FLOYD COUNTY PLANNING COMMISSION September 16, 2014 MINUTES OF REGULAR MEETING

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1 FLOYD COUNTY PLANNING COMMISSION September 16, 2014 MINUTES OF REGULAR MEETING A. CALL TO ORDER: The regular monthly meeting of the Floyd County Planning Commission was held on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, at the Floyd County Administrative Building. B. OPENING PRAYER: Chairman Sowers led those present in prayer. C. ROLL CALL: Present: Absent: Chairman Mark Sowers Mark Bolt, Building Inspector Vice Chairwoman Karla Turman Sec./Treas. Becky Howell Director Evelyn Janney Supervisor Fred Gerald Lydeana Martin, Subdivision Agent Jim Cornwell, Sands Anderson Marks & Miller Katie Holfield, Clerk D. APPROVAL OF MINUTES: Motion was made by Director Gerald that the minutes of the August 19, 2014 meeting be approved. Motion to approve the minutes was seconded by Director Howell and passed. Director Howell Director Janney Abstain Director Turman Abstain Director Gerald Chairman Sowers E. PUBLIC HEARING Proposed Amendments to the Floyd County Subdivision Ordinance: Tenley Weaver I m Tenley Weaver. I live in Floyd County and am the Co-Owner of Good Food, Good People and Full Circle Organic Farm. Ladies and Gentleman of the Planning Commission if you lived in my neighborhood there would be no doubt in your mind of to the need for a revision to the family subdivision ordinance that makes it more clear and stringent. About 15 years ago I watched a family subdivision go down in my neighborhood, in which the property was given to a 13 year old child who sold the property 3 days later to complete strangers. An ugly court battle has ensued over the property boundaries for the last 15 years entangling everyone in our neighborhood who wasn t even related or involved. A clear and enforceable family subdivision ordinance would have never let this deception happen. While I strongly support the right for family members to subdivide their land in order to legitimately live together we all know that the family subdivision is being fragrantly abused. I

2 mean a wink and nod is a one thing but this more like a wave and a shout. Yo over here, we don t care what is happening to land in Floyd County, come on and get a little sunk of it cheap. It s easy here. That is the message that is out there because of the lack of teeth of this ordinance. Especially in our tourism oriented economy now prevenient in Floyd. We are particularly at high risk for unwanted land speculators and second homers because of our high visibility, low land prices, outreaching publicity and very cool atmosphere. Now of course we all love living in a cool town but I hate to see that be the pivot point for the farm land options to be disappearing and for farm land to be escalating to the point we cannot protect our agriculture and our culture. Now is the time with a purposeful hand that we can protect what we hold dear to us. To say that there are loop holes in the current family subdivision would be an understatement. It is a wide open door with a red carpet out front that invites micro division of land in Floyd County. The current ordinance is a travesty and everyone knows it. Real estate agents, surveyors, lawyers, land speculators, freely circumvent this ordinance and any shenanigan will do because there is no teeth no enforcement once the magic word Family has been uttered. Real honest families intent to stay together and dividing their land indicates a commitment to each other and to the land that they steward in common. The new family subdivision ordinance should include 5 year ownership both before and after purchase as a way to slow down quick sale speculation and hasty micro division of our farm lands. Face it, no system including family unit is perfect. Personal exemptions may have to be granted if family members cannot truly remain together on their subdivide lands. The contingence for neighbors to be allowed input on exemptions is a very important cause here, they may have more objective input about a neighbor s needs to renege on their initial intentions and there by circumvent this ordinance. For the benefit of our agricultural or water and our quality of rural life in Floyd we must put breaks on small lot subdivisions; requiring modified statements of honest intent with clear and enforceable boundaries is a great place to start. The rocks of eons under our feet don t care a hoot for our blood lines and bickering up here above the soil and mean while they are silently transferring our water and sewage according to ennoble passages of conductivity. The underground fractures that hold our water may encourage cross contamination of wells and, of course, family parcel should be burdened with the same requirements that govern any non-family subdivision. A two acre mandatory perk test is essential to the health of the common water supply and should be a top priority of the public health initiatives. Members of the Planning Commission, I urge your full support for the revisions at hand and I appalled your vision and tenacity in bringing this forward. Your love of this place inspires us all. Thank you. Jim Newlin Good evening, I m Jim Newlin. I live down in the southern part of the County, down in the Burks Fork District. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to study this issue. A separate group had worked a long time looking at these land issues and I wanted to thank you for that. From my stand point what you are doing is addressing the public safety and public health issues that are involved; public safety from the stand point of requiring the right-of-way wide enough for a fire truck and emergency vehicles to get to these lots. Secondly, the fact that you are suggesting a two acre minim lot size is a public health issue. You got a whole lot better chance of

