Pennsylvania's "farmland preservation" boondoggle

Like an Autumn rite, each fall as the exquisite aroma of
ripening Concord grapes permeates the eastern Erie County
countryside, the Erie news media hone in on the usual
suspects for quotes and sound bites on the qualitative
and quantitative aspects of the grape crop, including
estimated tonnage per acre and sugar content.

Together those factors determine the gross value of
the harvest.One or two prominent grape farmers are
briefly interviewed for their take on the condition
of and prospects for the year’s crop; an expert over
at the regional agricultural experiment station is
consulted on more technical aspects; and a manager
of the Welch Grape Juice plant in North East, the
largest of its kind in the world, lends his expertise
on the subject from the perspective of the global marketer.

Occasionally an agronomist is called in to add academia’s
glossy imprimatur to the process.These formulaic media
reports are relentlessly simplistic, predictable and
invariably misleading or worse because the print and
broadcast reporters who produce them know little or
nothing about the subject, often drowning in arcana
and missing the big story.

For example, last year about this time, the Erie Times-News
ran an editorial commenting upon the prospective economic
impact of the grape crop on Erie County and beyond, summing
it up with the headline “Grape industry rebounds” and
concluding that “Agriculture is a roller coaster business,
as growers know all too well. But right now, these purple,
golden and green vineyards are producing plenty of green.”

But only a week or so earlier, The Times-News ran an article
which said just the opposite. A grape farmer the newspaper’s
reporter talked to said - despite what looks like an excellent
crop - growers expect little more than a break-even year,
with a harvest of six to seven tons of grapes per acre.
At this year’s expected prices, the grower said, income
from that level of production will barely cover production costs.

Apparently whoever writes and edits the editorials at the
Times-News doesn’t bother to read the articles the reporters
write.But the Times-News and other Erie media can’t see the
vineyard for the grapes.

Expect to see any day now a dreary re-run of this fictional
narrative masquerading as fact.

The real story which the Erie news media have missed and
ignored for years has nothing to do with cyclical crop
and harvest dynamics.

Rather it’s a gradual trend over the past two decades
which represents a paradigmatic shift in the grape farming
culture. It has quietly transformed the grape growing corps
in eastern Erie County with a long tradition of self-reliance
from hardy independent folks of yore to government hand-out
recipients of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars
subsidized by taxpayers at all levels of government, local,
state and federal.

This transformation is the regrettable but unintended
consequence (at least for the mindless masses who have
supported it) of something euphemistically known as
the state Farmland Preservation program, enacted into
law in 1987 by the Pennsylvania general assembly
under the most false of pretenses, yet enthusiastically
heralded by the Times-News and other Erie news media
as the salvation of Farmland Pennsylvania.

Back about two years ago, The Times-News published an
article bearing the garish headline: “Dying on the vine,
Concord grape growers struggle to hang on.” A reality
check indicated otherwise.

While one could sympathize with a few who were hurting,
the greater majority of grape vineyard owners in Erie
County, especially in the east county, have done very well,
thanks to enormous state subsidies many of them have
received under the so-called farmland preservation program.
It's a get-rich scheme for a select few at the expense of
millions of Pennsylvania taxpayers.

In 2005, that ill-advised scheme got a healthy multi-million
dollar boost with the passage of the so-called “Growing
Green II” ballot proposition by Pennsylvania voters which
provided an unspecified but massive amount of funding for
the program.During the past 18 years since the program's
inception in 1989, more than 50 Erie County farmers within
seven municipalities have collectively received more than
$7 million from state and local taxpayers for selling
development rights on their farms to the county or state
under the program.

By selling the development rights to the state for a
negotiated sum the farmers agree to continue that
acreage in farming activity in perpetuity and never
use or sell it for non-farming development purposes.
Statewide, about $1 billion has been poured into the
program, which was launched with a $100 million
statewide general obligation bond issue approved
by Pennsylvania's voters in 1987.

The massive subsequent funding - ten times the original
amount approved by the voters - however was not
subjected to a vote of the people, but has been
surreptitiously approved incrementally by the legislature
and successive governors, both Republican and Democrat.

