Bacon's Rebellion

Fairfax City Council is moving closer to restricting the construction of over-sized buildings in established neighborhoods that would visually overwhelm existing houses. According to The Fairfax County Times, options include:

• Restraining the size of a house’s footprint compared to the overall lot size.
• Limiting large sections of flat wall surfaces on house exteriors
• Providing pattern books of house plans and recommending architectural features for every neighborhood in the city
• Limiting the overall height of a house using a mechanism called “angle of bulk plane,” which would require successively higher floors to be set farther and farther back from the street.

This strikes me as a legitimate form of zoning. Erecting McMansions that overshadow neighboring houses disrupts the neighborhood fabric and hurts property values for all. Property owners should be allowed to build bigger houses in locationally desirable neighborhoods, but the changes should be incremental, not disruptive.

For once I agree with John Chichester. (Scary, huh?) During a legislative retreat in Staunton yesterday, the Senate Finance chair warned that the state’s budget “will be hit hard’’ when there is a drop in national defense spending, which he anticipates in the next few years.

Reports Bob Stuart with the News Virginian: “Virginia is much more dependent than other states on federal spending,’’ Chichester said. “Homeland security and defense contracts have buoyed our growth.”

John Peterson, a professor of public policy and finance at George Mason University, drove home the message. “Defense spending is four and a half times more important in Virginia than in the United States,” he said, “and nine and a half times more important in Northern Virginia than in the United States.’’

While Virginia’s economy is strong now, Chichester called for continued fiscal discipline. The state senator cited the 1990s dot-com boom, which led to budget surpluses across America. “In Virginia, we enacted tax credits and other tax relief that totaled $1.5 billion a year,’’ he said. “And then we hit another recession.” The recession led to Virginia budget shortfalls and painful spending cuts.

We are well advanced in our current economic cycle. Another recession is more or less inevitable. The only question is the timing. Over and above that threat, with the Democrats running Congress, the spending bonanza for Northern Virginia’s defense/intelligence/homeland security sector is sure to end. I question whether spending will decline outright, but we can be certain that the rate of growth will slow.

I would be interested to hear Chichester’s take on Gov. Tim Kaine’s proposal to provide universal pre-school in Virginia, at a cost of some $300 million a year. Given his views on the coming slowdown in state revenues, will Chichester support a major expansion of a spending program? If not, Kaine has no prayer of triangulating past the House of Delegates.

One more note: Virginia is in much better shape now than in the 1990s. We’ve fully funded our rainy day fund, we’ve built a cushion of unused debt capacity, and we’re spending a significant percentage of the General Fund budget on one-time capital expenditures, not ongoing programs. While I still think we should roll back the 2004 tax increase, I will concede that the state has not spent the revenues recklessly. If we can simply restrain our appetites for more spending, we should stay in good shape.

World-class historical sites, from Monticello to Colonial Williamsburg, play a critical role in Virginia’s economy and self image. (Any state blessed with a “Bacon’s Castle” is truly endowed with a rich heritage). Historical sites generate tourism and dollars. And therein lies a problem for historians and those who interpret history for visitors.

The current edition of The University of Virginia magazine profiles the work of UVa anthropology prof Richard Handler, who scrutinizes the history doled out at Disneyfied attractions like Colonial Williamsburg. There is an inherent tension, he argues, between pleasing the crowds with feel-good commentary, so they want to come back, and searing them with the ugly truth of an institution like slavery.

Focusing on the role of the tour guides and interpreters, he says, “They’re caught between educating and appeasing. They have a combination of anger and a lot of pride in their jobs. They live with contradictions they can’t resolve. And when we’d criticize the general historiographical contradiction at Williamsburg between constructivism and objectivism, they’d defend the institution.”

Handler raises a legitimate issue. Ideally, historical interpretations shouldn’t be tainted by commercial considerations. But things are changing. A critical strain of interpretation has made inroads, though Handler is still frustrated by the persistence of patriotic elements:

In the end all we can say is that the social history came to the museum in the ’70s, and by the ’80s and ’90s, the left-wing social historians were in control of the agenda. And yet so deeply anchored is the celebratory, patriotic story that a critical message doesn’t get out nearly as loudly as you’d think. You can certainly pick up strands of social or critical history, but the dominant message is still one of celebration.

