PDR program yielding doubt

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: April 1, 2008

Augusta County supervisors, amid their wrangling over a $172.5 million budget, have decided to bid adieu to the agricultural development director they hired just two years ago. They reasoned that Miles Bobbitt's job description substantively rendered the job itself superfluous. He was to have administered a purchase of development rights program that supervisors have decided - and then reaffirmed - need not exist.

The county's PDR program, as such initiatives are known, would have had Augusta spending $425,000 annually on what amounts to agricultural protection money, buying farmers' allegiance as a safeguard against the growing incursion of development on farmlands. Under the program, farmers would accept the payout in exchange for agreeing not to sell to developers.

Never a boom industry for most of the people who draw their livelihood from it, agriculture is in the throes of an extended downturn, battered by last season's drought and soaring costs for feed, fuel and equipment. PDR money, ostensibly, would have provided farmers with badly needed capital, sufficient to keep their floundering operations afloat.

Except many farmers were not so sure. The county's annual PDR payouts would have paled next to the money farmers, a perpetually debt-addled lot, could have made from selling to developers. As a result of that and the ordinary political considerations associated with any government program, many farmers cast a skeptical eye on the county's PDR program. So too did we.

Our backing of supervisors' 4-3 decision last summer to dissolve the program sparked a flurry of e-mail exchanges between Riverheads Supervisor Nancy Sorrells and former Supervisor Kay Frye, lamenting our absence of understanding and support of farmers.

The latter charge represented a misconception. Our concern was one shared by many farmers, namely that the money would do little in the way of accomplishing its stated objective. State Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Mount Solon, and Del. Steven Landes, R-Weyers Cave, support an amendment to fund a state PDR program that might alter our perspective, although the question of sufficient money to offset the lure of developers is likely to remain.

A more appealing and significantly less costly option to taxpayers would be to drop estate taxes for most farms, a move the dairy industry, naturally, backs with vigor. There are murmurs in Richmond about eliminating the tax for farms valued at $10 million or less. Some industry insiders think that limit might still be too low. We concur. But such a step, even with the limit, is one people on all sides should welcome.

Farmers are best helped not by what appears to us in PDR programs to be an agricultural welfare system that would scarcely benefit the people it endeavored to aid, but by government relieving some of the mountainous burden it places on farmers' backs.

However ardently we support farming, county supervisors were right to have yanked back on the reins before proceeding with a PDR program. Had the concept been properly vetted before Bobbitt's hiring, he likely would not be awakening to the discovery that he had played the cart to the PDR horse. That misfortune does not mitigate the lameness of the program's condition relative to its merits.