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By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Like a greasy hamburger from a truckstop diner, substandard subdivisions keep coming back. The big belch giving local officials indigestion this time is the aftermath of an old subdivision carved into the middle of farm and conservation land near Amissville.
Rapphannock Lakes, the 70-lot development created in the late 1950s, pre-dates local zoning and subdivision ordinances.
Under current regulations, the highest density allowed in the county is one dwelling unit per acre in the village residential zoning districts; in Rappahannock Lakes, the density is three dwellings, sometimes even four, per acre. Most — if not all — of the 30-some houses already built in the subdivision fail to meet today’s setback standards of 75 feet from the front lot line and 50 feet from side and rear boundaries.
The public water system which is supposed to serve the subdivision has problems suppling sufficient water to the few taps it has; other homeowners get water from a second atcapacitv well belonging to another landowner, and new residents must rely on private wells on the small lots. By-laws leave the subdivision’s homeowners' association without “authority. power, or ability to finance a publicwater system," according to zoning ad-ministrator John McCarthy. The association's president says it maintains only the well house, leaving the leaky lines the responsibility of individual home owners.
The private roads maintained by the association have a right-of-way of 40 feet, but the road surfaces are less than 15 feet wide, too narrow for cars coming in opposite directions to pass.
Never approved today
Rappahannock Lakes Subdivision would never be approved today. But the water system, the roads, and the houses that were here before the zoning and subdivision ordinances are beyond local government's regulatory power.
Not so the pearly 40 lots in the subdivision that don’t vet have houses.
A few, like similar small lots in Chestei Gap’s Blue Ridge Mountain Estates, may prove unbuildable because they lack enough land for a Health Department-approved septic system and well. But others have drainfields and wells already okayed by sanitarian Jack Lockhart. At least in the eyes of the state, those lots can be built on without endangering public health and safety.
It is one of those lots that is presenting the county with a sticky land use question.
John Hur is the contract buyer for a 15,000 square-foot lakeside lot owned by Thorne Tracy; the sales agreement is contingent upon issuance of a variance that would allow Mr. Hur to build on that lot.
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