Oh, what a shame. How terrible it is that Virginians still take pride in any aspect of their past.

The point that prompted this post is the line I italicized: the left-wing social historians [are] in control of the agenda. Handler obviously considers that a good thing. To me, that’s a huge story that needs telling. How did left-wing social historians take control of the agenda? Have they satisfied themselves with merely correcting the hagiographical excesses of past interpretations, or have they imposed a leftist race/class/gender construct onto the messages meted out to thousands of visitors every year? Inquiring minds want to know.

Bloggers can argue until they’re blue in the face about what kind of development Virginians prefer — low-density subdivisions and shopping centers, compact small towns, or dense urban environments, but the marketplace is speaking very plainly. Virtually every major development project proposed today entails mixed use on a small-town scale and density.

Projects highlighted in today’s headlines offer two cases in point:

Suffolk. Suffolk City Council has approved plans for a community of homes and businesses, “where people can walk to work and to stores,” reports Kathryn Walson with the Daily News. Similar to City Center at Oyster Point in Newport News, it would be the “first of its kind” in Suffolk. The project on a 132-acre plot of land south of the city will include 600 condominiums, two hotels and office and retail space. Two thousand, four hundred people will work there.

Chesterfield County. A local developer has filed a rezoning application to develop 1,394 acres in northwestern Chesterfield County. At full build-out the Roselawn project would have 5,140 residential units and more than 1.5 million square feet of retail, office and commercial uses. Writes Julian Walker with the Times-Dispatch:

Current plans describe the Roseland property as being a self-contained townlike entity, rather than a subdivision, that would be developed as five distinct districts with its own charter.

“Everything about this project is different from what Chesterfield is used to,” said Casey Sowers, one of the Roseland developers.

The development plans call for a town center, which would be the heart of the development, with a main street featuring shops, lofts, apartments and condominiums; a regional office park with retail establishments; a village with single and multifamily uses; and two other residential neighborhoods with tree-lined streets and green space.

“At Roseland, someone can leave his or her home in the morning, have coffee at the corner cafe, go to work, go for a run or bike ride, go out to dinner, all without ever getting into a car,” Sowers said. “This should be the model for any large development in our county, to reduce dependency on the automobile.”

Interesting dilemma: Dominion predicts that Northern Virginia faces the risk of blackouts by 2011 unless a 240-mile high-voltage transmission line is built from Pennsylvania to a power sub-station in Loudoun County. Predictably, the Piedmont Environmental Council and other citizen groups are up in arms — nobody likes transmission lines cutting through their farms and villages. (Read about the latest wrinkle in this long-running saga in this report by the Winchester Star and this by the Washington Post.)

I live near a transmission line and I can tell you, it is U-G-L-Y, though I don’t have much grounds for complaint — I moved into my house knowing that it was there.

Next to the Dulles South controversy, which seems to be resolved now, the transmission line is the hottest controversy in the northern Virginia piedmont. I don’t sense that residents of Fairfax County and other urbanized counties in the region have reached the same fever pitch of agitation as the citizens of Loudoun who will be most immediately affected. The suburban citizenry will live in sublime disregard of the inevitable until the inevitable hits them in the form of brownouts and blackouts. Then all hell will break loose.

If the debate is cast in an either/or format, the Piedmont Environmental Council and its constituents will lose. Virginia’s political system will favor the interests of the nearly two million residents of Virginia’s Washington suburbs who are threatened with electricity blackouts over the interests of a few tens of thousands of rural residents who are threatened with a loss of pristine vistas.

But the debate does not have to be either/or. There are alternatives. As I touched upon in a previous post, “Fixing the Power Grid: Distributed Generation,” and will explore in detail in an upcoming column, the problem is the current electric industry paradigm centered on huge power plants, typically located in remote areas, that connect to population centers with high-voltage power lines. As long as we stick with that model, monster power lines are an unavoidable necessity, and the rights of landowners along their routes will be sacrificed for the “common good.”

