LANDMARKS LIST HISTORY AND THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 16, 1992                   TAG: 9202170225
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: E2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
LANDMARKS LIST HISTORY AND THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
HISTORIC preservation in Virginia could be disrupted, if not destroyed, by a shortsighted bill sponsored by Sen. Charles Colgan of Manassas and pushed by Northern Virginia real-estate interests.
The bill, in greatly amended form, made it through the Senate last week. The House should slow the express. At the very least, the bill deserves far more study than it so far has received.
The Senate amendments improved the bill significantly, in part by reducing the threat that Virginia might be disqualified from the $600,000 it receives annually in federal matching funds. Such a loss would wreck the state's historic-resources program.
But as David Brown of the Preservation Alliance of Virginia observes, the National Park Service has not yet been heard from - and until it is, the possibility remains that Virginia could become the first state to lose federal historic-preservation funding.
In any event, the bill would set a bad precedent by allowing landowners at the Brandy Station and Bristow battlefield sites in Northern Virginia to have those places removed from the list of Virginia Historic Landmarks without regard to historic significance.
In addition, the bill would create unnecessarily cumbersome procedural hurdles to historic-landmark designations. It would do so even though the process has been working well for more than 20 years, and even though the vast majority of designations are made with property-owners' consent and, often, at their instigation.
In itself, state historic designation neither affects land use nor preserves landmarks. The Northern Virginia landowners' real beef is with local zoning ordinances, and with federal restraints on public projects (highways, for instance) affecting historic properties. Those ordinances and restraints would not be eliminated by removing the battlefields from the state register.
Historic designation by the state does, however, provide communities with professional expertise as to what is or isn't of historic significance, information that can be used by localities in shaping zoning laws and preservation policy. Delisting is a form of depriving communities of expert information already obtained at public expense.
In a state with so rich a heritage as Virginia's, historic designation - like historic preservation in general- has long since proved its value. Historic sites are, for example, Virginia's No. 1 tourist attraction, and tourism is the state's No. 2 industry. The work of identifying Virginia's historic places, and of preserving them where possible, should be accelerated, not slowed.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB