Development Debate Escalates in Loudoun
30,000-Home Dulles South Plan Advances

By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

A plan to open up a vast stretch of southeastern Loudoun County to roughly 30,000 new homes is prompting a fierce debate reaching all the way to Richmond over how best to guide growth and prepare for its inevitable effects on traffic, taxes and quality of life.

On one side are those who believe that so many new homes -- equivalent in number to four Fredericksburgs -- would hopelessly paralyze a region already struggling with traffic congestion. On the other are those who see an opportunity in Dulles South to coax hundreds of millions of dollars from developers to build roads, schools, parks and utilities that government can't afford.

Both sides agree on one crucial point: Too little has been done for too long to address Northern Virginia's mounting traffic troubles. What they can't agree on is what should come next: a major slowdown of residential growth -- or a partnership with developers to exact unprecedented contributions to the road network.

Loudoun's influential Planning Commission weighed in with the latter view late Monday, voting 6 to 2 to forward the Dulles South proposal to the Board of Supervisors. The panel did so after hearing from about 90 speakers, two-thirds of them in favor of opening Dulles South to development.

"We know that growth is coming," said Robert J. Klancher (Broad Run), vice chairman of the Loudoun Planning Commission. "And we're saying this is where we think it ought to be."

At stake is a largely undeveloped, 9,200-acre swath of farms and two-lane highways just west of Dulles International Airport. Known as the county's "transition area," it is designated for semirural development, intended to serve as a buffer between the county's dense, suburban east and its vast rural west.

Under consideration, however, is a sweeping proposal to remap the area to allow suburban-style planned communities, including a mix of single-family houses, townhouses, apartments and condominiums.

The Dulles South plan is among the most far-reaching in the region. It has attracted the attention of politicians in neighboring jurisdictions and of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), who ordered the Virginia Department of Transportation to conduct an analysis of the traffic that would result.

The proposal has yielded dire reports predicting as many as 89,000 new residents in the southeastern corner of the county, nearly 19,000 new pupils at already bursting county schools and up to 300,000 daily car trips on regional highways not only in Loudoun but also in neighboring Fairfax and Prince William counties.

"We are not 'no growth,' " said Lori Kimball of Leesburg, president of the Preservation Society of Loudoun County and a speaker at the hearing Monday. "But we do not support Dulles South because of the impact on traffic and taxes."

Such views are vehemently rejected by supporters of Dulles South, who point out that the traffic is already here -- and will continue to worsen for two reasons: Growth is not likely to stop, and Richmond has given no sign that significant contributions are coming anytime soon to expand the road system.

By contrast, the developers lined up to build in Dulles South are prepared to spend hundreds of millions on infrastructure. Greenvest, the Vienna-based developer that hopes to build 15,000 homes in Dulles South, has offered to spend $192 million on an extensive road network surrounding its property, including the widening of Route 50 and the construction of several new highways and interchanges.

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?' "