SUMMERFIELD, N.C. — A controversial development project is moving forward after years of debate in Summerfield. The town council voted it down, but state lawmakers stepped in and overruled them. House Bill 909 passed a final vote and now clears the way for the Villages of Summerfield Farms.
There’s been a lot of talk online about financial ties between the project developer and the main state lawmaker involved.
We sent WFMY News 2’s Ben Briscoe to Raleigh to follow the money and get the facts.
State records show the Summerfield developer, David Couch, gave thousands of dollars to Senate Leader Phil Berger's campaign.
On December 21, 2023, Couch gave $6,400. That’s the maximum amount allowed during an election cycle.
Briscoe caught up with Senator Berger at the General Assembly.
Briscoe: "If he wasn’t a donor, would this issue have mattered as much to you?"
Berger: "Absolutely. In fact, we’ve worked on other similar situations where I couldn’t tell you for sure who the property owners are.”
Berger was the most vocal supporter of Bill 909, which deannexed a section of Summerfield to clear the way for developer David Couch to build The Villages of Summerfield Farms, a controversial project that the Town Council voted down.
The $6,400 is the most recent in a string of donations totaling $33,400 since 2018.
The December donation came four days after the Summerfield newspaper published an article saying “there was no clear path” forward for an agreement between the developer and the town. The donation also came five months before the bill was placed on the calendar for a vote in Berger’s chamber.
For a little more context, Couch was one of 85 donors who gave Berger the maximum amount last year, including Greensboro developer Roy Carroll. And Couch has given to other politicians and groups besides Berger. His biggest donation was $100,000 to the Club For Growth Action, a group which targeted Mark Walker in the Congressional race to represent Greensboro.
Briscoe reached out to Couch asking to set up an interview about his relationship with Senator Berger, and received this statement back from a spokesperson:
“There is a very long list of reasons the legislature is considering deannexation that make more sense than the one you imply:
Summerfield is a government in chaos, as evidenced by the entire staff resigning en masse last month.
Summerfield government has spent 10 years thwarting a private landowner’s efforts to use his own land to build more housing even as the region is in the middle of a housing supply crisis.
To stop new housing, Summerfield’s government has gone so far as to not allow modern water and sewer infrastructure over the past 20 years, even as multiple residents have died in house fires. Summerfield is now the largest town in all of North Carolina, South Carolina, AND Virginia without modern water and sewer.
This list goes on and on. Just one of the many examples of dysfunction would be grounds for policymaker attention. Taken together, they show a local government that has stopped at nothing to block a private landowner’s efforts to use his own land to build more homes in the middle of a housing supply crisis.”
2 Wants To Know fact-checked the developer’s statement about multiple people dying in fires in Summerfield. The fire chief said three people have died over the last 17 years. He can’t pinpoint their deaths on the lack of water supply, but he said it is a problem. We’re currently working on digging more into that issue.
Briscoe also asked Berger more about the issue.
Briscoe: "Some people in Summerfield have raised questions about if those political donations impacted your decision to get involved with this bill. What would you tell them?"
Berger: "No, so, the situation in Summerfield was something where the town council really had overstepped what I think and a lot of other people felt were reasonable land use decisions and in doing so, they basically were infringing on the property rights of Mr. Couch and probably on some other folks as well. And so it became clear to me after Mr. Couch has been trying to work with them for about 10 years, that the town was not going to get in a more reasonable place as far as their land use. And really, the only option that was left available to Mr. Couch was having his property de-annexed. I mean, there was another option that came up after folks started seeing what the town council was doing to personnel in the town. I had a number of folks come to me and talk about whether or not the town should actually exist at all and whether we should have revoked the charter of the town because of the abuses that are taking place. We didn’t take that step, but we are going to look a lot more carefully at things that towns are required to do in order to receive what really is a great deal of authority under state law to impact people’s lives and their property.”