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In recent years, however, the program has come under increasing fire, especially in the rural counties like Rappahannock which circle metropolitian areas with skyrocketing land prices. Critics charge that land use has provided a de facto tax shelter for real estate speculators.
The program’s detractors say that out-of-county investors often purchase tracts of open space and agricultural acreage with the intent of eventually developing them. In the meantime, they say, the speculators take advantage of the drastically lower tax rates afforded to such land by enrolling it in the land use program, then renting it out as farm land.
The program’s supporters argue that the benefit to the county in the aesthetic quality of life here cannot be reduced to a price tag on lost tax revenues.
Tourism, which is the second largest and fastest growing industry in the county, would fall precipitously if the agricultural, open space and forests were developed into subdivisions like those which dot the counties to the east.
95.5%