By Bob Lee, Citizens for Fauquier County Board Member
As Alice learned during her adventures in Wonderland - if you don’t know where you’re going any road will get you there. I am pleased to say that for more than half a century the elected and appointed leaders of Fauquier County have known where they want to be from a land use planning perspective.
A tale of two Virginia counties
After WW2 Fauquier and Loudoun Counties shared similar population and demographic characteristics. Today Loudoun County races toward a population of 500,000 and the 2020 Census has a Fauquier population that only recently exceeded 70,000. A look at the land planning of these two formerly similar rural counties demonstrates the reasons for divergent population growth and development. Both Loudoun and Fauquier were early adopters of land use planning authorized by pertinent provisions of the Code of Virginia, but today these counties look very different in terms of natural and cultural heritage protections and human settlement patterns.
A chronology of Fauquier's foundational land planning components
Let’s examine the history of Fauquier’s land use planning, and particularly rural land planning. The first Fauquier Planning Commission was established in 1950. The first Subdivision Ordinance was adopted in 1951. The first Zoning Ordinance was adopted in 1955. The first Service Districts, designed to accommodate future population growth and development, were designated in 1967-68. Rural Village zoning for small unincorporated communities was adopted in 1981. And most importantly, Fauquier in the early 1980s followed the lead of neighboring Clarke County and abandoned by-right large lot rural land divisions - too large to mow and too small to farm - and adopted Sliding Scale Zoning for the designated Rural Agriculture (RA) and Rural Conservation (RC) areas that represented approximately 90% of the County land area.
Sliding Scale Rural Areas Zoning
Sliding Scale Zoning is designed to encourage clustered and very limited residential development. Let me briefly explain how the Sliding Scale zoning in Fauquier County operates. All RA and RC zoned properties have a sliding scale residential development rights/subdivision allocation based on recorded land records as of May 21, 1981. For properties larger than 30 acres in RA or RC zones, a maximum of 15% of the property may be used for residential subdivision reserving a minimum of 85% for production agriculture and forestry as well as natural resource protection. Once a landowner begins using the Sliding Scale area based lot division allocation, the 85% residual must be recorded in the County land records as not being available for further division rights and defined as non-common open space. This concept seems complicated at first glance, but it is relatively easy to administer and has now been in place for more than four decades.
The 1987 Comprehensive Plan wake-up call
The increasing suburban character of Loudoun and Prince William Counties, beginning in the 1960s, was a motivating factor for Fauquier elected and appointed public officials to try to preserve and protect the rural heritage of Fauquier County. The 1967 Fauquier Comprehensive Plan prophesy of a Year 2000 Fauquier population of 235,000, was also a major shock that frightened public officials and Fauquier citizens. While I was the Clarke County Administrator, I partnered with Dick McNear, Fauquier Planning Director, in the late 1970s to draft the Fauquier Sliding Scale component of the County’s Zoning Ordinance. That zoning and Fauquier’s tradition of perpetual conservation easements together represent reasons why the Fauquier landscape remains bucolic and the County retains an enviable quality of life.
A vision for the future - "progress with reverence for heritage"
I became Fauquier County Administrator in January of 1990 and worked with the Board of Supervisors to craft a Vision Statement that reads, in pertinent part, “… the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors seeks, within the bounds of fiscal integrity, to preserve the physical beauty, historical heritage and environmental quality of the county while ensuring that population growth and development is a positive force on the general welfare of the community.” Now, over thirty years after adoption of its Vision Statement, Fauquier continues to be a state and national leader in planning and implementing rural-area protection.
Voluntary land conservation and land-use value assessment for local tax purposes
Virginia has the best-in-nation financial inducements for voluntary land conservation and for more than four decades Fauquier County led the Commonwealth in the number of acres and the highest percentage of land area subject to conservation easements. Additionally, Fauquier County in the 1970s adopted the Virginia Land-Use Value Assessment Program, the preferential property tax assessments reduced the local tax burden for agriculture, forestry, horticulture, and open space lands.
Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) Program
As County Administrator I worked with Harry Atherton, who represented the Marshall Election District for 18 years on the Planning Commission and eight years on the Board of Supervisors, to initiate a Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) program. Most of the voluntary land conservation in the County was in the northern half of the County, but much of the productive farmland was in the southern portion of the County. Working with Harry, and his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors in the 1990s, I introduced a policy and program to purchase residential development rights in areas of the County not designated for future population growth and remote from planned public infrastructure. The Board of Supervisors adopted a small increase in the real property tax to fund this program and make the County eligible for State and Federal matching funds. This voluntary program only applies in the rural agriculture and conservation zoning districts and complements the Sliding Scale zoning by extinguishing residential development rights on properties where the owners are not interested in future residential development. It also provides additional funding to farmers for investment in their farming operations. Today, several decades into the PDR program, Fauquier leads Virginia jurisdictions in the acreage enrolled in this land planning program. This program has been particularly important to protect water quality in the Occoquan watershed that serves much of Northern Virginia and in creating an open land buffer around the Fauquier portion of the Quantico Marine Corps Base.
A note of caution and opportunity for the future
As noted, Fauquier has adopted what many informed observers consider the best rural planning and zoning framework of any county in Virginia, but most of these plans and programs are susceptible to future political vicissitudes. Even the best ordinances and plans are vulnerable to being weakened or even abolished by future local governing bodies or state legislatures. Permanent protection of land conservation values and purposes in the form of recorded perpetual conservation easements under auspices of the Open-Space Land Act and the Virginia Conservation Easement Act represent the strongest legal mechanism to assure protection of our cherished cultural heritage and a responsible human settlement pattern for Fauquier’s posterity. Moving beyond even the best rural land use ordinances and programs to perpetual conservation easements should be the next major policy priority for Fauquier’s future.
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