Development Debate Escalates in Loudoun

All told, a consortium of businesses with an interest in developing Dulles South has pledged to spend about $750 million on roads.

That's not including the money Greenvest and others promise to spend on internal subdivision roads, schools, water and sewer lines and even a 200-acre regional park and sports center. Many supporters of Dulles South told the Planning Commission that such development should alleviate, not heighten, residents' fears of more traffic.

"My biggest concern is traffic and congestion, too," said Dan Ritchey of Lansdowne, one of at least two dozen employees of the home-builder Toll Brothers who came to Monday's meeting. "I would like to see planned growth and have developers contribute for roads."

Opponents of Dulles South are unconvinced that developers' promises will counteract the effects of the new homes. They and the organizations to which they belong -- including the anti-sprawl Piedmont Environmental Council -- are increasingly powerful. Although their campaign contributions are outmatched by those of the influential development industry, slow-growth advocates have spread their influence as far as the governor's office, where Kaine has pronounced growth control and better land-use planning as key agendas for his administration.

Supporters of Dulles South have accused Kaine of meddling in the affairs of Loudoun County, which he won in the November election, and using the project to promote his agenda to raise taxes for transportation improvements. But opponents of the Loudoun proposal say the results of the VDOT analysis Kaine ordered speak for themselves.

"They ended up doing a study showing catastrophic results," said Christopher G. Miller, president of Piedmont. Those results factored in most of the roads the developers have offered to build.

Such viewpoints do not address what the results would be without Dulles South's large planned communities, and those outcomes would be worse, supporters of the proposal say. They also don't reflect the county's larger plans to guide growth, including two other proposals the Planning Commission also approved Monday: one to vastly restrict home building in the county's rural west, and a second to reinvent Route 50 near the airport as a commercial corridor where residents could work rather than commute to jobs in Fairfax.

Finally, supporters say, the naysayers fail to consider that the Dulles South proposal is simply a blueprint for development that will guide growth for 20 or even 30 years. No one should expect 30,000 homes to drop onto southeastern Loudoun County overnight.

That is small comfort to those opposed to the plan, who believe, as Dulles South's supporters do, that state government is unlikely to come in and fix things -- but who are not ready to trust the developers, that their plan is better than none at all.

"No one really knows for certain," said state Del. David E. Poisson (D-Loudoun). "We're still very far behind the curve. We've made a number of improvements, but there is still significant congestion trying to get around the county. People who have experienced this in eastern Loudoun are looking at the prospects for Dulles South and saying, 'How do you expect to be able to pull off a miracle that we weren't able to pull off where we live?' "