Gerald E. Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, wants to make Fairfax County more green. In the “Cool Counties” initiative he launched two weeks ago, Connolly aims to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that result from automobile emissions and coal-fired power plants that generate electricity. He has taken on a formidable task.
Fairfax County has an embedded infrastructure of buildings, roads and utilities — an investment worth hundreds of billions of dollars — built to serve automobility. Much of the development in th ecounty is scattered, disconnected, low density and energy inefficient. In describing Connolly’s challenge, Amy Gardner with the Washington Post hones in on the Fairfax County government complex as a monument to dysfunctional land use.
The 670,000-square-foot government center, built in the early 1990s when energy prices were low and environmental consciousness even lower, could have anchored a pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented community of homes, shops and jobs. “But,” Gardner writes, “the five-story mass of granite and glass, which rises squatly from an isolated, 86-acre sea of asphalt and lawn near Fair Oaks Mall, is suited to nothing of the sort. For years, critics have said the government center is an emblem of sprawl: far from Metrorail, sequestered by divided highways, intimidating to walkers and bicycle riders.”
Of about 11,000 county employees, only 135 are known to use bus, rail or vanpools to get to work. The ratio is even smaller at the 2,900-parking-spot government center, where about 1,700 county workers are based. Gardner paints a word picture of an empty transit bus “creeping from shelter to shelter in a vain search for a rider. Not a single pedestrian was in view on the sidewalks and trails leading away from the building.”
The “Cool Counties” initiative is designed to decrease government emissions of greenhouse gases by increasing the use of wind power, clean-burning vehicles and environmentally friendly building techniques. But Connolly concedes that it will take more than carbon fluorescent lightbulbs and hybrid cars to transform a government whose physical form, as Gardner puts it, “mirrors the expansive suburb it serves.”
Connolly envisions a future in which the government center is surrounded by a more urban feel: affordable housing for county workers, more commerce and jobs — and even an extension of Metrorail along Interstate 66.
Reading between the lines: The Greening of Fairfax County will require a built environment more hospitable to pedestrians and mass transit. And that will require the demolition and rebuilding of half the roads, buildings and utility infrastructure in the county. Even in the absence of political resistance and bureaucratic lethargy, that will take decades to complete. Connolly will not live long enough to see his vision fulfilled. But it’s accomplishment enough if he can get the process started.