The lead editorial of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., of 14 November was a gushing mishmash of praise for the Purchase of Development Rights program (otherwise known as “PDR rip-off”) currently in place in Fayette County. The editorialist remarked the fact that 20,165 acres have now been saved from those wooly developers of stores, houses, and other demons designed for (drum-roll!) dollars and desirability, never mind that both the Planning/Zoning Commission and the urban/county government have the responsibility for seeing that such violations of the human condition are denied/controlled.
The Urban-County government, accountable to ALL the taxpayers, has now spent $21.6 million in a very short time (PDR passed in 2000) to bribe property owners not to “develop” their land, notwithstanding the fact that they can’t do anything, in the first place, that’s against the planning-zoning requirements as enforced by – yep, you guessed it – the Urban-County government. This means that this obvious and pernicious duplication and overlap of responsibilities awards the “haves,” those folks owning valuable rural land at the expense of the “have-nots,” those folks who live in town and are stuck with nothing to “develop,” thus making them ineligible for the bribe.
This is the penultimate example of redistribution of wealth, though in reverse to the way generally conceived, i.e., money flowing from the wealthy to the poor. In this case, the wealthy (landowners) are collecting from those poor, unlucky folks who can be “had,” whether they like it or not, since their representatives (or at least the majority) have voted to sell them out. Mayor Newberry, the employee of ALL the people, has EARMARKED (he should be in Congress) a cool $2 million PDR-bribe for this year for a handful of people, most of whom are so far from the service area that they couldn’t – at least without enormous bribes to various commissioners – convince P-Z and the UCG that they should be allowed to build whatever wherever.
The editorialist lamented the fact that this cool $2 million is not near enough money for this year, since there are now (gasp) 49 PDR-applicants (count ’em) on the waiting list to collect the graft, their poor farms the objects of an unmitigated insult of non-acceptance. Even worse, there will be more applicants in January, according to the editorial, comprising another group forlornly neglected by their government in the matter of redistributing the wealth. Of course, the feds have kicked in to the tune of $26.9 million (EARMARKS), meaning that Lexingtonians have been taxed twice for the good old local PDR.
So…what’s a mayor to do, especially since mayors are more beholden to the money-people (landowners, for instance…hint, hint) than anybody else in the matter of elections? The editorialist suggested that the mayor and council members must start thinking now…NOW…about how to increase PDR funding for the next budget and (of course, more importantly) long-term financing at this “right moment” to invest in “our”…that’s “OUR” region’s future. OUR? Obviously, the editorialist was on something…maybe five pints of Jack Daniels in preparation for the midnight deadline for editorials.
The kicker, of course, lies in the fact that only three…that’s THREE…PDR properties (out of 176, or 1.7%) abut the service area and would thus be, though only at the pleasure of P-Z and UCG, eligible for development. Nearly all the other PDR-bribed properties (some 173 or so, or 98.3%) are so far away from the service area that they would never be developed anyway…unless, of course, the right palms might be crossed. So…what better to do than someday have to cross the appropriate palms with a bit of incentive than take the largesse today, right now…with no sweat? It’s called PDR…and it stinks. The average John Doe citizen-types wonder about the incentives involved in approving this kind of rip-off.
The supreme irony lies in the fact that these farms are already actual developments (horse-farms or dairy-farms, for instance, not to mention tobacco), the upshot being that PDR-bribes go to developers, not non-developers. That’s government…at its worst…for OUR region.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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