Month: October 2008

Landscape Buffers: Here today, gone tomorrow?

As if the major changes proposed for the Comp Plan weren’t enough, Supervisors will vote on proposed changes to the Zoning Ordinance on December 16. One of these changes would weaken our buffer standards for new and existing development. Buffers are strips of land with trees and other plants that separate (buffer) two different land uses, such as roads, strip malls, stormwater facilities and neighborhoods.
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This recent article in the Potomac Journal, clearly demonstrates, why the qualifications of appointees matter! Robert Doucaster is a symptom of a much larger problem in Prince William County. People appointed to public policy committees are often times selected for political reasons not because they necessarily have the proper experience or judgement for the particular committee!
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The State Corporation Commission yesterday agreed that there was a ‘need’ for a 500Kv powerline to run through Virginia. Now the construction of the line hinges on the decision of Pennsylvania judges who have atleast temporarily put a halt its construction through their state based on the argument that the line is not needed but rather is a mechanism to increase profits for the power company.

Dominion originally proposed a path that traversed the Virginia countryside, appropriately described by the Prince William County Board of Supervisors as ‘a drunken sailor looking for port.’ That path crossed hundreds of acres of conservation easements, crossed in close proximity to school sites and ran directly through the newly constructed Toll Brothers Country Club in Dominion Valley. They have since replaced that path with a longer one that runs on existing utility easements but will ruin the viewshed of the Manassas Battlefield.

Then as a further affront to the citizenry of Virginia, Governor Kaine puts the fox in charge of the hen house with his appointment of a Dominion attorney to the State Corporation Commission, effectively handing over the keys to the electric company to proceed at will in the Commonwealth.

I recieved this e-mail update from a concerned citizen.  Apparently, the Comprehensive Plan update will now include NEW land use designations, Centers of Community, that would bring in MORE high density housing projects to PWC.  Umm, aren’t we experiencing the fallout from previous poor land use decisions?  Do we really need MORE houses or instead maybe should  focus on bringing high quality businesses to PWC so people can work closer to where they live?  We are a bedroom community because our elected officials have not been able to induce more businesses to open up shop here.  THESE land use decisions ARE the quality of life issues that we all must deal with on a daily basis.  Land use decisions are about land convservation, parks for our children, clean air, clean drinking water, transportation, quality schools, and how much we pay in taxes!

All: If you’re concerned about the issues described below, please
attend (and, if possible, address) the 7 pm 8 October (Wednesday)
hearing of the Prince William County Planning Commission at the Board of
Supervisors Chambers in the McCoart Building of the County Complex off
the PW County Parkway. I intend to be there to speak and would be happy
to go early to sign up by 6:30 pm anyone else who would like to speak.
Let me know if you’d like me to do this for you. Each speaker is
limited to three minutes. If you cannot be there, and even if you can,
you might want to send a message to the eight members of the Board of
Supervisors to share with them your views:

http://www.pwcgov.org/default.aspx?topic=040050000940000442

If you have any questions, please let me know. And please share this
message with any of your friends/neighbors who you think would be
interested. Ralph

***************************************************************

The county is proposing sweeping changes to how it accommodates future
growth by designating 19 locations in the county as “Centers of
Community” (CoCs). CoCs are large areas (reportedly about one square
mile) that are specifically planned for high-density mixed use projects,
particularly high-density housing. Each covers a half-mile radius and
is supposed to be walkable and environmentally sensitive.

The screenshot at the bottom of this e-mail, which I took off the county
website a couple days ago, summarizes the latest version of the plan. I
count a total of 19 planned CoCs — 11 in the Haymarket, Gainesville,
Bristow, Manassas area, and 8 at the east end of the county. If each of
these centers builds 3,000 homes, which is about the same density level
as the infamous 2005-06 Brentswood Project, and assuming the county’s
average of three people per house, that would total 171,000 more people,
a 50% increase in the population of the entire county.

See this link for more info:
http://www.co.prince-william.va.us/default.aspx?topic=040073001410004148

You might be interested to know that two of the main authors of this
plan are leading members of the Prince William County developer
community who reportedly have a direct business interest (some might
call it a major conflict-of-interest) in land involved in the plan,
owning large parcels within some of the areas proposed for development.
You might also be interested to know that making this plan part of the
county’s Comprehensive Plan, as proposed, will effectively bypass the
former rezoning approval and public hearing process, and fast-track
future residential development projects for expedited approval.

I believe that nothing like this should be allowed to slip thru without
thorough citizen input and thorough study and publicizing of its impact
on: 1) traffic congestion, 2) overcrowding in schools, 3) the tax base,
4) property values in existing neighborhoods (oversupply drives down the
value of your home), and 5) the environment. Note: Relative to the tax
base, all but the most expensive homes in the county are a net drain on
county services and tax revenue. This means that ultimately as a
taxpayer you indirectly subsidize all the other, non-high-income
housing, which the county, already glutted with thousands of foreclosed
and unsold homes, doesn’t even need. (By the way, those thousands of
foreclosed and unsold homes can themselves become a significant tax
burden on county taxpayers)

It’s ironic that the county is bringing this up for discussion at the
very time that the U.S. is in the middle of its worst financial crisis
since the Great Depression, a crisis brought on by, among other things,
massive housing oversupply, predatory and dishonest lending practices by
many mortgage lenders to people who couldn’t afford the homes they were
being sold, and the financially toxic effect of these millions of
now-non-performing (bad) loans on the books of banks and other
investors. (Forbes magazine reported 2.2 million foreclosures in the
U.S. in 2007 alone.)
<http://www.co.prince-william.va.us/default.aspx?topic=040073001410004148

Finally, a guilty verdict for OJ.

