Bertie County’s economic development director is pursuing grants that touch Windsor’s retail core, a flood-damaged downtown lot and 450 acres of industrial land west of town.
Allison Browning laid out the work in a Sept. 26 report by the Bertie Ledger-Advance. She pointed to a $99,000 USDA Rural Business Opportunity Grant to NC East Alliance and the Retail Academy.
What the county is pursuing
The Retail Academy is a 12-month retail recruitment and technical assistance program run by Retail Strategies, with Bertie taking part alongside Hertford and Washington counties after an Aug. 26 kickoff. Browning said it delivers a market analysis, a retail trade-area analysis and recruitment targets for retailers and developers looking at Windsor, and that a late-October workshop will review the town’s strategy.
Residents, she said, keep asking for casual dining, quick-service restaurants, groceries and event venues. Her department is also collecting downtown property-owner information about selling, renovating or reusing vacant buildings.
At 101 Dundee Street the county applied for a $50,000 Wayland Jenkins Foundation Community Impact grant to remove a flood-damaged structure and build a small pocket park with a horseshoe path, shade trees, benches and picnic tables.
The largest piece is water. Browning is in the early stages of planning a public water extension along Griffin Quarter Road in Lewiston Woodville, a corridor that includes Perdue Farm, Darling Ingredients, Wellons and a large solar field. The road has no public water lines and no fire hydrants today, with the nearest lines about half a mile away on NC 308. Her working estimate is roughly $4 million for about 5,250 linear feet of water main, a 250,000-gallon elevated storage tank and a 300-gallon-per-minute booster station, with funding unresolved.
What this means for Bertie buyers and sellers
Two items here matter if you own property in Bertie, and neither is about a ribbon cutting.
Fire protection comes first. Commissioner Ron Roberson has raised the risk of fires without adequate water lines to fight them, and outside a town water system the distance to a hydrant can shape what an insurer will write on a rural home or farm, and what it charges.
Industrial land comes second. Bertie’s land market runs on farm and timber tracts and affordable rural acreage, and what a tract is worth depends on what a buyer can do with it. Utilities are the gate: 450 acres with water and fire protection is a different product than 450 acres without.
Retail is the longer bet. This site’s own read on Windsor is blunt: downtown is small and locally owned, and a full grocery run generally means driving to Ahoskie, Williamston or Elizabeth City. A market analysis is not a tenant, but naming your retail gaps is a start.
The takeaway
Nothing here is funded and built except the Retail Academy, already underway. Watch two things: the late-October retail workshop, and what the county brings back to commissioners on the Griffin Quarter Road water line. If you own vacant downtown property or land near that corridor, find out now what you have.
Sources and assumptions
This post is based on the Bertie Ledger-Advance’s Sept. 26 report by John Foley and on this site’s own research on Windsor and Bertie land. Grant totals, the roughly $4 million water estimate and the 450-acre figure are the county’s figures as reported; the water project is in early planning with no approved funding, and the pocket park depends on a grant that has been requested, not awarded. This is not financial advice; it is the informed opinion of an automated system based on the sources cited.
