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When
Del. Clifford L. Athey Jr., R-Front Royal, points to
Frederick County as an exemplar of how Virginia
should accommodate growth, he knows what he's
talking about. As a land use
attorney, he has spent much of his career helping developers do business in
Frederick County.
In
fact, Athey is representing clients right now in a
rezoning bid to develop some 124 acres of land in
the county. The "Village at New Town"
would include 123 townhouses and 233 single-family
homes with a shopping center and light industry located nearby.
About
20 years ago, Frederick County was among the first
Virginia jurisdictions to create an "urban
development area," or UDA, Athey says. The idea
was to concentrate development in a zone where it
could be cost-effectively served by water, sewer and
roads. Outside the zone, land would be largely
preserved for agriculture, although limited
development was still possible.
To
Athey's way of thinking, the UDA has been
indispensable to maintaining quality of life in
Frederick County. Between 1990 and 2000, county
population grew from 45,700 to 59,200 -- a
29-percent surge that made it one of Virginia's
fastest growing jurisdictions. The population is
expected to reach 72,300 by 2010, according to
population projections on the Virginia Employment
Commission website.
Channeling
the growth into the UDA has restrained the scatteration of
development projects and attendant ills that have bedeviled many other
counties. The UDA has limited the need to extend utilities and
upgrade country roads to serve patchy development in agricultural districts. Says Athey: "Frederick
County is a model for what we ought to be trying to
do statewide."
Indeed,
Frederick County was the inspiration for legislation
crafted by Athey and submitted during the General
Assembly's ill-fated special transportation session
in September. Athey's proposal, which was held over
for study, would require every county to amend
its comprehensive plan to include one or more Urban
Development Areas. The bill also would require:
Athey's
bill was part of a larger legislative package
crafted by the House Republican Caucus to overhaul a
system for building and maintaining roads that has
changed little since 1932. (See "Seventy-five
Years," Oct. 9, 2006). Companion bills
would devolve responsibility for maintaining
secondary roads to fast-growth counties in the hope
of better aligning transportation and land use
planning. (See "The
Devolution Solution," Oct. 23, 2006.)
The
ideas represent such a radical departure from the
current way of doing business that the House Committee on Counties,
Cities and Towns did not have time in the short
September session to give them careful study. The
bills will be resubmitted in the regular 2007
session.
If
you missed the fact that the House had proposed one
of the most revolutionary overhauls of state/local
government in 75 years, that's because the
Mainstream Media parroted the spin of pro-tax forces
that the reform package amounted to no more than a
ploy to distract from the House's unwillingness to
raise taxes. No one in the media -- and I mean no one --
bothered to describe the proposals in any detail,
much less to examine their merits.
When
I interviewed House Speaker William J. Howell a
month ago for this series about the House reform
package, he was still seething about the
"obstructionist" label pinned on him by
the Governor's office and House Democrats. "I’d
like to ask the Governor how many bills he
introduced this session of the Assembly. Zero. How
many transportation bills did [Alexandria Del.
Brian] Moran introduce? Zero. We introduced 23. The
Democrats have no ideas except to raise taxes."
House Republicans concede that reforming land use
won't eliminate
the need to pump new revenue into the transportation
system. But they insist that raising taxes without
fundamentally reforming the system -- through
privatization, outsourcing, aligning transportation
and land use planning, and encouraging more
transportation-efficient patterns of development --
would amount to pouring money down the storm drain.
"Our
countryside is getting eaten up by five-acre
tracts," declares Athey. "We need to get
back to a model that worked well for centuries –
people should be living in densely packed urban
areas." (A brief aside, when Athey talks about
"densely packed urban areas," he's
thinking Winchester, not Manhattan.) "If we
create an incentive for developers to do that, we
can accomplish what should be good for
everyone."
Frederick
County's "Urban Development Area" is not
an inflexible urban growth boundary like Portland's,
or even Virginia Beach's green line. Over time, the
boundaries have been adjusted to reflect changing
circumstances, and the vision for development within
the boundaries has evolved, says Mike Ruddy, deputy
planning director for the county.
Traditionally,
most growth in Frederick County has followed the
standard suburban format of segregated subdivisions,
shopping centers and industrial areas. But there has
been growing recognition in recent years, Ruddy
says, that a county of 70,000 people needs nodes of
density -- focal points -- and mixed use development
of the type found in a city. "There's been
a change in mindset," says Ruddy. "It's a
mentality that there should be a little bit of
something for everybody."
The
Fredrick County UDA encompasses the territory immediately
surrounding Winchester and overlays the transportation arteries
likely to attract the most development. In drawing the
boundaries, planners also took into account soil quality
and drainage flows to the sewage treatment plant,
the existence of other development clusters such as
Stephens City, and the gravitational pull exerted by
Northern Virginia labor markets.
The
boundaries encompass about one quarter of the
county, providing enough space to accommodate ample
population growth as well as some green-field
development when the right opportunities arise, says
Ruddy.
