Henrico Doesn’t Value Open Land—or Public Opinion

There's a photograph I took on Osborne Turnpike, southeast of the city. It was early and the low sun gilded the fur of a fox lying dead on the shoulder of the road. Behind the creature spread a 40-acre field that I've passed every day for a decade.

The land used to spend half the year covered in corn, the other half in flocks of gleaning geese. On the day of the picture it was bare orange clay crisscrossed by backhoe tracks. Today it is crowded with dozens of houses and wide paved roads.

For years now, I've spent far too many evenings in the car, passing that field, battling traffic across town to the Henrico County Government Center where I listen to my elected officials and their appointees explain policy choices -- then listen to my neighbors explain their needs.

When it's my turn to speak, I leave the fox out of it. The Planning Commission has made clear it's not its job to care about habitat loss. So I don't mention that ten years ago we heard quail every evening, but last summer we heard one single bob-white call. It was Aug. 28, the sound now so rare and hopeful that I wrote about it in our family almanac.

I don't waste my time explaining to the county my fear that bob whites will vanish from Henrico, not in my daughter's lifetime, but in her childhood.

I've learned, through experience, not to bother discussing our community's values -- preserving beauty, or respect for history, or supporting Henrico's remaining family farmers. I don't mention data showing children in our region get more asthma than the national average, and that each tree lost and each car added makes that problem worse. I don't discuss anything that could be disregarded as sentimental or nostalgic or maternal or naive. Instead, I talk about money.

I'm not alone. For years I've listened to my fellow citizens stand and quote studies showing that each new house costs local governments more in services than the household provides in taxes. More houses mean more work for Henrico police officers, more traffic on area roads, more pressure on local schools, and more stress on infrastructure. And every tax dollar spent on these services is diverted from the county's existent needs, including longed-for school improvements and the revitalization of Nine Mile Road.

Yet county officials keeps courting subdivisions.

Right now Henrico is drafting the 2026 Land Use Plan, mapping where to encourage construction for the next 15 years. The first step of the process was a survey of citizens to ascertain our needs. Our answers were surprising; we agree on an awful lot.

"82 percent of respondents support further restricting new development in rural areas," reads the published report -- and 98 percent think rural lot size should be at least one acre.

The survey shows "strong support across the board for environmentally sensitive planning" mixed with "worries about too much growth and unraveling the social fabric." And the report concludes that "items that do not appear to be of great concern [include] availability of housing."

Agreement on this scale transcends district boundaries and demographic lines, according to the county's own analysts. Citizens in all five districts, all economic and age brackets, and ethnic backgrounds unite in calling for the county to restrict weedy growth.

By what authority, then, do our public servants push alternate plans?

In March, Henrico's Planning Commission voted for a version of the land-use plan that pays lip service to open space while systematically destroying it.

If the commission had its way, Henrico would no longer have any prime agricultural land; they replace the term with "rural residential/prime ag," a label that guides developers straight to Henrico's last farms.

The draft land-use plan takes tens of thousands of acres of environmentally sensitive land, including extensive stretches along the James River, and categorizes them as suburban and urban mixed use.

It condemns so-called "leap frog development," while converting a remote rural parcel -- more than 2,000 acres of fertile farmland and forest -- to urban mixed use -- essentially a Short Pump for the East End.

I wonder how our public officials expect us to react to such sweeping defiance of our mandate. I've heard them explain, over and over, that sprawl cannot be stopped. "It's just reality," they say, as if subdivisions were an unstoppable force of nature, like drought or mosquitoes -- something to accept with a brave face. And I wonder if they expect us to buy that? That unwise land use decisions are inevitable?

Sometimes the official message seems to be that land-use issues are too complicated for Henrico citizens to comprehend. But I think we get it. Wise land-use planning ensures intentional, prosperous growth and avoids haphazard sprawl that destroys fertile land, communities, and budgets. Henrico citizens understand that very well.

What we don't understand is the emergent attitude that public opinion should be endured, typed, and ignored. This mind-set is more than insulting; it reflects a dangerous misinterpretation of representative government.

Henrico citizens' opinion is unified, clear, and quantified. We believe Henrico's remaining open space offers more value to residents than more square miles of strip malls and subdivisions. And we want it preserved.

This isn't a pipe dream. Neighboring counties have taken meaningful steps to balance the needs of individual land owners with the property rights of all their neighbors. And why not? There is money to be made on open land.

Biofuels are being touted as Virginia's new tobacco. A barley-fueled ethanol plant is under construction in Hopewell, just across the James. We know about the green building boom, the high price for sustainably harvested wood, and the growing popularity of locally grown food.

We're paying attention to these economic trends and we expect our elected officials to do the same. We want a land-use plan that shows leadership, one that profits from keeping land green. As it stands, the draft 2026 land-use plan is wasteful. It is a fool's trade and we are not fools.

The plan needs to be redrafted to reflect the needs of the county. The Planning Commission failed to listen, so we've raised our voice. The Supervisors needs to know that the people of their county are paying very close attention to how they handle our business.

Nicole Anderson Ellis teaches critical thinking and writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a monthly columnist for Virginia Business magazine, and the 2009 recipient of the Southern Environmental Law Center's Reed Journalism Award. A member of Envision Henrico, she and her husband live on a tree farm in eastern Henrico County. Contact her at .