Are the Stafford elections next on development-backers' list?

By David Beiler

Date published: 3/20/2005

BY COMMANDEERING the local GOP and pouring in campaign cash, developers reopened Loudoun County to unbridled growth. Is Stafford next?

Two years ago, urban planners across America took note of recent changes in the local ordinances of Loudoun County, the second-fastest-growing county in the nation. Permitted housing densities in the western two-thirds of Loudoun had been slashed 85 percent in some areas, 70 percent in the rest.

Developers, builders, speculators, and several big landowners howled. Opponents soon filed nearly 200 lawsuits challenging the new rules. The county budgeted $6 million for its defense and dug in.

Recently, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the Loudoun downzoning on a technicality: While the new policies were being considered over a three-year period, precise boundaries of the affected areas were not included in the public notices.

The ruling surprised many, considering that the county had sent several notices to almost all of Loudoun's landowners during the torturously slow study process. But two facts had made the result a foregone conclusion: (1) The court often sides with business interests and against local governments on minute technicalities and (2) a radical transformation had taken place on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors. In short, one boxer had the ref in his pocket while the other was throwing the fight.

About the same time developers started running to their ambulance-chasers, they launched an effort to reclaim the Loudoun board.

A new organization called "Voters to Stop Sprawl" had swept the ballot in 1999 with a slate of growth-control candidates, and the results--while slow to materialize--had proven profound. Now the pro-development forces started their own campaign group ("Citizens for Property Rights"), determined to oust their opponents from office in the 2003 elections.

They largely succeeded--through a combination of partisan politics, subterfuge, class warfare, and dump-truck loads of campaign cash.

"The way to get [candidates] into office is to throw as much money at them as possible," the chairman of the Northern Virginia Building Industry PAC told The Washington Post at the time. It was a strategy pursued with religious fervor.

Date published: 3/20/2005