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Dow Jones & Company Inc Jan 4, 2000HAMILTON, Va. -- In November, developer John Andrews was completing his plan for the 82-acre cornfield he had bought outside this charming town (pop. 480). "Hamilton Station" would feature 69 large homes nestled on one-acre lots along narrow lanes and a "substantial" entrance to give each home an "estate look."
What he didn't foresee was a political revolution. That month, candidates endorsed by a previously unknown group called "Voters to Stop Sprawl" blew away the opposition in all eight contested races for Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors, rocking a political establishment that supported rapid development. The election results also stiffened the collective spines of the nine members of tiny Hamilton's planning commission. They just said no to Hamilton Station.
The political appeal of fighting sprawl appears contagious, at least on the local level. Three nearby counties also threw out pro-development politicians in November. More than half of the nation's governors have raised sprawl-related issues, including traffic congestion. And Vice President Al Gore has taken it on the presidential campaign trail where he seems to have stark differences with the GOP front-runner-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
Noting that developers are gobbling up farmland at twice the rate of the 1980s, Mr. Gore favors what he calls "smart growth" initiatives. One of his proposals would provide a "significant increase" in federal funds to help state and local governments conserve farmland.
"My view is the national government should not be a national zoning agency," counters Gov. Bush, who believes growth issues should be left to state and local governments. But he favors dealing with some of the consequences of sprawl by helping schools and creating tax-free zones to help redevelop inner cities.
Gov. Bush, who comes from a state where zoning laws are politically incorrect, need only look out the window in his governor's mansion to see the problem. Austin and its suburbs now sprawl almost 30 miles up and down Interstate 35. Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a Democrat, recently came up with a program to address chronic complaints about traffic and to lure business back to Austin's seedy downtown. He also calls it "smart growth."
The winning politicians here in Loudoun County, which is 16 miles from Washington, talk about "smart growth" as well. While scrambling to find an acceptable local definition for the term, they agree that the county is an ideal place to draw the line. Twenty years ago, the rolling land of Loudoun was mostly farms and horse country. Now, feeding from an influx of high-tech companies, its population has quadrupled to 166,000 people, making it the third-fastest-growing county in the U.S. Under the pressure of traffic jams, overcrowded classrooms and a bewildering carpet of new subdivisions, office buildings and malls, something in the political apparatus that had supported the growth seems to have snapped.
Mr. Andrews, 38 years old, the designer of nine previous subdivisions in this booming county, thinks the political setback is temporary. "I call it visual overload. You know, you drive down to the shopping mall, and you're seeing things that weren't there five years ago."
But Joseph Maio, the chief political strategist for Voters to Stop Sprawl, sees it as a watershed event that will shape the county's future. "There has been this growing frustration. People moved here because they wanted to be part of the country," says Mr. Maio, a retired Internal Revenue Service analyst.
Even he was shocked by the vote in this traditionally Republican-leaning county. Starting with a group of seven volunteers, he figured he might raise $20,000 and have an impact on five, maybe six county races. He raised $70,000 and swept the board. "Winning eight races was a dream!"
Scott York, the new Republican chairman of the county board, explains: "This wasn't a Republican or a Democrat thing. It was Voters to Stop Sprawl that won the election. They did everything out there that the Republican Party should have done, but failed to do."
A home-improvement contractor, Mr. York was a member of the county's planning commission until last year, when he was on the losing side of a bitter 5-4 vote that approved subdivision zoning for a farm in an area that had no sewer, water or existing schools. "I just decided then and there that we had to do some drastic stuff," he says.
Winning the election was probably the easiest part of the job. First, Loudoun has an overhang of 40,000 unbuilt houses in subdivisions approved by previous administrations. Then, under state law, 50,000 more houses could be built without county approval. Finally, more than $600 million will be needed to build 26 schools in the next six years to keep up with development already in place. "What the new board of supervisors has in front of them is, what do they want Loudoun to become?" Mr. York says.
"Smart growth" is a slogan that was coined to ease part of the new board's predicament. It doesn't want to be seen as stopping growth, but rather as channeling it into areas that are already urbanized. Michael Replogle, a former transportation planner for Montgomery County, Md., says he may have helped coin the term in the early 1990s as a way to deflect the political complaints of developers who said he was "antigrowth."
By allowing housing densities to rise sharply in corridors served by Washington's subway system, Mr. Replogle's plan shaped Montgomery County's growth differently from that of Virginia's suburban counties, which continued to gobble up land with low-density housing projects and a varicose road system. "We could see we were going to get swamped with traffic" if something wasn't done, says Mr. Replogle, who now promotes the issue for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Smart growth means different things to different people in Loudoun, explains Paul Ziluca, a retired Air Force colonel, who as head of Chairman York's transition team has held a series of public hearings.
In eastern Loudoun, which is largely developed, "you heard a lot about more street lighting, crowded schools and the poor quality of development." In western Loudoun, which has most of the remaining farmland, he says, "there was considerable talk about scenic views, the beauty of meadows and open spaces, and how to try and preserve that."
Frank Raflo, a local newspaper columnist who spent 16 years on the county's board of supervisors, thinks the real moment of political truth will come later. "My judgment is that they will have to raise the property tax considerably. But they don't say that."
Whatever comes, rural Hamilton, a town that looks like it might have inspired a Norman Rockwell painting, is digging in against sprawl. Only two blocks wide and a mile long, it is surrounded by farms that have recently been sold to developers. One of them, Mr. Andrews, is suing to force Hamilton to give him the permits he needs to go ahead with his "estate look."
While the town is small, Daniel Kaseman, a businessman who heads the town's planning commission, says the stakes aren't. "We're trying to keep the fabric of the town, the feel of the place," he says. "Virginia has a lot of tradition. If we lose that, we lose a lot."
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| Measurements of Sprawl |
|
| -- Between 1992 and 1997, 16 million acres of farm and forest land |
| were developed in the U.S., twice the annual rate of growth from 1982 |
| to 1992. |
|
| -- Wetlands in the U.S. are disappearing at a rate of 54,000 acres |
| annually. |
|
| -- The average American household drives 40% more than in 1970. Car |
| ownership, per household, has increased by 30%. |
|
| -- Almost half the commuters in European capitals, such as Stockholm |
| and Munich, use public transit. In most American cities, less than a |
| fifth do. |
|
| -- Since 1980, the U.S. population has grown by 1% a year, but |
| vehicle miles driven have risen by 3.2% a year. |
|
| Sources: U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Transportation, the |
| Census Bureau and the Tellus Institute |
Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
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