The Big Darby Accord group was organized to develop a land use recommendation that would be the basis for creating a binding development agreement among the jurisdictions with an interest in the Big Darby watershed in western Franklin County. Those jurisdictions are: Franklin County; the Cities of Columbus, Hilliard, and Grove City, the Village of Harrisburg, and the Townships of Brown, Prairie, Pleasant, Norwich and Washington.

UPDATE: May 2006: Hold on -- During a May 2006 meeting of the BDA planners and landowners, Butch Seidel of the City of Hilliard indicated that the objective of the BDA is not a binding agreement among the parties, but rather an understanding among that would be subject to the "political will" (his words) of the current and future elected officials. This is definitely a warning flag. It appears now that the goal, at least for the City of Hilliard, is to create a Community Development Authority which has the power to collect levies across all ten jurisdictions. We need to keep our eye on this situation!

UPDATE: June 14, 2006: At the final public meeting of the Big Darby Accord planning process, Hilliard Mayor Don Schonhardt stated publicly that the City of Hilliard has problems with the plan as it now stands. According to an article in the Columbus Dispatch, Schonhardt want Hilliard to be the sole implementation authority within its current and to-be-annexed borders. In other words, the Mayor wants to be able to change things without getting approval from anyone else. Has Hilliard struck a side deal with the City of Columbus for sewer and water, and therefore no longer needs the accord?

Update: June 30, 2006: Mayor Schonhardt continues to press an agenda understood only to himself and his insiders. For some reason, he is acting as though: a) he is compelled to accept annexation requests for addition residential development; b) he is sure he can get water/sewer service to these annexed areas; and, c) he has worked out his own pay-as-you-grow system (i.e. Impact Fees), and doesn't want to share with any other jursidictions. Mayor Coleman of Columbus does not seem to be happy with Schonhardt right now (see article)

Update: April 28, 2008: Mayor Schonhardt has finally agreed to sign the Big Darby Accord, but with an interesting wrinkle - he got the City of Columbus to agree that the Accord is a non-binding agreement. That means nothing is settled, and we can expect arguments and litigation for years to come.

The City of Columbus is the 800 pound gorilla in these discussions, because it controls the regional water/sewer system. Starting a half-century ago, when James A. Rhodes was the Mayor of Columbus, the City of Columbus began offering water/sewer service to suburbs, but with conditions. To protect its future capability to expand alongside the migration of residents from the inner city to outlying areas, Columbus would specify limits to the areas into which a suburb could expand by annexation and be served by the Columbus water/sewer system. The suburb would also have to agree to use Columbus as its exclusive water/sewer service provider, and shut down any water/sewer system the suburb might be operating. Columbus was careful to preserve growth corridors between suburbs so that it never became blocked from outward expansion.

This was a wise move on the part of Columbus' leaders. While homeowners have moved into suburban municipalities primarily to gain access to suburban school systems, Columbus has been able to develop commercial zones nearby, such as Easton Shopping Center and Mill Run (which is part Columbus and part Hilliard). Columbus is able to capture jobs and the income taxes they generate without having the infrastructure costs associated with residential neighborhoods. That's shrewd planning.

In regard to western Franklin County, Mayor Michael Coleman has backed away from this policy. The City of Columbus has said that it does not feel there is economic justification for building the expensive extensions to the sewer/water system that would be required to develop the Big Darby watershed in the style of a typical Franklin County suburb with an average of 4 dwellings per acre. Some of that expense has to do with the sheer magnitude and distance of the trunk system which would need to be constructed to serve this area at typical residential densities. Another factor is the extreme care, and consequent expense, which would be demanded by the federal and Ohio EPA to ensure that the watershed is protected from harm by either the construction effort itself, or the effects of later development.

So the mission of the Accord group is to develop a land use plan which becomes a binding contract among the jurisdictions. The key reason this is necessary is that the land use plan will by definition place restrictions on the ways some parcels can be used, and the degree of restriction is not evenly distributed among the jurisdictions. In particular, much of the land in Brown Township would be designated as open areas, or for open-space conservation development. The pain and gain need to be distributed across jurisdictions, and a binding agreement is the only practical way to pull that off.

A great deal of the land which is currently designated as open area follows Hamilton Run, a small creek immediately west of and parallel to Alton-Darby Rd, the current frontier of Hilliard and Columbus annexation. The landowners along that creek are very eager to sell to developers. Indeed, a few of the major landowners are developers. They don't feel it is fair that they should bear the whole cost of conservation efforts, which is what happens if their land is declared undevelopable by this plan.

I agree.

