THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 4, 1995 TAG: 9503040462
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF REPORT
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Short : 40 lines
The property rights bill passed by the House Friday would make a big difference to City Councilman John Baum.
About $1 million worth, by his calculations.
Baum, a farmer, manages 800 acres of Virginia Beach woodland that he owns with his five brothers and sisters. Unencumbered by regulation, he figures it would be worth about $1.2 million. But because the federal government categorizes it as wetlands, he said, its value is lowered to about $180,000.
``It really means you have land that you can't use at all except to grow trees,'' he said.
Because the area is so close to sea level, Baum's story is a common one in Hampton Roads. A survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year identified 70,000 acres, about 20 percent of the area's land mass, as wetlands.
If the government were required to compensate the owners of those 70,000 acres - using Baum's estimates of lost value - the bill to the U.S. taxpayers would come to a whopping $89 million.
Baum said his family would like to develop its property. The land is a little spongy after a heavy rain, he said, but ``if you drain it properly, you can build homes, highways - anything else you want on it.''
Between 1982 and 1990, the Fish and Wildlife survey found, about 5,000 acres of Hampton Roads' wetlands were destroyed.
``This was to be our retirement,'' Baum said. ``But by the time this is all resolved, we could all be dead.'' MEMO: [For a related story, see page A1 for this date.]
KEYWORDS: ENVIRONMENT WETLANDS by CNB