As the P.R. war heats up in Loudoun County over the future of the Dulles South district, the Piedmont Environmental Council has been a leading voice opposing the granting of greater density. According to the Loudoun Times-Mirror, Supervisor Steve Snow, R-Dulles, considers the PEC a malign influence:
“[PEC members] are insidious. They are everywhere,” said [Snow] at the Oct. 3 Board of Supervisors meeting. “They are trying to take over local and state government to try and get their will done for environmental extremism, and I think we have to fight against it.”
Newspapers ads, paid for by the pro-growth group the Right Growth Policy Institute, detail a complex chain of influence that reaches from the PEC all the way up to the governor’s office in Richmond. Characterizing the PEC as the “hunt-country elite,” the ads claim the organization is using its influence to “stop economic development, job growth and private investment in new infrastructure.”
It is true that the PEC has worked its way into the inner sanctum of power in Richmond for the first time ever. As the Times-Mirror recounts:
Scott Kasprowicz, a former PEC board member who donated more than $140,000 to the Kaine for Governor campaign, was named Deputy Secretary of Transportation. More recently, Peter Schwartz, who was vice-chair of the PEC and gave more than
$31,500 to Kaine, is a new appointment to the Commonwealth Transportation Board. The CTB, which Kasprowicz serves on as well, directs state funding to individual road projects throughout the state.
The PEC also funds Bacon’s Rebellion’s Road to Ruin project, so I may be hopelessly “conflicted” when I say this, but… The charges are hystericallly overblown.
First, the “influence” of the PEC in the Governor’s Office is more than offset by the heft of Business As Usual interests such as developers, home builders, construction firms, engineernig firms and all the rest. As an indicator of who is winning the tug of war, the Governor abandoned his commitment to allow localities to restrict rezonings that would negatively impact the local transportation network — the top legislative priority of the PEC and other conservationists. Instead, Kaine committed his political capital to raising taxes for transportation. Just what the PEC and other conservationists have been longing for: New arterials and bypasses to open up the countryside to development. Yeah, right.
Second, and more germane, the PEC is asking the tough questions that few others willing to ask: What are the fiscal and transportation impacts of growth? Does it make sense for growth in the metropolitan Washington area to push ever outward — even when it leaves vast tracts of vacant and underutilized land closer to the metropolitan core? Is it not possible to devise human settlement patterns that are more efficient than the scattered, disconnected, low-density development that has characterized most growth for the past 50 years? These are reasonable questions.
If asking those questions makes the PEC environmental extremists, I guess that makes me an environmental extremist…. perhaps the most conservative “environmental extremist” on the planet.
