The Fayette PDR Rip-off!

In the Lexington Herald-Leader of 28 February, columnist Tom Eblen extolled the virtues of the Development of Purchase Rights program, which is designed to pay Fayette County property owners for promising never to develop their properties from farming usage (mostly horse and cattle business now that tobacco has faded) to anything else. The city and state pay the landowners an average of $2,500 per acre, in the process of which the land is devalued for tax purposes, meaning that the owners not only get the cash but also get the tax break. The Urban/County government has contributed $26.1 million and the state/federal another $31.5 million since 2000, which, of course, means that Fayette taxpayers have anted up thrice for 10 years. Add the tax-break others must make up and a fourth rip-off is in place.

The added tax burden per household is not enormous but the principle stinks. The Urban-County government, accountable to ALL the taxpayers, has now spent $26.1 million in a very short time to bribe property owners not to “develop” their land, notwithstanding the fact that they can’t do anything with it, 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.

The local budget includes $1.1 million for these land-bribes this year even though the government is strapped for cash just to fix potholes. In the last map I saw (2006), 98.3% of the PDR properties were so far away from the service area that they would never be developed anyway…unless, of course, the right palms in government might be crossed, not unheard of in Kentucky. The map of 2009 included with the article didn’t define the service area but it’s a leadpipe cinch that little has changed. In the meantime, the property-owners have complete and normal use of their operations since the government has bought absolutely nothing tangible from them.

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…and there’s quite a waiting list of owners out there, waiting for their turn at the public trough. Also ironic…Eblen suggests that PDR is good environmentally but certainly doesn’t mention how the extensive use of chemical fertilizers used on farms affects everything from wells to streams.
And so it goes. Jim Clark