Thursday, October 30, 2014

Blogpost #12 Guidance for letter writers?


Looking at Garrett McGuire’s peevish letter (http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-howze-is-the-arlington-candidate-looking-to-the-future/article_26dbe972-5f75-11e4-b91f-f364419610ed.html) peevish letter I was struck by its similarity to the Smith (http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-howze-policies-will-help-young-professionals-stay-in-county/article_20e755ee-591a-11e4-afa6-6329b75fab8d.html) and Lewan (http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-howze-is-the-candidate-with-can-do-spirit-for/article_e00561ba-5919-11e4-a1a2-43de15e67cc3.html) letters from last week, and I wondered if guidance for letter writers is being distributed from the Democratic HQ and Bat Cave over on Jeff Davis Hwy.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that!  But if this is the Dem line it suggests a couple of things: that the Dems have noticed that their stance from last time (Reeps are mouth breathing knuckle draggers!  Vihstadt is a known Reep!  Arlington can’t possibly!) was not a winner, and that the new stance is: Howze is forward looking!  Young professionals need forward looking!  Housing costs too much for young professionals! 1951-model Vihstadt is too old to be marching towards Arlington’s glorious future!!  Ethics concerns are a trivial distraction Vihstadt is placing in the way of the progress of People’s Arlington towards its glorious future!

I kind of like the LaGuardia line:  "There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean streets." And the Little Flower must have been doing something right, since there’s an airport named for him.  I’m a Vihstadt backer and a historical Dem, and I think he’s been playing it very straight and not partisan so far.   And as a ‘40s model myself, I am very pleased that a young and vigorous and forward-looking person like Vihstadt is willing to put some effort into County affairs!

McGuire seems to assume that County efforts for affordable housing will in fact benefit young professionals like himself.  There’s a lot of debate on the actual effect of inclusionary zoning (IZ) requirements in providing housing. A piece by Emily Washington on the right-of-center Market Urbanism website discusses exactly that: (http://marketurbanism.com/2014/05/29/how-affordable-housing-policies-backfire/), and suggests:
“...it’s hard to deny that inclusionary zoning beneficiaries win a lottery. They live in new construction in desirable neighborhoods, housing that would cost several times as much at the market rate. However, IZ’s effects are not limited to beneficiaries, and its costs are not fully borne by developers. Because developers will lose money on the IZ units they build, this cost has to be made up in the market rate units in order for the project to go forward. This adds to construction costs and also incentivizes luxury units that can better absorb the cost of the IZ units relative to more affordable construction. While providing affordable housing to a few lucky low-income people, IZ also makes housing less affordable for everyone who doesn’t receive the benefit by reducing housing supply and skewing the market toward luxury housing that can subsidize the affordable units. IZ appears free to everyone except developers because it’s not paid for out of city budgets. But ultimately housing consumers share in the cost of IZ units through a hidden tax. By making new construction more expensive, IZ also reduces the rate at which the prices of older or less desirable housing filters down to the point that it becomes affordable to low- and middle-income residents. Putting affordable housing in new construction ensures that it will benefit fewer people than the same amount of resources otherwise could...”

I read this to suggest that, despite County Board Democrats’ charitable and inclusionary motives, the effects of their IZ policies will be largely perverse - a few lucky winners and lots of people squeezed out.  The people who get squeezed out will include McGuire, Smith, and Lewan, the young professionals who are too well off to enter the affordable housing lottery and not well enough off to afford the $750,000 condos whose profits pay for the affordable units.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Blogpost #11 - Proffers Should Not Be a Slush Fund

Blogpost #11 - Proffers Should Not Be a Slush Fund

This letter to the SunGazette was posted (somewhat truncated) on its web site Oct 29 at     http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-howze-not-telling-whole-truth-in-discussing-housing/article_9edc77e4-5f74-11e4-b315-2b802e28a47c.html  as “Letter: Howze not telling whole truth in discussing housing”

This letter responds to the Sun Gazette article “County Board contenders vow to protect open space” which covered the October 15 Cherrydale Citizen’s Assn candidate night. (http://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/apah-nearly-of-first-arlington-mill-residents-are-from-county/article_049482b4-f7a8-11e3-b918-001a4bcf887a.html?mode=jqm) Both candidates made the crowd-pleasing statement that existing park space ought not be converted to affordable housing nor schools.  It’s particularly encouraging to read this from Mr. Howze, who is running with the endorsement of the Board majority which has encouraged identification of park space for just this sort of conversion!  Mr. Vihstadt spoke more to the origins of the problem: the Board has been whooping through thousands of units in new projects, and “..“We ask for all sorts of things” from developers, Vihstadt said, from public art to placing utilities underground, “but we don’t ask anything for schools.”” Mr. Howze’s response was sort of a red herring: he “..seemed less inclined to make developers pay the price...Student growth is “overwhelmingly coming from single-family neighborhoods,” Howze said. “A block that had two families on it a decade ago now has 10 families on it, 12 families.””

