By DAPHNE McCULLOUGH

By DAPHNE McCULLOUGH

RAPPAHANNOCK County has 49 subdivisions with a total of 1,078 lots already platted, according to a report submitted to the Planners by Eva Dahlgren at last Wednesday’s meeting. Commission members had recently expressed concern over the lack of information on the county’s growth. “We need to know what we’ve got before we go ahead approving more,’’ said Planner Walter Masterson at the February meeting when the Commission considered a Flint Hill subdivision application.

“If we can’t make sense of what you’ve given us, it will be our fault, not yours,” Chairman Herbert Barksdale told Miss Dahlgren on Wednesday. “We now know what we have” and are in a better position to assess the impact of future growth, he said.

At the request of County Engineer Fanning Baumgardner, Miss Dahlgren volunteered to compile a list of the county’s existing subdivisions as part of her independent senior project at Garrison Forest School. She spent two weeks going over the Clerk’s office plat books, the Commissioner of Revenue’s records, and Piedmont Environmental Council maps, looking for development of five lots or more with lot sizes of 25 acres or less.

The information was scattered, making her job all the more difficult, noted Miss Dahlgren. She suggested that the definition of “subdivision” and how one is recorded should be standardized throughout all the county offices. Followup work on all land transactions should be done to locate “creeping subdividions,” she suggested.

Miss Dahlgren felt that her study had shown the inefficiency of what had been done to keep track of county growth. “Pastplanningme^ thods need to be revised,” she maintained. She emphasized that her information was probably incomplete, that some subdivided lots were not shown on her list. Even after going to the PEC offices in Warrenton for help, she said she was unable to locate between 18 and 20 subdivisions shown on the PEC maps.