The alternative is moving to a system of smaller-scale power sources embedded in close proximity to the consumers of the electricity. Photovoltaic electricity is on the cusp of being economically competitive. According to Saifur Rahman, a Virginia Tech expert in distributed generation, it would cost only $10,000 to install an array of photovoltaic cells on a roof-top, with batteries for storage, capable of generating enough power for a family of three. Such a system could sell electric power into the grid on bright sunny days and draw from the grid during other times. If the installation cost were rolled into a mortgage, it could be paid off over years with the savings from electric bills. The main constraint right now, Rahman says, is not the efficiency of the solar arrays but the difficulty finding contractors qualified to install them.

If the financial savings aren’t enough to induce you to install solar units, consider this: Having your own energy source protects you against local power outages from snow storms, ice storms, hurricanes and other natural disasters. (Hurricane Isabel knocked me off the grid for 10 days.)

Another commercially competitive technology is cogeneration — smaller power plants that generate electricity and convert waste heat to steam, which can be used for heating/air conditioning. Cogeneration would be most applicable to apartment buildings, office clusters and other densely populated areas.

More decentralized and small-scale energy sources would present technical challenges for a distribution system designed for giant power plants. Kinks would have to be worked out. But such a system would be more stable and less vulnerable to system-wide blackouts like the one that afflicted 50 million people a couple of years ago. Oh, and for what it’s worth, Dominion wouldn’t have to run transmission lines through so many peoples’ farms and back yards.

Blenheim, the 500-acre, mixed-use development project proposed by Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting network, has hit a speed bump: The Federal Highway Administration has rejected an interchange on Interstate 64 that would provide interstate access to the development. Deirdre Fernandes with the Virginian-Pilot has the details.

Federal engineers, writes Fernandes, aren’t convinced that the interchange would alleviate increased traffic resulting from the new development and the already congested interchanges at nearby Indian River Road and Greenbrier Parkway.

The federal agency also disputes VDOT’s projection that traffic in the area will increase only 3 to 5 percent by 2028 without the Blenheim project. Federal planners estimate a 20 to 25 percent growth in traffic, and under those circumstances the new interchange would cause gridlock on I-64, [FTA official Michael] Canavan said.

“In 20 years you don’t want to basically have a parking lot out there,” Canavan said. “From a design standpoint, it’s a tough place to put an interchange.”

CBN officials insist that the interchange eventually will win approval. The parallel road system suggested by the feds would cost $100 million — nearly $38 million more than the interchange, said CBN consultant Lowell Morse.

Update: Lowell Morse, the CBN consultant, has apologized for characterizing a FTA official as a “stumbling block” to the interchange project.

The Village News, a weekly community newspaper based in Chester, VA, has joined the parade of print media outlets exploring the blogosphere and its impact on public life. With a story titled, “I’ve Got Something to Say,” writer Elyse Reel examines the nature of political blogging and offers a bit of commentary on the roles that bloggers can play. She asserts that political bloggers “help figure out the tangled mess of today’s government,” concluding that if “the current generation of bloggers step aside, however, it’s a sure bet that a new one will instantly spring up to take their places. Blogging is becoming a bigger and bigger phenomenon.”

Featuring comments from yours’ truly and BR chief Jim Bacon, the article covers a number of angles, with the general sentiment being that blogs are permanent fixtures as players in the provision of news and opinion. Village News publisher Mark Fausz is a solid proponent of blogging, believing that the “citizen media” will join community newspapers like his as alternatives to larger corporate media entities. Given the continuing misfortunes of the MSM, he could be right.

Beyond simply covering blogs, The Village News actually provides links to a number of local and state blogs (including this one), and earlier this year, and the paper stirred up a bit of controversy in Chesterfield by reproducing and citing material from South of the James in a local political story. In light of yesterday’s forum on blogging and journalism hosted by the Richmond chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, it will be interesting to see how the Village News’ brethren in the community weeklies adapt to the brave new world in which bloggers make and create the news.