I’ve got a going-in assumption here: that County expenditures can be categorized as ‘nice-to-do’ or ‘must-do’, and that having adequate schools for our children is a ‘must-do’ and public art and underground utilities and affordable housing are ‘nice-to-do’.  This makes a very strong public policy argument that expenditures for ‘nice-to-do’ items should be on the budget as much as possible, so that the Board is forced to examine them in the context of everything else discretionary for which it is spending  If we have off budget resources coming in, as we do from the proffers we extract from developers in exchange for site plan approvals, those resources should be devoted entirely to ‘must-do’ expenditures.  Proffers should not be a slush fund for Board members to dip into for the ‘nice’ items they like. This would be true whether or not schools growth was coming largely from single-family neighborhoods, as Mr. Howze claimed.  Mr. Vihstadt's ads say No Vanity Projects, and I think that's not quite true: we are a very rich county and we can and should do some vanity and charitable things.  But they should be compared to our other expenditures, not shielded from scrutiny.

Even though Howze’s claim that growth is overwhelmingly coming from single-families would be a far weaker argument against developer payments toward schools, I want to raise doubt about whether it’s even true: in a June 19 Article, the Sun Gazette quoted APAH officials that of the 375 people in lottery winner families for the 122 units in the new Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing (APAH)  Arlington Mill Residences apartments, 147 were children under 18.  At $20,000 per year per kid, this is a very large charitable expense the County has taken on!

Now, it may be that residents in non-subsidized apartments are less reproductive than those in subsidized, but I’m going to make up a story about life cycle: some fellow buys a two bedroom condo and rents out the second bedroom to help on the mortgage.  He checks out a couple of library books every year, and consumes $1500 in arrest and booking services for some unfortunate events after a pub crawl involving vomiting on somebody’s lawn while loudly singing Hokie fight songs. With the taxes on his apartment, this guy is pure profit for the County, very nearly!  But then, he turns 30, and he meets somebody nice while pub crawling, and she moves in and nature takes its course and there is now a little one in the second bedroom.   Used to be, someone like that would buy a town house in Vienna, but these guys like Arlington and Vienna’s gotten expensive, so - bang! - another $20000 a year.  I have two kids as Washington-Lee, and both have several friends who live in apartments, so I think my story is at least as plausible as Howze’s.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Blog Post #10 Streetcar tracks and bicycles

Blog Post #10 Streetcar tracks and bicycles

Paul Goddin wrote at Mobility Lab “...There will always be those who are resistant to change.
These are the people who fight the Columbia Pike Streetcar despite credible evidence of its return on investment. These are the ones who use rhetoric like “war on cars” and are fond of excessive punctuation.
And lately, these are the people who write angry op-eds to their local newspaper, decrying bicyclists as out-of-control “terrorists” running roughshod over normal car-driving Americans and calling city officials who install bike infrastructure “totalitarians.” Oh, the humanity!
TDM Takeaway When educating about multiple transportation options and freedom of choice, know that some people are going to be afraid of the changes this implies.
This phenomenon has a name: “bikelash” – a clever word used to describe the resistance and hostility some people demonstrate towards the growing presence of bicycles in their cities..”
( http://mobilitylab.org/2014/10/10/how-to-combat-bikelash-embrace-it/#comment-13005)

In the comments,  Greg posted: “..Greg October 15, 2014 at 11:47 AM Yet another reason to dislike cyclists. What the f*** does the Streetcar have to do with this?”

in response, I wrote: “dave schutz October 27, 2014 at 7:38 PM
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Streetcar tracks regularly cause bicycle accidents. Toronto has had a huge problem with this.

and:

Here are four pieces brought up by a quick Google about trolley tracks causing bicyclist accidents.

http://hiddencityphila.org/2014/05/accident-galvanizes-city-to-address-unused-trolley-tracks-in-center-city/

http://tucson.com/news/local/more-than-bike-crashes-documented-on-tucson-s-new-streetcar/article_932a6387-978a-5a9a-9bcc-9ae66d3ab913.html

http://bikeportland.org/2010/06/01/in-seattle-bike-crashes-on-streetcar-tracks-lead-to-lawsuit-34271

http://www.stmichaelshospital.com/media/detail.php?source=hospital_news/2012/20121026_hn

- See more at: http://mobilitylab.org/2014/10/10/how-to-combat-bikelash-embrace-it/#comment-13005

Blogpost #9 Sungazette put up an article saying Frank O'Leary predicted a Howze win. I put up this comment:

Blogpost #9

Sungazette put up an article saying Frank O'Leary predicted a Howze win. I put up this comment:

Frank O’Leary is a gray eminence genius of Arlington Politics.  Most of what I know is either what I read in the Sun Gazette or what I hear from my close neighbors.  He may well be right.  But his is a sort of static analysis here: this is what Dem voters do, this is what Reep voters do, there will be a lot more Dem voters in the mix in the general than there were in the special which elected John Vihstadt.  Thus: Howze triumphs!  And this whole Vihstadt interlude can be pleasantly forgotten, Libby Garvey’s requests to talk about issues will die for lack of a second, the good times will come again.

