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Subdivision
Politics
Loudoun
County is the fastest-growing locality in
Virginia. The
Smart Growth movement there combines face-to-face
contact with interactive- media savvy.
By
Bob Burke
If
you want people to get involved in local issues,
says Loudoun County activist Andrea McGimsey,
nothing works better than a knock on the
door.
That’s
what she did in mid-2004, when she went house to
house in some of the county’s newest
developments, warning residents that they were in
or near the path of a new highway, the Western
Transportation Corridor. Not only did most people
agree with her view that the road was a bad idea,
she says, they liked talking face to face. “I
think they appreciated that somebody was
worried… about [their] family life,” she says.
When
county leaders later backed away from plans for
the highway, McGimsey claimed some credit for
rallying the public opposition. “That really
kicked things off out here,” she says. “The
way I put it is, I gained people’s trust in the
real world.”
Former
AOL employee Andrea McGimsey
has
moved from online marketing
to
one-on-one activism in Loudoun County.
That
effort helped launch the Campaign for Loudoun’s
Future, an organization McGimsey leads that wants
to channel the frustration residents there have
about the county’s explosive growth in
population and traffic. “A revolution is
brewing,” is how McGimsey, 40, describes it.
Certainly
something is brewing. Consider these numbers: In
the past five years Loudoun’s population climbed
49 percent. That is equal to 82,700 new residents,
putting the current estimated population at
253,300 people. And the challenge for McGimsey,
and for anyone else who wants to influence
Loudoun’s future, is how to reach these new
residents before their opponents do.
It
matters, because control of the county’s
political power is up for grabs. Voters elected a
slow-growth board in 1999, then went with a
pro-growth majority in 2003, and now seems to be
switching again. Loudoun gave strong support to
Gov. Tim Kaine, who pushed growth control, and
yesterday elected slow-growth Democrat Mark
Herring to fill a vacant state senate seat.
One
byproduct of the county’s rapid growth, McGimsey
says, is that a lot of residents don’t know much
about local issues or politics. “Many people
don’t even know what their local form of
government is,” she says. “When I talk about
supervisors, people think I’m talking about my
boss at work.”
The
outreach to residents is the core of what McGimsey
does. The Campaign for Loudoun’s Future counts
about a
dozen community groups among its membership, but
it is not a grassroots group in a traditional
sense. Though passionate about the campaign's
issues, McGimsey is an employee. The campaign’s
key funding source is the Warrenton- based
Piedmont Environmental Council, the same group
that helps finance the Road to Ruin project, which
includes this article, for Bacon’s Rebellion.
It
was McGimsey's idea to create the group in fall
2004, in part to escape the “elitist” label
that critics slap on the PEC. “It’s a campaign
to get the word out about what’s being proposed
for the county and to get citizens engaged,” she
says.
McGimsey
makes it easy for residents to support the
campaign’s slow-growth positions. Its website, www.loudounsfuture.org,
is filled with issue primers, links to members of
the county board of supervisors and state
legislators, and advice on how to get involved. It
sends out frequent e-mail alerts to thousands of
residents letting them know the latest news. Using
the Internet to reach people makes sense in
Loudoun, McGimsey says, because so many residents
commute and have little time in the evenings to
catch up with local issues. “They really have no
time at all,” she says.
The
Web strategy also reflects her background. Before
joining the PEC, McGimsey spent five years with
America Online working in interactive marketing
and strategic development. She grew up in
Springfield, graduated from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and earned a master’s
from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
She’s
got a knack for marketing ideas. The campaign
gives out “Don’t Supersize Loudoun!” bumper
stickers, and has handed out free decals for
commuters to stick on their windshields that
asked, ‘Stuck in Traffic Again? Let your county
supervisors know’ and then gave the phone number
for the supervisors’ comment line.
The
group made perhaps its biggest splash on election
day 2004, when it put volunteers at some polling
stations around the county to collect signatures
for a petition that was really nothing more than a
show of support. They handed out fliers that
claimed the county was open to another 42,000
housing units under its current zoning.
They
collected nearly 14,000 signatures in a day. “I
was so stoked,” she says. “It was so exciting.
I was saying, ‘Do you want to sign a petition
against 42,000 houses?’ And people would just
spin around.”
McGimsey
and others touted the signatures as proof of the
public’s support, but opponents were skeptical
when the group would release only copies of the
petitions. “They never presented them to the
board, and we’ve asked them five, six, seven
times,” says Stephen J. Snow, a Republican
member of the board elected in 2003.
Snow
is a good spokesman for the opposition. A retired
Army colonel with a master’s in business
management from Central Texas University, he is
active in the current board’s transportation and
land-use planning initiatives. He is also deeply
skeptical of the campaign’s goals and of its
motives. “They’re effective at putting out
distorted information,” he says. “What they
put out is not true, or if there’s any modicum
of truth it’s cherry-picked.”
Snow
also thinks McGimsey is rallying people behind the
wrong cause. “They’re just putting out stuff
that doesn’t make any sense to me,” he says.
The county is going to grow no matter what, he
argues, and the new residents will help attract
the commercial investment the county needs. Plus,
the current board does consider the transportation
impact of land-use decisions, he says. “We have
what I judge to be true smart growth,” he says.
McGimsey
counters that at the very least, she’s bringing
residents into the debate about how the county
will grow. “I’m not anti-developer. I just
don’t want them to be basically the only ones at
the negotiating table,” she says. “What I’m
very proud about is that we really have gotten the
word out. We’ve changed the dialogue in the
county.”
Bacon's
Rebellion News Service
February
2, 2006
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