Bacon's Rebellion

This ain’t your father’s Fairfax County. KSI Services Inc., of Vienna, has received the OK from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to build 152,400 square feet of offices (with an option to add 50,000 square feet more), 32,100 square feet of retail and 500 residential units onto a scant 18 acres. The urban, mixed-use project stands on property that previously had been zoned industrial, permitting no residential at all, according to an article in the Connection newspapers.

From my distant vantage point here in Richmond, it looks like a winning formula: Give developers permission to increase density… which increases the revenue flow from the project… which allows the developer to provide public infrastructure such as, in this case, parking, quality open space and the extension of the four-laned, median-divided Government Center Parkway.

The Ridgewood project at the intersection of Waples Mill Road and Lee Highway will have a New Urbanism feel: ground-level retail in multi-story buildings otherwise dedicated to apartments, condos and offices… parking tucked underground… pedestrian-friendly design of the streetscapes… housing designed for households making less than $74,000 a year… and quality public spaces.

Plus, Ridgewood will offer a feature that’s quickly becoming all the rage in Fairfax County, a Traffic Demand Management (TDM) plan. The Connection article offers few specifics on the plan other than to say that “Ridgewood will … participate in a future shuttle-bus program.”

Many of the traffic demand features are baked into the project. A mixed-use project, by its very nature, creates an environment where people can conduct some of their routine errands and trips on foot. Also, because KSI has designed eight percent of the apartments/condos as “workforce” housing, dozens of teachers, police officers, clerks, tradesmen and other blue- and pink-collar workers can forego buying a house in Stafford/Spotsylvania counties and making the grueling, 50-mile commute on Interstate 95 every day.

Developers like KSI and Pulte Homes in Fairfax County are ahead of the curve. They’re designing transportation-efficient communities — not as the result of government fiat or social engineering but in response to market demand. Fairfax County, apparently, sees the wisdom in this kind of mixed-use development and is permitting departures from its outdated zoning code and comprehensive plan.

The Ridgewood project drives home, once again, that the ultimate, long-term solution to traffic congestion in Virginia lies not in widening our thoroughfares to 17 lanes but in revisioning the way we build our communities. This trend is real, folks, and let us hope that the General Assembly takes cognizance of it when it reconvenes later this year to discuss transporation solutions.

City officials in Alexandria are cracking down on the phenomenon of “mansionization,” which they fear is disrupting the character of traditional neighborhoods. Locations in the core of the Washington New Urban Region have gotten so valuable that people are tearing down older, smaller houses and building mansions that dwarf their neighbors. The trend, in the words of Alexandria mayor William D. Euille, “threatens to undermine the harmony” of the city.

City council has enacted emergency legislation to block the re-development and plans to take up a permanent solution, limiting the size or height of new homes, according to an article by Annie Gowen with the Washington Post. Arlington County, she noted, is grappling with similar problems.

The mansionization controversy pits two competing views: One view says that a property owner should have the right to build anything on his property as long as it doesn’t actively obstruct or interfere with his neighbors’ properties. A contrary view notes that an inappropriate structure can diminish the value of neighboring properties, which rely upon a consistent neighborhood “look and feel” for their value. Neighbors, or the city acting on their behalf, should have the right to veto a building that, by size or architectural inconsistency, is jarringly incompatible.

There is an argument to be made that city and county zoning codes are regulating the wrong thing: They restrict supposedly “incompatible” uses, such as housing, professional offices and small retail stores from being located in proximity to each other when, in fact, the intermixture of such uses often is highly desirable. What local governments should regulate is incompatible heights and sizes that disrupt the continuity of streetscapes. In other words, no 10,000-square-foot mansions shoe-horned into a street of 1,500-square-foot townhouses or cottages.

Frankly, I’m not sure where I stand on these issues, but I’ll continue to track them for Bacon’s Rebellion.