Republicans aren’t the only casualties of the 2006 elections, reports Jennifer S. Forsyth with the Wall Street Journal. Political gridlock could turn into real estate gridlock as federal agencies and federal contractors hold off signing long-term leases. Contractors also have reason to worry about curtailed spending on the defense, intelligence and homeland security sectors that boomed during Republican rule.

The blizzard of new offices due to come on line will hurt developers’ prospects in the overall Washington market. More than 16 million square feet of office space is under construction in the area, with some of it expected to be ready by mid-2007, according to Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason School of Public Policy’s Center for Regional Analysis. Tenants will lease only about four million of that this year, he predicts. “Everyone is building and very little of it is preleased,” Dr. Fuller says.

Aggravating the overbuilding: The surge in federal procurement is slowing. Procurement in the region was up 16.9 percent in 2003 and 19 percent in 2004. The 2005 numbers aren’t in yet, but Fuller expects an increase below the decadal average of 8.8 percent. Procurement growth could slow even more next year as Democrats set new budgetary priorities.

A bursting of the Northern Virginia office bubble would have many ramifications, which we’ll try to explore in this blog as they unfold. They include: (1) Less job creation and a slowdown in the in-migration of people to fill those jobs, with an easing of growth-related pressures on local governments; (2) Less tax revenue for state coffers, perhaps bringing an end to the state’s chronic budget surplus; (3) a collapse in commercial building sector to accompany the slowdown in residential building, with consequent loss of blue collar jobs, and (4) moderating costs for construction, reducing risk of cost overruns on the Rail to Dulles project.

Senate Finance Chair John Chichester says the General Assembly should cut its 46-day schedule in 2007 to 30 days. Chichester made the suggestion out of sympathy for legislative staffers, who have been forced to work overtime for two of the past three years, reports Christina Nuckols with the Virginian-Pilot.

But Chichester added that idea won’t work unless legislators exercise self-restraint and reduce the number of bills they introduce. This year, writes Nuckols, legislators filed 3,287 bills and resolutions during the regular session and added 391 after Gov. Timothy M. Kaine called a special session.

I quite agree that legislators file too many silly bills that clog the legislative process. But I don’t agree that the General Assembly should cut the length of the session. If anything, lawmakers need to stick around longer to work through the really complex challenges of restructuring government. Next year, that means grappling with the House legislative package to reform transportation and land use that got bumped from September’s special transportation session. Thirty days just won’t cut it.

Virginia is saddled with a government structure designed for the early 20th century — some 75 years out of date. If we want the Commonwealth to remain competitive in a global economy, lawmakers must give unremitting attention to reinventing, restructuring and streamlining government. The House seems up to the task. “It’s a lot to cram into 30 days. I think we should have a 60-day session every year,” House Appropriations Chairman Vincent Callahan, R-Fairfax, told Nuckols.

It’s an old joke that no man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the General Assembly is in session. Sometimes, that seems all too true. But witticisms shouldn’t drive policy. There’s real work ahead. The General Assembly needs to set aside the time to do it.

Leonard Downie, Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post, has distributed a memo to the newspaper’s editorial staff, which has been picked and up published by Editor & Publisher.

“Readership and economic challenges remain daunting,” Downey wrote. “We must produce high quality, compelling journalism and carry out our public service mission while adjusting our cost structure to shifting advertising revenues.”

Adjusting our cost structure. I like that. I should have used that line when I had to cut costs and lay off employees at Virginia Business magazine.

But it’s not just about cutting costs, Downie insisted. It’s all about making the newspaper better. On the cost-cutting side, the WaPo will shrink newsroom staff through attrition as low priority positions become vacant. He did not provide a specific number of positions to be attrited. On the making-the-newspaper-better side, staffers will be reassigned from general assignment positions to specific assignments and beats.

In form, our priorities include original reporting, scoops, analysis, investigations and criticism.

As opposed to what other priorities? Rewriting press releases? Fabricating news? Masquerading personal opinion as news coverage?

In content, they include politics, government accountability, economic policy and what our readers need to know about the world – plus local government, schools, transportation, public safety, development, immigrant communities, health care, sports, arts and entertainment.

Personally, I think the WaPo reporters covering Virginia state/local government are doing a reasonably good job. If I were in Downie’s office, I’d start by whacking the guys who write the editorials.

