Commissioners Dan Murrey and Dumont Clarke now talking about promoting local food, and preserving farms.
It would help provide wholesome food and affordable food, Murrey says, and also help energy efficiency. “It is not energy efficient to fly asparagus from Chile in the middle of the winter,”
Murrey says. (Hmmm, the asparagus I buy in the middle of the winter comes from Peru.)
One teeny problem amid all this good feeling (and I’m a big proponent of local food and helping farmers and preserving farmland). Mecklenburg has almost no working farms left, and even worse, has no mechanism for keeping the handful of remaining ones from being developed. Unless the county intends to buy all the farms – even this tax-and-spend librul thinks that isn’t workable – there’s no mechanism for stopping their almost inevitable development. Tools such as buying development rights and urban growth boundaries have been left on the table* and there’s no move from anyone to resurrect them. (*Except in Davidson. It has its act together.)