Alec MacGillis with the Washington Post ran a story two days ago on the anti-growth backlash in the Washington region, highlighting recent events in Loudoun County, Prince William County and Montgomery County, Md. Most disturbing from my perspective was a vote by the Prince William board of supervisors to approve a one-year freeze on most subdivisions “to protest the lack of transportation funding from the General Assembly.”
The Prince William action strikes me as an act of blind, inchoate frustration. It’s not helpful in any way, and it’s wrong on so many levels. Let me count the ways:
First: The vote assumes that the primary reason for traffic congestion in Prince William County is a lack of insufficient spending on roads — as opposed to really bad zoning and land use decisions made by previous boards of supervisors. As we documented in our close-ups of Prince William transportation and land use issues earlier this year, there is a massive overhang of land approved for development. It’s only been in recent years, under now-departed board chairman Sean Connaughton, that the board even began thinking about adopting more transportation-efficient patterns of development. Blaming the state absolves Prince William from the responsibility for developing transportation-efficient communities with a balanced mix of homes, jobs, stores and amenities.
Second: Freezing new housing starts will not solve anything. As long as Northern Virginia generates new jobs, people have to live somewhere. If they don’t live in Prince William, they’ll move to Stafford or Spotsylvania. But they’ll drive back through Prince William to get to the jobs closer to the urban core, only adding to congestion on Interstate 95 and other traffic corridors.
Third: Let’s say the General Assembly raises another $1 billion a year in taxes, as Gov. Kaine and the state Senate want to do. Prince William, with about 350,000 residents, accounts for about 4.7 percent of the state’s population. The county’s share of that $1 billion would be $47 million a year. That’s not enough for P.W. to pave its way out of its traffic congestion problems. But it is enough to perpetuate Business As Usual, supporting the same dysfunctional land use patterns that created the mess.
As Ed Risse was quoted in the article as saying, the moratorium could have the unwanted effect of bogging down the county’s land-use policy in court. What Prince William and the rest of Northern Virginia really need is more control over funding and building roads. “It’s nice that Prince William’s evolved to the point where it can put its foot down, but it will take some reallocation of powers for transportation planning until something happens.”
Update: Turns out that PWC doesn’t have the legal authority to put a freeze on new house rezonings. So, the board of supervisors has decided instead to defer action on rezonings as long as legally permissable, 12 months. The Gainesville Times has the story.
