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Lee Rafalow expressed concern that a lot of time had been spent <br />talking about positives and he was not quite sure where things were <br />going; it didn't capture the negatives. He said there were two <br />things the group had tentative agreement on: 1) we like rural <br />character, and 2) we like land owners to get fair value for their <br />property. Thus far we've spent no time working on item 2. At the <br />last meeting he sensed a strong undercurrent getting in the way of <br />working together; undercurrent is concern about that second item, <br />fair value to landowners. He said the last comment in the survey <br />dealt directly with that issue. He thought it was real important <br />to surface that issue and get it on the table. <br />Bob Strayhorn agreed. He said we've identified things we'd like to <br />see, but in reality someone else owns that land where I might want <br />to see a park or someone else a wildlife corridor or permanent <br />forest. At some point in time we have to think about what are the <br />rights of the people who own that. This was one of the main <br />reasons he liked the Rural Character Study. It encourages people <br />who own land to do some of these things. We say we want a 15 acre <br />park; are we intending to down zone it in some manner that we are <br />going to capture that? How are we going to do that? At what point <br />in this process will we talk about these types of things, i.e., <br />wildlife corridors, how we get them so that someone is not having <br />to sacrifice their land to create that wildlife corridor. We all <br />agree that we like that, we like the open space. <br />David Yelton said he thought that each of the plans looked at <br />(student plans plus Rural Character) has some positives and maybe <br />some had more than others. He said this may not exactly which ones <br />people were leaning toward, but at least the group saw more beauty <br />in some as opposed to others. However, he said all had negatives <br />and that one of his goals would be to try to identify the plan or <br />combination of plans that looked best on the surface. Then you <br />would have to start digging out the negatives and say can we <br />neutralize that negative or can we adjust the plan we've come up <br />with to incorporate that negative and change it into a positive or <br />take care of as many negatives as possible? You can't always get <br />rid of all negative impacts of some large comprehensive plan, but <br />you can try to minimize those and address things such as, if the <br />big idea is to have x number of acres of park land in a certain <br />area, how is that going to be contributed? How can we address the <br />fact that no landowner wants to have to take that out of their <br />profitability as far as the value or salability of the land. <br />Meg McKean said Lee and David had talked about the need to discuss <br />negatives; she didn't know when this was going to happen, but felt <br />it was an extremely important thing to do. If all we do is list <br />positives all we will have is a list that says apple pie, apple <br />pie, apple pie. <br />Verla Insko said she was going to try to summarize what she had <br />heard. Lee Rafalow raised the issue that we really haven't had a <br />9 <br />