Conservation Easements for Unsuspecting Farmers

Paris Barn Virginia (Martha Boneta's Farm)

After Delegate Bobby Orrock introduced on January 8, 2014, HB 268 http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?141+sum+HB268,
and Senator Richard Stuart filed a companion bill, SB51, http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?141+sum+SB51,
Delegate Bob Marshall introduced on January 17, 2014, HB 1219.

The first two bills reintroduced the Right to Farm Act HB 1430 (Boneta Bill) which passed in the House but was defeated in the Virginia Senate last year. I have discussed the battle in my recent article, “Boneta Bill Part Deux.” http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/60539

In case you wonder, why would anyone care what is happening in another state, rest assured that it is coming to your state or is already there. It is an important battle not just in Virginia. Property owners and farmers are fined, bullied, and threatened around the country based on zoning ordinances and environmental conservation easements with onerous requirements and inspections.

HB 268 addresses agricultural operations and local regulation of certain activities, “protecting customary agritourism activities from local bans in the absence of substantial impacts on the public welfare and requires certain localities to take certain factors into account when regulating agritourism activities.”

Because local boards of supervisors have abused their power in the past, “there has to be a basis in health, safety, or public welfare for a local ordinance to restrict activities such as agritourism, sale of agricultural or silvicultural products, related items, preparation or sale of foods that already comply with state laws, and other customary activities. Local boards are “prohibited from subjecting these activities to a special-use permit requirement.”

Delegate Bob Marshall’s bill HB 1219, introduced on January 17, 2014, “provides that local governments violating constitutional rights through zoning shall pay their victims (1) the amount of fines they sought to impose, and (2) actual damages including attorney fees. Local government officials who intentionally violate this law would also be liable.” http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?141+ful+HB1219

Had these bills been in place, Martha Boneta would not have been bullied and threatened with $5,000 fines per day by her county government when she held a pumpkin carving party for 10-year olds on her own property.

Mark Fitzgibbons, a Constitutional attorney, is of the opinion that “There is great but underutilized precedent for remedies against government officials who abuse their power to violate the rights of citizens. Virginians don’t need to go broke protecting their rights on their own property.”

HB 1219 will “authorize private citizens to file suit for damages, Virginia’s Attorney General to defend the victims, and give whistleblower protection to government employees who expose violations of this law.”

The problems with land use restrictions in Virginia run deep. For example, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Warrenton, Virginia, Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), with its “comprehensive planning” of Virginia’s rural areas, has been successful in blocking Disney from opening a theme park in Prince William County twenty years ago.

More recently, PEC battled Trump Virginia Acquisitions, LLC, who bought Patricia Kluge’s Estate Winery and Vineyard in 2011 with the intent of expanding its dormant 9-hole golf course into an 18-hole course. The problem was that 216 acres of the 1,200 acre property had been placed by the former owner, Patricia Kluge, under “conservation easement” in 2006.

A “conservation easement” imposes certain restrictions on the homeowners’ use of their property in exchange for tax breaks. According to Dr. Cohen, “golf courses with conservation easements are common throughout the United States, including on courses owned by Donald Trump.”

PEC considered the project “inconsistent with the rural and agricultural character of the area,” citing traffic and noise. “In addition to the traffic and noise impacts, we also have concerns about water use, run-off, and septic issues.”

Martha Boneta had a conservation easement with PEC when she bought her farm. Martha uses tires on her property to “help hollow fields for plowing, train animals to move in a certain direction, and assist in planting. PEC sued Boneta, saying that the tires violated her agricultural conservation easement, and she was forced to store them in an enclosure.” Tires were the least of her numerous and constant problems with PEC. http://www.cfact.org/2013/11/05/trumping-a-golf-course-over-pec-adillos-in-northern-virginia/

On January 21, 2014, the new Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, announced more than $1 million in farmland preservation grants - “Eight localities receive funds to place working farmlands under permanent conservation easements.”

The counties of Albemarle, Clarke, Fauquier, Isle of Wright, James City, Stafford, and the City of Virginia Beach will receive $149,678.46 each. Rappahannock County will receive $11,000. Since 2008, the Commonwealth of Virginia allocated $8.68 million in state matching funds for permanent conservation easements.

“Localities must use the grant monies to preserve farmland within their boundaries through local Purchase of Development Right (PDR) programs. PDR programs compensate landowners who work with localities to preserve their land permanently by voluntarily placing a perpetual conservation easement on it.”

At a time when food is expensive, we are using more crops for biofuels, and we have to import food from other nations, the obvious and most important question is - why would a landowner place good farmland under perpetual conservation easement in order to preserve it? Preserve working farmland for what?

A quick check of United Nation’s Agenda 21 40-chapter document on Sustainable Development, signed and adopted by 178 nations in 1992, reveals under Chapter 10 (Integrated Approach to the Planning and Management of Land Resources) a section 10.7 (c) which mandates to “establish a general framework for land use and physical planning within which specialized and more detailed sectoral plans (e.g., for protected areas, agriculture, forests, human settlements, rural developments) can be developed.”

http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf

Check the rural “comprehensive planning” in your area in synch with UN Agenda 21 and see how much of your property rights have already been taken away by regionalism, conservation easements, and through zoning laws passed by Boards of Supervisors without your knowledge, input, approval, or opportunity to vote.