We are not the first community to face this problem. A number of solutions have developed, all which have a common theme: in exchange for developing a parcel at higher density, the developer must purchase development rights from those who are restricted to lower density. Some common variations of this approach are:

• Transfer of Development Rights (TDRs): The basic premise is that the entire planning area is assigned a development density (e.g. 2 dwellings/acre), which grants that development density right to every landowner. However, some landowners would be prohibited from actually developing to that density by the land use plan (e.g. owners of land through which sensitive streams flow), while other parcels could be developed to a higher density in accordance with the land use plan. However, to develop to that greater density, a landowner would need to purchase development rights from others -- most likely the landowners who have development rights, but cannot use them because of the restrictions of the land use plan. Many in our area oppose this approach because they feel it permanently devalues the land in the restricted zones. Read more about TDRs on the website of Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University*.
   
• Purchase of Development Rights (PDRs): While very similar to TDRs, the PDR presumes that every landowner has, in the absence of something like the Big Darby Accord, a right to develop on his/her land at the density allowed by law and regulation. In Franklin County, that generally means 0.2 dwellings/acre (ie 5 acre lots). So the owner of a 100 acre parcel could either: a) sell 20 lots of 5 acres each; or, b) sell some or all of those development rights to a developer who is allowed by the land use plan to have more than 0.2 dwellings/acre.
   
• Development Rights Bank: In this case, the land use authority would create a bank which is authorized to buy and sell development rights. A developer with land on which higher development densities is permitted would be required to buy additional development rights from the Development Rights Bank. That bank might have already purchased development rights from another landowner, or may 'sell short' -- meaning it could buy development rights from a seller after it has sold rights to a developer. The benefit for both parties is that buyers and sellers to not have to be matched for every transaction. Those who want to sell rights can sell to the bank regardless of whether there is a buyer at that particular moment. Conversely, the developer can buy rights whether or not there is a seller.

While such a bank might be the most acceptable option for our community, we still have to pay attention to some subtle dynamics. By allowing development rights to be separated from the actual land, this Rights Bank approach creates a condition which is not otherwise true -- that all development rights have equal value at any given time. What I mean is that the purchaser of a development right does not care in the least what parcel of land the right came from. Any development right is a good one as long as the developer can get it at an acceptable price.

But the value of those rights are not the same for every seller. One seller might have land which the plan tries to preserve as open space, yet would otherwise be quite valuable if sold off as 5+ acre lots. Another seller might also have land which the plan designates as open space, but isn't really developable anyway because of terrain or soil. This land has low value whether or not there is a conservation plan. A couple of questions: A) Should the bank pay the same amount per acre for the rights of both properties?  B) Which ones will the bank buy first?

If I were running the bank, my answer to those questions would be: A) no; and, B) the cheapest ones. In fact, I would try to buy all the rights to the naturally undevelopable land first, because it gets me the cheapest inventory.

I also presume that the Bank will not have a government-ordained monopoly on the trading of development rights, and that buyers and sellers could deal outside the banking system. If I were a developer, or maybe even a shrewd landowner, I would try to go out and buy up as many development rights from otherwise undevelopable parcels as I could before the sellers figure out the game. I'd like to beat the Bank to the punch, in fact, and would try to get these cheap rights locked up before the Bank gets up an running (corrupt politicians might seek to retard the startup for exactly this reason). Then when my competitor shows up later needing to buy development rights, the only rights left would be the expensive ones, because they come from parcels which have higher development value outside the limitations of the land use plan.

The oldest adage in real estate is that only three things are important: Location, Location and Location. A Development Rights Bank messes with that dynamic. The change in the game will benefit some at the expense of others, because some will understand the new game more quickly than others. My concern is that landowners (especially Homewood) who are on the current development frontier will figure out that the land which they had hoped to annex into Hilliard and develop at 4+ dwellings/acre will suddenly be reduced in value to what they can get by selling development rights and renting it out as farmland. It shifts the advantage to a competitor who might not have had the foresight to purchase land twenty years ago, but who suddenly finds land elsewhere (e.g. in the so-called Town Center) worth much more because of the availability of relatively cheap development rights.

Homewood may, by themselves, have the political clout to motivate Mayor Schonhardt and the Hilliard City Council to pull out of the Big Darby Accord and blow this whole thing up. However, I am very encouraged by the recent passage of  a resolution in support of the Big Darby Accord by the Hilliard City Council. [update: Since the passage of this resolution, Mayor Schonhardt staged a press conference in the Central Office building of the Hilliard City School District to announce his independent plans for development west of Alton-Darby Rd. You are encouraged to read my analysis of the Mayor actions]

Please invest the time to pay attention to what our government officials are doing. This Big Darby Accord is what we need to bring growth under control in our school district. It needs your support to survive.

* You are encouraged to check out the extensive research performed by the Swank Program in Rural-Urban Policy at The Ohio State University.

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