Reston resident Linda Mallison has been involved with the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce for more than 20 years. A senior vice president with Transwestern, a commercial services real estate company in Vienna, Mallison is in the middle of her one-year reign as chairman of the organization.
Chamber president and CEO Tracey White has been in charge for seven years. Hired during the 1990s boom, White has seen the market at its peak and its current depths. In March, she watched as insurance giant, USAA, packed up and left Reston for greener — and less congested — pastures in Norfolk. And, in September, she welcomed Microsoft into the Reston business family. How does the Chamber see 2002 as it comes to an end?
<b>Q</b>: Before the election, the chamber was just one of many high-profile civic organizations to come out in favor of the now defeated Sales Tax Referendum. Now what?
<b>White</b>: What is plan B? That's the question everybody is asking these days. The chamber's public policy committee are all trying to figure out what Plan B is. What we do know is that we have all been a champion of a re-look at the tax structure in the Commonwealth and the focus on what that structure looks like is very important for this coming year. There's always the possibility of looking at the reallocation of the funding formulas for transportation.
Right now the pie isn't big enough. It's not even a question of how you carve it up solely, anymore. Now we are asking how do you make a bigger pie. And that's a tough question. Nobody wants higher taxes, but the flip side of that is that if you want more services then you are going to have to pay for it somehow. Now we have to figure out a new way to do that. It's going to take those who opposed the referendum and the supporters to work together, now post election. If they were opposing it, what ideas do they have to reach the next step. Everybody knows that the current road we are on, continuing with the population growth, if we don't do something, the quality of life here is going to deteriorate and everybody is concerned that the quality of life in the region stays strong and the economy stays strong, even the opponents are for that. So if, at least, we are going from that common base, you have got some place to go.
<b>Q</b>: Have companies come to you and said, 'Listen, if something is not done about the transportation issue, we are out of here?'
<b>White</b>: Yeah, that has been a discussion. You have to look no further than USAA leaving Reston in March and consolidating operations in Norfolk because they were looking at the cost of doing business here and their employees' ability to live close to work and to get to work on a timely basis. We know that that is a big issue to consider. We need healthy corporations here. We need everyone to feel like this is the place to do business and this is the place to raise your family. We can never stop trying to fix these issues. But I think, there are an awful lot of companies that have stayed here and decided to join in the fight, like Dyncorp and TRW.
<b>Mallison</b>: They are still coming here from points in and outside of this country. Microsoft could have gone anywhere in the metropolitan area and they decided to stay here.
<b>Q</b>: Some people have complained that the GRCC has forgotten its roots and it has spread it's wings to far. Is this a fair complaint? And just how 'Greater' is the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce?
<b>White</b>: Forty percent of our member businesses — their actual physical plants — are based here in Reston. That means 60 percent are not, but the issue is that there are a lot of people who might work outside of Reston, but this is the community they love and this is the community they want to be active in.
<b>Mallison</b>: Or maybe they are in Herndon or Chantilly or Tysons or they are very close. So defining Reston as 'Greater Reston' really is the Toll Road, and the Dulles Corridor.
<b>White</b>: We have members from Maryland and D.C., North Carolina and Delaware, but predominantly we are from Reston, Herndon and Tysons Corner — that's where 75 percent of them are from.
<b>Mallison</b>: While the company might be in Tysons, a number of the employees may live in Reston. They may want to invest in the community where their employees live and give them the opportunity to give back to local charitable groups and partnerships in the community.
<b>Q</b>: Speaking of giving back to the community, one of the recent local controversies has been the RCC's attempt to build a skatepark behind the YMCA. The chamber made its position quite clear. You did not support any new RCC-sponsored programming. Can you talk a little about the decision-making that went into that opinion.
<b>White</b>: Actually this is not a new discussion for the chamber. It is a discussion that we have had about the small tax district for two and a half years and the position hasn't changed in terms of the tax district. The business community pays just shy of 50 percent of the tax revenue in the district. As things like 'Dulles rail' come at the businesses community, specifically the landowners along the corridor, they are going to incur significant increases in their taxes to pay for that rate. When we were talking about the hopeful passage of the transportation referendum, there was an increase in that tax rate and everything from proffers for developers to corporate donations, the businesses were seeing the cost of doing business in the community continue to rise. RCC is a great organization and the chamber has been a great supporter of it, but due to the nature of the tax district they had been able to really do well on their budgeting. It just seemed a very good business decision to say if you've got increased taxes for the business owners on one level and you have other taxes they are paying just kind of going into a surplus that it would seem prudent to look at rolling back the tax rate on one side to pay for the other. That kind of discussion had gone on for two and a half years and it did result in a small tax roll back six or eight months ago.
<b>Mallison</b>: I think there are really two points. Number one is the expenditure of surplus funds for something — whatever it is: a drive-in movie theater, a bowling alley or a skatepark — as opposed to the expenditure of funds for RCC's original charter. Yes, we do want to fund the very worthwhile programs of the RCC but just limited to the operation of the existing centers. And then there is another issue of business representation on the RCC board which is something the chamber has been talking about for years and its not new to anything in current events. Not to say "taxation without representation," but the whole concept that 50 percent of the taxes are coming from other sources, other than residential homeowners, then that tax-paying group should have representation on the advisory board.
<b>Q</b>: Why didn't you put some of your own candidates up for selection on the RCC preference poll?
<b>Mallison</b>: There are no seats at the table designated for commercial property owners. Those seats are designated for people who live in Reston and have homes in Reston. One of our public policy committee members had this analogy of the RCC as a three-legged stool. One of the legs is the homeowner tax. One leg is the apartment owners' tax and the third leg would be the commercial property owners tax contribution. And right now, that stool has only one leg.
<b>White</b>: The issue has been that a number of the largest property owners don't live in Reston and that totally shuts them out of the ability to have their voice heard ...
<b>Mallison</b>: However, they are paying big taxes.
<b>White</b>: Right. So it's simply, in some cases, down to a nuts and bolts issue surrounding the preference poll. But a larger issue is that it would seem to make sense that you wanted to make that input and you wanted to make it easy for more people — commercial property and apartment owners — to come to the table, by simply adding additional seats. We are not looking to roll back the residential, just add the business component and the land owner component.
<b>Mallison</b>: And the Board of Supervisors has the ability to do that.
<b>Q</b>: Have you talked about that with Supervisor [Catherine] Hudgins or Chairman [Katherine] Hanley about that prospect?
<b>Mallison</b>: Oh yes, and not just recently, but years ago. The chamber is on record, so least anyone think that this is something just being brought about by current events, that is just not the case. There are letters on the record, dated from two years ago, from the chamber to the Board of Supervisors on this very subject. Current events bring things to a head, but it is not new.
<b>Q</b>: So do you have any sense why your proposal hasn't gone anywhere to this point?
<b>White</b>: I think that when things have been the same for 20 years or more, sometimes it is tough to incorporate change.
<b>Mallison</b>: The concept of inertia.
<b>White</b>: The conversations continue and we are hopeful in talking to Supervisor Hudgins and the Board of Governors that we will be able to make some headway.