Maybe.  I will say that I have never seen my neighbors so cross at the Arlington Board as they are this year.  It’s not just Zimmie’s Twee Little Trolley, it’s the staggeringly bad planning for schools expansion, the casual acceptance by the Board of the idea of converting scarce park space to other public uses, and the sense that this government is NOT operating in the sunshine, as decisions appear in Board sessions with little apparent discussion behind them.   So this suggests to me that ‘what Dem voters do’ may be different this year than in previous years.

It’s certainly not propitious for the Trolley Troika that their hopes are pinned to the lowest-information and least-frequent voters giving them a victory this year, looking forward to 2015 when those folks will stay home.

http://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/prognosticator-democrat-howze-on-track-for-election-in-arlington/article_6752c0e8-5b92-11e4-9188-afa6d1868a37.htmlPrognosticator: Democrat Howze on track for election in Arlington

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Blogpost #8 - letter about legitimacy of reexamining Streetcar decision


 I sent this letter to the Post July 20

Dear Editor:

This letter is to respond to two points from the Patricia Sullivan July 20 article, “More State Money to fund contentious Arlington Streetcar” - Sullivan writes of Libby Garvey’s statements: “... (Board) majority has voted not to hold a citizens’ referendum on the matter “and says the time for discussion is long past... but we also need to be respectful of where the public is now.”” The Board majority is pointing to neighborhood meetings at which the trolley - then estimated at less than half the cost now being quoted - was talked up as part of a general Bethesda-ization of the Pike.  They whooped it through.  Now that the cost has ballooned to a ‘bet-the-company’ number and the rest of the County has noticed, trolley proponents are saying that any rethink is illegitimate.  I don’t accept the idea that a ‘popular approval’ expressed for a hugely less costly project, and only in meetings held in one area of the County, can’t be reexamined.

Sullivan also refers to Walter Tejada, vice chairman when the Board “approved a plan that tied new development on the Pike with saving 6,200 currently affordable housing units.”  This is not quite right: the plan is to extract 6200 affordable units of new housing from developers who, we are supposed to believe, will be magically attracted to a Pike with a trolley, and who would not be attracted to a Pike which has bus transit. The Board has written off the 6200 units of affordable which exist, no hope of preservation, and has written a land use plan calling for an enormous number of additional units in the idea that this will be attractive enough to developers to pay for new affordable units.  And then they say that this will overstress the existing transit, so there must be a trolley.  Everybody knows the story of the man who killed his parents, then asked the judge for mercy on grounds that he was an orphan.

Residents are shaken by the amount of green space proposed to be paved to provide schools for the thousands of new residents for whom the Board has approved units in the last two decades.  No one can reasonably expect that the effects of grossly overcrowding the Pike will be confined to the Pike.  Nor does it seem likely than an overcrowded Pike with a poky 7-mile-an-hour trolley (if it matches the speed of the Portland trolley on which the Board wants to model it) will draw large numbers of eager developers when the Silver Line offers both a speedy Metro and an area with many jobs.

Sincerely, Dave Schutz

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Blogpost #7. Juliet Hiznay sent a letter to the Sun Gazette calling for County hire of additional planners

Blogpost #7: Juliet Hiznay sent a letter to the Sun Gazette calling for County hire of additional planners, I posted a comment.


http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-arlington-is-in-desperate-need-of-more-planning-staff/article_21eae724-5390-11e4-adf3-8f0fc8587b36.html


This from Juliet Hiznay suggests that Arlington County must hire more planners to get us out of the ‘whack-a-mole’ process we now have for school siting, and that it  “will result in 50- to 75-year mistakes”.  She notes the staggering waste of citizen time and County money due to analyzing project after project and seeing them go down in (really, predictable) flames due to public opposition.  Her view is that we need a “comprehensive approach to site analysis across all county sites”, and that hiring a whole lot of additional Arlington County civil servants is how to do this.  Well, maybe.  If we hire a boat load of planners for our current emergency, and who we don’t need on an ongoing basis, it’s a recipe for fifteen- to 30- year budget lines which crowd out other County priorities. 

The original error here, in my view, is that the Board has happily approved project after project, enabling thousands of additional units to be built, without making provision AT THE TIME for the additional school capacity which they would require, and the Board has at the same time elicited proffers from the developers for whatever ‘flavor of the year’ projects were currently in favor - affordable housing and public art/ art studios/ theater most notably.    So now we find ourselves in an emergency situation, and the resources which might have been available if the issue had been faced timely have been spent on other things.  When the Feds do this to a locality it is called an unfunded mandate, but we have done this to ourselves.   

So: two questions.  One is how to get out of the pit we are in, the other is how to avoid digging it ever deeper.  There has been a staggering failure of foresight, but it’s not something which could be addressed by adding some planning positions to the budget: the County Board got us into this pit by approving projects which would require big later expenditures, for schools for the children who would come from them. As well, our jurisdiction is badly underparked, and this gets worse with every two-hundred-unit apartment which gets whooped through the approval process.  These are results determined by the projects being built.  Every proffer we extract from a developer from here on out should be devoted, every proffer we extracted from developers from earlier projects should have been devoted, to these predictable and inescapable effects.  

We can do some ‘flavor of the year’ initiatives - we are reasonably prosperous.  But they should be done on budget, not by using the developer proffers as a slush fund.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Blogpost #6 - “Arlington County Board sets up group to wrangle with elementary-school placement” - TJ site

Blogpost #6 - “Arlington County Board sets up group to wrangle with elementary-school placement”
I sent the below letter to the Sun Gazette 28 July in response to its article about the Working Group on elementary school on TJ Campus (http://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/arlington-county-board-sets-up-group-to-wrangle-with-elementary/article_4eaa0c8e-13e6-11e4-a81c-001a4bcf887a.html)



Dear Editor: On July 25 you reported that the County Board had established a “Working Group” to “..decide whether a new elementary school can be integrated successfully onto the campus of Thomas Jefferson Middle School..”  The County press release was interesting: it said the group would “...evaluate, together with County staff, the feasibility of adding an elementary school to the Thomas Jefferson site..” but it then quoted Jay Fisette saying its task was a “...robust consideration of whether to use a portion of the Thomas Jefferson site for a new elementary school.”

Jay Fisette has the question right, and County staff who wrote the press release have it exactly wrong.  Of course it’s feasible: you hire guys with chain saws to cut down all the trees, then the cement trucks come, structural steel: forty million dollars later,  you’ve got an elementary school! Fisette’s question is: should we?  I think the answer is no.  And I think the answer should be no to New Urbanism/ Smart Growth/ The Zimmerman Steamroller.

When I was a kid I used to read the Reader’s Digest at my grandmother’s house.  They suggested the commies might take over the world with the salami strategy: each slice was very small, and not worth fighting about, but eventually all you had was the end and that wasn’t worth the fight, either. Most jurisdictions in Virginia use the proffer system to get benefits from developers which address the costs their projects will be creating: need for new schools, parks, sewer, streets.  Arlington has been taking developer money and riding the hobby horses of our Board’s majority: affordable housing, public art, Zimmie’s Twee Little Trolley, etc.  And then when it becomes a crisis they go to the taxpayers for the new schools and water system, etc.

We are trying to provide schools for the children of the last fifteen thousand new Arlington residents for whom the Board has permitted housing.  The Board majority wants to allow 25 thousand MORE residents along Columbia Pike, some of them will be turning up at the schoolhouse gate.  Of course the voters are restless! Now the Board is looking at the parks which we prize as a source of cheap land for affordable housing and schools, a lot of salami all at once, and residents are suddenly forced to notice where this is leading.  I kind of wonder sometimes if Chris Zimmerman saw the current turmoil coming and decided it was a good time to get out of Dodge, leaving the current Board majority to try and clean up after him.

To the extent that I have a proposal, it’s this: neither in the close-in suburb which we are, nor in the city into which the Board seems to want to remake us, is it appropriate to have hundreds of acres of golf courses.  We should condemn and acquire the Army-Navy Country Club and build the necessary new facilities there, not on existing park land.  And if the generals and admirals set up a defensive perimeter (I wouldn’t put it past them!) we should acquire the Washington Golf and Country Club, instead.

Blogpost #5


Blogpost #5 Peter Harnik Letter July 29 the Sun Gazette published a letter from Peter Harnik “Arlington spending far too little on acquisition of parkland” http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-arlington-spending-far-too-little-on-acquisition-of-parkland/article_6f282172-1719-11e4-9a50-001a4bcf887a.html

I sent this letter in response:

On July 29, you published an important letter from Peter Harnik “Arlington spending far too little on acquisition of parkland” in which he states that $2 million found in the Board’s bond referenda is ridiculously low and calls out the “Public Land For Public Good” slogan of the folks who want to convert existing parks to other public purposes as Orwellian Newspeak.  His suggestion was “Public Land for Individual Good” - yes!  Parks should not be looked at as a cheap and easy source of land for whatever flavor-of-the-month project some interest group wants!

