Cumberland County, North Carolina commissioners have delayed indefinitely a decision on whether to allow Sanderson Farms to build an 1,000-worker chicken plant in Fayetteville, according to the fayobserver.com. Monday night during a closed meeting, the Board of Commissioners could not reach an agreement on an incentives package for the $113 million project, which would be built in the county’s empty industrial park in Cedar Creek.
The Fayetteville City Council plans to proceed with discussions about incentives at a meeting this week, but it remains unclear how the county’s delay will affect any decision by the city on Sanderson Farms.
Pic Billingsley, a Sanderson Farms spokesman, said the county meeting Monday will not stop the company from continuing to evaluate the site and the community. He said a delay by the county commissioners is not a disappointment. “They are elected to gather information,” Billingsley said. “They are still in the process of trying to understand, and they are getting a lot of information from a lot of different sources.”
The company has secured options to buy several hundred acres of private land, mostly around the industrial park, for spray fields of treated wastewater. The options are long term, so a county delay poses no problem, Billingsley said.
The Fayetteville Regional Chamber has touted Sanderson Farms as a good company that follows state and federal rules for operating its processing plants and disposing of treated wastewater.
County leaders have given no indication how long they intend to postpone a decision on Sanderson Farms. If they wait at least seven weeks until after the November 4 election, the issue will fall on a new board that would assume office December 1.
