Big Property Rights Win In VA

Many wealthy DC power-brokers, both Dem and GOP, who pose as "gentleman farmers" on their horsey Virginia estates, lost a big, expensive battle at the Virginia Supreme Court yesterday. Their years-long effort to keep out the common people -- snobbery hiding behind environmentalism -- went down to a crashing defeat.

Louden County's leadership, in the pockets of said power-brokers, was in court fighting to keep alive restrictions that deprived property owners in a large swath of the county from developing their land. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled in favor of pro-development, pro-property rights factions yesterday, and it looks like the Louden County supervisors won't appeal.

"Localities have a great deal of freedom of movement on land use issues, but they've got to follow the rules," said John Foote, chairman of a litigation steering committee that has overseen a sprawling fight that at one point included more than 200 lawsuits. "For all of the old board's assertions that they did this very thoroughly and carefully, the Supreme Court of Virginia found simply that they did not."

The slow-growth push by supervisors on a previous board helped turn Loudoun into a closely watched test case in the national struggle over property rights and the environment. With its proximity to the nation's capital, its fastest-growing designation by the Census Bureau and tens of billions of construction dollars at stake, Loudoun's development debate has transcended the ordinary dust-ups over spreading U.S. suburbs.

The Washington Post, in which this article appears, errs in calling the case a "struggle over property rights and the environment." It is actually a struggle between those who are willing to follow a highly restrictive, regulated and public path to achieve environmentally sensitive development and those who would use environmental regulation and back-room manipulation to achieve social, not ecological, engineering.