According to an interesting piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the campaign against "sprawl" is getting expensive, with local governments discovering that there are actually costs associated with acquiring and owning property. Even if the noble goal is to stop "development" and "the developers," it costs money to cut grass, bring buildings up to code, and police publicly-owned property:

In town halls across the suburbs, conservation euphoria is giving way to the sober realization that open space can be a money pit.

"What did we get ourselves into?" is the increasingly common refrain among municipal officials, said John Granger, manager of Solebury Township in Bucks County.

The shopping spree leading up to that lament has been going on for 20 years. In that time, with their voters' blessings, communities in the region have issued upwards of $300 million in bonds and raised more than $109 million in new taxes for land preservation. They've bought at least 52,000 acres in Bucks, Burlington, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Gloucester and Montgomery Counties.

In their "race" against developers to acquire land, "the thought was, 'Let's get it and figure out what to do with it later,' " said Jeffrey Marshall, a vice president of the Heritage Conservancy, a nonprofit land trust based in Doylestown. "It's later."

It certainly is in Lower Makefield, Bucks County. The township bought the 235-acre Patterson farm a decade ago for $7.25 million - a deal in which "there was never a lot of thought given to what we [saw] as the future of this place," said Steve Santarsiero, a township supervisor.

On the farm are 16 structures, some dating to the 1700s and declared eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

They're also falling apart, said Terry Fedorchak, the township manager. One farmhouse alone needs $400,000 worth of work - new roof, new windows, reinforcement of sagging floors and beams - to bring it up to code.

Meanwhile, even without a clear source of funding for renovations, a committee of preservationists and Lower Makefield residents is looking into ways the buildings could be used by the public.

Taxpayers in many communities are demanding utility from the land they've bought. They clamor for bike trails and dog parks. Soccer and baseball fields are big, too. In Evesham, recreation groups are pushing for a synthetic-turf playing field, estimated at $1 million, to be installed on a yet-to-be-picked parcel.

In the hard copy edition, there's a picture of a sign posted on public land which reads "CLOSED TO PUBLIC," and I think that more and more that sort of thing will emerge as the goal. Parks only invite trouble, maintenance, and above all, lawsuits! While lawsuits are not mentioned as a cost of owning land, the fact is that people routinely sue governments for injuries they suffer while on public lands. Such injuries could include slip and falls, drowning, or even being victimized by criminals availing themselves of untrimmed foliage or unpoliced bathrooms.

I'm fascinated by the idea of what it is that constitutes the "public" and what is a "use." If land is simply preserved so that it's off limits to developers, is that a legitimate public use? Does the government even have to use land? Who owns this land? The taxpayers? Or the people they elect? The latter are spending the money of the former in order to buy this land, and they're also finding ways to persuade people to deed it over or preserve its open nature by means of restrictive covenants. But doesn't this put the elected officials in a bit of a conflict of interest? Eventually, the land's value will increase, and because governments always need money, they'll end up resembling the greedy families that once wanted to sell the land to the greedy "developers." How do you stop these local governments from succumbing to temptation? (After all, they do have to run for office.)

To avoid the hassles of property ownership, the new trend is to buy the development rights from the owner, who is still responsible for maintenance:

In Solebury Township, officials have managed to minimize those headaches by primarily purchasing only the development rights to land, rather than the ground itself. Under such so-called easements, maintenance remains the responsibility of the property owner. So while the township has protected 3,000 acres, only 100 acres have been bought outright, said Granger, the Solebury manager.

"If we did own [all that] land," he said, "I'm not sure how we'd maintain it."

In London Grove, a Chester County community just beginning to venture into open-space preservation, Township Manager Steven Brown said one thing is certain: "Mostly easements is the way we are going to go."

The irony here is that even though I'm a libertarian free market advocate, the esthete in me very much likes open space, and I hate seeing these hideously ugly developments spring up on what was once beautiful farmland ("fertile farms and verdant woods" as the piece says). But all that land is owned, and there is always a cost of ownership. "The government" can become the owner, but all the government is is a collection of certain people who claim to speak for the rest.

