Farmland and Sprawl
“Eblen: PDR still a great deal for taxpayers”
Excerpt from Kentucky.com, posted February 28, 2010
By Tom Eblen, Herald-Leader Columnist
…Any healthy city needs to grow, and Lexington has managed growth better than most. Sprawl was limited by the Urban Services Boundary, created in 1958 and expanded a few times since then, as well as by minimum lot sizes for rural homes — 10 acres from 1964 to 1999, when they were increased to 40 acres.
Still, it was clear more than a decade ago that unless more was done, Lexington could eventually lose the rural landscape and unique agricultural soils that made it famous as the Horse Capital of the World. The World Monuments Fund has declared the Inner Bluegrass Region one of the planet’s 100 most endangered environments.
So, in 2000, the Urban County Council created the Purchase of Development Rights program. The goal was to permanently protect 50,000 acres of Fayette County’s most sensitive rural land — 27 percent of the county’s total land — with voluntary conservation easements by 2020…Read more at Kentucky.com
