The Fifth Annual Meeting of
The League of Kentucky Property Owners
Thursday, October 12, 2000
The General Meeting begins at 6:30 P.M.
at the Triple Crown Clubhouse

Featured Guest Speaker:
Charles E. Smith

Nationally Acclaimed Motivational Speaker andProperty Rights Advocate. Hear his exciting speech: "This Land IS Your Land"

This will be a wonderful opportunity for you to initiate your friends and help us enroll new members.

Land and Water Conservation Fund

U.S. Congress proponents have fallen over themselves in defense of the new and improved Land and Water Conservation Fund legislation by invoking the mantra of the "willing seller"; trying to convince the doubting public that the billions of dollars involved in these programs will only be used to provide the funds to buy land from people who are begging to have government purchase their land. It evokes images of proper business transactions and the free market at its best.

The reality, unfortunately, is something quite different. The phrase has long been used to placate those who would question the motives of the land grabbers. The disturbing part of all this, is that the vast majority of "willing sellers" are created by the government through excessive regulation, inverse condemnation and intimidation.

As we approach government ownership of over 50% of the land of the United States, stop and think for a moment what a 51% stock position in a corporation portends. Are we to be masters over our government or are we serfs, no better than the inhabitants of many third world countries are today. The rush to increase government land holdings has never been about environmental protection...It is about power and the control of the means of production. The casualties will be the free market and individual liberty.

It was the axiom of our founding fathers
and free Englishmen before them
that the right to own and
control property was the
foundation of all other liberties.
Property Rights are central to liberty and
should never be trampled upon.

-Ronald Reagan

Taken from Liberty Matters Urban Growth Boundaries Traveling Incognito

By Dan Dressman

They say that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck-- more than likely it's a duck.

Well, the Boone County Planning Commission has disguised the duck and now wants to allow it in the county. At least, that's the way the proposed Open Space Design Incentive Areas proposed in the 2000 Comprehensive Plan appear. They look and sound an awful lot like the Urban Service Boundaries that the Boone County Fiscal Court struck from the Goals and Objectives of the Comprehensive Plan in March of this year.

Urban Service Boundaries are artificial barriers that are established by local governments to stop or slow land development. They have been implemented in places like Portland, OR (the poster child of environmentalists), San Jose, CA and Boulder, CO. In each one of these places, such boundaries have caused land and housing prices to skyrocket. Additionally, they have forced developers into "leap frog" development patterns in order to provide families with affordable housing. The high density land use promised by these boundaries has failed to materialize in each one of these cities. The existing open space inside the boundaries has also been quickly gobbled up. Somehow, these planners failed to remember that people moved to the suburbs to get away from high density development.

Now, the Boone County Planning Commission wants to bring this failed program to our area disguised as Open Space Design Incentive Areas. Interestingly, the majority of the 7 proposed areas straddle existing east/west roadways, creating a "Berlin Wall" effect down the center of the county. In theory (soon to be reality ), landowners on the western side of the wall would be prohibited from subdividing their property into smaller lots for purposes other than farming.

The Planning Commission also hopes to implement a program which would allow the county or its surrogate to purchase or transfer the development rights from current property owners in the western portion of the county. Details of this risky scheme are not yet available, but would more than likely cause the devaluation of property in the area.

The Sanitation District has determined that the Belleview site in the western portion of the county is where the much-needed new sewer plant will be built. However, the Planning Commission and other county officials want to hold off the development that will eventually follow. In this vein, the Planning Commission is insisting that zoning in this area remain primarily agricultural through the year 2025.

The commission states that any future development in the western portion of the county should be centered around the existing towns and burgs, and be of a higher density. Should this occur, the roads leading west will have to be upgraded to accommodate the additional population and traffic. Ironically, the existing roads, such as East Bend Road and Burlington Pike, run through two of the proposed Open Space Design Incentive Areas. This means improvements to increase traffic flow will be limited at best. The result will likely lead to more choked roadways in the county.

Is it really necessary for Boone County to throw up barriers in an attempt to curtail the necessary housing growth and development of the county? It's projected that by 2020 there will be 139,000 people living in the county, compared to 64,000 in 1994. This in-migration will create an estimated 52,442 households. Right now, the county only has 31,760 households. Last year, there were a total of 1,661 permits issued in the county for new home construction. This pace will be necessary to meet the projected needs of 2020. However, if the supply of available, developable land diminishes due to artificial restraints, how will these people be housed?

Instead of trying to build walls to keep people out, the county should be building roads and infrastructure to accommodate the projected population increase that is anticipated in the western portion of the county. People are attracted to the county because of the new job creation resulting from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and Toyota operations. The Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments predicts that Boone County will employ approximately 80,000 people by 2010, furthering its trek from a rural to an urban economy. The airport alone expects to employ 18,000 people in the next 20 years. This has allowed Boone Countians to have an average household income that is the highest in Northern Kentucky and higher than most of Greater Cincinnati.

At the same time, the county is realizing that many more of the people working in the county are not living in the county, possibly due to the shortage of affordable housing.The slowdown of residential housing development and increases in development costs will only drive these rates up further. And what if there are no takers for these Open Space Design areas? The Planning Commission staff freely admits that they have no research on the economic viability of this type of zoning. The landowners will be left holding the bag with land that has been devalued because of improper zoning.

Most of the provisions recommended in the 2025 Boone County Land Use Plan are well researched and based on sound economic factors. The concept of Open Space Design Incentive Areas is not one of those provisions. These regulations will only drive up land and housing costs and have a detrimental effect on working families, farmers and the least prosperous segments of the population. These ducks need to be unmasked for what they are and promptly slaughtered. How did fields and pastures ever become "green spaces" anyway?

Dan Dressman, CAE, is the Executive Vice President of the Home Builders Association of Northern Kentucky.