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Court upholds rural zoning; More legal challenges coming
New land-use rules in the western part of the county, adopted by the Board of Supervisors on Dec. 5, 2006, were adopted legally and are intact, ruled Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne Nov. 30.
Challenges to implementation and enforcement of the zoning ordinance have yet to be argued, but Horne's ruling leaves the basic ordinance and zoning map in place.
The case involved nine of 20-some cases challenging the legality of the downzoning. The court had thrown out a downzoning enacted by the previous Board of Supervisors, and most land west of U.S. 15 had gone back to a base zoning of one house per three acres. The board that took office in January 2004 could have re-advertised that downzoning and corrected the problem, but instead took nearly three years and eventually adopted a less restrictive version of rural zoning. Land use in the west since then has been limited to one house per 20 or 50 acres.
Horne ruled that the board was within its legislative rights to continue to amend the new ordinance after it had been considered by the Planning Commission.
He also ruled that advertising of the proposed amendments in the Times-Mirror complied with the law and with previous court decisions.
Finally, Horne ruled that the board was not obligated to re-advertise when it reverted from a seven-acre minimum lot to the original 15-acre minimum lot size. Since the 15-acre lot size was advertised in May, it did not have to be re-done when a November ad suggested a seven-acre lot minimum would be considered.
Had Horne found in favor of the landowners on the two questions of the legitimacy of the ordinance, it would have been voided -- it simply would never have existed.
Now that it does exist, the court will consider challenges to details of the new zoning: whether the law in Virginia specifically allows a local government to set up cluster zoning in a rural zoning district; whether the downzoning was piecemeal or comprehensive; whether some of the landowners had vested their rights in development plans at the moment the downzoning took effect; whether the entire downzoning can be considered "exclusionary" (excluding lower income buyers by making lots more expensive); and whether the entire action was arbitrary and capricious.
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