So Molly and Dick are gone - one of our writers is over at the courthouse right about now covering the swearing-in of the new commissioners - and we’re getting the usual post-mortems, looking back on the outgoing board of commissioners’ achievements.

Where you stand on the convention center issue, of course, largely determines where you stand on those “achievements.” But one thing many of the anti-convention center folks have been touting - everybody has been touting, really - is the “success” of farm preservation efforts under this last board.

Lancaster County is now number one in the nation when it comes to acreage preserved. And in one respect that’s a grand thing. But in another respect, I’ve noticed that in most of the stories written about this, the cost of being number one has been rather downplayed.

But the county, in fact, has $8 million budgeted next year alone for farmland preservation efforts. That’s not a staggering figure given that the county’s total budget is $284 million; but consider also that since 2004, the county has spent $40 million on farmland preservation. The other outgoing commissioner, Sharron Nelson, had on occasion “questioned whether non-farming county residents are being left out of such perks.”

And they are - though to the extent that they want farmland preserved by, in effect, giving tax money to farmers not to develop their land, that may be fine by them.

But I’ve never been a huge fan of circumventing the market this way. Becuase what it amounts to is giving money, your money, to people who (in theory, were they to sell their land) have assets that far outpace most of the people whose tax dollars are being used to purchase these easements.

Yes, yes; we say we want to keep Lancaster an agricultural community and doing so means “easing development pressure,” one means of which is to pay farmers not to sell their land, to keep it in farming. But given the tax hike the county was compelled to pass this year; given that future years may require similar hikes - can the county afford to keep spending this much on farmland preservation?

Maybe or maybe not; there’s a debate to be had. But we’re not having that debate.

It may be fiscally irresponsible for the county to back bond guarantees for the convention center. But I can’t see how it’s somehow the height of fiscal responsibility for the outgoing board to spend as much as it did on farmland preservation - spending that is entirely discretionary - and then hike taxes, basically, on the way out the door.