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.