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By SEAN KILPATRICK
Rappahannock Newt Special Writer
Welch versus Rappahannock County is over. For now.
Judge Joshua Robinson ruled Wednesday, after three days of mostly boring, highly technical testimony on the merits and demerits of sludge, that the county’s Board of Supervisors did not act in an arbitrary and capricious manner when it banned the spreading of sewage sludge on county farmland.
First the judge congratulated the attorneys for both sides:”I appreciate your skill. You have made sludge interesting.”
Then he quoted from an essay in the Virginia Law Review by Clayton P. Gillette on the design and practice of state and local government law.
“It is tempting,” the judge read, “to inject the judiciary, with its ability to make determinations
7 am of the opinion that the
county has the power...to
adopt ordinances regulating
or prohibiting the spreading
of sewage sludge.... ’
- Gerald Baliles
on an ad hoc basis, into each instance of perceived injustice.
“Certainly that is the case where the perceived injustice emerges from governmental action, because the failure of courts to provide a corrective typically leaves little in the way of alternative forms of redress.
“Yet judicial decision making provides no panacea, insofar as it involves a process that is not only costly in its own right, but that can only imperfectly determine whether a perceived impropriety constitutes an actual one.”
Ms. Patricia Saltonstall, a joint plaintiff with Dale Welch and John Harrison Powers, had raised the separate issue of how the ban should be applied within Agricultural and Forrestal Districts. State law carefully restricts a county’s ability to interfere with normal farming practices within an Ag District.
Judge Robinson ruled that “It would not be appropriate to treat her property differently than other property in the county.”
The judge appeared to base his ruling in part on the General Assembly’s failure to take action after Attorney General Gerald Baliles issued an opinion on just this question for Caroline County in May, 1984.
That opinion concluded, “I am of the opinion that the county has the power under Section 15.1510 to adopt ordinances regulating or prohibiting the spreading of sewage sludges and other wastes on farmland in the county.”
“I have seen no change in Virginia Law to that opinion since 1984,” Judge Robinson said.
At this year’s session of the General Assembly
93.3%