RALEIGH, N.C. — A fight over 192 rezoned acres in Rockingham County reached the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday, and the ruling that comes out of it could set the rules for who may challenge zoning decisions in every county and town in the state.
The parcel sits near Stokesdale. In mid-2023 county commissioners moved it from residential agricultural to highway commercial zoning and, in a companion text change, added state-licensed uses such as electronic gaming to what highway commercial land may host, all during a heated local debate over a possible casino. The rezoning itself did not say what would be built. A summer camp serving children with chronic illnesses, a bakery and nine neighboring landowners sued in October 2023, citing traffic, noise, light and risks to private wells. A trial judge threw the case out in April 2024. All three judges on a Court of Appeals panel later voted to revive it in an opinion dated July 16, 2025, ruling that the neighbors did not have to plead special damages to have standing.
Rockingham County and the owners who sought the rezoning asked the justices to reverse that decision. Their position is that a 1976 Supreme Court precedent requires anyone challenging a legislative zoning decision to show a specific, personal harm, and that dropping the requirement would invite lawsuits from anyone near a rezoned parcel and make it harder for local governments to act and for landowners to use their property.
The neighbors argue the special damages test applies only to quasi-judicial land-use decisions, not to legislative rezonings, and that the General Assembly never wrote it into the law covering these challenges. They also noted they had only 60 days to sue, at a point when nobody had disclosed what the land would be used for.
Most of the justices who spoke pressed the county’s side. Justice Richard Dietz asked why zoning should get a different standing rule than other government actions, and Justices Anita Earls and Allison Riggs asked whether the county’s approach would effectively shut off any challenge. Justice Tamara Barringer pointed to the camp’s argument about the children it serves.
Six of the seven justices heard the case. Justice Phil Berger Jr. stepped aside because his brother Kevin sits on the Rockingham County Board of Commissioners. The court agreed in a June 18 order to take up the appeal and will rule in the coming months.
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