An important new dynamic has entered the politics of taxes and transportation. Six Republicans in the House of Delegates — including senior legislators Del. Vince Callahan, R-McLean; Del. David Albo, R-Springfield; and Del. L. Scott Lingamfelter, R-Woodbridge — have rolled out a package of proposals to generate at least $400 million a year in new road financing for Northern Virginia.

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the opposition of some Republican delegates to raising taxes for the Transportation Trust Fund by some $1 billion a year wasn’t a principled resistance to taxes, or even the belief that pouring more money into a broken transportation system won’t solve congestion. It was the concern that the Transportation Trust Fund formula short-changes Northern Virginia, as in fact it does.

As Michael Shear and Rosalind Helderman summarized the plan in the Washington Post Tuesday:

Under the plan, which the lawmakers presented to Northern Virginia business executives in a private meeting Monday, annual registration on automobiles in the area would more than double, from $29.50 to $59.50 for a typical passenger car.

Those who buy new vehicles or move vehicles into Northern Virginia would pay a higher tax. Tourists who rent cars and book hotel rooms would pay more. Home developers would be charged higher fees on their projects, and property taxes for office buildings would rise.

One could dismiss this initiative as simple political posturing for the consumption of constituents who are increasingly frustrated with traffic congestion. Perhaps. I can’t say. Regardless, it says something about the legislators’ understanding (or lack of it) of the nature of Virginia’s transportation crisis: The unstated assumption is that the problem is simply a lack of money to fund more transportation projects. The legislators did not include any alternatives to Business As Usual — building balanced communities, smarter urban design, telework, more creative approaches to mass transit, Intelligent Transportation Systems, etc. , etc. — in their proposal.

It will be interesting to see if the Axis of Taxes can peal off the Northern Virginia contingent from the hard-core, low-tax faction of the House of Delegates when the debate over taxes and transportation resumes in a special session later this year.

Notice to the Washington Post metro desk: Have your your Richmond reporters been acting strangely recently? Have they exhibited any quirks or unusual mannerisms? Are you quite certain they are who they say they are? You might want to have them tested.

After yesterday’s emotion-charged General Assembly session, in which the GOP-dominated House of Delegates rejected the last-minute budget amendments submitted by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, Michael Shear and Rosalind Helderman with the Washington Post wrote an article that was highly negative toward… are you ready for this… toward Gov. Kaine.

The article started as follows.

The 2006 General Assembly gave final approval to the state budget and went home Wednesday, leaving behind a first-year governor who presided over the worst stalemate in the legislature’s history while failing to make good on his promise to ease traffic congestion for Virginians.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) confronted an issue that has bedeviled state leaders for two decades: how to finance billions of dollars in road and transit construction. His plan for tax increases to finance those improvements, presented six days into his term, stalled after he misread the resolve of his adversaries and overestimated public pressure for improvements.

He had mixed success with his other major initiative, an ambitious push to adopt new tools to slow growth. Efforts to help localities study the impact of development on traffic passed. But he failed to win passage of his boldest proposal, a new law letting local government turn down development if nearby roads are inadequate.

By pushing for the higher taxes, he also prompted the state’s worst budget stalemate, which ended four days shy of a deadline that threatened to shut down the government and cause a constitutional crisis.

“There’s a lot of people who have been around a long time who were surprised he attempted to tackle this elephant in his first session,” said Michael Toalson, the chief lobbyist for the Homebuilders Association of Virginia. “Most successful governors just try to survive their first session.”

Failing to make good… misreading the resolve of his adversaries… prompted the state’s worst budget stalemate… Ouch! Real Washington Post reporters don’t apply that kind of language to Democratic governors!

Contrast the WaPo’s coverage to the conventional Mainstream Media spin by Jeff Schapiro and Michael Hardy at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, who portrayed the “House Republicans” as hard-hearted meanies:

In a raucous finale to the unprecedented budget marathon, House Republicans yesterday spurned millions of dollars sought by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for colleges, the environment and child care.

