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.