Arin Sime, vice chair of the Jefferson Area Libertarians, isn’t the first from his party to comment on Albemarle County’s mountain overlay and phasing and clustering ordinances, which would limit development in the county’s rural areas. Here, some of Sime’s hands-off opinions on property rights and county development.
C-VILLE: How do you think planning should be happening in the county?
Arin Sime: We need to change the focus from bureaucrats who believe they know how best to run our lives and our property to the individual landowners. The planning process just generally starts with the assumption that anybody in the County Office Building has more right to tell us what to do with our land than those of us who actually pay for our land.
Is that another way of saying you think the market should dictate?
Largely…that doesn’t mean it’s purely an economic market. There are a lot of ways in a free market things like this can be influenced, you can have voluntary associations. Lake Monticello is a good example…you can have a very large area of homes voluntarily agree to live within certain constraints or build within certain constraints… You don’t necessarily have to have the force of government behind something for it to work.
What about members of the population who aren’t owners, who don’t have the option to have a voluntary say?
I think privately funded voluntary conservation easements are a wonderful way to preserve large tracts of land that’s seen by the public as particularly sensitive… We already have multiple entities that can purchase conservation easements and compensate the landowner for that.
What’s wrong with the mountain overlay and phasing and clustering ordinances?
This is a freebie for the county. [They’re] going to force people to give [them] these easements and not compensate them for it at all. [A County staffer] did use the word “freebie.”
Will unregulated development ruin the land?
This is land that’s been privately owned for hundreds of years and looks good… If you’re somebody who’s buying mountaintop property, it’s generally because you want to enjoy the natural beauty of it. So what incentive do you have to go level all the trees off there? I just don’t see where people are clamoring to do that. And yet you get the impression that “If we don’t take away your private property rights as soon as possible, there are going to be nothing but bare mountaintops in Albemarle County.”
