Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 12 · column 1 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
By DONALD DEL ROSSO
Daawcrat 8taff Wrttar
They may be a bit shopworn, but the tools exist to preserve rural land in Northern Virginia, according to a local environmentalist.
Preserving more of the area’s rural land would require that the tools be slightly refashioned and applied in a “creative, positive” way by a regional organization of area county governments, said Piedmont Environmental Council President Robert T. Dennis.
To date, no such cooperation exists, but since July 1984 President Dennis has been quietly promoting the concept of a nine-county “rural land unit” that could protect as many as one million acres in the area from residential and commercial development.
However, before a regional land unit could take hold, Mr. Dennis said it first may be necessary for county officials in the Virginia Piedmont to individually do some long-range planning.
He explained: “I think you (county officials) need to try to sit down and think ahead — in the long run — of how you want the county to look, what are the (development) pressures and how are you going to respond to them.”
Several area jursidictions, he said, are responding independently to pressures to develop rural land with varying degress of success. The challenge is to get them to respond in a collective and complementary manner.
The Virginia Piedmont Reserve, as the conceptual unit is called, would include Fauquier, Loudoun, Rappahannock and Clarke counties and, Mr. Dennis said, would employ existing land preservation tools that could be slightly retrofitted to encourage more landowners to protect their property from development.
The key to creating such a reserve would be an “enhanced” version of the argicultural/forestal district, which prohibits landowners from developing their property for up to eight years.
Mr. Dennis, a Rappahannock County resident, indicated the reserve concept also could include various land preservation techniques used in Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina that involve transferring development rights from one parcel to another.
But the General Assembly in Richmond would have to approve a Transferrable Development Rights program before it could be applied in Virginia.
Loudoun County Chief of Comprehensive Planning Milton Herd said his staff is working on a TDR program that would be ready for debate in the 1986 General Assembly session.
84.2%