Concluding action on the state budget after a 169-day standoff, the General Assembly again spotlighted the bitter differences over taxes and spending that have splintered its fledgling GOP majority.

“This is almost a shameful day,” said Senate Republican Floor Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr. of James City County.

“Maybe it’s fitting we have a dysfunctional end to a dysfunctional session,” said Del. Ward L. Armstrong, D-Henry. …

“I’m just scratching my head in wonder of it all,” Kaine said.

Schapiro and Hardy finally get around to getting the House Republican side of the story by the 12th paragraph.

(In defense of the Mainstream Media, I would observe that the other accounts are largely neutral. The Virginian-Pilot emphasized the contention between local legislators over local pork-barrel projects, as did the Roanoke Times. The Washington Times played it straight down the middle, as did the Free Lance-Star.)

The coverage by the Times-Dispatch, supposedly the state’s “conservative” newspaper, doesn’t surprise me. The T-D political reporters have slanted the reporting in favor of the Governor and the Senate throughout the budgetary controversy. But the Post story? That confounds all expectations.

Washington Post reporters just don’t do that — they don’t trash talk Democratic governors. Did aliens abduct the real Shear and Helderman? Is House Speaker William Howell holding their families for ransom? I just don’t know. It will take me a while to sort all of this out.

Conservation tax credits are back in the news. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine says that legislators should not “grievously wound” Virginia’s land conservation program as the price for repealing the inheritance tax on the estates of multimillionaires.

Kaine supports the repeal of the Death Tax, but he also sees conservation tax credits as essential to his goal of preserving an additional 400,000 acres of open space from development by the end of his term. However, estimating that the death tax would drain some $100 million a year from state revenues, the General Assembly imposed a $50 million cap on the amount of conservation tax credits that could be granted in any one year. As the popularity of the program increased in recent years, lawmakers in the state Senate worried that it would create an open-ended loss state revenue.

Here’s the rub: The Death Tax/Tax Credit trade-off was a critical compromise that enabled the Senate and House of Delegates to come to a budget deal only days before the start of a new fiscal year. There just isn’t time to re-open the issue.

Oh, well, maybe next year.

Bob Lewis with the Associated Press has the story here.

Sean Connaughton, chairman of the Prince William County board of supervisors and a rising light in the state Republican Party, has been nominated by the Bush administration to run the U.S. Maritime administration — a position that he is almost certain to accept. Although Connaughton lost the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor last year, he has established a track record as one of the most effective local government leaders in Virginia. As the Washington Post recapitulates:

When he became a supervisor, the county had 280,000 people, an annual budget of about $400 million and one of the highest tax rates in the region.

He leaves an increasingly diverse county of about 364,000 people, a budget of $857 million and Northern Virginia’s lowest tax rate, which he and his board colleagues accomplished by cutting the tax rate as property values soared. The county also earned a AAA bond rating during Connaughton’s tenure, a gold star for local governments.

Developers are now paying more in proffers, voluntary funds used to offset the costs of schools, roads and other public services. Rather than wait for state transportation money to trickle down, the county used its money to build hundreds of miles of roads. And Prince William recently became one of a handful of municipalities in the state to propose creating a transportation department.

Frankly, I don’t know Prince William County well enough to judge Connaughton’s accomplishments. Prince William County stood in the path of growth, and there was no way that anyone could have tamed it. One can’t help but admire Connaughton for taking a proactive approach, raising local money for roads rather than whining that the state wasn’t doing enough. But is the county using those funds wisely? Is it coordinating its transportation projects with its zoning policies to create more balanced, better connected communities? Or is the county just playing catch-up with developers who convert vast tracts of farm- and woodland into a dysfunctional mess?

The abominable development taking place around the Gainesville interchange does not bode well for Connaughton’s legacy, although responsibility for that disaster cannot be fairly ascribed to any one individual. Tax rates in Prince William are low, that is clearly a bonus. But how well does the county work? Does it have a sense of community, a sense of place? Does it inspire loyalty — “I live in Prince William, and I love it!” — or is it a collection of stepping-stone subdivisions where people reside until they find somewhere else they like better?