The awards to individual farmers in Erie County since they
began participating in the program in 1994 range from a
high of $832,000 for 595 acres committed to the program
to a low of $30,000 for 20 acres. Total acreage committed
to non-development of farmlands in Erie County since the
program began is upwards of 3,000.

Guess what virtually all of them have used some of the
windfall they collected from the state for : to develop
their non-preserved farmland!The Farmland Preservation
Program, a huge financial boondoogle on behalf of
participating farmers, real estate developers, land
speculators, money changers and other promoters
throughout the state, is jointly administered and
funded by the state and county governments, with
some funds available from township and federal sources as well.

The Erie County Planning Department administers the
program locally under state- mandated procedures.
One of the program's more insidious features is that
it contains no disclaimers prohibiting state or local
legislators or officials who have used their public
offices to create and administer the program from
exploiting and profiting from it by participating,
a clear violation of ethical precepts.

While there is no evidence that this has occurred in
Erie County, there is no guarantee that it won't. It
has occurred frequently in other parts of the state
where the program is being implemented far more
extensively.

While local and state officials and
bureaucrats repeatedly claim the program has widespread
public and farmer support, in the case of the public,
it's unlikely the general public would be supportive
if it knew what is really going on behind the extravagant
claims of its supporters.

But it doesn't, because of the failure of the news media
to expose it.At the same time, prospectively eligible
farmers who hope to participate in this giveaway program
would be foolish not to support it, given the enormous
subsidies it makes available to them with no real commitment
on their part. Whoever said there’s no free lunch, never
heard of Pennsylvania’s farmland preservation program.

The program’s purported goal is to assure permanent
preservation of viable agricultural lands in order to
protect the state's agricultural economy and culture.
Its objective is "to slow the loss of prime farmland
to non-agricultural uses," according to the state
Bureau of Farmland Preservation in Harrisburg, which
administers the program at the state level.

But since its idealized inception nearly two decades
ago, the program has taken a sharp turn to the right.
Elsewhere in the state, for example in Lancaster
County, the largest agricultural county in the
state - compared to which the Erie County program is
a mere drop in the bucket - it has had the diametrically
opposite effect of opening more farmlands to developmen
t at much higher prices, putting them out of reach of
all but the most affluent.

In a smaller way, it has had the same effect in eastern
Erie County and will continue to expand here. In one
notable instance in southeastern Pa., the state paid a
Montgomery County farmer $3.7 million for the property
rights to his 70 acre farm, an average of about $53,000
per acre. Another farmer there was paid $48,000 per acre.

Inevitably, this will happen in Erie and other participating
counties as well, albeit on a lesser but munificent scale.
While farmers who participate in the program sell the
development rights to their land, they can continue to
raise, harvest, market and utilize any livestock,
crops or products grown or derived from them for their
own benefit, in effect, double dipping into the state
and local taxpayers' pockets.

They also retain sub-surface rights to any mineral deposits,
such as oil and/or gas. The commercial reality which enables
the so-called preservation program to gobble up more land
than it preserves derives from the fact that the portion of
the farmers' land not preserved which adjoins reserved land,
over time becomes much more valuable on the real estate
housing and commercial market.

That's because private purchasers can be assured the
non-preserved farmland they buy on which to build their
homes or businesses won't be blighted by unsightly
housing, business or industrial developments on adjoining
land owing to its preserved farmland status. Their back
and front yards will remain forever open to scenic farmland vistas.

This hastens and expands development on non-preserved
farmland, as participating farmers jump at the opportunity
to exploit rising market prices precipitated by the
diminishing amount of land available for development.

It also gives them a windfall with which to launch
housing and other developments on their non-preserved
farmland, thus removing that acreage from farming,
an alarming trend which has already begun in east
Erie County.

How the “farmland preservation”
boondoggle works.

The monetary amount participating farmers or owners
of farmland receive for their land sought to be
preserved, called "easements," is derived from the
difference for which their land would sell for
farming purposes compared to how much it would
fetch for development purposes.