Now, the assessed value of the 254-acre Army Navy Country Club is $134 million.  Of the 120-acre Washington Golf and Country Club - $60.4 million. Please compare these numbers to the most recent predicted cost of Zimmie’s Twee Little Trolley: $333 million - and THEN you have to maintain it and run it!   I’d like to refer the reader of this letter to a very nice article “Fairways Under Fire: Are Little-Used Public Golf Courses Worth the Space?” co-authored by none other than Peter Harnik (with  Ryan Donahue) posted to the City Parks Blog on July 23, 2012.  A golf course is a grotesque misuse of space in a crowded inner suburb such as ours, becomes even worse as the Board attempts to shoehorn in even more residents and businesses.

Arlington could condemn and acquire the Army Navy Club for around a third of the predicted cost of the Columbia Pike Trolley.  This would solve our high school problem.  It would solve our elementary school problem.  It would solve our playing fields problem, our picnics problem.  It would not saddle Columbia Pike with a third-rate trolley system at the mercy of traffic and stopped FedEx trucks.  South Arlingtonians have long been grumpy about the idea that North Arlington gets better facilities - solved!

There’d be a new Era of Good Feelings toward the Board majority.  Only the golfers would be cross, and they mostly live out of town, anyway.

And I posted this comment on the Sun Gazette web site:

Peter Harnik is a man with immense self-control. If I had written the article “Fairways Under Fire: Are Little-Used Public Golf Courses Worth the Space?” which Peter Harnik (with Ryan Donahue) posted to the City Parks Blog on July 23, 2012, I wouldna had the modesty not to plug it in a letter about how severely underparked Arlington is. But he didn’t, so I will.
It’s been very interesting to look at the comment strings at the website Arlington Now: many different people are posting highly negative comments about New Urbanism/Smart Growth/Infill. When you think about it, the Board’s priorities in recent years have resulted in greater crowding and need for new facilities, and anyone looking ahead at the planned inundation of Columbia Pike with new residents can predict that they will need schools as well as transit. It’s not just the ZimTrolley. Citizens are currently trying to defend what little park space we have from being consumed, and can see that more and worse lies ahead on the current trajectory. The Board needs to find some way to offer voters a more appealing prospect, and if it doesn’t public response will continue to be negative.
Blogpost #4

The Sun Gazette ran “Protect Green Space, Recreation Options as Arlington Gets Denser” June 11 2014 by Mark Antell, Suzanne Bolton, Katie Elmore, Richard Epstein, and Jay Jacob Wind

I sent this letter in response, suggesting that we acquire the golf courses in the County and make them into public spaces and parks:


This letter responds to the Antell-Bolton-Elmore-Epstein-Wind Letter “Protect Green Space, Recreation Options as Arlington Gets Denser” which the Sun Gazette posted on 11 June: Yoo Hoo! Board Majority! Anybody listening?! If you want to ensure a Vihstadt victory in 2014, and a Foster-Brunner ticket taking both spots in 2015, your very best way to do it is to regard park green space as a cheap and available land bank for other public purposes.

Mary Hynes and Libby Garvey should particularly well remember the stubbornness of the opposition spawned by the idea that Quincy Park should be the site of the new Washington-Lee High School. The crisis of public facility space we are now facing was predictable. It stems from years of School and County Board profligacy in approving new market rate housing without using the impact fees the builders paid to build schools to educate the predictable children. We have no business putting up affordable housing units, either, without identifying the funds to pay for the school expansion they will require.

Many of Arlington’s residents moved here hoping for a green and pleasant inner-ring suburb, with competent and well planned public improvements. To see the Board paving over the very things which attracted us, hustling us towards city status, glorying in pub crawls and playing frantic catch-up for the investments required to make ‘city’ work is disappointing. In proposing a referendum on the trolley, Patrick Hope was quoted by Patricia Sullivan (in the Post): “But we can’t keep doing what the voters don’t want us to do.” Zimmerman’s Twee Little Trolley is just one example, though an extremely expensive one. As nearly as I can tell, Fisette’s natatorium is a costly offering for an Olympics which may never come to DC rather than any kind of appropriate response to local swimming demand.

Antell-Bolton-Elmore-Epstein-Wind asked that “no current or intended publicly-owned parkland or recreation facility sites be utilized for any purpose other than parkland, open space or recreation facilities, now or in the future.” One of the worst current land use decisions in Arlington - and it wasn’t bad, when they were put in place, in the semi-rural Arlington of the past - is the devotion of many acres to golf courses. They don’t belong in the inner-ring suburb we are, nor do they belong in the city our Board seems determined that we become. If Arlington has a land bank for desirable public purposes, it should be the golf courses. We should condemn them, pay fair value, and put up the new facilities we want and need on that land, rather than squabbling over conversion of existing and loved parks to other use.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Blogpost #3. John Vihstadt was quoted in the Sun Gazette extolling civility, and the example he cited is ‘trolley’ versus ‘streetcar’ for the Monstrously Expensive Tracked Vehicle Which The Board Majority Wants To Shove Down Our Throats (METVWTBMWTSDOT).  It’s at http://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/vihstadt-no-need-to-deride-streetcar-as-trolley/article_b1037358-4c89-11e4-ad92-d7a6a670f726.html.  Now, I’ve been calling the METVWTBMWTSDOT “Zimmie’s Twee Little Trolley” or, for short, the “ZimTrolley”, so I need to think about this. 

