanted a smaller village concept and would not agree with anything else.

As Pintz and his commercial builder went back to the drawing board, it became clear the land would stay farm fields for a while longer.

So it goes for the 20.62 acres at Forge and Richmond. And so it goes for James City, which on a larger scale is ensnared in the very same challenges tying up this family's land. The reasons behind the challenges vary, depending on if you're the owner, an area resident, a developer or a county planner.

It should be plainly said that Rose Bunting wants an attractive project on her land. She agrees with those who call the acreage beautiful as well as in a crucial location for Toano.

But there's another thing you should know about Bunting. She's long since grown tired of waiting for that nice project. Where some see an opportunity for a bakery or a two-bedroom home, 75-year-old Bunting sees a chapter in her life in desperate need of conclusion.

Bunting's mother, Mary Kinder, lived on the land since she bought it in the late 1950s. Kinder spent some of her last years in Eastern State Hospital, and money got tight. So Bunting, her 69-year-old brother Jack Ferguson and a now-deceased brother Roy Ferguson bought the land in even thirds to pay Kinder's hospital bills. (Jessica Burden and Elsie Ferguson, his widow and daughter, now own his third.)

After Kinder died in a nursing home in 1996, the family began taking care of the land, including paying its mortgage, taxes, insurance and even a couple hundred dollars to keep the grass cut around the home.

Bunting, who was widowed last year, said she's fed up with the delays in getting the land approved for something — anything — that would let her move on with her life. Though she could sell the land as agricultural, she blames the county for not allowing her family to realize a more lucrative development solution.

 

"I'm so aggravated with it now," said Bunting, sitting in her other residence in Poquoson. "You've got five supervisors and all those planners and they know we're trying to sell this. They need to tell us what they want. They don't need every citizen on the street giving their opinion. They need to do their job."

Like other appetizing properties in James City, different proposals have come and gone. In 1999, two different groups came forward pitching a concept around a Food Lion, but the county reminded Bunting that the 2003 Comprehensive Plan recommends a housing use.

According to letters saved by Bunting, the local building firm Atlantic Homes, LLC offered $1.6 million to take on a housing project on the site. The family, only asking for $1.2 million at the time, was ecstatic, even though such money is only paid upon project approval.

Three months later, Atlantic Homes withdrew its offer, at least, in part, because of a group of active residents called Friends of Forge Road, who they saw as too antagonistic to allow anything to get passed, according to the correspondence.

Instead, the family signed on with W.R.M. Ventures for the $1.2 million they had originally hoped for. Bunting and Ferguson were sure of supervisor approval to rezone the land, and were bursting with pride over plans that included fountains and 91 majestic townhomes.

But in June 2006, supervisors voted 4-1 to turn them down largely because they felt the design didn't fit the rural area. Wallace Scruggs, the W.R.M. builder working the Toano Center project, would later tell Bunting he spent around $100,000 on the abortive effort.

The family heaps plenty of blame on residents who they believe helped torpedo the project with negative comments and no firm counter-suggestion. But the county gets the lion's share of scorn.

"We feel like no matter what we do, they're against us," said Jack Ferguson, a Newport News resident. "James City County will not work with us, plain and simple."

The County Planner

James City officials, obviously, see it otherwise.

Jason Purse, the county planner working on the Toano Center project, was in the library meeting room when members of the ownership family grew frustrated with the development stalemate.

The standoff, pushing a formal proposal back even further, vexes Purse — and not just professionally. Purse, 27, grew up in Toano and is a proud member of the first-ever graduating class of Toano Middle School.

"We all want a place in the northern area of the county that residents can be proud of," Purse said. "We're trying to bring the village character back to Toano."

Last fall, after supervisors killed the only plans for the parcel yet to get that far, a recently hired Pintz contacted Purse and began discussing options. In meetings since, the two have worked to find something better integrated into planning guidelines approved in early 2006 for Toano.

Those guidelines spell out the sort of village character the county would like in Toano, delineating building heights and pedestrian-friendly features. As one of the community's largest undeveloped parcels, Purse said, it will surely drive the development of the larger area.

What's different this time, according to Purse, is early involvement from the developer and the property owners. Purse called Pintz a prime example of a builder working with the county in the conceptual phase, looking for feedback before money is spent on formal plans.

"I think Mr. Pintz is doing it the right way," Purse said. "You don't even want to get up in front of the board and have citizens make points you've never heard before. The last application, we didn't have as much contact with Ms. Bunting or Mr. Ferguson either. I think they're making an effort to find what the county wants."

The Residents

That interactive effort has been made in heightened intensity by some in recent years. As Atlantic Homes predicted, a leader from Friends of Forge Road was one of two residents who spoke against W.R.M.'s project during that June 2006 meeting. Rich Krapf, now a county planning commissioner, cited public concern about traffic, open space and diminished rural quality as reasons to kill the plans.

Friends of Forge Road, now banded together in a federation of resident groups known as the James City County Citizens' Coalition, does not plan on apologizing for standing up against what it sees as unfettered growth. The group's hyper-involvement may be discomforting for some — Bunting has said more than once that the Friends act as if they own the land, too — but it's the way of the future, said Linda Rice, the Friends president.

"The attitude before was that a man's land was a man's land," Rice said. "If you own it, you can do anything you want on it as long as it meets zoning, but we're not going to worry about it a whole lot. That's not so anymore."

The Friends organized a petition with a few hundred signatures against the 2006 proposal. But, the group maintains, they are willing to work on an answer to the conundrum.

To be sure, Pintz has asked residents repeatedly what they want to see. But the answer isn't a simple one, Rice said. When Richmond Road was widened decades ago, it thinned out many parcels, making the land too shallow for extensive business. And the demand to place many stores or homes at the site is mitigated somewhat by already approved shopping and living opportunities all around, notably in nearby Norge.