Readers, please weigh in.

University of Virginia engineering professor Peter Norton has documented a century-long conflict between motorists and pedestrians for control over city streets.

When the automobile was invented, Norton notes, it was an intruder. States a profile of Norton in the University of Virginia News:

Early in the 20th century, pedestrians claimed the right of way on country roads and city streets, sharing the public space with children at play, domestic animals, carts, vendors, carriages and streetcars. … There was a clash of cultures, particularly in the cities, between residents who used the streets as an extension of their homes, chatting with neighbors and watching their children at play, and drivers of the newfangled vehicles who wanted to travel quickly from one place to another.

Eventually, motorists gained the upper hand in the battle for right of way. By 1930, the pejorative term “jaywalker” was routinely applied to pedestrians engaging in once-uncontroversial practices. “By then most people agreed (readily or grudgingly) that streets are chiefly motor thoroughfares,” Norton wrote in “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street.”

But the clash continues. Norton sees modern-day activists carrying on the fight by advocating bike paths and bike lanes, traffic-calming measures in residential areas, and pedestrian malls, which ban cars and reclaim the street as public space for strolling, street performers, sidewalk cafes and vendors selling their wares from carts.

“People who live OR (emphasis added) work in Northern Virginia would pay steep new fees and higher taxes under a $578 million transportation plan being circulated by six Republican delegates from the region.” The opening sentence in a story headed “GOP Plan Would Raise N.Va. Taxes for Area Roads” WaPo for 27 June 2006. Metro section page 1.

“People who live and work in the Virginia portion of the National Capital Subregion would pay less in taxes and variable fees based their level of travel demand if they lived in Balanced Communities and the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region evolved into a sustainable NUR.”

We start with a title that reflects the fact, documented by the recent and continuing rainfall, that for 60 years VDOT and the municipal jurisdictions have been building infrastructure that is deficient.

Instead of building first class infrastructure our governments have been expanding asphalt that enable the scatteration of urban land uses to dysfunctional locations.

Just Sunday “Parade Magazine” (of all places) had a cover story on what to expect from climate change. It looks like evidence arrived with the Sunday paper.

Citizens need to insist that the governance structure builds infrastructure to more than just 100 year flood standards but first we have to up grade what a 100 year storm really is.

One wonders if the hundred-year-old elm falling on the White House lawn will bring in to perspective the relationship between partisan politics and reality.

Next we rewrite that fist sentence of this important “transportation” story. Enough said on that.

Readers of our columns at Bacons Rebellions at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com are invited to see how many errors there are in the original opening sentence.

Here are some clues:

Will more money improve mobility? See yesterdays column “The Free Ride is Over.”

Is this a “transportation plan”? See “Regional Rigor Mortis,” 6 June 2005.

Where is this place called “Northern Virginia’? See “Where is Northern Virginia,” 11 August 2003.

There are several more.

Note that these “GOP” taxes and fees hit enterprises hardest.

Will MainStream Media or pandering politicians ever catch the boat?

EMR

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine promised to link transportation and land use planning, and so he will, thanks to passage of Senate Bill 699. The legislation, which goes into effect in July 2007, will require rezoning projects in fast-growth counties to be subjected to review by the Virginia Department of Transportation for their traffic impact.

The law is essentially toothless — there are no sanctions for local governments that spurn VDOT’s advice — but the Kaine administration hopes that it will force local governments to at least consider the traffic impact of their rezoning decisions.

The law doesn’t go into effect for another year because VDOT needs time to write the regulations. But that won’t stop the Kaine administration from initiating a “pilot project” in Loudoun County, where the board of supervisors will make decisions this summer on a number of massive development proposals that could shape the county for decades to come.