    I like John Vihstadt, and I voted for him and will again.  And he is a civil and serious guy, and he needs to get along with his fellow Board members.  It’s probably good for him, in pursuing his goals as a Board member, to refer to the METVWTBMWTSDOT as ‘streetcar’.  But for me? I am thinking of several things, in deciding whether to follow his lead: Can we bring back ‘Arlington Nice’ by calling the METVWTBMWTSDOT  ‘Streetcar’?  Do we want to bring back ‘Arlington Nice’?  Does it help him win reelection for me to call METVWTBMWTSDOT ‘Streetcar’?  Does it make it more likely that METVWTBMWTSDOT will be consigned to the ash heap of history if I call it ‘Streetcar’?

    I think the answers are ‘no’, ‘probably not, at least right now’, ‘probably not’, and ‘no’.  So I am sticking with ‘Zimmie’s Twee Little Trolley’. 

    Arlington Nice.  I arrived in Arlington in 1985 from Mass., and I was astonished at Arlington Nice.  Politics was a bare knuckle sport where I was from.  It was lovely here.  What were the conditions which made it possible, and why has it deteriorated so much?

    I don’t think the Trolley Troika understands how much the general acquiescence the Board enjoyed during the Zimmerman Era was due to residual good feeling from the Bozman-Milliken-Whipple-Eisenberg-Brunner Board.  That trust has not deteriorated just because of the planned METVWTBMWTSDOT!  There’s the land grab for the few patches of green Arlington has managed to acquired and maintain over the years, and the current immediate crisis in school capacity. 

    I talked about this in a comment I put at the Sun Gazette in response to a July 9 letter from Nancy Sylvester in which she said: “Yet, county leaders knowingly built new high schools without sufficient room for growth.  Our children are now suffering from the incompetent leadership in this county. It’s going to cost ... the taxpayers nearly $600 million to fix the self-made crisis.” (http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-school-capacity-crisis-in-arlington-fault-of-poor-management/article_7fbc4d52-0773-11e4-ab37-0019bb2963f4.html):

“Ms Sylvester, you seem to have been following the advice of Napoleon: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” And that’s charitable of you! But let’s think whether malice would look any different from what we see: utterly predictable crisis which will force actions many citizens don’t like? Check. School people licking their chops while viewing parks as low-cost land banks? Check. Razing the existing Old Wakefield, then demanding funds to build a new middle school? Check. Meanwhile the County Board itself has sown the seeds for this by planning and permitting units for 30,000 new people in recent years, and says we must build a half billion dollars in trolleys to move the tens of thousands of additional new people it hopes to attract, largely to Columbia Pike. The County Board has spent the proffer money it extracted from developers on things other than school construction, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag when the bill comes due.
The Napoleon quote is compelling, but I think instead of calling it malice, exactly, we have an elected group - County and School Boards - which thinks it knows better than the citizens what they should want, and has relatively deliberately set out to create conditions which will force the electorate to accept the New Urbanist vision they share. The Arlington Now blog quoted Chris Zimmerman on Feb 11th: “In the end, each Board member has to make a judgment about what is best for the community...Leadership is the unflinching exercise of that judgment without regard to momentary swings in popularity. I believe that the great success Arlington has had is the result of the combination of leaders who actively engage the people; listen closely to what they’re saying; and then chart a path that they, in their best judgment, believe is most likely to result in the ultimate happiness of the community; and the willingness of the people in this community to let them do so.”
I don’t think the Board majority during the Zimmerman Steamroller era really understood its debt to the Bozman-Milliken-Whipple-Eisenberg era. Voters felt a sense of shared enterprise in Arlington, a general worry that we didn’t want to go the way of Chelsea, Somerville, Newark. Nobody was getting rich from Arlington, we were just trying to keep from going under, keep from losing everything to the outer-ring suburbs. Arlington’s Era of Good Feelings... The decision to intensely develop the Metro corridors was genius, as was the work to keep the schools attractive to the middle and upper middle. That history led to a remarkably durable expectation that the Board was working to preserve the things we valued in our community, and to avoid problems in our future. As a result, people gave the Board a lot of leeway.
Now it appears that lots of people are getting rich from Arlington, developers mainly, pavement is on the advance and green is in retreat, and we don’t see much interest in our views from those we’ve elected. Also in retreat is the easy assumption that the Board knows what it is doing. You said: “Yet, county leaders knowingly built new high schools without sufficient room for growth. Our children are now suffering from the incompetent leadership in this county. It’s going to cost ... the taxpayers nearly $600 million to fix the self-made crisis.”
Whether or not the current Dem establishment survives this crisis of money and of voter confidence, I expect this kind of skeptical voter scrutiny to continue, from you and from many others who have lost confidence that our interests are being considered.