Sorry, I’m so slow. I was occupied with the election. That’s my story. Nevertheless, three weeks ago the York School Board changed their policy on Religion.

The School Superintendent offered a much longer, and seriously flawed, change to the Religion policy. (See http://www.ycchh.org.)

Parents asked that the Religion policy not change, but simply add a policy statement about holidays that York would follow the guidelines of the State Department of Education.

The elected School Board voted to do both. You have to love representative democracy at work. The Golden Age of Greece ain’t got nothing on York County.

The next step is for the Superintendent to provide implementing regulations. Those will be interesting to see.

The step after that is for the citizens of York to consider if they need to elect any new School Board members.

Meanwhile, it looks like Christmas, the official U.S. and Virginia, holiday will be noted in all York Co public schools this year. Good work, Citizens.

Loudoun County has engaged The Telework Consortium Inc., of Herndon, to upgrade its telwork program. Loudounm, which has 92 government offices dispersed over 500 square miles, worked with the consortium in early 2005 to pilot a video and collaboration tool. The pilot has since been expanded, as has the role of telework, in helping the county address continuity of operations, the lack of space for an increasing workforce, and growing traffic problems.

As a part of the turnkey agreement, Telework Consortium provides county officials with a desktop collaborative (video, audio, and data software) Internet Protocol-based environment, dedicated server hosting, application training on the collaborative software, and a customer support desk.

Find details in the Telework Consortium press release.

State lawmakers will have an extra $600 million to play with when it reconvenes in January and next, but Del. Vincent F. Callahan Jr., R-Fairfax, chairman of the House Appropriations committee, is urging fiscal caution. Revenue growth is slowing from the double-digit rate of the past few years to a single-digit rate.

Says Callahan: “We can ill afford to repeat mistakes of the past, where, in times of what appears to be plenty, we created costly new programs before fulfilling previously made commitments.” He recommended spending the money on one-time expenditures such as construction projects rather than ramping up new programs. (The Richmond Times-Dispatch has the story. So does the Washington Post. And the Virginian-Pilot.)

The Washington Metro is planning to purchase 100 rail cars at $2 million a pop to run trains along the silver line, the 24-mile Rail-to-Dulles extension of the metro system, reports Examiner.com. That’s despite the fact that no one is certain how much the project will cost or how any amount over the current $2.1 billion estimate for Phase One will be funded.

Admittedly, Metro is in a tough position. There’s a long lead time in ordering rail cars. And Metro would look pretty stupid if the rail line and stations were built and there weren’t any cars for anyone to ride.

More than a year ago, I predicted on this blog that the impending end of the real estate bubble would portend fiscal problems for local governments, especially those in Northern Virginia, which have relied upon soaring property assessments to fund their massive spending increases. Not to toot my own horn, but I was right about the real estate bubble, and now, it appears, I was right about the fiscal distress.

The headline on Annie Gowan’s story in the Washington Post this morning: “Cuts in Spending, Increase in Taxes Considered to Offset Revenue Drop-Offs.” According to Gowan, Arlington County faces a $20 million shortfall next year, while Alexandria will take a $18 million hit. Loudoun County, which saw a 28 percent growth in property assessments last year, is anticipating an outright decline in 2008. Fairfax County is already trimming personnel expenses this year in expectation of a modest three percent revenue increase next year.

In my real estate jeremiads, I predicted one additional effect from the bursting of the market bubble: A surge in anti-tax sentiment. The budget cuts and tax hikes are only anticipated right now — they haven’t taken place yet. The screaming won’t begin until next spring when localities begin working on their fiscal 2008 budgets. That’s when the public will focus on just how much local government spending has surged since the recession – far outpacing inflation and population growth. The agitation will only increase when the tax hikes actually go into effect that summer.

That’s right about the time that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine thinks voters will be itching to chastise the low-tax partisans in the House of Delegates for failing to embrace his $1 billion-a-year taxes-for-transportation proposal. Somehow, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. Indeed, depending on how much taxes increase in NoVa, low-tax advocates could gain ground in the 2007 elections.