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Good example
RAPPAHANNOCK COUNTY is still in the process of learning to live with new and tougher subdivision and zoning ordinances, and already some voices have been raised urging county officials to get to work on a Master Plan, to go along with the other documents. Well, there are things to be said on all sides of the Master Plan question. Done right, it could indeed aid county officials in shaping the destiny of Rappahannock in the face of pressures to transform the county into something else—something undesirable, from our point of view. But Master Plans have also been known to serve as the basis for arguments by developers and speculators, who use the basic planning document to speed up their own plans and enrich their own pocketbooks, at the expense of beauty, order, common sense, a desirable lifestyle, and peace of mind. “It’s on the plan that we can build subdivisons over on that hill,” the refrain goes. “So you can’t stop me from building.”
But if there is to be some thinking about a Master Plan, we would recommend that county officials look to the nearby rural county of Clarke for a good example of how to go about it. Clarke, like Rappahannock, is largely rural, and most of the people who live there want to keep it that way, as much as possible. So they started off by stating as the primary goal of their Master Plan the object of keeping their county agricultural and rural.
Officials in Clarke aren’t wasting a lot of time arguing among themselves about whether planning controls are “pro-growth” or “no-growth,” they simply agree that they want Clarke to stay rural, and they and their planning consultants are going about seeing that this goal is given every opportunity of attainment.
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