   My view is that Arlington Nice was earned by earlier Boards and has been squandered by the actions of the current majority. 

Blogpost #2

County Board Chair Jay Fisette sent a letter to the Sun Gazette which was published Tues, Aug 12, as Letter: Revised funding plan for streetcar best for Arlington.  The URL for it is: http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-revised-funding-plan-for-streetcar-best-for-arlington/article_8e3290b6-221d-11e4-87b1-001a4bcf887a.html#user-comment-area

The comment I posted follows, there are also two other comments on the Sun Gazette site with similar opinions: 

Chairman Fisette’s letter, above, suggests that everything is swell with the ZimTrolley because the County has shaken down the state for lots of subsidy to pay for it, and it will do great things for the County in the future. I accept neither his assertions about the financing nor his assertions about the value of the trolley.

Fisette’s Assertions about the Value of the Trolley: Fisette says “Our funding plan leverages transportation-dedicated funding to build a streetcar system that will serve generations of Arlingtonians, allow us to build it faster, and generate a substantial return on the investment for use on schools and other community needs well into the future.” The Trolley Troika members have convinced themselves that ZimTrolley will be hugely attractive, that squads of yuppies will pay large rent premia to be near it, and that the County can extract big payments from developers who want to rent/sell to the yuppie hordes which will go to affordable housing, schools, and everything swell.

It’s always a danger to assume that current trends will continue unchanged. Everyone who looks ruefully back after having bought at the top of a bubble will tell you this! In this case, the Trolley Troika seems to assume that the same sort of attraction will bring free spending renters to a trollified Columbia Pike as came to the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor for the Orange Line. At this point, I’d like my readers to go take a look - then come back! - at the photo of the Toronto Spadina streetcars (LOTS of them) stuck behind a fender-bender (scroll to August 22 at http://www.thestar.com/photos/toronto_star_photo_blog/2010/12/2010-and-rick-eglinton.html), the one which the SunGazette has not chosen to run and of which Chairman Fisette said “That picture drives me nuts.” The Portland trolley averages seven miles per hour.

A trollified Columbia Pike will have at least four formidable future competitors in the struggle for yupster dollars, each with far better transit: Silver Line Tysons, Red Line Bethesda, gentrifying areas in the District, and the R-B Corridor itself. The yuppie hordes question itself is pretty fraught: I work in a Federal agency, and we are allowed to hire one person for every three who quit. Defense cutbacks have been huge, and DoD is trying to move activities out of center Washington anyway. Will there BE hordes? Arlington office rental vacancies are 20 per cent just now, if that gives a clue. Will it get better? It always has, but as the mutual funds say, past performance does not predict the future.

In my college economics class, prof talked about ‘value added manufacture’. This means you take steel and concrete and electricity and with it you make something which has more value and utility than the raw materials. My view is that the ZimTrolley is value SUBTRACTED manufacture: you take steel and concrete and electricity and you are making something which has less value and utility than the raw materials. It do very little for rental attractiveness, it will slow general traffic on the Pike. Bonus problem: streetcar tracks hurt cyclists, a lot - http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=187985

In recent days there have been a number of articles in the Post and Wall Street Journal about the competition between Uber and Lyft to produce the next great car sharing app. It’s going to be car pooling. Forget the slug line! In ten years, in Baileys, you will punch in on your phone where you want to go and where you are. In five-ten minutes you are in a car with three others, zooming towards the Pentagon, or Crystal City. The parking lots have re-worked their charging structure: driver pays $20 if he drives in alone, $15 if he drives in with two, $10 if he drives in with three or more. Everybody with a rank lower than general looks for car poolers! EZPass, by the way, will be charging you ten bucks to drive down Columbia Pike, or ten for Route 50. I’m retired by then, and I also have to pay EZPass ten bucks if I drive Columbia Pike at rush hour, so I am motivated to rearrange my schedule and do my Pike errands at 11, when the toll is $3. And the ZimTrolley, if it hasn’t been abandoned and the tracks pulled out leaving hundreds of millions of dollars of debt behind, is still poking along at seven miles an hour. All twelve passengers have seats, though...

