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Officials hope to preserve 'precious' Crow's Nest
A Stafford County supervisor is advocating a land swap in an effort to save the environmentally fragile Crow's Nest peninsula from development.
"It comes down to how badly we want Crow's Nest," Supervisor Mark Osborn said. "If we are talking abut paying $30, $35 million for Crow's Nest, quite frankly, I don't know where we'd get the money."
The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation and the local Trust for Crow's Nest have teamed up to try to buy the land from K&M Properties of McLean. The price for the 3,800-acre tract between Potomac and Accokeek creeks stood around $30 million when 18 months of negotiations broke down earlier this year.
When the sale failed, K&M began exploring possibilities for developing the land. But many Stafford residents and area preservationists protested and asked county officials not to give up on attempts to preserve the peninsula.
Crow's Nest has one of the last stands of virgin forest in the region and is home to rare plants and animals and a large heron rookery.
Stafford will not give the property over to development without a fight, said Supervisor Kandy Hilliard, whose district includes Crow's Nest.
"We are going to look at every possibility, every opportunity, every option," she said. "That property is too precious, too valuable to lose."
Although the county can't afford to buy the peninsula, it might be able to barter for the coveted land, Osborn said. In exchange for Crow's Nest, he wants to offer K&M an opportunity to rezone another tract elsewhere in the county to allow all the development slated for Crow's Nest.
Another supervisor, Bob Gibbons, has said he is enthusiastic about the idea.
Such a transaction would be similar to the Transferable Development Rights, or TDRs, that advocates for stronger growth-control measures have been seeking from the General Assembly for years. Many bills to allow TDRs have been introduced since the 1990s, but none has passed.
And that makes some supervisors wary.
"To say we're close to any type of deal like that is awfully premature," said Supervisor Pete Fields, whose district abuts Crow's Nest. "I am not even sure you can legally do what they are claiming."
Most proposed legislation to allow TDRs involve the county designating a preservation area where landowners can sell development rights, and a growth area where other landowners can buy those rights.
Once the development rights are transferred, the new owner would be able to build more densely than the area's zoning allows. The seller of the development rights would get to profit from their land while still preserving it.
But the Crow's Nest deal wouldn't be exactly like the traditional arrangement, said Clark Leming, the Stafford attorney who represents K&M.
He said his client would have to initiate a rezoning on a parcel other than Crow's Nest. But instead of proffering the traditional school sites, ball fields, road improvements or cash, K&M would proffer part or all of Crow's Nest.
"There are some hurdles to get over," Leming said.
For example, exactly how much development Crow's Nest is zoned for or capable of isn't yet clear. The Stafford Board of Zoning Appeals will discuss next month whether a 1971 rezoning, rescinded by the Board of Supervisors in 1978, is still valid.
Once that question is settled, Leming said his client would still have to find land that could accommodate the number of homes allowed on Crow's Nest, though the parcel wouldn't have to be as large.
In addition, Leming said, proffer statements are theoretically supposed to pertain only to the property up for rezoning. So proffering Crow's Nest for a rezoning across the county might be straddling a legal line, he said.
But he is confident an arrangement can be reached.
"There is probably a way to work this so both the county and the property owner come out with something positive," Leming said.
No request for a rezoning or proffer statement that includes Crow's Nest has been filed with the county's planning office. K&M hasn't even looked for another suitable parcel in the county, Leming said.
He said his client won't seriously pursue the idea of a zoning trade-off until it gets a message that the Board of Supervisors is willing to entertain the possibility of such an arrangement.
Most board members are non-committal. They say that without a concrete proposal in front of them, it's difficult to know whether they can support the idea.
Leming first floated the idea of saving Crow's Nest through a something similar to TDRs at a meeting last month with Fields and Hilliard.
Leming has also proposed putting all of the Crow's Nest development rights on half the peninsula so the other half could be preserved. But Hilliard said that won't fly with her.
"I don't want to see any development on Crow's Nest whatsoever," she said.
It is not clear when, or even if, supervisors would take action. There's simply not yet enough information to intelligently discuss the idea, Fields said.
"Everybody's acting like there are a lot of things on the table ready to be dealt with and that's not the case," he said. "Anything we say about Crow's Nest is wildly speculative. There is no official negotiation, no official proposal."
Until more information becomes available, Save Crow's Nest, a citizen's alliance spawned after negotiations failed, is reserving judgment.
"Save Crow's Nest would welcome any creative idea that would save all of Crow's Nest, and I do mean all of Crow's Nest," said Patricia Kurpiel, the organization's spokesman. "But the devil is always in the details of any proposal."
To reach RUTH FINCH: 540/720-1622 rfinch@freelancestar.com