As a hypothetical if somewhat simplistic example,
if Farmer A offered to buy 500 acres from Farmer B
for its market value of half a million dollars for
farming purposes, and a real estate developer
offered Farmer B $750,000 for the same acreage
for residential, commercial or industrial development,
the state/county would pay Farmer B the half million
dollars plus the $250,000 difference to place his
acreage in the farmland preservation program instead
and retain its farming function.

North East grape farmers outnumber by far those
from other parts of Erie County who have been awarded
funds under the program since its inception. Plans were
initiated last year to curb participation of North East
farmers in the program in an effort to spread its limited
funding around to other parts of the county previously
less favored.

There are four possible funding sources for the farmland
preservation program: the county, state and, rarely,
federal and township governments. The program was initially
funded by a $100 million general obligation bond approved
by the voters in 1987, which was heavily lobbied by certain
farming, real estate interests, banks, land developers,
well-organized land trusts in the nation and others.

The bond issue, though controversial, was readily passed
by more than 2 to 1, with 1,172,483 voting for it, 575,330
against. Pennsylvania voters naively supported the bond
issue because of its superficially attractive features
and deceptive patina which over the years continue to
over-ride the program's hidden mercenary realities which
defeat the purported goal of farmland preservation.

Over the years, more than half as much has been expended
on the program annually as was provided by the initial
$100 million bond issue, although no voter approval has
been obtained for the additional funding.Since its
inception in 1989 through Sept., 2003, the state and
57 of Pennsylvania's 66 counties have paid about one
billion dollars to preserve about 300,000 acres of
farmland, according to state figures.

In some southeastern Pennsylvania farming areas, county
and municipal bonds have been floated to expand the
farmland preservation program because of limitations on
government funding.Authorization of these bonds has been
fueled by special interest groups having nothing to do
with farmland preservation except to profit from it by
exploiting the development it is supposed to curb, but
which in fact it generates, such as realtors, banks,
land developers, general and sub-contractors, and others.

Meanwhile, rank and file voters, duped by the program's
duplicitous promoters and the news media's failure to
expose them, continue to be led down a merry path.
Amortization of these bonds shifts the burden for
their repayment onto future generations who have no
say in whether they want to assume this burden of
debt for a program that has more to do with profiteering
and accelerated development of rural landscapes than
with farmland preservation.

Pennsylvania owns the dubious distinction of leading
the nation in the number of farms and acres of farmland
protected, about 300,000. But this distinction is
double-edged, because the longer range effect, as
noted earlier, has been to open up more farming
land to development faster than would otherwise
have occurred, but at much higher prices than lower
income folks most in need of affordable housing can pay for it.

Back in 1987, when the $100 million general obligation
bond proposal was placed before the state's voters, it
was aggressively lobbied by farming and other special
interests which would benefit from it. But there was one exception.

In Lancaster County, Donald L. Ranck, a prominent and influential
farmer in Paradise Twp., along with a handful of devoted
supporters, launched a vigorous campaign opposing the bond
issue and the program on grounds that, as formulated, its
long-range effects would adversely impact both farmland
preservation efforts and the interest of taxpayers throughout
the state, without commensurate benefits.

Today, Ranck still actively opposes the relentless expansion
of the program, while advocating reforms which would sustain
the preservation of Pennsylvania's farmland without the
deleterious effects he and others claim it promotes in its
present form, but so far with limited success in the face
of politically powerful development interests.

His proposed reforms would also significantly reduce its
exploitation of taxpayer dollars. Says Ranck: "The best
prevention for farmland development is allowing landowners
to keep their development rights, keep their building rights,
keep their management rights. The worst loss of farmland
occurs next to 'preserved' farms. This is so obvious you
may wonder why the preservation gang can't see it. "We
believe they can, but continue their charade for their
own personal profit. Future generations will curse them
for it!" Rank predicts.

Currently, portions of 3,000-plus farms and mor than 400,000
acres have been preserved statewide through the program.
But the Commonwealth is not keeping track of how much
non-preserved farmland has been lost to development as
a result of the program since its inception nearly two
decades ago.

Nor is it letting it be widely known how
many hundreds of millions of dollars, now approching
$1 billion, millions of state and national taxpayers
have paid for the disproportionate benefit of a very few.