The Tea Party movement in Virginia has a new whipping boy: smart growth.
One focus is Chesterfield County, the largest suburban area in the state capital region which has been beset with the woes of overbuilding and lax oversight for decades.
That doesn’t faze a Tea Party offspring that calls itself the Virginia Campaign for Liberty. Chesterfield County is going through the process of reconsidering its comprehensive plan, perhaps to avoid past mistakes. In response, a woman named Donna Holt, who lives in the county and is executive director of the “liberty” group, says the plan could be an avenue to massive government intrusion in the form of “some very nefarious ordinances and regulations.”
Never mind that the county, which hasn’t reviewed its plan in some years, is nowhere close to passing any regulations, the point is clear. The Tea Party types, that eclectic bunch of gun nuts, Patrick Henry impersonators, no tax mavens and Obama birthers, are piling on to make sure that their individual and property rights are not violated.
Holt’s attacks show a basic lack of understanding of what’s been happening in Chesterfield, as well as other suburban and exurban counties such as Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford. The problem is not too many regulations, but too few. For years, laissez-faire mentalities took hold among planning commissions and boards of supervisors. Developers of gigantic, car-centric subdivisions got whatever they wanted. Strip mall builders likewise built at will.
Needed infrastructure and services were put in a perpetual catch-up mode. The explosive suburban growth from the 1970s until the 2007-08 financial crisis severely tested schools, classrooms, health, police and fire services. Fueled by cheap money and gravity-defying real estate assessments, huge suburban clusters sprang out of cow pastures with little rhyme or reason, other than a developer wanted something and supervisors had “growth” on their brains.
That’s what happened in Chesterfield. A Republican-controlled board allowed developers anything they wanted. They never met a subdivision plan or a mall they didn’t like. Never mind that Chesterfield is seriously imbalanced in that it doesn’t have a healthy mix of industries or commercial office space to help pay the tax bills, as Henrico County, a sister area, does.
As homes flew up, kids went to school in mobile homes until new schools could be thrown up as fast as possible. Police were underfunded, so you may have had one or two officers on duty on night shifts patrolling vast areas of the county.
It all came to a screeching halt when the subprime crisis brought the growth engine to a halt. Since then, Chesterfield has been laying off teachers and other workers as it struggled to deal with real estate assessments that have been dropping for three years.
Holt, apparently, doesn’t get it. She was quoted as saying that the comprehensive plan could be some kind of pro-government regulation trojan horse. As she points out, somewhere in Alabama, some homeowner was told he or she couldn’t grow a tomato garden because of government land use rules (The horror!)
The relevancy and veracity of that statement are hard to check. But you can check the “Virginia Campaign for Liberty” website. It is filled with low-brow pieces titled “Global Totalitarian Dictatorship Invading a Town near You with Your Permission (sic).” This rather impenetrable analysis by a man named James Simpson (credentials unlisted) rants on about the United Nations, condoms, Dr. Paul Ehrlich (“Obama’s lunatic Science Czar”) and a host of other issues. I had trouble connecting the dots.
It is too bad that the Tea Partiers have to go after smarter growth just after the financial meltdown has given us some breathing room to get things right.
Peter Galuszka
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