Will Smart Growth remain a driving force of county planning and development, the platform on which the current Board of Supervisors was elected and a concept candidates for the next board are debating?
"The next board can do whatever it wants to, but it must follow the state code process," said Kirby Bowers, county administrator since 1992, when Loudoun had half the population it does today, less traffic and no need for an anti-gang unit.
Each year, the county adds 12,000 to 15,000 new residents, or about 6 to 7 percent new growth. The population in 2002 was 205,800 residents, compared to 90,000 residents 10 years ago. The growth rate gives the county the distinction as the second fastest growing county in the nation, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau last year. By the end of this year, the population is expected to reach 218,000 residents.
Eight of the nine Supervisors promised four years ago to do something about the growth rate and the changes growth brings, campaigning on a Smart Growth platform, though the definition of Smart Growth varied slightly from board member to board member. During the board’s term, the county built 16 new schools, hired 900 additional teachers and "met our skyrocketing debt payments each year," said Supervisor James Burton (I-Mercer).
THE BOARD of Supervisors, with the help of county staff and the Planning Commission, developed a Revised Comprehensive Plan, adopted in July 2001, and a revised zoning ordinance to carry out the plan, adopted in January 2003. The Comprehensive Plan outlines the county’s development over the next 20 years and decreases the number of housing units that can be built in that time period. It aims to reduce school and infrastructure costs, to help alleviate future traffic congestion, to protect the county’s rural economy and to preserve the environmental and historical features of the landscape.
"The General Plan is a long-term plan and, as the board indicated, it will not produce immediate results, because it is designed for the future of the county," Bowers said.
The General Plan and a Countywide Transportation Plan are components of the Comprehensive Plan. Passing the General Plan did not give the Board of Supervisors any authority over the 40,000 by-right housing units that had been approved by previous boards. However, the plan allowed the board to cut the number of new units outlined in the 1993 plan by 47 percent and thus reduce the potential population in the next 20 years from 682,000 residents to 438,000 residents. If carried out, the General and Transportation plans will remove $1.8 billion in costs over the next 20 years that would have been needed to build 125 schools instead of the 61 schools allowed in the plan, $250 million in infrastructure costs in the next 10 years and 750,000 daily vehicle trips from the county’s roadways in the next 20 years.
Does creating and adopting this Comprehensive Plan and a revised zoning ordinance mean the board has been successful in carrying out the ideas of Smart Growth? Or will a new Board of Supervisors elected this November scrap the plan in favor of allowing growth to continue as it had before? The new board can vote to repeal the plan, revert it to the 1993 plan and refuse to defend the zoning decisions made by the current board, or it can continue the current board’s mission.
"The next board can accept it as is or make little or major changes," Bowers said about the Comprehensive Plan.
THE COMPREHENSIVE Plan is "why this election is so important. We need the majority of the board to return to keep growth decisions we made long enough to make a difference," said Burton, who does not like the term Smart Growth and says he had campaigned on a slow growth platform. "I believe the rate of growth has been too high to be sustainable, and it’s caused tremendous financial and social problems for the county, like constant school boundary changes."
Burton’s slow growth platform involves getting the rate of growth under control and slowing it down to a level to which the county can adjust and adapt, he said. "Unfortunately, the General Assembly didn’t give us any tools to do that, so we have to use local zoning," he said, adding that he was reluctant to use rezoning to get growth under control.
The tools Burton and other supervisors favor include developer impact fees charged on each housing unit in a development, adequate public facilities ordinances that limit new construction until infrastructure is provided and affordability indexes that limit the number of building permits that are issued to the county’s debt level.
"I’ve given up on the General Assembly. I’m not wasting time," Burton said about being told that the county already has the tools it needs. "The development community controls two committees that deal with land use. We couldn’t get a single one of those ideas voted out of committee to have a debate and a vote on the floor."
The county has four primary sources of local revenue to pay for county operations and new growth, including sales taxes, businesses taxes and personal property taxes, which have been flat in the past two years, along with property taxes, Burton said. "Yet we opened 10 new schools in two years [and] hired firefighters, deputies and teachers," he said. "All those things have put pressure on property taxes. The property tax will continue to rise until the economy turns around."
THE PROPERTY TAX this year is $1.11 per $100 in assessed value, the same amount as when the board took office four years ago and 6 cents higher than last year’s tax rate.
"One of the biggest challenges we have had is to fund the basics of what a government is supposed to do with a tax structure designed for an agrarian community," Bowers said.
County taxing is based on a time when property was the means of production causing the county to rely on property taxes to provide most of the revenue to fund the operating budget. "That’s a major issue that needs to be addressed by the General Assembly. We have responsibilities that are associated with an urbanizing area," Bowers said. "The tax structure is not matching up well with the services that municipalities would provide."
Taxing property makes sense in an agriculture community where property is the main source of income, said Supervisor William Bogard (I-Sugarland Run). Alternatively, in an urbanized community, property costs more for infrastructure and services than agriculture land, he said. "We have to tax the highest and best use. Consequently, you have farmers paying the same rate as suburbia, then we wind up with farmers being forced to sell."
Agriculture producers end up paying for infrastructure costs though they may be on a well system and send fewer children to schools than residents living in a developed community.
