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Roads

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the “no new roads” mood of the meeting: “You can put a different spin on highway planning and prevent future traffic congestion. You can manage access and reduce infrastructure costs,” he said. He also suggested that “you can develop hybrid solutions, some ideas that are not on the option sheet.”

In an interview VDOT engineer Bob Moore, who supervised the widening of U.S. 211 and would be in charge of further road improvements, said, “You need to look beyond the county’s borders and see this on a regional basis. No matter how you look at it, regional growth is occurring in nearby counties, and this is not something you can stop from within Rappahannock County.”

County Administrator John McCarthy, for one, questions one of the report’s core recommendations: “U.S. 211 won’t be 6-laned between Washington and Sperryville in my lifetime. . That’s ridiculous,” he said in a telephone interview.

Reflecting the powerful urge to resist development in this county Mr. McCarthy said, “We don’t want to be the asset that someone else comes to plunder.” Although he sees the state government in Richmond as solidly pro-business and pro-development, he did cite these four local controls as having a profound effect on limiting new roads or.expanding existing ones:

• Open space easements allow landowners to get tax breaks for agreeing not to subdivide or develop land.

• Agriculture and forest districts allow farms and forests to remain as they are — unmolested by new roads running through them.

• Scenic Highway designations increase the constraints on improvements that can be made to a road. (Currently Route 231 south of Sperryville, Rpute 628 (the Fodderstack road), and Route 647 from Flint Hill to Marshall have this designation.)

• Set-back requirements can make it more attractive to widen existing roads rather than seek routes for new roads.

Mr. McCarthy does support the report’s recommendation that bypasses be built around Sperryville, Flint