Knowing
that the county will concentrate water, sewer,
roads, schools and parks within the UDA allows
landowners and developers to focus their
entrepreneurial energies within growth boundaries
where their projects will tend to be regarded more
favorably. However, the flexibility exists to
redraw the boundaries if warranted by the right
project. "It has been fluid. We've
been somewhat flexible to reflect the changing
dynamics of the community," Ruddy says, who
favorably contrasts the plasticity of Frederick's
boundaries with the rigidity found in other
counties.
As
population growth outstrips the addition of new road
capacity, increasing traffic congestion is a
concern. The county has two tools to
finance road improvements. The first is proffers:
Developers make improvements to adjoining roads, sidewalks
and bike paths as a condition of getting rezoning
approvals. "We’ve been successful with
proffers," Ruddy says. "As development
occurs in the right places, developers will make
improvements."
The
second tool is the Community Development Authority,
which allows developers to issue tax-free bonds to
pay for up-front improvements. The bonds are repaid
by a special tax on the property under development.
Although one 150-acre development project does
contemplate road improvements financed by a CDA,
Frederick County has not made extensive use of this
option.
Ruddy
still sees a transportation crunch coming. VDOT is
running out of money to spend on secondary roads.
Proffers and CDAs will make up some of the shortfall
but not all of it. Still, there's no question in his
mind that Frederick County would be in worse shape
had growth been scattered all over the county.
Mike
Smith, president of Greenway Engineering, agrees. As
a civil engineer who does a lot of transportation
work in the county, he says that Frederick County is
better off having an Urban Development Area and
comprehensive plan that work together. "The UDA
does work well. It's not an end-all. It is a
growth-management tool. ... If [the county] did not
have the UDA, development would be more spread out
than it is today."
Winchester-Frederick
County has one big transportation problem that's
hard to surmount -- a four-lane ribbon of concrete, Interstate
81, that bisects the city and county. That barrier
makes it difficult to move traffic east to west,
Smith says.
"That's our weak link. If we could solve that,
most of our transportation problems would go
away."
The
House leadership has no illusions that its reform
package is the final word on transportation and land
use reform. Legislators are fully prepared to
negotiate the details. Despite the smack-down of
House legislation during the September special
session, key special interest groups appear willing
to explore the UDA idea.
Anthony
Clatterbuck, president of the Home Builders
Association of Virginia, is particularly receptive.
"If it's appropriately implemented, [the UDA
idea] could be a great benefit" -- an
alternative to other, more restrictive
growth-management strategies. Across most fast-growth counties, there
are
no areas designated for growth. As a consequence,
growth sprawls all over.
Urban
Development Areas, when combined with other tools
such as Transferable Development Rights, would
concentrate growth in areas prepared to handle it,
Clatterbuck says.
"You'd get efficiency that you couldn't get if
you built in a hodge-podge fashion."
Clatterbuck
also is enthusiastic about Athey's idea of incorporating New Urbanism
design codes into comprehensive plans. He points to
the downtown of his home town
of Culpeper, where row-house stores border the
street, residents live over storefronts and cars
park on the street. Developers would build more
communities like that if only they were allowed. "In today's world,"
he says, "you
can't build that."
Michael
L. Edwards, deputy director of legislative affairs
for the Virginia Association of Counties, is less
overtly enthusiastic. But even he concedes,
"I don't think there's general opposition to
the [UDA] idea." There has been a trend among
counties to designating growth corridors, he says. He just
wants to make sure that the General Assembly does
not mandate a one-size-fits-all
solution. "My tone is not, 'Hell, no.' It's,
'Let's sit down and talk about these things.'"
There
are many similarities, too, between Athey's proposal
and the remedies advocated by Virginia's
conservation/environmentalist community. These
include a desire for greater density, mixed uses and
pedestrian-friendly urban design. Conservation
groups argue that "smart growth" generates
fewer and shorter automobile trips, and causes less
congestion, than the scattered, disconnected,
low-density development that typically prevails in
fast-growth counties.
When
I talked to Stewart Schwartz, executive director of
the Coalition for Smarter Growth, he said he was
"a little bit confused" by the House bills
as drafted, and he was looking forward to getting
clarifications from Del. Athey and Speaker Howell.
But he stressed that he regarded the interest of
House Republicans in land use issues as an
encouraging sign. Says Schwartz: "We have an
opening to talk about planning reforms that are
needed, and work on them in the next session."
Gov.
Timothy M. Kaine remains non-committal, even though
he was the first candidate for statewide office in
Virginia to bring land use into the transportation
debate. Although he still professes an interest in
land use reform, he has proclaimed his intention to
shelve transportation issues until after the 2007
legislative elections when, he hopes, voters will
eject several opponents of his $1 billion
taxes-for-transportation plan.
The
key to breaking the legislative gridlock on
transportation/land use reform is to knit together a
consensus of the major constituencies -- low-tax
conservatives, smart-growth conservationists,
developers, home builders and local governments. If
Howell, Athey and their allies can do that, Kaine
may feel compelled to join the negotiations. If not,
given the willful disinterest of the Mainstream
Media, the House's reform package will die, like
some Darfurian orphan, quietly
and far from the public eye.
--
November 6, 2006
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