3 being able to have land that perks and being able to get a well on the same lot, which a one acre does not necessarily do that. If it did then we would have those all over the place. I wanted to thank you for that and I think the time limits will prevent people from trying to use the family subdivision to try and circumvent the regular subdivision ordinance and that is there for a reason. We thank you for tackling the issue and I support your work. Jerry Boothe Hi, my name is Jerry Boothe. I live in the Courthouse district. For those of you who weren t here, I spoke at your last meeting. I haven t seen the minutes but I m going to assume that those comments are in those minutes and I m just going to highlight on what I said there. I agree with where you are going. I served on the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors and the family division has been a problem since day one. I don t look at these as, well you know me, I m the most admit property rights people that will ever walk through this door. But I don t see this as taking a right. From the stand point that I mentioned before, the rights involved with this were taken in 1978 when the very first ordinance was adopted. This is a revision to try and take care of some problems and I support that. There are a couple of areas I think you need to, in particular, I think are going to create problems. I know you think you got a variance or a request for procedure, which is now, you are going to charge for, by the way. I didn t address that the last time. But I think requiring the person owning the property to have owned it five years before they can pass it to their children, whether you change the acreage size are not, it s going to open a whole lot of problems. Let s say for instance I purchase a piece of property and a year and a half from now I find out I have an illness that s going to take me out of this world. I would love to know that I can go ahead and take care of and administer my business that I need to without having to come down and beg my neighbors, there are two of them seating here by the way, with begging my neighbor permission and get a group of peoples permission for me to take care of what I would like to do. So I think that part of it is a problem. On the tail in of it, requiring, if I give my son five acres of land under a family or two or whatever. I see no problem in requiring him to retain that property for that amount of time. So long as there are allowances for lending institutions to understand those problems and I think you have taken care of that. I mention before whether it is one acre or two acre, and this is all throughout the entire subdivision, whatever acreage size you have the right-of-way to the lot is included in that acreage. I d rather have, if you ve got one acre and a 20 foot entrance, well you are actually taking that 20 foot off of that acre. That is reducing you down to where you don t have a full acre to put your well and septic on. I think that 50 foot right-of-way or 20, or whatever you settle on, needs to be outside of the lot that goes with the house. In other words, it needs to be a little bit bigger so that you have a full two acres to do what you need too. And speaking of the two acres, I understand what you are doing and I support it because of the impact on the water, I think you should change the acreage on all of them at the same time. Piecemeal sounds good but sometimes, I ve sat on the Board of Supervisors and don t take this the wrong way, but sometimes things get lost when bigger problems come up and you don t get back to it. I think it would detrimental to the family subdivision to change this to two acres right now and then find out that a developer can still sell one acre

