Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 17, 1993 TAG: 9312180008
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The Board of Supervisors defeated the plan 5-2 Monday in the face of concerns among supervisors and vocal opposition from rural landowners who feared it would lead to government infringement on private property rights.
In October, the Planning Commission had recommended approval of the plan, which included more than 60 recommendations to help balance growth with preservation of the county's fields, forests, streams and rivers.
Though a majority of the Board of Supervisors at one time or another favored certain aspects of the plan, members couldn't agree Monday on a way to add those portions separately to their comprehensive plan, which serves as a foundation for county regulations.
The supervisors held a work session Nov. 29 to go through the open-space plan in detail - in particular to address Supervisor Henry Jablonski's concerns about conservation easements and Supervisor Larry Linkous' questions about buffers for development next to agricultural and forest districts. But that session ended up being shoehorned into the end of a long night of review of financing options for several bond projects.
``The two of us [who] voted for it were the only two who attended any of your planning meetings,'' Moore told the commission Wednesday. ``It was too much for the Board of Supervisors to digest in one resolution. It represented a big change.``
The only person who enjoys a change, Moore said, is a baby in a wet diaper.
Moore suggested the commission ``let things cool down a little bit'' before it continues working toward some of the goals of the open-space plan, which planners and volunteers developed over the past two years in a series of workshops with county and Blacksburg residents that began in the spring of 1992.
In Blacksburg, by contrast, the open-space initiative is still alive. The town Planning Commission is set to take up the matter again in January.
All but nine of the proposals included in the county's version were voluntary measures, which planners said eventually would have given landowners more options for preserving or developing rural land than now exist in the county's zoning and subdivision ordinances.
In an attempt to make the plan more politically palatable to the elected supervisors, the Planning Commission in October changed the name from the open-space plan to the ``conservation and development'' amendment and added verbiage clarifying that the document had as its base the protection of private property rights.
Throughout the two-year process that finally brought the open-space plan before the board, commission members and volunteers faced questions from skeptical landowners who believed ``open space'' meant the public would have access to their land, particularly riverfront property.
Similar concerns led the Board of Supervisors to defeat a scenic river designation for the Little River in February 1992.
Nevertheless, Moore said not all is lost. As a member of a committee that studied ways to protect karst terrain in the late '80s, he watched the Board of Supervisors reject all four of its proposals.
Now, four years later, three of the recommendations have come into effect in other ways, Moore said.
by CNB