Editorial

Editorial

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III considered bill

Regardless how you feel about property owners’ rights, the bill passed during the recent General Assembly session and signed this week by Gov. Wilder concerning historic districts is a bad law. Senate Bill 514 is supposedly designed to allow those who own property slated to be designated on the Virginia Landmarks Register to vote down the designation. In our opinion, however, there are holes in the bill big enough to drive a backhoe through, which is exactly what developers probably plan to do to it.

Although S.B. 514 contains a number of changes to state law, the controverial portion allows a “majority” of property owners to vote down a historic district, or an owner to veto a building’s historic designation. “Majority,” according to the law, is “a majority of the number of property owners of or within the proposed property or district. ”

Let’s suppose the Town of Washington did not have its historic designation, which of course it does (and the law does not cover already-designated property, except Brandy Station and Bristoe). How would the “majority” vote be taken? Would one “lot of record” be a vote? Or would it be a taxable lot? They’re two different things,, at least in Washington. What about a single landowner whose many parcels were non-contiguous—how many votes would he or she get? Or a family subdivision? If one person owned 90 percent of the property, but it was in one large chunk, could two neighbors with oneacre lots out-vote him and keep the land from being preserved? Apparently so.

Who would conduct the balloting, the State Board of Elections? There’s no provision for that in the new law. What will happen in the event of a tie? Of all people to go off half-cocked on an issue requiring a majority vote, the state legislature is the last group one might expect.

We also question the provision that allows a single property owner to veto his or her building’s designation as historic. The owner may not want to preserve a certain building as it should be, but the people have an interest in the matter. Not everyone who might end up owning Monticello is going to want the state involved in their property—yet most would say it should be.

The Preservation Alliance of Virginia, which lobbied against the bill, says it allows owners to block designation without any process to at least determine the eligibility of the resource—in other words, its historic significance. Without hearing the case for the historic designation, the public won’t know if the property needs it or not. It’s simply up to the landowner.

There’s another issue here. Historic Districts are, in many respects, like any other zoning district. And zoning decisions can’t be made by a majority of landowners, or else everyone would vote to make their property as loosely zoned as possible, even if they don’t plan to change the use. Most people would want to keep their options available, even while seeing the value of restricting their neighbors’ options.

We should add, for those that don’t know it, that 31st District Del. Jerry Wood of Warrenton was behind passage of the bill. Mr. Wood’s pharmacy is in a Historic District, so he of all people should realize the districts’ value. We invite him to make the case that the law is not, as we argue, severely lacking in specifics.