Word that the Harford County Council rejected a land deal that would have turned over slightly more than 11 acres of county land in exchange for a free and clear title to territory totaling slightly less than one acre is as welcome as it is unexpected.
The swap was a deal worked out by the Harford County Department of Recreation and Parks with Griffith Davis, owner of Belle Vue Farm adjacent to the county's popular Swan Harbor Farm park in Oakington.
Swan Harbor Farm is one of the county park system's real gems. It is among the few public parks outside Havre de Grace that is on the Chesapeake Bay, and is also among the most striking in terms of the waterfront vistas it offers.
It's therefore easy to understand why managers of the county's parks system would be eager to ensure public access to the park will not be threatened. The problem — and it's still a problem because the land swap proposal was rejected – is Davis has questioned the county's ownership of the land that provides public access to Swan Harbor Farm.
Though he has never threatened to block access to the park, according to Arden McClune, the director of parks and recreation, the access territory is "not the clean legal access we would like to have."
The solution proposed, however, seemed a bit extreme: 11.14 acres of county land to ensure there was no claim on 0.98 acres of county access. It was pointed out that the land to be given away is largely swamp and probably couldn't be developed. Still, it raises the question as to why so much land would have to be exchanged for something that would probably be very difficult to wrest from the county, namely access to a property that has used the same access road since long before the county acquired it.
A swap may be in order to secure the "clean legal access" to the property, but an 11:1 swap doesn't seem like a fair deal for the owners of Swan Harbor Farm, namely Harford County's taxpayers. The county council did well to hold out for a better deal.