"The agricultural reserve is our Central Park," Planning Board Chairman Derick Berlage said. "It is a great oasis surrounded on all sides by urbanization."
But it is far from a preservationist's dream: From 1997 to 2002, the amount of farmland in the county dropped from 77,266 to 75,077 acres, according to last year's census figures. County officials expect it to shrink to 70,000 acres by 2010.
"I want to live here instead of Fairfax because I don't want my county paved over," Perez said. "The challenge is: How do we continue to preserve that in the face of demographic changes and an array of pressures to develop? That is going to be one of the paramount public policy challenges before the council over the course of the decade."
In many cases, the county's policies and practices have opened the reserve to development. For example, Montgomery allows the extension of water and sewer into the reserve for churches and other so-called private institutional facilities, such as day-care centers, a practice the council is considering ending.
Another county policy allows farmers who owned their property before the reserve was created in 1980 to build houses for their children without having to abide by normal zoning restrictions. It was meant to promote family farming, but county officials say they have anecdotal evidence that property owners have built houses using the "child lot" provision only to sell them to people not related to them.
How many times this has happened or even how many child lots exist is unclear, which some say is part of the problem.
"We can pass legislation, but the reality is we have clear legislation in the books," said council member Michael Knapp (D-Upcounty). "It's just a matter of getting people to enforce it."
Perhaps the most ambiguous county policy governing development in the reserve is the one that opened the door to sand mounds.
When writing the master plan that created the reserve, the Planning Board prohibited the use of "alternative" sewage disposal systems. In the early 1990s, Nancy Dacek, then the council member who represented the upcounty, was approached by a farmer whose parents had to move from his property because he could not get a traditional septic system to work. Dacek said that led her to ask the council to approve the use of sand mounds, which by then had become popular across the country.
Saving the Reserve
Dacek now says the policy the council approved was too vague. She and others believe that sand mounds should be used only when existing septic systems fail or when children of farmers legitimately want to live on the land.
Royce Hanson, chairman of the planning board that created the reserve, also cautioned against the use of sand mounds. "They permit pods of development to occur in such a way that it fragments the agricultural land and therefore runs against the purpose of the zone and particularly of the master plan," he said.
"It's an acceptable system," said Raquel Montenegro, associate director of the Maryland-National Capital Building Industry Association. "It has a successful record here in Montgomery County."
Jeremy Criss, the county's agricultural services chief, said taking away the right to build sand mounds could hurt farmers by reducing the equity on their land. "If the county wants to limit the application of sand mounds, I think it has to be done in a very careful way so that it is sensitive to the rights of the landowner," he said.
A dozen or so sand mounds could end up next to Schaudies's farm if Winchester Homes, a company that builds communities in Maryland and Virginia, has its way. Planning Board officials point out that the company will build 15 homes rather than the 28 it proposed in January 2003.
The Stoney Springs project, as it is known, has galvanized the community. Supporters of the reserve fear it will signal to other developers that they can use sand mounds to bypass the lack of public sewer lines. John Monacci, vice president of operations for Winchester Homes, declined to comment.
"It's more than a small battle over one piece of land," said Michael Rubin, a real estate investor who owns more than 3,000 acres that he has put into preservation. "To many of us here, this is a battle to save the agricultural reserve."