Road to Ruin writer Peter Galuszka has the skinny here.

For my current contribution to the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, I interviewed Patrick Gottschalk, Tim Kaine’s secretary for commerce and trade. Kaine campaigned for governor promising continuity with the Warner administration, and that’s clearly what we’re getting. But there are some new wrinkles.

First, the Kaine administration is tackling a problem that confounded both the Gilmore and Warner administrations: streamlining Virginia’s redundant and tangled workforce training programs. Kaine has appointed Daniel LeBlanc as a senior advisor with cabinet-level status in charge of workforce development. (After all the hoo-ha regarding LeBlanc’s rejection by conservatives in the House of Delegates as Secretary of Commonwealth, did the MSM ever report this? If so, the story was buried.)

Second, following up on legislation enacted this year, the Kaine administration will be conducting a 10-year comprehensive energy plan to address off-shore drilling for natural gas, as well as alternate and renewable energy sources such as solar energy, biofuels and tidally generated power. Read the full story here.

Doug Koelemay, a regular contributor to the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, devotes his current column to an important topic totally overlooked by the Mainstream Media: how Virginia universities treat intellectual property.

Since the time of Gov. Charles Robb in the early 1980s, Virginia’s political leaders have taken a holistic approach to economic development, recognizing the potential for state universities to conduct research and development that could be commercialized locally and provide the basis for new, knowledge-based industries. That insight led to the creation of the Center for Innovative Technology and has justified significant state support for the expansion of engineering, life sciences and other research-intensive programs at public universities.

The fly in the ointment is tech transfer. It’s one thing for state universities to conduct R&D, quite another for the intellectual property to make its way into the local business community for conversion into new businesses and jobs. Although there have been some modest success stories, university research has not had the transforming effect upon Virginia’s economy that some had hoped.

As Koelemay tells the story, a key barrier has been the uniform, top-down state policy dictating intellectual property policies for all state universities. In a 180-degree turn, the state is moving toward a system in which universities can devise policies that work best for them. Read Doug’s story here.

I have given insufficient visibility to a regular feature that Conaway Haskins is penning for the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, a regular column entitled, “Blogology.” Each edition, Conaway compiles a Q&A with a Virginia blogger covering state/local politics. In previous editions, he has profiled Waldo Jaquith, Will Vehrs and Kenton Ngo.

You might have seen these features if you had the patience to read the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine table of contents I publish on the blog each issue. But that’s clearly insufficient. Committed to building the Virginia blogosphere, Bacon’s Rebellion needs to do more to highlight the contributions of other Virginia bloggers. From this edition henceforward, we will promote the “Blogology” Q&As in separate posts.

Conaway’s current Q&A shines the spotlight on blogger/activist Lowell Feld, founder of the Raising Kaine blog. Not only is Feld a tireless and talented blogger, he combines his writing with political activism and a political action committee. As a key player in the Jim Webb senatorial campaign, he arguably has had more impact on Virginia politics than any other blogger to date. Read the Q&A here.

The June 26, 2006, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion is now available online. Articles and columns include:

Gottschalk Got Game
Virginia’s new secretary of commerce and trade is eager to help Tim Kaine put his own imprint on Virginia’s economic development policy. Likely starting points: energy and workforce development.
by James A. Bacon

Ip, Ip Hooray!
Virginia is conducting a 180-degree turn in its approach toward intellectual property originating at state universities. Lighter central control could stimulate more commercialization of R&D.
by Doug Koelemay

A New Political Laboratory
The days are gone when Virginia politics were of local interest only. Campaign themes and strategies in the Old Dominion are increasingly visible on the national stage.
by Patrick McSweeney

It’s Never Enough
Even the next two-year budget, at $74 billion, isn’t big enough to satisfy some legislators. Spending discipline isn’t likely to be restored as long as Republicans are divided.
by Patrick McSweeney