4 lots, where it didn t get took care of. So I would change that acreage all at one time if that s what the board and you are looking at doing. The 175 feet measure, you ve got it on public maintained road. Family Subdivisions can also go on public right-ofways, in other words, discontinued roads. So I think you need to have that reworded where it says instead of public maintained roads to public right-of-way. JC Holden My name is JC Holden and I m live down in Locust Grove. First thing that has been talked about here, if all that land was kept in the original farmers families we wouldn t have outsiders in here and we wouldn t have this problem. If it had been in my original family, my original family come over here in this Country in 1640 from Jamestown. If it would have stayed in the Radford family, would may people be here, we would have it our way. So its been divided up. Several things that bother me is that it takes nine years to come up with this, whatever you call this, and you give us four minutes to tell us what s wrong with it. The other thing is that, I believe Ms. Howell put a motion in or a letter in that clarified everything this problem has when she says do away with the family subdivision. Go back to where you can sell an acre of land with a right-of-way like you use too. It takes care of all of that. I believe there was an analogy used when this was presented to the Board of Supervisor, that if you had a fire in the attic you didn t go down in the basement to put it out. Well if you have a fire in the attic do you outlaw attics? So it seems to me that it s kind of getting out of hand. The 50 foot right-of-way, I just want to show you, I don t know how many people know how wide 50 feet is. A school bus is 8 foot wide. 50 feet is 6 foot, I mean 6 times a parcel width. It s wider than 6 school buses seating side by side. It s wider that 6 tractor-n-trailer seating side by side. 221 between the white lines is 40 feet. It s 10 foot wider than the traveled surface of 221. When you came up here today, if you came up 221, did you notice in side roads? Sure you did. Not a one of them was as big as 221. But we are going to have right-of-way as big as 221 to go to an acre of land or two acres and if it s in the back of a large tract of land, just think about how much farm land is going, by the time back there, you could have a 5 acre right-of-way to get to two acres. A man that had three and three quarters acres and he had one son or one daughter and he wanted to give them a lot to build on, he can t do it with a right-of-way because he can t take two off and leave two. If the tracts laid out with the narrow side of two acres, it would be about 208 feet wide and I believe it would be 416 feet long. Something like that with those figures, the right-of-way would be the fourth of the width of the whole lot. We don t need a lot of times, to change things to fix them. With that said, I know a lot of people are wanting these small lots, and all, but they wasn t looking for that when they came in here. A lot of these people now they don t want these people with small lots, they were looking at what they could get. Like I had said if they had left it alone and nobody but the family could have owned it, there wouldn t be no problem. Cause the Radford s and all back then, they fought among themselves and settled their own differences in land and all and that was the way it was done. But the thing about one family and I ll end this thing, if you re going to fix this family subdivision, how about taking every bit of it and going through and fixing all the problems in it like you did back in Cause he said you re going to do it piecemeal, that s no good. Thank you.

5 Beth Honeycutt I m Beth Honeycutt and I m sorry I don t have my reading glasses so I couldn t read it, however, I think I know what s going on. First of all, I am an outsider and I sort of resent the comment about outsiders coming in. I inherited the property because my family goes back to sixteen something, thank you JC. My roots are here but my family is not here and when my uncle passed away we all re-inherited our property. I am representing, first of all, four property owners. They said they would be happy to send a letter stating their names and that I represent them. I don t really understand everything that s going on. I m not against the 200 or 175 foot right-of-way. One thing I want to know is, is this being decided on a vote by the Board of Supervisors or is there a referendum. Since there are a lot of people, outside land owners, such as my siblings, that are not residents of Floyd, or for that matter, that State of Virginia, how are their legal rights represented in their statements as far as to whether this is or is not passed? The five acres, I kind of feel like that goes against the Constitution, I mean the five years not the five acres, I mean against the Constitution of Virginia land rights as to when I have the right to sell, give or develop my land even though I have been here now for 22 years. But I have two sons and I may give it to them tomorrow. But if they don t want it, I don t feel like they should have to keep it five years and be miserable and pay the taxes and I think that is an infliction on my rights though the Constitution. I guess that s really it, those were that things that really bothered me. I wasn t sure how it was being voted on, how can people be notified on what s going on, how can they stand up for their rights and their property because they are not here to make their statements known. That s about it. Thank you. Joni Deditch Thank you, my name is Joni Deditch and I leave on Fairview Church Rd and I will say right off the top, I feel like a lost ball in high weeds. I got notification today, or this morning, about the meeting and just a general, very general, summary of the issue at hand. So I want to apologize for not being thoroughly researched in this but I will say the part that I do know, or the parts that I do know, I agree with. I guess that only part that I have a little bit of heartburn with is five years pre and the five year post and I hope that at some point before this goes to the Board of Supervisors, if they re the ones that untimely vote on this, that we have an opportunity to get answers to those questions as to what s the impact, have you done a study to see what the impact would be. I mean you re hearing what the impact is. But at any rate, that s the problem I have. The one other thing I was reading, on I appreciate the last sentence, The Planning Commission may allow a waiver of the time requirements shall be the same as the procedure for deciding an exception as specified in the chapter, that is going to be problematic I believe. I appreciate this but I do believe it s going to be problematic and you re going to find someone having to sit down and sift through all the facts to make a determination if this five year rule can be broke. So that s just one thing I would mention and I do agree with Beth Honeycutt, that I m a little uncomfortable with being told how long I can keep my property before I can sell it and how long my children can keep it before they can sell it. If they live in Kalamazoo the last thing they want is property in Floyd. I do I love Floyd, that s why I m here and I m an outsider too but I just think it is a little impractical. But I also need to understand the rational for it and that, I have to admit, I

