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