Agenda - 11-23-1987 - Laserfiche WebLink

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trolling stormwater--all kinds of devices--at best, and we have had a study at the University on this--at best they •r• only partially successful . Even if they are very well designed , they at best are from 50 to 70 percent successful In reducing the impact of that development. What they may do Is delay to some extent the erosion of the water quality. And erosion Is a good word because a lot of the problem deals with sediment control and that gets us to another factor which mitigation measures require of us and which we are really not prepared to do and that is to maintain the facil - ities that we put in for mitigation . We don 't have in North Carolina or Orange County sufficient forces to go around and look at every construction project and exert the kinds of controls that are necessary because we see the streams, despite the regulations that we have, running red after rain storms . So on paper we can look very good and we can build facilities that meet what we feel are the best standards that we now have, but there is still one thing that Is Inexerable, development on the watershed is going to effect the quality of water drawn from that watershed in direct proportion to the level of development. And we need to be particularly careful about that. Now the prressures of development that we are feeling here are very great, but I would like to cite one example of an area where the pressures of development are far greater and the money values of lands have been substantially greater than here and that Is northern Virginia in the surburban area of Washington , Fairfax County specifically . Now the Fairfax County Water Authority is something in the same position that OWASA is here and Fairfax County has half of the watershed called Aquatron Lake on Aquatron River . They control half of that watershed and they had zoning on that wateshed on an average of one dwelling unit per acre. They had a study made of what levels of development could be admitted to sustain the quality of that water for Fairfax County Water Authority . And as a result of that study over the whole area the reco- mmendations made to them by the consulting engineers that the zoning of the watershed in the Fairfax County half be reduced from one unit for a acre to one unit for five acres and that was a very brave thing to do because development pressures there are very high and land values are very, very much higher than they are here . Homes that are being built there are way out of scale for anyone Who has ever been there recently to try to buy. Even modest homes are in the $200, 000 and $300, 000 range, so land values are very high . They did this and they were sued by - t'he developers because they saw one acre they could make money beoause the value of land was high and developers here with one acre zoning can make money . They could see that making money on five acres was going to be very difficult but the courts in Virginia upheld the Fairfax County Supervisors on that stance . There have been many other similar cases where local communi - ties--state , county and community--have taken watersheds and protected them by what appears to be an Infringement on development rights . In every case because this Is done for