"We're at the point where I'm saying it's just the time to cool off," Rice said. "Mrs. Bunting is not going to want to hear that, but it's hard to look into the crystal ball and see what's the right mix there."

Among the residents' biggest fears is a mixed-use development in which no business wants to make a home. A strip mall with empty storefronts would turn beloved Toano into, well, Lightfoot, a community in northern James City that was unable to maintain a unique identity. It is now, in Rice's eyes, a personality-robbed "mega-mess of retail."

The Friends of Forge Road group was borne out from a desire to bring historic awareness of Toano. But over the years, that appeal has taken the form of a development watchdog group, a band of residents staking a claim on decision-making in their backyard.

"We've told Pintz we're sympathetic to his needs, but the citizenry are the ones who have to deal with the aftermath," Rice said. "It's not just a matter of letting them sell something. If that family disappears from James City — which they will — it's the folks left behind that have to deal with the infrastructure and transportation issues.

"There has to be more of an equitable balance between what the landowner wants and how we cope with the impact on our quality of life."

County officials are currently looking into a recent request from the Citizens' Coalition to demand environmental reports from builders earlier than at the back-end of the development process. Last-minute studies of streams and soils have led to countless 11th hour protests from residents.

Before the county could even act on the request, a development firm offered to show its plans to the Citizens' Coalition well before county planners got a peek.

Rice, who has called Forge Road home for 30 years, lived earlier in the Denbigh area of Newport News — before it looked like one large subdivision, she said. Nothing is more disappointing, she added, than when communities lose their character and bloat into vanilla sprawl.

The future of development here and in Hampton Roads will boil down to the level of resident involvement, many say. Even though elected officials have the ultimate say-so, Rice predicts the pockets of unique communities will only exist based on who's willing to speak up.

"Where there's citizenry that's concerned, and receptive officials, you have a chance at that preservation," Rice said. "Where there's not, it's going under the bulldozer."

The Developer

Michael Pintz is frustrated. He's been in business since 1991, but this is his first project in James City County.

And he's beginning to see why.

"The reputation of James City, in and out of the county, is that James City has a strong reputation of being difficult to get projects through," Pintz said. "The staff has been very accommodating to me, but the history and the heritage here carry a presence in people's minds."

Like his employers, Pintz is annoyed by residents but has even more enmity for a county he sees as sending the ultimate in mixed messages. The Comprehensive Plan calls for multifamily housing, but supervisors voted that down. And yet county planners and leaders have said they won't support anything not allowed in the Comprehensive Plan.

The Toano study on which the latest guidelines were based calls for a village proposal with tiny shops, but developers have long pointed to the need of an "anchor" store to draw smaller stores into a development. The Toano Center preliminary sketch did that with a grocery, an addition residents decried as too massive. But without that customer traffic, Pintz said, smaller stores will simply die on the vine.

There is not yet in Toano a modern village-type development to give a builder indication that one could be successful.

"The hardest part of all this is the fact that the county planning and this study's options are not one and the same," Pintz said. "You don't have anything that tells you 'you can definitely do that,' short of leaving it cornfields, and while I know that's fine for some residents, it doesn't suit the owners. This is a group that would like to liquidate and move on, and they've been denied that due to a lack of clear direction.

"I've never seen something with two guidelines for the same property that differs so greatly."

Using the same hypothetical as Rice, but settling on the opposite outcome, Pintz said any project that follows the Comprehensive Plan's recommendations should be obtainable. In this case, he said, design concerns can be handled with the county's rules and regulations — not by what he sees as an unreasonable public standard.

With the family unlikely or unwilling to sell the land while it's zoned agricultural, Pintz is still researching the idea for a village shopping center, even if he believes Toano isn't economically ready for a nonanchored project. This summer Pintz's firm requested information and advice from a national industry of village-type community builders. At the same time, he is marketing the property to see if anyone in the development world wants to tackle the knotty project. There's been some new interest in recent months, but nothing to hang a hat on.

With county officials rejecting both multifamily and village concepts, the solution may only be found in the hotly anticipated Comprehensive Plan update, slated for 2008.

"We can't keep things in cornfields 150 feet from thoroughfares," Pintz said. "We have to be smart and fair as we progress as a society. As individuals, I think we have a tendency to stay at one tempo. We like to come and not see others come. We create our own corner of existence. But that doesn't follow the growth of our country. We know we're going to grow, so what do we do? You have to have a game plan that will let people play the game."

The Game

The future for the property owned by Bunting, Ferguson and family may be unknown, but projects all over James City are inching forward. More than 10,000 residential units across at least a dozen projects countywide have been approved over the years and are yet to be built.

As officials wonder in public and in private how much development the county can absorb, the county's developmental path may finally have hit its fork in the crossroads in mid-July. That's when planning commissioners rejected a rezoning request that would allowed 180 homes at the Candle Factory site in northern James City, saying they simply couldn't stomach any more growth.

Even still, developers have annually built about 1,100 units in James City, suggesting at least a 10-year supply of homes could be coming the county's way.

But that crowded pipeline won't be dumping any project on the corner of Richmond and Norge roads soon. For better or for worse, Toano has evolved into a rural bubble of hope. Once popped, some say, that distinctive and historic village atmosphere will never return.

Maybe the 2008 Comprehensive Plan update will find a compromise. Or maybe Pintz or another developer will unearth a project that fits the zoning and still maintains Toano's character.

What persists is the dialogue between the owners, the residents, the county and the developer. That four-way conversation may be a recent fad in James City, but it provides some kernel of faith to all four groups that a solution exists.

Someday something will be built on Rose Bunting's acreage. And after the final coat of paint is spread and the last nail hammered down, the focus will simply switch to the next open piece of James City land.