In the MoCo360 “Local Views” council member (Dist.6) Natali Fani-Gonzalez opines how she sees her proposed ZTA23-09 as “a big win for the rural economy and the Agricultural Reserve.”
I do not share that view, and neither do the Montgomery Agricultural Producers or the Montgomery County Farm Bureau, nor do the local civic associations in the Ag Reserve (Montgomery Countryside Alliance and Sugarloaf Citizens Association). www.mocoalliance.org/news
The opinion published by Ms. Fani-Gonzalez indicates that this ZTA will support activities “with a direct relationship to agriculture, to facilitate preservation of farming.” However, according to the report in the Monocacy Monocle, the meeting she hosted in the Ag Reserve where “one idea stood out from the rest: the need for visitors to be able to spend the night,” included only people with connection to economic development interests and did not include the farmers or local organizations representing those farmers.
This ZTA would not “facilitate the preservation of farming,” but rather would facilitate land speculation and commercial development – the very things that the Agricultural Reserve was created to avoid.
The opinion piece states that “the legislation provides important guardrails to ensure that farming is still the primary use of the property and that … overnight stays are secondary.” How this regulation is to be accomplished, and how this is supposed to prevent construction of inappropriate residential facilities, is unclear at best and seems to be missing altogether.
Missing from Ms. Fani-Gonzalez’s opinion piece is any mention of the status of Development Rights being required before “Rustic Accommodations” could be built. Does the ZTA intend to allow up to 10 of these residences to be built even if all the Transferrable Development Rights for the property have been sold off? Present zoning would require 275 acres be subdivided for such additional residential facilities, but the ZTA seems to ignore that requirement.
When Ms. Fani-Gonzalez spoke at a joint meeting Dec. 6, 2023, in the Ag Reserve hosted by SCA and MCA she was met with near universal opposition to this ZTA by the ~100 local farmers and community members in attendance.
In my opinion, this ZTA is unnecessary (special exceptions could address the few applicants on a case-by-case basis) and ill-conceived (the agricultural community was not involved in the development of this proposal) and should be withdrawn or tabled until the supposed beneficiaries of this ZTA can be consulted. As it presently stands, this ZTA seems to benefit only one or two land speculators at the risk of serious detriment to the goals of the Agricultural Reserve.
A rush to vote on this proposal is premature and ill-advised. Better to respect the 43+ years of success of the Agricultural Reserve by providing the time and means for careful evaluation of any need for change by the stakeholders involved in the Agricultural Reserve itself.
Dick Thoms is a 50-year resident of Dickerson, MD where he and his family operate a 60-acre farm.
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