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.