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Practically
every farmer in the county has received numerous phone calls
from someone wanting to buy their land for speculation or
development. The average size farm of 180 acres is worth several
hundred thousand dollars. Although most farmers don't want
to sell out, as one property after another gets developed
it becomes more and more difficult to continue farming.
There
is currently about 170,000 acres of farmland left in Washtenaw
County, down from a high of over 400,000 acres in the 1930s.
There are also adequate support businesses for the agricultural
industry; farmers can still buy what they need and sell their
products in or around the county. If too much more land is
converted, however, the agricultural community's fabric will
start to unwind, and the $300 million industry, along with
its natural and aesthetic benefits, will be lost forever.
Why
Land Preservation Makes Good Economic Sense
As land becomes developed, there are a number of costs associated
with servicing that property. In 1995, WLT published a Cost
of Community Services (COCS) study, the first of its kind
in Michigan. The study compared the revenues generated by
and the expenditures for public services to each of three
land uses: agricultural, residential and commercial/industrial.
The study was conducted for the 1994-95 fiscal year in Scio
Township by a group of Master's degree students from the University
of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment. The
results of this study were as follows: for every dollar that
agricultural land contributed in taxes, only 62¢ were
required to service that land. Commercial/industrial land
was also a good deal; only 26¢ were used to service those
properties for every dollar they contributed. Residential
land, however, cost the community $1.40 for every dollar they
paid in taxes.
The
reason residential land is so expensive to service is that
houses contain children who need to have space in public schools.
Voters in the Dexter Community School District, which encompasses
about half of Scio Township, committed to spending $175 million
during the 1990's to build new schools. Those schools are
nearing capacity already, and even more new schools will have
to be built within the new few years. Children and education
are very important, but so is fiscal responsibility.
Proponents
of PDR argue that we can spend a little money now to preserve
farms forever, or we can spend a lot more money building new
roads, schools, township halls and water and sewer lines and
buying new fire trucks and police cars. We have that choice,
right now. Keeping farms around will have numerous nutritional,
environmental and economic benefits for our children and grandchildren.
The
Push for PDR
In 1996 a group of citizens brought a draft PDR ordinance
to the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners and advocated
for a ballot measure to fund it. The County Board's response
was to create a special committee to study the variety of
ways farmland and open space can be protected. That committee,
the Agricultural Lands and Open Space Task Force, recommended
a number of actions, including PDR. The ballot measure known
as Proposal 1 was placed on the ballot in November 1998 and
included 0.4 mills of funding for planning, urban revitalization,
natural areas protection and PDR, which would have generated
$35 million over ten years. Half of that amount would have
been for PDR. The measure was defeated in a hotly contested
race in which opponents of the proposal spent over $330,000.
However, the story doesn't end there: in Fall 2003, voters in both the City of Ann Arbor and in Ann Arbor Towship had the
opportunity to vote on open space ballot initiatives, including PDR. Both initiatives passed
with overwhelming margins. These programs will preserve thousands of acres of open space.
Citizens groups and others continue to advocate for PDR as
a necessary and important tool to be utilized in protecting
our agricultural lands.
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