A few of us who are citizens in the CDS are fortunate enough to own many parcels. This may bring pleasure to us, but also brings huge benefit to the economy of the CDS, as we struggle to gain new residents. When we own these parcels, we provide the much needed economic benefit of significantly helping the community to pay its tier.
But early on we established that it was best if a single citizen did not own TOO MANY parcels, and to my understanding a law is in place regarding this. So there is a need, I think, to reconcile these two concerns.
As a citizen who indeed owns many parcels, I make the following offer. And I offer this as a basis for a policy which the community might refine and adopt.
I own parcels of two sorts. Some are my “core identity parcels”, in my case the few parcels I have lived on in NFS since the community was founded. They are P250 and a few parcels surrounding it, making up a chunk of land at the east end of the valley.
But the much larger number are parcels that I have bought and created personal expressions with. Sanctuaries, chapels, bars and bakeries. Some of the parcels have been designated places for historical preservation. But some of them are simply personal enjoyments. It is this latter group of parcels that I should like to declare are parcels that are available to existing, or new, residents who might wish to enjoy them.
My offer will come with no obligations to preserve any of the content on these parcels, unless the community determines that such content should be preserved. When a new owner is identified I will transfer the land for nothing. But, of course, they’ll need to start paying the tier.
Lil has suggested that a way to identify such parcels might be to place a simple, discreet sign at each. That may work. Identifying available parcels is one challenge of making this work, and a second is identifying which parcels should have content preserved for historical community reasons.
So maybe there are two kinds of (discreet) signs that might be posted. One for parcels which you can do anything you’d like with, subject to the existing covenant. Another might be for parcels where the community has identified content which it would prefer preserved. Ownership of that parcel would incur the moral obligation to preserve the content (I’m not sure how to enforce that obligation, other than perhaps to have the creator store everything in their inventory, and if the parcel owner deletes it, retake the parcel and restore the content).
So I’m floating this offer for discussion. We thought it might best be brought to the LUC, since it is a “land use” issue, which the committee might discuss and prepare an actual recommendation to the RA. But I’m entirely open to suggestions regarding what process to use. The core message here is that the parcels I own, except for the previously noted “core identity parcels”, are available to anyone who might like to use them creatively.
Sudane................
