If I told the County building inspector that I complied with the Building Code because my house met several of the Code requirements even though it failed to meet others, he would probably laugh at me.

If I told a state trooper that I shouldn’t get a ticket for driving without a license because I was driving under the speed limit and had my seatbelt on, I doubt that it would persuade him.

Yet, the Board of Supervisors decided to approve the Malvern rezoning even though the Planning Department concluded that the application was not in conformity with the County’s Comprehensive Plan. That conclusion was undoubtedly correct because the Plan designates the land involved in the Malvern rezoning as Rural Residential, not Commercial. At least one supervisor concluded that the application’s obvious conflict with the Rural Residential designation was not controlling because the application was consistent with language elsewhere in the Plan.

The opening of an intersection at Routes 288 and 711 introduced a significant change that the current Comprehensive Plan does not address. The Malvern rezoning application may be justified because of this change, but there was a proper way to accommodate the change with the County’s comprehensive planning process — amend the Comprehensive Plan for the specific area affected. That is the way other Virginia localities deal with that situation.

Many assumed incorrectly that the only choices were either to defer the rezoning decision until the Comprehensive Plan Update is approved months from now or to ignore the current Comprehensive Plan. For reasons that have not been stated, the Board, the Planning Commission. the Planning Department and the applicant decided not to pursue a simultaneous amendment to the Comprehensive Plan.

State law mandates that every locality adopt a comprehensive plan. That requirement was enacted to introduce rationality and forward thinking to local zoning and financial planning. In fact, a locality cannot legally adopt a zoning ordinance without first adopting a comprehensive plan. The local capital improvement program and the annual capital budget recommendation must be based on the Comprehensive Plan.

Perhaps the greatest value of a comprehensive plan is that it can support zoning decisions that otherwise would be considered arbitrary and invalid. If future zoning decisions are challenged, the Board of Supervisors can rely on its Comprehensive Plan to uphold those decisions if it has adhered to the Plan consistently. The Virginia Supreme Court refused, for example, to allow Fairfax County to rely on its Comprehensive Plan to sustain a rezoning decision when the County had failed to adhere to the plan in the past.

The argument that the Board should decide each case on its facts rather than follow the letter of the law is misguided and even dangerous. As Chief Justice John Marshall observed, we have “a government of laws, not of men.”

In our system, rezoning and other governmental decisions must be based on settled, previously published rules that apply to all alike. Governor Timothy Kaine said in a recent speech that this notion of the rule of law, as opposed to the unbridled discretion of our rulers, is the first principle of our form of government.

A decision to grant a rezoning application based on the “proven track record” of the applicant does not prevent the transfer of the rezoned land to a person with no proven track record. Once the land is rezoned, the County can enforce only the “letter of the law,” regardless of who owns the land.

The major defect in the application is in its proffered conditions. The Board ignored the fact that state law prohibits the inclusion in a rezoning application of proffers that are not in conformity with the Comprehensive Plan, as well as proffers that weaken the requirements imposed by the Zoning Ordinance. The Malvern application included both.

This is not a question of the reasonableness of the Board’s ultimate rezoning decision, but rather whether the application could even be considered by the Board in the exercise of its zoning discretion.

It is especially when so many, as I, favor a project like the Malvern project that we should make certain that we follow the established rules, which would have meant no significant delay, if any. When projects we oppose appear, we will surely wish we had the protection of those rules.