Harford County boasts the third-best agricultural preservation program in the state and one of the top 10 in the nation. But officials fretted Tuesday over whether they’d be able to meet strict new guidelines to keep state funding.

Under the 2006 Agricultural Stewardship Act, counties that want to keep getting state money to preserve farms from development have to designate “priority preservation areas” and demonstrate detailed plans for saving 80 percent of the undeveloped land within them.

But Harford was struggling to choose an area that has the right balance of preserved land and farms that can be saved — especially given the decline in home sales that pay for most agricultural-preservation programs.

“A lot of people want to see the preservation area expanded,” said Pete Gutwald, Harford’s director of planning and zoning. “We should be innovative, but we also have to be realistic and financially manageable.”

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If counties don’t meet the state’s criteria, their share of state tax funding for preservation will drop from 75 percent to 33 percent, and they’ll no longer be eligible to participate in other state programs, Gutwald said.

Howard County dropped out of the state program last year, but not because of the stricter standards, said Kimberly Flowers, deputy director with Howard’s department of planning and zoning.

 Like Harford, part of Howard’s “transfer tax” on home sales goes toward the county’s preservation program, but officials had enough money in reserve that the economy has not yet had an effect, Flowers said.

Baltimore County will have no problem meeting the requirements because its preservation money comes from the county’s general fund, and it has enough undeveloped land to put into the program, said Land Preservation Administrator Walter Lippincott Jr.

Harford’s priority area will encompass 40,000 acres around the lower Deer Creek watershed, where the 80 percent goal is already met by including parts of Susquehanna and Rocks state parks in the equation.

But state officials might be skeptical if Harford was gaming the system, said farmer Charles Day of Darlington.

“I’m asking you to create amendments that will make this more acceptable to the state,” Day said. “If you do not, this will be one of the easiest budget items to be taken off the table.”

Councilman Richard Slutzky, an Aberdeen Republican, said the new requirements would take a shrinking pool of preservation funding away from farms outside the narrow priority area. Under the program, farms inside the priority area get five extra points on the 300-point scale used to determine which land is preserved.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com