To the Editor,
The Orange County Board of Supervisors, the Planning Commission and the Planning staff have been working on a revision of the county’s Zoning Ordinance.
The treatment of agricultural land has emerged as perhaps the most difficult issue for the revision.
Under current rules, land zoned agricultural in Orange can be divided into an unlimited number of two-acre lots, with two houses per lot. Someone can put scores of houses on a hundred-acre farm, almost no questions asked. Every day we are seeing more farmland cut up all over the county.
Our neighbors treat agricultural land differently.
Louisa allows only seven divisions—total
Culpeper allows three divisions every five years
Madison allows four divisions every ten years
Orange’s radically permissive policy allows for indiscriminate residential development. This is problematic since the more houses there are, the more services the county must provide, and the more services the county provides, the higher its taxes must be.
The property taxes paid by new households do not offset the increased cost of services. In more than two hundred studies of various communities, the cost of services to households has been found to exceed the revenue from residential property tax.
Take Orange: the typical new home here brings in about $2000 in property tax. But just one child in school costs the county over $5,000 a year—and then there are the costs of public safety, roads and so on.
According to the studies, communities do make money on farms. Why would the county trade profits for losses? But that’s what happens when farmland is developed.
If Orange’s policy does not change, taxes will go up.
To avoid this, the Zoning Ordinance should be revised so that the treatment of agricultural land is more like that in Louisa, Culpeper and Madison.
James Collins
Somerset