As a practical matter, I've noticed that what they call "sprawl" is limited by driving time and driving distance to the nearest metropolitan areas. Pennsylvania is a huge state, and much of it is very rural, very "red." "The boonies," as it were. No one cares much about sprawl in such flyover country, because there isn't much, and unless new suburbs and cities spring up, there isn't likely to be very much, and local governments would probably love to entice developers in.

No doubt, the possible future willingness of local governments to do things like sell land they own (or development rights they aquired), or to allow property owners to build on their own land is very worrisome to environmentalists. What seems to be going on is a preventive attempt to come up with a plan which would envelop local and state governments and assorted conservation groups into a quagmire of environmental bureaucracy. The Inquirer article links the "Regional Green Plan" web site, which outlines the goals:

With the aid of advisory groups, the Alliance identified three primary uses for open space-agriculture, ecological function, and recreation-and assembled multiple data layers to determine how valuable the region's land is for each use. Each data layer contains a measurable criterion, such as soil quality (for agriculture), land use and land cover (for ecological resources), and proximity to existing parks (for recreation). A full description of all the data layers used to prioritize land for each open space use is provided in the following chapters.

A raster-based technique is used where each data layer is composed of a grid of 30 by 30 meter cells. In all, there are slightly over 6 million cells in the region. Each of the cells in each layer is assigned a numerical score based on the value of resources in that cell. After cell scores for individual layers are determined, all the layers making up each of the three sub-components are weighted and combined. The process for establishing layer values and weights will be described later in each section.

Ultimately, each cell in the region receives a cumulative score for agriculture, ecology, and recreation.6 The cumulative numerical scores are then reclassed into "quantile" format. A quantile denotes groups of equal numbers of cells. For example, separating 100 cells into 10 quantiles would result in 10 groups of 10 cells. Separating 100 cells into 5 quantiles would result in 5 groups of 20 cells, and so on.

For agriculture, ecology and recreation, cells are divided into 10 quantiles. All cells in the highest quantile are reassigned a score of 10. Cells in the next highest quantile are reassigned a score of 9, all the way down to the lowest quantile, which is assigned a score of 1. Using this classification technique, the three major components of this report were assembled: the agricultural priorities map, the ecological priorities map, and the recreational priorities map.

Finally, the three components were used to create two composite maps. In the first composite map, high priority values, i.e., values of 8, 9 and 10, from each component map were overlaid onto one another. These lands represent the top agricultural, ecological, and recreational priorities in the region. Taken together, they total 466,300 acres. In the second map, the values from each component were combined and reclassified to produce one set of open space priority values for the region.

By overlaying development data on Rural Conservation Lands, it is apparent that they are already experiencing the pressures of development. As of 2000, 175,000 acres were identified as developed-some 22% of the total area of 807,000 acres. Of the remaining 632,000 undeveloped acres, approximately 125,000 acres are protected, leaving 507,000 acres undeveloped and unprotected. Of these 507,000 acres, 401,100 or 79 percent are high-resource-value lands. Development in these rural areas is occurring in a fragmented way, with development sites scattered throughout these lands, threatening their contiguity and connectedness.

The balance of the five-county region contains most of its residential, commercial, and industrial uses. Within this 602,000-acre area, 451,000 acres are developed and 41,000 protected, leaving 111,000 acres undeveloped and unprotected. Of these 111,000 acres, 68,700 or 62 percent are high-resource-value lands.

The key term here seems to be "protection." If land is deemed in need of "protection," the goal is to stop it from being "developed" or even used. How that is defined seems to be up to them, not the citizens, or even the government.

Perhaps the goal is to change the legal structure to protect and preserve all land, from all threats public and private. Against all rights of ownership, whether private or public? (Why, this promises to turn Marxism on its head!)

How do you get to be in the protective class, anyway?

Does anyone elect the protectors?