At a Tuesday summit, leaders across tourism, conservation, government and industrial circles made the case that preserving the county’s rural spaces is good not just for the people living there, but all of Loudoun.

“People want to move here from all over the world, to live, to work, to recreate, have families and even to retire, and that’s an exceptional thing. That’s not true everywhere in the world,” Piedmont Environmental Council President Chris Miller said. “… And what we produce here is increasingly the most important thing in the global economy—data. So all that’s combined with one place and that’s amazing. We also have a legacy of challenges that are not fully met, and future issues that we have to squarely acknowledge.”

And despite their different background and perspectives, Miller and Kuhn agreed Loudoun’s growth and affordable housing needs shouldn’t mean opening the floodgates for development in the county’s rural reaches.

Miller pointed out that contrary to Loudoun’s rapid population growth, worldwide, population growth is less than 1% a year, and Virginia’s population growth is less than a half-percent.

“So yes, there is growth, but it’s growth about choice, and it’s growth about planning,” he said. “Not growth about inevitability, and that has to be part of our thinking. We cannot simply say we have to grow in an unlimited fashion, because that’s when you start to run into the consequences.”

Kuhn, on the other hand, said he’s “a big believer, whether it’s in your businesses, whether it’s in your community, whether it’s in your town, it’s grow or die. You’re either going up or you’re coming down.”

But he said that did not translate to opening the doors to unchecked residential development.

“I’m a big believer that we’re short on affordable housing. I think we need to get moving on it. We’ve been talking about it in this county for a long, long time. Good things are happening. We have been moving the needle, but it’s not enough fast enough,” he said. “What I don’t think we need is thousands and thousands and thousands more general homes built through Loudoun County.”

But he also argued Loudouners in some parts of the county will have to get used to seeing development like data centers from their windows.

“Where are we getting in Loudoun County that we think we’re going to build things that are not seen from any door?” he said.

But Kuhn’s speech also highlighted some of the opposing forces and difficult questions around protecting rural land from development. The county is working to update its cluster subdivision zoning ordinance, which gives developers a bump in how many homes they can build overall in a subdivision if they cluster those homes together, leaving more space open. In practice, that has resulted in the homes being clustered on the best land for septic systems—which is also the best soil for agriculture, meaning preserving land that is less suitable for farming.

But Kuhn said the change to cluster zoning under consideration now would end his conservation easement work. He said that “easement harvests” already makes half as much now as it did when he started a decade ago, and has warned before those zoning changes could reduce the value of that land, which would also further reduce the profitability of placing land under easement.

“When we buy a farm to put it into easement, we’re always competing with a homebuilder. And we always have to pay the landowner something close to what the builder’s going to pay or they’re not going to sell it to us. They all care about easements, but they all have their own financial goals and needs, and I understand that,” Kuhn said. “So we have to pay what the homebuilder’s going to pay. As these easements provide less and less return, they won’t be possible. Easements provide a fraction of what we would get building homes on these properties.”

In 1981, Montgomery County established it Agricultural Reserve, downzoning a third of the land in the county. Even in Montgomery County, which under Maryland state law has much broader authority to make laws than Loudoun, that was no small decision—that made farmers’ land much less valuable, which had effects like making it harder to raise money by borrowing against that land.

He said the proposal led to a “revolt” among the farmers. To make them whole, the downzoning was accompanied with a Transfer of Development Rights program—while they could no longer build as many houses on their land, they could sell the rights to build those houses to apply to land in other parts of the county targeted for growth. That gave them a way to raise money from their land’s development potential while also permanently protecting it from development.

He said that master plan is working—the 2017 Census of Agriculture found 558 farms in Montgomery County, covering 65,537 acres and employing more than 10,000 people.

And Montgomery County has avoided Loudoun’s rapid loss of farmland over the past decade. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent 2017 Census of Agriculture found Loudoun had lost 10% of its farmland over the previous five years, shedding 137 farms and 12,860 acres of farmland. Over the same period, Montgomery County’s farmland slightly increased, adding 18 farms and 2,044 acres being farmed, about a 3% increase in farmland.

“That’s really what we want to encourage. We want the farmers to own the property, to be able to make those investments because they’re certain that they’re going to own the equity. There’s no uncertainty with the lease with the landowner,” he said.

Middleburg Mayor Bridge Littleton closed the summit with a warning about how much development could occur in western Loudoun under today’s zoning—and a pitch for starting Loudoun’s own Transfer of Development Rights program, something county supervisors have debated but never acted on. And he pointed to state legislation in Virginia allowing the county to sell residential development rights in one area as commercial development rights in another.

The county government would also designate which areas of the county can sell those rights, and where they can be bought. Littleton said it’s an opportunity to let data center developers buy those rights to build bigger data centers in industrial areas, rather than spread into new areas where they may clash with homes and other businesses.

“This is a government land zoning program, but it is a private transaction, so there’s no government money involved. A data center person and a landowner will come to a negotiated price,” he said. “…It’s a win-win for Loudoun. We get to take and put into conservation easement those prime agricultural areas and farming areas that we really, really want to protect, and we get to concentrate those data centers and take the other data center areas off the table.”

That answer is not universally agreed to among stakeholders or policymakers. And with local elections this November, those policymakers could change, and county policy with them. Littleton urged people at the summit to make their voices heard while those elected officials and candidates are campaigning.

“They need to hear from you. On these types of ideas, your voice will make the difference,” Littleton said.

After the summit, Littleton said he was pleased with the attendance and discussion at the summit.

“This is exactly how we’re going to tackle these issues: people being engaged, having meaningful conversations, asking questions, learning more, figuring out solutions and getting to an end state,” he said. “It’s going to be the 80% solution, but it’s going to be one that everyone can live with, and that’s the goal.”

“Whether it’s access to healthy local foods, safe drinking water, housing attainability, or even access to nature and open space which we all celebrate—these are all things that are really at risk or have not been fully addressed,” Miller said. “And so we need to acknowledge and be humble at the same time as we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.”