Virginia’s identity is its land. From the shores of Chincoteague to the hills and valleys of Cumberland Gap, Virginia’s beauty is unmatched. But as quickly as our population is growing, our rate of development is growing even faster. If we continue as we have, Virginia will develop more land in the next 40 years than we have in the last 400 years. Without foresight, without a plan to focus and manage that growth in a balanced way, we will be failing ourselves and future generations.

As we partner to protect Virginia’s outdoors, we must put balance at the center of land use decisions. We must create an effective model that encourages redevelopment in cities and suburbs and discourages the wasteful and unnecessary consumption of land farther out from our population centers. And we must reward communities that adopt and use balanced growth policies with economic development assistance and other incentives.

Balanced land use

Balanced land use is about foresight. It’s about understanding the needs of today and weighing them against the needs of tomorrow. It’s about solutions that meet both the short-term needs of business and the long-term needs of a community. It’s about considering all the ramifications of growth, from the logistical burden it places on public resources to the quality-of-life burden it places on people in terms of energy usage, commute times and community quality. It’s about rejecting the false choice of growth or no-growth and replacing it with growth that is sustainable.

Many of Virginia’s current development policies lack the balance they need to be effective over the long-term. That leads to challenges not only in our urban and suburban areas, but across the Commonwealth. A report being released today by a non-profit conservation group says the Shenandoah River is number five on its list of the nation’s ten most endangered rivers in the country. The American Rivers report says overdevelopment is the biggest danger facing the cleanliness and character of this historic waterway.

As we consider the long-term impact of overdevelopment near the Shenandoah and so many other places in Virginia, we must make deliberate decisions about open space that should be preserved. In the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, Virginia has pledged to permanently protect 20 percent of the Chesapeake Bay watershed by 2010. The other states that made the same promise - Pennsylvania and Maryland - have already met that goal. Virginia still has 358,000 acres to go.

Getting there won’t be easy. In the last 5 years, we’ve protected an average of 54,000 acres per year statewide, counting both private and public efforts. We need to protect about 72,000 acres per year, just in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, in order to meet the goal.

It will be the goal of my administration to meet that obligation and surpass it. Since 1968, Virginia has preserved 330,000 acres of land. Most of that has been preserved in the past five years. The goal of my administration is for the state to preserve an additional 400,000 acres by the end of the decade.

To accomplish that, we rely heavily upon the open-space protection tools that have served Virginia well: Our land preservation tax credit and the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation.

Virginia’s land preservation tax credit is among the most effective open-space protection tools in the nation. And I will protect it from political and meddlesome limitations. The tax credit is driving an increase in the number of voluntary donations of conservation easements and is a key part of meeting our Chesapeake Bay Agreement obligations.

Meeting those obligations and protecting open space throughout the rest of Virginia requires significant, reliable state investments in land conservation. In addition to protecting the tax credit, I pledge to provide more funding for the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation and local “Purchase of Development Rights” programs than any governor before me. I believe that investment can be made by making open space preservation a priority in Virginia’s General Fund.

The result will be more conservation easements; more public lands, such as state parks; wildlife management areas, state forests and natural-area preserves, protecting opportunities to hunt and fish, and greater local preservation efforts that will help family farmers stay on their land instead of selling out to development.

With every passing day, land is becoming more expensive and scarcer. I will set and meet this preservation goal during my term - not just because it’s the right thing to do - I will do it because if I don’t, the opportunity to do it will not be there for future governors and future Virginians.

I will continue to work to improve the coordination we have in Virginia between transportation and land-use. This past winter’s General Assembly session was a watershed year for local governments. Instead of taking away tools they need to wisely manage land-use, state legislators agreed to give them more tools. And I intend to keep working to grant city councils and county boards the ability to control development that would overwhelm their local transportation network.

The above is excerpted from Governor Kaine's 2006 address at Environment Virginia Conference at the Virginia Military Academy in Lexington.

Click here to see the current status of this land conservation initiative.

In the media

Click the links below for articles about Governor Kaine's land conservation initiative.

• From September 2007 issue of Virginia Wildlife (Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries) (PDF)
• From April 2007 issue of Virginia Builder (Homebuilders Association of Virginia) (PDF)
• From October 2007 issue of Virginia Lawyer (Virginia State Bar) (PDF)
• From fall issue of Virginia Forests (Virginia Forest Association) (PDF)