The Wall Street Bailout bill aka Economic Rescue Package has now been signed by President Bush.

According to the Potomac News/Journal Messenger, there was an attempted robbery at a local store where one of the thieves was wielding a pair of scissors, but luckily for the business owner, she was armed with a handgun. Ergo handgun beats scissors.

One of the would-be robbers immediately ran out of the store, located on PR Business Center Drive. A second robber, who wielded the scissors, tried to run out of the store but tripped on a clothes rack and fell. He finally crawled out the front door.

And the second rule the robber forgot? – Don’t run with scissors in your hand.

Please share your impression about the VP debate!

This was a VERY long article, but truly excellent.  Amazingly, the Brookings Institute, decade by decade, sheds light on the how the media has framed the debate regarding immigration.  I found myself wondering, how is it that American policy has been reduced to sound bites and simple catch phrases. Lou Dobbs says there is a crisis and we believe him? Where are the moderate voices of reason, described within this Brookings Institute report? What really stood out to me, was their analysis that a comprehensive conversation regarding immigration, legal and illegal, was simply not taking place within the larger context of American economy. What was happening within our economy that was allowing for such the large flow of immigrants, including those who were not entering through legal channels? Where is the discussion regarding the housing boom and the need for additional labor? What about the need for high tech employees that this country needs in order to continue competing in a global economy? The media is complicit in promoting the belief that there is an us vs them. Whether it be citizens vs. government or legal vs legal,  somehow the more complicated resolution of immigration has been left behind for the easier to write, us vs them paradigm. In order to come to any meaningful conclusion regarding immigration, we must first rewrite the narrative of immigration. I will add, that although the media may be simplifying this issue, our politicians have shown little initiative to leave behind the politics and search for a comprehensive solution that so many middle of the road Americans desire. 

http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/0925_immigration_dionne.aspx

The U.S. media have hindered effective policy making on immigration for decades, and their impact has been increasing in recent years as a result of an ongoing evolution in the media industry. Deeply ingrained practices in American journalism have produced a narrative that conditions the public to associate immigration with illegality, crisis, controversy and government failure. Meanwhile, new voices of advocacy on the media landscape have succeeded in mobilizing segments of the public in opposition to policy initiatives, sometimes by exaggerating the narrative of immigration told by traditional news organizations. The combined effect is to promote stalemate on an issue that is inherently difficult to resolve and that is likely to resurface on the public agenda when a new administration and a new Congress take office in January 2009.

These findings emerge from an examination of how the media have covered immigration going back to 1980 with a special focus on the extended policy debates in 2006 and 2007, which collapsed without producing any significant legislation. Supporters of radically different positions in those debates agree that the current immigration system is broken; one need not favor any particular outcome to conclude that stalemate is a mark of failure in the policy process. Many actors in Washington and beyond played a role in that outcome, and the intent here is not to argue that the media were the decisive players or to rank their influence relative to others. The objective is to understand how the media conditioned public opinion and the policy landscape, and the results show that the media—both traditional journalism and new forms of expression—need to be considered among the factors that contribute to polarization and distrust.

While the immigrant population has grown vastly larger over the years, the terms of the policy debate over immigration have hardly changed in 30 years. Improving border controls; halting the employment of unauthorized migrants; dealing with temporary workers; determining legalization plans for people in the country illegally; refiguring visa categories for legal immigrants—all these topics have been debated repeatedly since at least 1980, and some have actually been legislated. In the meantime, however, the media have undergone a radical transformation marked by declining audiences for the daily newspapers and broadcast network evening news programs that once dominated the information flow and by rising new forms of news delivery via cable television, talk radio and the Internet.

In the recent immigration debates of 2006 and 2007, the new media landscape also amplified discrete sectors of public opinion to help block legislative action. In the first act of this drama, the Spanish-language media helped mobilize huge crowds to protest legislation passed by the House that would have mandated an unprecedented crackdown on unauthorized migrants including their jailing on felony charges. The protest marches of spring 2006 were one factor that pushed a bipartisan group of senators to present a counterproposal whose passage kept the other legislation from moving forward.

The new media voices played an even more significant role in the second act of the legislative drama. In 2007, conservative voices on cable television news shows, talk radio and the Internet mobilized opposition to provisions of a Senate bill that would have offered legal status, or “amnesty” as it was labeled, to unauthorized migrants. Meanwhile, liberal commentators and bloggers paid relatively little attention to the issue. Conservatives in the media successfully defined the terms of the debate in a way that helped lead to the eventual collapse of efforts to reach a compromise.

Both cases represented a triumph of “no!” These media sectors proved adept at promoting opposition to specific measures, but they have shown no comparable ability to advance an affirmative agenda. The media have given voice to strongly felt and well-defined views at either end of the policy spectrum. Meanwhile, the broad middle in American public opinion favors a mix of policy options on immigration, but that segment’s views are marked by uncertainty and anxiety about the topic and skepticism about government’s ability to handle it. This reflects the way the immigration narrative has been framed by the media for a generation.

An important but unresolved question is whether these same dynamics apply to other issues that share certain characteristics with immigration. Comprehensive reform of health care and energy policies, like immigration, require the mediation of many competing economic and regional interests while also assuaging strongly felt ideological differences. If the effects of media transformation can be generalized, the recent failures to reach grand bargains on immigration should serve as a cautionary tale.