Nominee for Planning Commission Takes Slow-Growth Debate Personally
By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Barbara H. Munsey and her husband and two young children moved to South Riding nearly a decade ago from a cramped condo in east Arlington to discover a family wonderland just steps from their new four-bedroom home: playgrounds, parks, a pool, schools.
But Munsey also found a community roiling over whether to accommodate families such as hers: families seeking affordable homes, safe neighborhoods and good schools; families responsible for the explosive residential growth that has transformed Loudoun County from a rural hideaway in the region's outer orbit into a traffic-choked, tax-saddled, bona fide suburb.
So Munsey became involved.
Really involved.
She wrote sharp-tongued letters. She sent dismissive e-mails. She criticized officials at public meetings. Today, she is a leading voice for property rights in Loudoun County. And, as if Loudoun County needed more drama in its polarized debate over growth, Munsey might be about to take that voice to the powerful county Planning Commission, to which she has been nominated by Supervisor Stephen J. Snow (R-Dulles).
"When they talked about vinyl McMansions, they were talking about me," Munsey recalled recently about the activists whose hostility to new homes drew her into the public arena. "You can't talk about the cancer of the suburbs and divorce it from the people who live there. Are we all supposed to go away, and the land go back to cow pastures? That's not realistic."
If she is appointed by the full Board of Supervisors next month, Munsey will replace Lawrence S. Beerman, who resigned from the Planning Commission in July after years of public service in Loudoun. And she probably would attract the same kudos -- and criticism -- that Beerman and Snow have received by supporting residential development.
As Snow does, Munsey says she believes in securing infrastructure improvements from developers in exchange for permission to build more homes. The two met during the supervisor's campaign three years ago. Although he could not be reached last week to comment on the nomination, Snow, a retired Army colonel, has said that he turns to Munsey often for advice and ideas.
"Barbara is more than up to the task," Beerman said. "She is well-known throughout the Dulles District. She's extremely competent, and she's a quick study. I think Steve has made an excellent choice."
It would not be accurate to say that Munsey, 48, was prepared to mind her own business when she moved to Loudoun in 1997. An enthusiastic chain smoker with a throaty laugh and a collection of T-shirts with such declarative slogans as "The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves," Munsey is not one for the sidelines.
But fate probably couldn't have come up with a more compelling target for her attention -- and her ire -- than the activists she calls the "no-growthers."
They unrealistically oppose, in Munsey's view, most development. They oppose transportation improvements. And they disdain people like her.
Munsey remembers reading a comment in The Washington Post from a growth opponent shortly after she moved to Loudoun. The speaker, addressing the Board of Supervisors, described families living in "those rabbit warrens they call townhouses" and raising their children to be "nothing more than mall rats."
Munsey was offended. She was also struck by how many people were willing to "throw bombs" but not offer solutions. Too many families like hers are eager to move into Loudoun for "no growth" to be a viable option, she says. Yet that, she believes, is the primary agenda of the leading anti-sprawl organization in the region, the Piedmont Environmental Council.
"You can't be against everything," Munsey said. "That seems to me the position they take. Stopping the infrastructure doesn't keep people out. That's the story of Northern Virginia."
Bomb-thrower is an interesting term for Munsey to use -- to describe others, that is. It's a label just as aptly used to describe her.
"She has been an extremely divisive individual who has for several years gone out of her way to denigrate citizens and communities in western Loudoun," said Supervisor Jim G. Burton (I-Blue Ridge), who opposes Munsey's nomination to the Planning Commission. "Because of her public record of speeches and letters to the editor, I find it hard to believe that she could represent the full public interest."
Consider these Munsey snippets published over the years:
· On the PEC's desire to preserve much of southeastern Loudoun as a buffer zone between the suburbs and the rural west: "If we are to be no more than a layer of foam rubber for the world that is Planet PEC, we 'existing citizens' will never get the roads, schools or public safety needs of our community met."
· On eastern Loudouners who support the PEC's opposition to rapid growth: "God help these people when they figure out that 'the needs of existing citizens' is just the song best calculated to use these folks to carry the PEC's water against service improvements for everyone including them. Who better to turn on the next guy than the most recent last house on the block?"
· On western Loudouners who want little development in the west: "The no-growth wishful thinking that the days when one could live on a 'farm' with horses while painlessly commuting to DC and beyond, with a 0.6 or 0.8% tax rate that will never change, is a desperate fantasy."
Such comments show that Munsey is "out of step" with a majority of Loudoun residents, said PEC spokesman Robert W. Lazaro Jr.
"Does anyone think that traffic or taxes have gone down in the last three years in Loudoun County?" Lazaro asked.
Munsey acknowledges having a role in the divisive tenor of the growth debate in Loudoun. But she said she also thinks that those who disdain her don't really listen to her words.
"I've got years' worth of two- or three-minute sound bites on deposit," she said. "It's all added up to people thinking, 'Well, obviously, she believes this, this and this.' It's hard to make declarative statements about people who you've never actually sat down with and talked to."
Munsey's critics, for example, would probably be surprised to learn that she is a lifelong Northern Virginia resident, except for her student days at Catholic University. Or that she used to ride her bicycle to work when she taught ballroom dancing in Arlington. She doesn't own a cellphone. She wears pink horn-rimmed glasses, circa 1985. And she drives a 12-year-old Toyota wagon that has no fewer than 92,000 miles.
She is not the oblivious, affluent newcomer, which she thinks is how some slow-growth advocates see Loudoun's recent arrivals.
"I don't make 10 vehicle trips a day," Munsey said, referring to how much traffic a new home is thought to generate.
Munsey also doesn't support every development. She opposes high-density projects approved near Dulles International Airport that are supposed to take advantage of a Metrorail extension but which she thinks will pour thousands of vehicles onto area roads before the extension has been completed.
She says, however, that she is open to a controversial proposal to rezone Dulles South to allow as many as 28,000 new homes because, she says, the development would give the county a chance to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in road improvements from developers.
Said Lazaro: "No one believes that adding 300,000 car trips on Route 50 is going to make traffic on Route 50 better."
Against such criticism, Munsey falls back on her mantra: Stopping growth is not an option. But she also acknowledges that not everyone sees it her way, adopting a conciliatory tone that she promises to use more often if she makes it onto the Planning Commission.
"There's going to be a whole lot more to the issues than what I personally believe," Munsey said. That's why, she added, she probably would leave at home a certain T-shirt -- the one that says "Fruitcake. Warning: Contains Nuts."
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