We also knew that these tough decisions must be made. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there. If you are building out there, if you tear up one more farm, then you pay for roads, water and sewage, schools, parks, and other development costs. We like to think of this as our carrot and stick approach. While we encourage growth within our existing population centers, we are also preserving Maryland's best remaining farmland and natural resource areas with our competitive Rural Legacy program.
Counties work with citizen groups and individual landowners who voluntarily participate.
They identify their most valuable areas, and then apply for State funds. The goal is to buy development rights to these areas, or, in some cases, to buy the land outright. Since last summer, using Rural Legacy and Open Space funds, we permanently protected nearly 16,464 acres of greenbelts, Civil War battlefields, prime farmland and areas along both the Chesapeake Bay tributaries and our Atlantic coastal bays. Each of these areas were under intense development pressure. In fact, bulldozers were already on some of these properties when we saved them.