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Stafford County residents will not be voting this November--and possibly not ever--on whether the county should sell bonds to buy Crow's Nest.
Supervisors voted 6-1 yesterday to table a motion that would have asked the Circuit Court to put a general-obligation bond referendum on the ballot. A board member and a conservation group trying to preserve the 4,125-acre tract between Accokeek and Potomac creeks said they may have another way to reach their goal.
Save Crow's Nest, a grass-roots preservation group that had been clamoring for the referendum since January, supported the supervisors' decision.
"If you vote for a November referendum, you are voting to sabotage the efforts to save Crow's Nest," Save Crow's Nest member Patricia Kurpiel told supervisors before their vote. "Please demonstrate that you really do want to save Crow's Nest. Please vote to defer action on this referendum."
Save Crow's Nest had wanted a special bond referendum held earlier this year. On the November ballot, they say, it would have been overshadowed by the presidential election. They want the county to buy the environmentally fragile peninsula to prevent its present owner, K&M Properties of McLean, from putting houses on it.
The land is zoned for a minimum lot size of one acre, or about 1,400 homes.
Kurpiel also said yesterday that a bond referendum at this time could interfere with negotiations under way between the county and K&M ,and that the county may have found a better way to finance the purchase.
That alternative to a bond referendum could be the Virginia Land Conservation Loan Fund.
Kandy Hilliard, the supervisor whose district includes Crow's Nest, said she voted to table the referendum because she first wanted to see how much the county could borrow from the loan fund, which offers a 3 percent interest rate, compared with a minimum of 4.65 interest for general-obligation bonds.
The county has applied for the fund's maximum amount, $30 million, and Hilliard said she expects to hear by the end of the year how much the county can borrow.
But $30 million, even when combined with the $7.5 million in state and local money already earmarked for Crow's Nest, isn't enough to buy the property, said Clark Leming, the Stafford real-estate attorney who represents K&M.
He declined to say exactly how much K&M is asking for Crow's Nest, but concurred with other sources familiar with the discussions who said the price is about $50 million.
Hilliard said the price is still up in the air and she believes that K&M may be overvaluing the property, considering that a deal to sell Crow's Nest to luxury home builder Toll Brothers fell through recently.
Leming said K&M has met once with county officials to see if the county would be willing to forge an agreement that would allow part of Crow's Nest to be developed in clusters while preserving the remainder of the tract. But the county has made no specific offer to buy Crow's Nest, he said.
"We will work with the county to try to come up with a solution that preserves the value of the property to the owner and at the same time preserves the property's historic and environmental features," Leming said.
Hilliard said she isn't interested in that sort of deal.
"The whole point of this continues to be [that] the value of the property is in preserving it in its entirety," she said.
To reach RUTH FINCH: 540/720-1622 rfinch@freelancestar.com