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Page 2 9 around the country to see what might apply here. There is no one size fits all solution." Farmland protection has been and continues to be most effective where an assortment of different preservation tools are available. Money is certainly a big piece of the puzzle. Cohn complemented - Orange County on its efforts to promote the importance of agriculture, and said that he uses our county as his example when he travels around the southeast. "I was impressed with the turnout, farmers, commissioners, school board members, etc., at the recent Agricultural Summit and getting everyone involved is what will make it work." Cohn shared a series of publications done by AFT from around the country, particularly those related to cost of community services studies. "We go into a county take a snapshot of a given year and time and look at the cost of providing services to different classifications of land use, usually residential, industrial, and farmland. In most cases industrial land generally comes out the best because it provides a high level of taxation. Residential comes out the worse due to schools, water, sewer. Farmland comes out as a net gain to the county. Although it doesn't bring in enormous revenue even at cost use taxation it costs the county almost nothing in services. Cohn mentioned hearing a speaker last month, who said, "it's cheaper for us to buy development rights from farmers now than to pay for services on sprawling development." Ranells asked how much a study of this type costs. Cohn said that it depends on several things such as how the data is set up within the county and whether the county can provide the manpower to do the study. AFT sometimes trains interns to do the work. Goodwin noted that Orange County is doing a study on the cost of services verses tax dollars. AFT is working on a methodology to combine cost of service information with twenty -year growth projections so that you could look at a map of the county and see how an area might be built out over a certain period. Tate asked how long it takes to complete a study like this. Cohn said a couple of months, once everything is in place. The APB agreed that it is important to convince the general population that preserving farmland is important. Tate said that a lot of people think that 100 acres with 100 houses on it is more valuable than 100 acres of open land. People don't realize the cost of services for those 100 houses. Morrow noted that the study needs to say you need to have this kind of density within this number of miles of the existing services -- sewer, water, and so on, to justify development based on this tax revenue and this cost of providing services. It leads you to growth policies for clustered higher development rather than spread out development. Cohn suggested that the APB assess the county to see what its needs really are. For example, how much agriculture is going on in the county, what is the value of Draft 2/21/2001