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.