6 thoroughly don t understand the rational. So, one other thing, I didn t know about the meeting. I don t take the paper, forgive me. How will I, or anyone else, know about meetings like this, if you don t take the paper? If you can answer that question and that s all I have and thank you for your patients. Larry Scott My name is Larry Scott. I live in the Courthouse district. I just got a question, why can t the ordinance that s in place today be enforced without making a lot of changes? That s just a question. Thank you Mike Burton My name is Mike Burton, I live out in Check. First I would like to say that my property is situated in such where the family subdivision could be, I hope it will be, really important to me someday. I ve got about a 40 acre parcel but the road frontage is very narrow. It s about 90 feet but I have a son and my greatest hope is that he is going to want to stay here or some back here and build on a piece of that property. I want to be very clear about that, I m not against the family subdivision ordinance in any way. But I thought I could come here and provide some prospective and it might be actually a response to the question that was just asked. I was pulled into a dispute several years ago, a neighbor, direct contiguous neighbor, was selling her property. She needed to leave the area. She had grown children that did not live in the area and it was well known in the neighborhood that she was going to use this family subdivision ordinance to get an additional lot or two, it was just well known. I wasn t personally too interested in fighting it but my other neighbor was and he actually objected and brought it before this body. Some of you were on it then, some of you weren t. So you know, it was a very uncomfortable situation for everyone involved because there was no way to enforce it. This was a situation where I cannot imagine a way where there would have been more facts available to a deciding body. We have witnesses who she had told, I m going to sell, I have this many lots available, before it was approved. She was getting advise from here surveyor who told her about this. We actually had a flyer she put up advertising the amount of lots that were for sale through her children. So, she got up and said that s not my intention, the kids got up and said no I love this property, I grew up here. I really felt bad for the commission because they had to sit as a trier of fact for one of their own citizens. It was a close vote. One of the members abstained. I thought that was interesting. I asked him after, Why did you abstain? He goes well, I know her. That s how uncomfortable it was for this body to have to enforce that when all the facts were very clear. What are the chances of someone coming before you and you knowing them and having to be very awkward and say We just don t believe you that you want to do a family subdivision? That s why it can t be enforced, it s just almost impossible. It s not fair to this body to be a trier of fact like that. I think the way it s written and the details, I can t give a lot of comment into that but just to have some box that you can check off saying you have done this or you haven t done this, it should be very clear cut objective decision is really key. I think that is what you are trying to get at. Now I will leave it to you for the details and the Board of Supervisors. I just wanted to provide a bird s eye prospective of someone who was very uncomfortable in that situation. To end I will just paraphrase Robert Frost,