"It’s the infrastructure that costs the local government so much money — schools, libraries, parks. It’s cheaper to build in phases than to let it sprawl," said Supervisor Charles Harris (D-Broad Run).
Harris prefers the term Smart Growth, believing that slow growth refers to how the economy is affecting the rate of growth. "What Smart Growth does is try to phase the development and maximize existing infrastructure and what new infrastructure is created," he said. He explained that the current board doubled the amount and sped up the timetable for proffers the county requires of developers seeking rezoning approvals. The board also increased the capital intensity factor for the rezonings, a calculation based on the average number of residents per type of housing unit to determine the level of services needed.
Harris pointed to what he considers to be some of the board’s other Smart Growth successes, including:
* Bringing together the county, developers and the Department of Transportation to identify missing roadway links, then planning how to coordinate and speed up proffer contributions from developers.
* Addressing for the first time the county’s surface and subsurface water quality and quantity through samplings, studies and programs.
* Forming a department of environmental resources and of transportation, to provide "more efficient resources with the government," Harris said.
BOGARD considers that the Board of Supervisors succeeded with the "principles" of Smart Growth. He defines Smart Growth as "how you’re going to grow" and slow growth as how fast or slow growth occurs and the fiscal impact of it.
"We are emphasizing compact building design. … We try to keep community identities together, mix land uses and protect open space," Bogard said. "We are trying to grow at a rate that we can afford. I would love to be able to say we can grow when we have the infrastructure available, but Virginia doesn’t allow us to do that."
The board’s Revised Comprehensive Plan is intended to direct growth "to the right place." "It’s not that this board is no growth. No growth is just as bad as too much," Bogard said.
The board has been accused of approving more housing units than the previous board, though it supports Smart Growth. The board approved nearly 17,000 residential unit permits in three years, compared to nearly 18,000 units the last board approved in four years, according to the county’s 2002 Growth Summary. Six thousand of the units the current board approved are for the future Moorefield Station, a mixed-use development that will be built at the future Route 772 transit stop. The units will be phased in as bus and eventually metro rail services become available at the stop, possibly by 2015. "The majority of those houses can’t be developed until transit comes," Burton said.
The 1993 plan would have developed out both the eastern and western ends of the county, said Board of Supervisors chairman Scott York (R-At large). He disagrees that the revised plan downzones the western end of the county in favor of placing most of the future growth in eastern Loudoun. The plan reduces the potential number of housing units in the west by 77 percent and in the east by 27 percent, a total of 83,158 units. During the 1995-99 term when York was Sterling supervisor, the board reduced 50,000 housing units from the Dulles South area in 1997 and another 28,000 units from the Toll Road area in 1998, both in eastern Loudoun.
As a result, "The Comprehensive Plan does a better job of protecting our taxpayers," York said.
SUPERVISOR Eugene Delgaudio (R-Sterling) disagreed. "I defeated the Smart Growth slate head to head because I promised I would keep taxes low," he said, adding that the word "low" is a relative term and that, unlike the board, he made both the promise and kept it by voting against tax increases. "Taxes are too high. Spending is too high. That’s what my constituents believe. I will vote against tax increases because I’m firm."
The flip side of low taxes is property rights, according to Delgaudio. "Property rights are directly related to property taxes. They shouldn’t be the vehicle to steal from taxpayers," he said, adding that the board eliminated property rights from the General Plan. "The concept of density packing came about because of the plan to down-zone the west. By doing that, it increases the density in the east in strictly relative terms."
Delgaudio voiced his support for Citizens for Property Rights (CPR) members, most of them from western Loudoun, and CPR president Jack Shockey when they spoke at Board of Supervisors meetings. "I consider the property rights crowd as a watchdog," he said.
After the zoning ordinance passed, the Shockeys and several other residents and developers filed 200 lawsuits with the Circuit Court by the Feb. 5 deadline. "It appears 80 of those will fall away. The rest will be bundled into one big case," Harris said, adding that as decided by the courts, the lawsuits will be tried as one case. "We need to make sure this next board defends the plan in court."
Round Hill resident Joseph Maio said that the lawsuits speak to the opposition of special interests. The plan has "been very successful as far as it went. Like anything else, people try to stop you. They’ve run against developers, land speculators and political extremists, people who don’t like it. Considering that, they did miraculously well," said Maio, spokesman for the Voters to Stop Sprawl, a grass roots organization that evaluates candidates and runs independent campaigns on their behalf.
Maio said the Board of Supervisors should have better communicated with the public about what the plan does. "A lot of them are political enemies or don’t understand what’s happening. The eastern part of the county sees that things are being done for the west," he said. "The next thing they have to do is start redeveloping communities in eastern Loudoun. … They need to make sure our older suburbs don’t decline. Developers can come in and do that. When they put in amenities, they get people who want to live there."
Burton said the supervisors did what the voters had asked of them. "I view this election in November as a referendum on the growth control decisions we made," he said, adding that anytime changes are made, there will always be critics and that within time, residents will say, "Why didn’t we do this sooner? It’s common sense for the residents."
Whatever residents decide "after this election, it would be nice if people on all sides of the issue could get together and come to some kind of solution for the future of Loudoun County," Maio said.