By MARY K. BLEWITT

By MARY K. BLEWITT

Arundel Newspapers Staff Writer

Robert T. Dennis, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, sees the water supply for Virginia’s Northern Piedmont at a critical stage and the land-use value tax as a valuable means of preserving rural J&nd.

Dennis made the observations in an interview June 14 during an Arundel Newspapers editors’ meeting in Warrenton.

The Piedmont Environmental Council has taken positions on issues ranging from growth management to taxes and transportation.

The PEC was set up in 1972 to try to preserve the rural character of the Northern Piedmont, which is comprised of Clarke, Loudoun, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Culpeper, Madison, Greene, Orange and Albermarle counties. -1 “We are an organization of rural landowners trying to keep rural an area that is subject to an awful lot of development pressures,” said Mr. Dennis, who has served as the organization’s president since 1981.

In 1984, the PEC decided to create its vision of the future. The result was the Virginia Piedmont Reserve, which established a goal of tryng to keep a total of one million acres in rural character within the nine counties of its region.

“That would still leave slightly more than half of the nine counties available for development, so we don’t think we are reaching too far,” said Mr. Dennis.

The PEC is mainly interested in preserving a landscape that is privately-owned and remains in productive use, explained Mr. Dennis.

“I personally believe that the question of how you protect the public resources value of private lands is going to be an increasing environmental challenge as we go into the next century,” he said.

“I don’t think we know how to do it nowr,” he said, “but we are learning.”

“The public has a lot of interest in private lands and the open space character of the bucolic quality of the region,” said Mr. Dennis.