7 Good fences make good neighbors and I think sometimes good laws, clear laws, make good neighbors too. Thank you. Richard Bishop My name is Richard Bishop. I m in the Indian Valley district. We have nine acres, the part that I purchased from my sibling and part that I inherited. We got six children and have already surveyed for a family subdivision. I sure hope that don t mess it up. It s for the family and the family only. I d like to see my family there. Thank you. F. PLATS: 1. Preliminary Family Subdivision Jack C. & Carolyn W. Holden Ms. Martin stated that this plat was brought before her as the agent for review since the division only contains 3 parcels. Ms. Martin noted that since the planning commission has heard of this land and this community many times at the planning commission meeting she would like additional sets of eyes to take a look at it. She also noted that the only concern she had after reviewing the plat was the 35ft building set back on New Lot B1 and B2 was not shown. Ms. Turman addressed Mr. Holden with the following question, Are these parcels that were referred to as illegally created lots and if so, what was illegal about it? Mr. Holden response was, The problem is that the property piece of property that we subdivided, that was the only legal piece of property in that whole thing that the man did. That one was done with a survey the rest of them had no survey, the ones that we originally bought in 84. Ms. Howell asked Mr. Holden again, So JC you are saying that this part that you are subdividing now is not illegally done? Mr. Holden s response was, This was part of the 43 acres (41.43 acres). Then there was 2.5 added. The 2.5 and all the other lots around them had no survey. They were illegal. He went on to say that the one the commission is reviewing tonight was created legally. On a motion made by Director Howell, seconded by Director Janney and carried, it was resolved to give preliminary approval of the Family Subdivision of Jack. C. and Carolyn W. Holden and authorize the agent to sign the final upon the showing of the 35 set back line of the parcels along the road. Director Howell Director Janney Director Turman Director Gerald Chairman Sowers

8 2. Final Family Subdivision James Noah Moran Ms. Martin stated that all corrections from the November 19, 2013 meeting had be made. After brief discussion the following motion was made. On a motion made by Director Janney, seconded by Director Gerald and carried, it was resolved to give final approval of the Family Subdivision of James Noah Moran. Director Howell Director Janney Director Turman Director Gerald Chairman Sowers 3. Final Family Subdivision & Lotline Revision Richard & Patricia Bishop Ms. Martin stated that all corrections from the July 15, 2014 meeting had be made. After brief discussion the following motion was made. On a motion made by Director Gerald, seconded by Director Turman and carried, it was resolved to give final approval of the Family Subdivision and Lotline Revision of Richard and Patricia Bishop. Director Howell Director Janney Director Turman Director Gerald Chairman Sowers G. EASEMENTS: None H. MARK BOLT, BUILDING INSPECTOR: None I. LYDEANA MARTIN, SUBDIVISION AGENT: None J. NEW BUSINESS: Ms. Martin reminded commission members of the ribbon cutting at the Floyd County Innovation Center on Monday, September 22 at 10:30am. There will also be an open house and walk thru from 1:00pm to 3:00pm.

9 K. OLD BUSINESS: 1. Family Provision of the Subdivision Ordinance On a motion made by Director Gerald, seconded by Director Janney and carried, it was resolved to table discussion of the family provision to the subdivision ordinance until next months meeting. Director Howell Director Janney Director Turman Director Gerald Chairman Sowers 2. Comprehensive Plan-Classification for exceptional properties in growth areas Ms. Martin stated that she plans to provide commission members with a summary regarding exceptional properties in growth areas next month. She has been contact by a land owner off of Christiansburg Pike who is interested in placing their property in a conservation easement however the property is located in a growth area. 3. Special Legislation-Regarding preserving water in Floyd County (Possible Subcommittee to help with the topic) L. NEXT MEETING: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 at 7:00 P.M. Floyd County Administrative Offices. M. ADJOURNMENT: There being no further business before the Floyd County Planning Commission, the September 16, 2014 meeting was adjourned. Approved: Mark Sowers, Chairman Date: Respectfully submitted, Katie Holfield, Clerk