A fabulously interesting combination of oxymoron and conundrum appeared in the Lexington Herald-Leader on its editorial page of 11 December. There was an article at least inferentially extolling the virtues of the Purchase of Development Rights program alongside a map regarding that program that essentially nullifies any argument in favor of it. The writer attempted to make the point that valuable farmland must be protected, i.e., that the Urban Service Area must not be expanded and that the Urban Service Area “holes” should be filled with people first, presumably whether they like the locations of those “holes” or not. The current in-place method for accomplishing this is seen as taxpayers’ money is used to bribe the landowner in the interest of his promising, in exchange for cash, not to “develop” his property (PDR program in action), no matter how far from the urban-service-center of the county it is located, i.e., no matter how silly it would be for the landowner even to consider “developing” the land (houses, shopping areas, businesses, etc.).
On the map that appeared with the article was the location of the Urban Service Area, the locations of the PDR properties with “rights” already bought by taxpayers, who are lucky to own a house and lot anywhere in the Urban Service Area, and the few Rural Activity Centers such as Spindletop and Avon. In the mix is the fact that there is a Planning-Zoning Commission empowered to decide what gets built (or torn down) where, as well as how either will be done, and the Urban-County Council, which makes the final decisions. The rule of thumb, of course, is that developments of any significant size be considered worthy only if they are contiguous to the Urban Service Area.
Therein lies the oxymoron. According to the map, in the 128,000 acres outside the Urban Service Area, there is only one PDR-program property (with maybe one other tiny parcel), with its rights of development forfeited for cash, contiguous to the Urban Service Area. The other PDR properties are scattered far and wide throughout the county. In other words, these landowners took taxpayer money to promise they would be good guys and not try to burden the county with more buildings and asphalt, knowing full well – as did the solons who voted for this outrageous boondoggle of a plan – that the P-Z Commission and Urban-County Council would turn thumbs down on a request for development, anyway, or at least absent the “appropriate” incentives. Indeed, most of the PDR properties are relatively nowhere near the Urban Service Area and therefore could be considered totally ineligible for development for decades, if ever, so their owners have taken the cash and laughed all the way to the bank. The folks who own land abutting the Urban Service Area have elected sensibly not to be PDR freeloaders for the obvious reason that their land is situated perfectly for development, whether it’s classified as super-valuable farmland (including “horse-farms,” with which the writer of the article seemed most concerned) or not.
The conundrum: Why was the PDR program ever inculcated, in the first place, especially since at least two agencies already control development? It amounts to taking money directly from one set of taxpayers and handing it over to another set of taxpayers, most of whom already own valuable land and are better off than the citizens who cough up the cash, whether distributed from Frankfort or Lexington or anywhere else in the state. There certainly is no reasonable answer, so one has to wonder what the incentives were. The possibilities are not pretty and are left to the reader to contemplate.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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