LoudounExtra.com

Backlash to Rapid Growth Extends to New Services and Infrastructure

By Sandhya Somashekhar

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Call it growth fatigue.

Across Loudoun County, residents weary of the intense growth that has gripped their community over the past decade are fighting back, not against housing developments or shopping centers, but against schools, cellphone towers, a sheriff's substation, even a hospital.

Gone are the days when developers proposed building tens of thousands of houses on former farmland, angering residents who said the county's population was expanding too much and too fast. Instead, county officials are engaging in an ambitious and expensive effort to build infrastructure and services to catch up to the population boom. But they, too, are encountering opposition.

"Everywhere we pick to put a school or a substation or a firehouse or whatever, we run into resistance. It's very frustrating," said Board of Supervisors member James Burton (I-Blue Ridge), who criticized the pace of growth.

Loudoun's population has more than tripled since 1990, to about 270,000. In 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau named the county the country's fastest-growing jurisdiction of its size. Since then, though, construction has greatly declined with the housing market, and population growth has eased off.

Still, hard feelings linger among longtime critics of the rapid expansion, who say the county's crammed roads, crowded schools and rising taxes are a direct result.

Steve Hines, a longtime slow-growth activist who has raised concerns about two proposed school sites off Route 50, said the policies that allowed the county to expand so rapidly were a wake-up call to residents, who will not stand by again as their community transforms around them.

"You can't afford not to be vigilant," Hines said. The developer-friendly policies of previous county leaders "pointed out the fact that it is the responsibility of the electorate not to give up the reins of responsibility to elected officials. You want to trust them, but you can't."

Loudoun's education system, in a flurry to build enough facilities for its burgeoning student population, is finalizing plans to construct schools at three sites around the county. The three face resistance from the community, partly over fears that they could generate traffic or that the empty desks could prompt more growth.

That attitude has frustrated district officials, who hope to begin construction on as many as 18 schools in the next six years.

"It's really backward," said Sam C. Adamo, director of planning and legislative services for the school system. "We mitigate the growth. We are the solution for the growth that is there."

This year, a majority of the Board of Supervisors, elected on a promise to slow the county's growth, voted against building a set of cellphone towers in western Loudoun. The towers had the potential to expand cellular coverage and Internet access in the rural reaches, but county officials denied them in the face of intense opposition from residents who said they would be an eyesore.

In Ashburn, a group is campaigning against a proposal to build an HCA Broadlands hospital because of traffic and noise concerns. Farther west, a small group of residents is challenging the proposed location for a sheriff's office substation in Round Hill, saying there are better sites elsewhere in town.

In each case, critics say the projects are wrong for reasons that have little to do with growth. Tax-wary residents have accused the county of paying too much for land for schools and the sheriff's substation. The opposition to the HCA hospital is in part driven by rival Inova Health System, which is seeking to build a medical center nearby and has donated money to the group lobbying against HCA's request.

Part of the problem might be that the county is trying to build the infrastructure after people have moved in, setting up inevitable fights about what goes up in their back yards. Another problem, Burton said, might be the county's reliance on "cookie-cutter designs" to save money. The sprawling design for a sheriff's substation in suburban South Riding, for example, might not be appropriate for Round Hill, population 500.

Gem Bingol, a Loudoun field representative for the slow-growth Piedmont Environmental Council, said the county lacks a clear and logical process for buying land that keeps residents in the loop. She said residents are traumatized after years of waking up in the morning and finding green space suddenly paved over and buildings rising out of what just months ago were open fields.

"Too much change too fast, that's what we've had," she said. "If it was a slower pace of growth, then the community can handle it. But it is shocking when you go down the road, and you drive down six months later and there's a building there. It's like, what just happened?"

Stephen J. Snow, a former Republican supervisor who represented the populous Dulles district, said too many residents want to preserve the "fantasy" that Loudoun is still a sleepy, far-flung, rural community. He blames environmental groups such as the Piedmont Environmental Council and the majority on the Board of Supervisors for perpetuating that notion.

"Tell me what business wants to come here if you have no roads, you have no fire stations, you have no fine restaurants," said Snow, who supported Loudoun's population boom during his term. "It's silly. It's juvenile. It shows a gross lack of understanding of how building a community works."

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