In an Uber-Lyft car pool world, none of the prospective tenants will want to pay a premium for living on Columbia Pike, living out Braddock or Lee Highway is just as good, so the value of the rental properties along the Pike goes down to take account of this. The extra tax revenues which the Trolley Troika think they will get because of ZimTrolley are not there, tax revenue is no greater than they’d have gotten without it.

Here’s a bonus bunch-up photo, because I found it when I was looking for the Spadina fiasco:
http://www.blogto.com/city/2013/02/what_made_st_clair_streetcars_bunch_up_like_this/

Fisette’s Assertions about the Financing:

I’ve said above why I think ZimTrolley is a bad thing to do and ought not be built. Now I’d like to do a little deconstruction on Chairman Fisette’s financial piece. I’ve had a general under-which-shell-have-they-hidden-the-pea reaction to the dizzying array of financing pictures the Troika has presented over time as the predicted cost has tripled, but let’s look at the current letter. Broadly, he says:

- ZimTrolley will be built be using other people’s money
- and anyway, it is money which can only be used for transportation, so ZimTrolley is the only thing we can do with it
- and having spent this money we will get back lots of nice extra taxes with which we can meet other public needs in future

So, in order:

- ZimTrolley Will Be Built Be Using Other People’s Money

Fisette: “The transportation surcharge, put in place about six years ago, remains unchanged. Local businesses will NOT pay more taxes under the new funding plan” This kind of refutes itself: the County got businesses to acquiesce to this tax surcharge. If the most urgent use of the tax surcharge is this impending white elephant, it should be repealed. There are many other transportation initiatives we could undertake, and if the tax surcharge is consumed in ZimTrolley, they will either go undone or be built with other taxpayer dollars.

Fisette: “ It is also important to note that that ZERO homeowner-financed General Obligation bond funds will be used to build the streetcar.” We are all paying lots of money and are being threatened with loss of park amenities to clean up after the last fifteen thousand people worth of apartments this Board has approved. There are huge “homeowner-financed General Obligation bond funds” being asked for now, and the need for them is due to the Board’s expansionist program. I assume that the 25 thousand additional people contemplated in the Columbia Pike plan will require taking even more of Arlington’s remaining park land for infrastructure of one sort or another?

The ZimTrolley will cost lots of money to keep running, if built. Is the plan to extract this from local businesses and landlords? It is unheard of for transit to pay for itself in the US, the only question is how big the subsidy will be. Even if we extract the money to subsidize ZimTrolley from local businesses and landlords rather than from homeowner taxes, that money will show up in what they charge for services and rents.

We are all paying lots of money and amenities to clean up after the last fifteen thousand people worth of apartments this Board has approved. I assume that the 25 thousand contemplated in the Columbia Pike plan will require taking even more of Arlington’s remaining park land for ?

- and Anyway, it Is Money Which Can Only Be Used for Transportation, So Zimtrolley Is the Only Thing We Can Do with it

There are a number of potential transportation projects which would actually make things work better in Arlington, unlike ZimTrolley. Here are a couple: Please go read http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/23527/a-wye-is-out-but-a-second-rosslyn-station-may-make-more-blue-line-trains-possible/ and then come back, I’ll be waiting. A Blue line stub at Rosslyn would enable the existing tunnel under the river to be devoted entirely to Orange and Silver trains, but passengers on the Blue line could make the transfer to Orange or Silver on foot. Better still would be a second tunnel under or bridge over the Potomac, carrying Blue line to Georgetown and M Street, and beginning the new loop line: http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/21020/metro-maps-out-loop-line-between-dc-and-arlington/
Both of these projects have real benefits to South Arlington people, unlike the illusory developer benefits of ZimTrolley.

One of the ongoing themes of Arlington public life is the persistent belief of South Arlingtonians that they are getting the short end of the stick from the swells in Country Club Hills. This belief has persisted because they aren’t wrong! A plausible transportation project which could ameliorate this some would be to put Rte 50 into a trench like that in which 66 goes through east-of-Sycamore Arlington. You’d get immediate relief for the long lines of cars which wait to cross south to north every morning, and maybe you could put a deck over it, build the new elementary school, and save TJ Park and the County Fair. And you would greatly lessen the barrier function of 50 in our community.

- and Having Spent this Money We Will Get Back Lots of Nice Extra Taxes with Which We Can Meet Other Public Needs in Future

Discussions of Columbia Pike’s glittering future feature apartment blocks. LOTS of apartment blocks. Residential does not pay for itself through taxes, this is why Manassas is perennially strapped and Arlington is perennially flush. As discussed above, I don’t think there will be a big premium for Columbia Pike rents over other rents, even if ZimTrolley is built. Jack Herrity, the long-time central figure on the Fairfax County Board used to say that residential paid about two thirds of its way and industrial/commercial paid about a third more than it consumed in taxes.

ZimTrolley is not in Arlington’s long term interest, no matter how its finances are tweaked and primped.