PHOTO : WIB MIDDLETON
THE Ag RESERVE AT FORTY
Seeing Serendipity in the Rear View Mirror
By Richard Tustian Retired Montgomery County
Planning Director
One morning in 1979 , Royce Hanson , then Chair of the Montgomery County Planning Board , strode into our office and said to me : “ We need to act on preserving the wedges ” ( or words to that effect — it ’ s over forty years ago and memory focus fades ).
The wedges referred to that portion of land in Montgomery County that had been designated by the Council-approved General Plan for non-urban and low-density land uses . And so the formal creation of the Agricultural Reserve began . How it survived and flourished still seems to me like a minor miracle — maybe a major miracle .
The first step was scoping out the scale of the effort . We had three options : 1 ) try to buy the land ; 2 ) try to downzone it ; and 3 ) try to do something in between .
We all knew there would never be enough tax money to buy all the land . We also knew there were enormous political obstacles to downzoning it . And I had written a professional paper in 1970 about how many practical complications lay hidden in a large-scale TDR system ( i . e . Transferable Development Rights , the only “ something in between ” that had ever been implemented and then only once in NYC at very small
4 plenty I autumn harvest 2020