 

 

Communist Labor

As long as I can remember, my dad was an inveterate anti-communist. Because he spoke so openly about his beliefs and his anti-oligarchy stance, he was never in the graces of his bosses who had to kiss up to the local communist party organizer. There was a communist organizer assigned in every workplace, they earned double the salary of an ordinary engineer and his sole job was to spy on workers to make sure they were good communists. He filed reports at the end of each day which was read and catalogued by his higher-ups. The amount of paperwork and storage must have been overwhelming in the absence of computers. Staggering amounts of data were put on microfiche. Some were released to the public after communism fell in 1990. This community organizer was hated but nobody dared to challenge him or speak ill of the regime in front of him, except for my dad. He did not hide his feelings of hatred for the communist dictator president, Ceausescu, and wished openly for his demise. His policies were destroying the nation. Because my dad was on the security police's radar, every time the president was travelling within a certain mile radius of our home town, he would be detained under lock and key wherever he happened to be at the moment, at work or at home. If he was walking in the street, they would take him to headquarters until Ceausescu was out of range. I did not understand why they would do that, my dad never threatened to kill him and did not own a gun. Daddy was a peaceful man and would never take a small creature's life much less a human being's. He regarded life as sacred, only God could give it and only God could take it away. To make his life miserable, dad would get the most disgusting jobs to do and would be frequently moved from refinery to refinery - he was a petrochemical mechanic and a foreman. On any given day he could be swimming in mud and oil goo up to his hips, climbing on poles without safety gear, or crawling in narrow spaces with possible gas leaks. It was as if they wished him dead and put him in harm's way on purpose. Dad never complained about that, and even if he had, they would have ignored him. His labor union (sindicat) to which all workers were forced to belong and pay dues, did absolutely nothing to protect his rights as an employee. There was no such thing as bargaining contract with rights and responsibilities. Management improvised as they wished, with no accountability. The law was only on the side of the employer, the communist regime.

Many employees stole from the refinery, everybody knew it, but they kept quiet. They bribed the gate guard to let them through with their loot once a week. Workers used the stolen goods to barter with other people for food, wine, bread, medicine, gasoline, whatever their needs were at the moment. My dad hated the thieves and the collusive robbery. He said, poverty was no excuse for stealing. If he reported a theft to his boss, dad would get in trouble and the workers would beat him up for reporting them. Even the director of the refinery was caught stealing wrought iron fencing. He was going to use it around his parents' cemetery plot. The irony was that his parents were still alive! If you think, he did not get in trouble and got to keep the fence, you are right. Daddy was beaten up once again and thrown into a pit of metal shavings from a two story height. He cracked his skull which eventually led to his painful death.

Workers' lives were expendable, no OSHA there to protect them. My cousin Emil, a welder, was sent into a low tunnel, crawl space only, without protective gear, and never came out. He died of suffocation. How in the world was he going to weld around a gas leak? The all mighty government employer paid lip service to safety and protection but sent many young men to their deaths without any accountability. You were more likely to do hard time if you were missing money in the inventory - and some accountants did, by no fault of their own. Many factory directors and managers had sticky fingers and pointed the blame on hapless accountants.

Everyone worked from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. with a 15 minute break for lunch. However, many crew members would hide to sleep because there was no incentive to really try, you could not get fired, nor would you get extra money if you worked harder. Once the freedom and the reward to be exceptional was removed, there was no reason to try at all. But everyone expected the thirteenth check at Christmas time, a welfare check cloaked as performance bonus. The communist work ethic was, "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work." Women skipped work worse than men and it was not difficult to bribe a doctor to give a bogus excuse. Aunt Angela missed work half the time and still received full pay. Her illness was laziness and alcohol, not necessarily in that order.

Agricultural laborers worked really hard, long days to put in the crops, weed them, and harvest them. It was backbreaking work with very little pay. Most of the work was done manually. Each village had one tractor and it stayed broken most of the time, either missing parts, or the operator did not know how to fix it. The dirt was tilled manually with a hoe, the weeds were dug up with a hoe, and the harvesting was done with shovels by hand. A large percentage of the crop had to be given to the regime to be sold on the open market, while the villagers shared a small percentage according to the amount of labor and the number of days worked. The collective farm of the regime had an agreement with each villager. When crops were burned by draught, the villagers were paid with money. The regime provided the irrigation systems via ditches diverting water from various rivers and creeks. Collective farms also raised cattle and hogs, remuneration was mostly in money since the animals went for slaughter, nothing was shared with the workers.

Each village had a shephard who rounded up the villagers' cows every morning and took them to pasture to graze. He returned them in the evening. Amazingly the cows knew exactly which house to go to as if they knew their own address. In mountain villages, there were more sheep herded than cows. You could hear the cow bells and bleats in late afternoon and you knew the herd was coming home. The shephard was the poorest man in town but always seemed the happiest. He lived, ate, and slept with the cows or the sheep.

Each home raised at least a cow, a hog, chicken, ducks, and rabbits. These animals provided them with milk, cheese, butter, eggs, meat, and fur. Self-sufficiency was important since transportation to the city was difficult, expensive, and uncommon. Sugar was a rare commodity and so were sweets. It was a real treat to be able to make your own fruit preserves and serve them to company as an exquisite desert with well-cold water. During wine making season in the fall, sugar was hard to find and very expensive. Milk was used to feed babies, make cheese, and butter. Teenagers and adults did not drink milk as it was better used to make other products. Most village kids had never seen ice cream, tasted it, or heard of it.

Many factory workers and shephards alike drank a lot to drown the sorrows of their pitiful existence. Communism was not supposed to exploit the proletariat, only evil capitalism did. Surely, anybody who saw how poorly these people lived, could not possibly believe this lie. They had no place to go and no way to improve their lot in life.