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Regulations
To the Editor:
I was not present at the recent meeting of the Rappahannock Planning Commission at which proposed amendments to the Rappahannock County Zoning Ordinance were discussed. I read about it in the News and heard comments from friends who did attend and it is obvious that most of those in attendance were very much opposed to most of the proposals. I suspect that the drafters of those amendments chose to ignore or were unaware of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision which bears directly on this issue.
A lady bought a piece of property some years ago near Lake Tahoe in Nevada, intending to build a house on it. However, between the time she bought the land and sought permission to build, the local county planning authority determined that her land was located in a protected stream environmental zone and turned down her request. She took her case to court and lost. When she pursued her case to the Supreme Court, however, that court, in a unanimous decision, declared that she had been denied her Constitutional rights as a private citizen to build on her own property. The Court cited Article V of the Amendments to the Constitution which says, among other things, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Since the Lake Tahoe county government had “taken" her land, it was ordered to compensate her for the full value of that land.
According to Mr. Newbill Miller in his recent excellent letter to the editor of the Rappahannock News, there are about 1 ,(XX) pieces of land in this county which would be directly affected by the proposed zoning amendments. In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling, it is quite likely that the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors will be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy land from those property owners who
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