Does Carroll County have zoning?

At present, Carroll County does not utilize zoning, and it is important to understand that the Comprehensive Plan is not another name for zoning.

Carroll County, 2024 Comprehensive Plan

That sentence does two jobs. It confirms there are no county zoning districts, and it heads off a misreading: that the comprehensive plan, with its maps and its goals for the county, works as zoning by another name. It does not. A plan sets out the county's intentions for its land; it is not an ordinance a permit desk enforces.

The county repeats the point elsewhere. Its economic development page lists no zoning among what Carroll offers a business, alongside its workforce and its permitting and inspection process.

Zoning is optional in Virginia. A subdivision ordinance is not. Va. Code 15.2-2240 requires the governing body of every locality to adopt one, and in Carroll County it is the county rule that reaches a parcel the moment an owner divides it.

The county's Land Use and Planning page puts the scope as broadly as it can be put: any division of a lot or parcel of land is a subdivision, the subdivider must comply with the Subdivision of Land ordinance, and every subdivision needs a plat approved by the Subdivision Agent or the Planning Commission before it is recorded in the Circuit Court Clerk's Office. That reaches further than the Code's default definition of a subdivision, which applies only where a local ordinance has not defined the term; in Carroll a single split is itself a subdivision. Whether you can sell just part of your land, and what that sale waits on, is answered on its own page.

The ordinance also sorts divisions into kinds. It classifies subdivisions as Class A, Class B or Family subdivisions, and its definitions describe a Class C as well, each with its own road and lot rules. And it does some of the work a buyer might expect zoning to do: in a Carroll County subdivision, no building may stand closer than 35 feet to the adjacent edge of any street or 15 feet to the boundary of the lot.

Everything above is about unincorporated Carroll County. The county's subdivision ordinance applies to land in Carroll County that is not within the jurisdiction of incorporated municipalities, and the Town of Hillsville is incorporated.

The Town's staff directory lists a Building Code Official / Engineer / Zoning Administrator. Which district such a parcel sits in, who reviews its plat, and why a Hillsville mailing address does not settle which side of the line it is on are set out on the Hillsville, Virginia page.

State permitting does not stop at the town line: under the Virginia Department of Health's regulations, all buildings and residences designed for human occupancy must be served by an approved sewerage system. Which localities across the footprint zone and which do not is on the six counties and Galax page, and what the difference means in general, for any county that chooses not to zone, is in zoning versus no zoning.