Let's make a river easement happen.

Date published: 8/21/2005

Easement progress

Don't allow the improved plan for preserving the city's river lands to stall

LOVE IS ETERNAL, a wit said, as long as it lasts. Regional cooperation is much like that. With cooing pledges, Fredericksburg-area politicians vow their fidelity to the notion, which usually survives exactly as long as it takes for the pettiest parochial interest to raise its piddling head. But now, embodied in a river easement proposed by some members of the Fredericksburg City Council, regional cooperation has a chance to really last eternally--by law.

A council majority believes that the best way to protect 4,232 acres of unspoiled city-owned land along the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers is to convey it forever, in the form of a conservation easement, to one or more nonprofit groups. However, a lame-duck council that last year tried to create the buffer got ahead of itself, riling five riverfront counties--Spotsylvania, Stafford, Orange, Culpeper, and Fauquier--whose transportation and other plans could be hampered by an impassable easement. The counties wanted conversation and concessions.

Members of the new council have begun the former and granted the latter--at least regarding near-neighbor Spotsylvania--via a draft agreement that they hope will be a model for bilateral pacts with the other counties. The latest proposal would create easement corridors where a bridge could be built if most of the region's jurisdictions sought one. Also within these less-sensitive zones, the counties could not only repair but expand utilities. The idea is to balance the conservation of an east-west river with the needs that naturally arise along a north-south transportation conduit. Sugaring the Spotsylvania deal is the city's offer to sell the county about 60 riparian acres for creation of a nature park.

Date published: 8/21/2005