The Free Ride is Over
The General Assembly paid lip service this year to the transportation-land use connection but it didn’t come close to Fundamental Change. Until it does, Virginia’s mobility crisis will only get worse.
by E M Risse

Envision This!
What the “Washington region” needs is not another visioning session — it needs a rational definition of the region, an understanding of the nature of its problems and the political will to enact real change.
by E M Risse

Failure is OK – When It’s Cheap
Virginia’s transportation system is a mess. But with state spending hitting $74 billion, up 20 percent, in the next two-year budget, Virginia government can hardly be described as cheap.
by Geoffrey Segal

Dumb as Rocks
If the “fiscal conservatives” in the House of Delegates think they held the line against spending in the state’s new $74 billion budget, John Chichester’s epithet may well be justified.
by Phillip Rodokanakis

Why Not Webb?
Senatorial candidate Jim Webb exerts a strong, gut appeal for many Republican constituencies. He could give Sen. George Allen a good run for his money.
by James Atticus Bowden

Want Students to Learn?
Try Enforcing Truancy Laws.
The city of Richmond has among the worst attendance records of any Virginia school system — and is doing very little about it.
by John Butcher

Nice & Curious Questions
Behind Bars: Virginia’s Jails and Prisons
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs

Blogology
Caught in the Webb: Lowell Feld
by Conaway Haskins

The premise of Christina Nuckols’ story in the Virginian-Pilot this morning is that “[Gov. Timothy M.] Kaine’s freshman year has gotten off to a difficult start.” Few would disagree. The question is why. For Nuckols, Kaine’s problems are mainly about personal style and legislative tactics.

Kaine has only begun to seek out allies and nurture relationships in the Republican-controlled legislature. Legislators say Kaine’s leadership style bears little resemblance to that of his predecessor, fellow Democrat Mark Warner. … Some Republicans said the governor has failed to reach out to them and has alienated them with a blitz of campaign-style automated calls. …

Although Kaine aligned himself with state senators, who shared his desire to increase investment in transportation, they clashed over strategy at times. Senators, who included a gasoline tax increase in their own plan, resented Kaine’s public statements that a fuel levy was politically unwise.

Those observations are all true — yet they miss the point. Kaine and the Senate leadership share a very different vision for Virginia government than that of the House leadership. No amount of schmoozing on Kaine’s part could have papered that over. The fact was, Kaine was heading for a show-down with the House the day he announced his taxes-for-transportation plan, and he put himself at a severe disadvantage from the very beginning because it was a plan he’d never mentioned in his campaign and he could not by any remote stretch claim a mandate for it.

If Kaine continues pushing the taxes-for-transportation plan in the upcoming special session of the General Assembly, no amount of kissy-face is going to sway the GOP delegates. Kaine would be best advised to seek areas of common ground with the House — reforming VDOT, promoting public-private partnerships, reforming land use — declare victory and start preparing for the inevitable confrontation next year over his universal pre-K plan.

As if the Rail-to-Dulles project didn’t have enough hurdles already, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s inspector general is launching an audit of the project, which is projected to cost $4 billion or more. Reports the Washington Post:

In a letter sent last week to the Federal Transit Administration, the inspector general’s office said such a “major project monitoring effort” was needed in this case because of the large amount of federal money expected to be spent on it: roughly $900 million.

Also justifying extra scrutiny, the letter stated, was Virginia’s transferal of control of the project to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. Because the authority leases its airports from the federal government, the letter states, the authority’s role in the rail project gives further reason for the federal government to have a “vested interest in ensuring that the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project is completed efficiently and effectively.”

The project, a top priority of the Kaine administration, has stalled while a task force recommends whether or not to include a tunnel underneath portions of Tysons Corner. The addition of a tunnel would add to the project’s expense, threatening to render it cost ineffective according to federal guidelines, which would threaten the loss of federal funds. But many Fairfax County officials deem the tunnel crucial for long-term plans to re-engineer Tysons into a more cohesive, pedestrian-friendly community.