Supervisors Look into Land-Use Ordinance
By Sarah Watson, The News & Advance, Lynchburg, Va.
Feb. 7–Appomattox County supervisors have a lot of homework to do before their next meeting.
The county is considering adopting a land-use ordinance, which would allow agricultural and forested land meeting certain requirements to be assessed at its productivity level rather than fair market value.
“This is probably one of our tougher issues, simply because the public we’re dealing with,” Supervisor Tom Conrad said at Tuesday night’s board meeting. “We have a lot of citizens in the county who are homeowners and just that. And they’re affected by this.”
The board has been working on a land-use ordinance and trying to anticipate the financial impact for almost a year, county administrator Aileen Ferguson said.
“It’s hard to put a definite dollar figure on it” because no one knows what the total value of reassessed property under the productivity value system would be, she said.
“Our county is not growing nearly as fast as what we’ve been told,” Conrad said. “Certainly based on the rate of growth in the county, that has to be part of the decision-making process”
If it’s adopted, the county will most likely have to raise taxes to make up for lost income, Ferguson said. “I think that’s a pretty sure thing because I don’t know what else to do to raise the revenues.”
The land-use program started in 1972 as a way to preserve agricultural land and open space, Virginia Farm Bureau district director Mark Campbell said earlier Tuesday. Campbell discussed the ordinance with the board at a special meeting Jan. 29.
Appomattox is the only county in the Lynchburg area that doesn’t have a
land-use ordinance.
Land must meet minimum requirements for eligibility. For inclusion under the agricultural label, landowners must have at least five acres of productive land and a documented financial history, Campbell said.
Under the forestry label, landowners must have at least 20 acres of land devoted for a timber crop. It can’t be “just a piece of property that’s growing up in cedar trees and blackberry vines,” Campbell said. “It’s gotta be dedicated to the production of timber.”
Those eligible for reassessing their land under the system would be responsible for applying to the program, Campbell said. “I see it as a tax equity program because obviously forests and open space don’t require the services that residential areas do.”
Board members were interested in hearing an unbiased opinion of the pros and cons of a land-use ordinance and wanted to hear from counties with similar economic structures as Appomattox. Additionally some board members wanted to hear opinions from counties that implemented the ordinance within the last five years.
Appomattox supervisors have until July 1 to adopt the ordinance if they want to implement it in time for the county’s 2008 real estate reassessment, but the decision should be made sooner, Ferguson said.
“We got to know what we’re gonna do when we work on this budget,” she said. “Because that’s the money we’re going to be working with.”
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Copyright (c) 2007, The News & Advance, Lynchburg, Va.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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