Rural lands as great risk

lewleadbeater.com

notes from the edge

Home

Email Me

				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Rural lands at great risk				June 13, 2009

In a letter to James Madison in 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.” Earlier, in 1781, he noted that “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantive and genuine virtue.”

I have no idea how many centuries of virtuous government Jefferson envisioned, but if what’s transpiring with farmers and farmland in James City County is any indication, we had better start paying very close attention to the ethical formulas, or lack thereof, to which our county leaders are allegedly adhering.

According to Libby Oliver, the manager of the Williamsburg Farmer’s Market, there is a grand total of one JCC farmer participating in her operation.

“That’s not what we want to have happen,” said Oliver. “We want to use the land that’s here. When we say we want local food, we want it to be truly local.”

Well, luck with that.

In conjunction with the formulation of the new Comprehensive Plan, we’ve been blitzed with bloviations from various active and defunct rural land commissions about how desperately we want to preserve farmland and green spaces in the county. Yet when push comes to economically opportunistic shove and acres of farmland are up for sale, the Planning Commission and its Comprehensive Plan steering ganglia suddenly become the Carve up the County Committee and start discussing what new ordinances and land designations they can come up with to make it easier for development to replace corn fields.

The latest incarnation of an agricultural preservation operation is rather ominously called the Rural Economic Development Committee. Their alleged purpose is to get farmers who are considering selling their land to hold on to it and return to profitable farming. And that’s where the “economic development” comes in, or so they say.

Yet you have to wonder in what direction this committee is going when one of its seven members is Don Hunt, owner of Hill Pleasant Farm in Norge. Far from returning to agriculture, Hunt has made it clear that he has quit farming and now is willing to sell his land for development.

And that’s his right. But why is he sitting on a committee that is purportedly out to preserve land like his for positive agriculturally economic purposes? Just last year, Hunt maintained quite forthrightly that “It’s arbitrary to keep land if the county wants to expand in the future.”

Indicative of the paradoxical approach the county takes to such situations, and in apparent conflict with the goals of the Rural Economic Development Committee, the Planning Commission has greeted Hunt’s decision to sell his land with a proposal to reconfigure and jerry-rig the town of Norge to the point of assuring not agricultural longevity, but industrial and commercial development.

As reported in the Gazette, landowners in Norge received letters originating with JCC’s Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee indicating that land-use designation changes were being considered for the part of Norge that adjoins Hunt’s property. Land on Richmond Rd. from the Pottery Factory to Croaker Rd. and east to Interstate 64 would be designated “economic opportunity” or “mixed-use” parcels.

In conjunction with the designation changes was a proposal to extend Mooretown Rd. through Hunt’s property to Croaker Rd. and extend Croaker Rd. as well.

One wonders what the difference between economic development of rural lands and economic opportunity really is. Why would any farmer want to return to agriculture if those involved with establishing a new Comprehensive Plan and the Planning Commission drooll, as one Norge resident put it, at the prospect of turning a small town topsy-turvy because a farmer is willing to sell his land?

Why establish yet another committee devoted to preserving agricultural land if commissioners are going to wax economically and developmentally apoplectic and do all they can to expedite the sale and assure the demise of farmland and other green spaces?

The fact is that Jefferson’s virtuous government becomes a mixed bag sending mixed signals whenever saleable agricultural land confronts the unstoppable economic juggernaut of urbanization and industrialization.

Money talks. Corn, wheat, squash and tomatoes are not participants in the conversation.

As for the chosen people of God, they are quickly disappearing. That some Rural Economic Development Committee thinks that the county has any interest in saving them is nothing short of hypocritical duplicity. Drool smothers okra every time.