Loudoun's Inconvenient Facts

LOUDOUN County has packed roads and, The Post reported this week, packed classrooms -- some of the county's public schools have even resorted to placing students on waiting lists. But don't mention these facts to a Loudoun developer eager to build even more homes in a county with increasingly overstretched public infrastructure -- you might be accused of playing politics.

Just look at what apologists for Virginia developers tried to do to the Virginia Department of Transportation at the end of last month. They sought to discredit an inconvenient VDOT study on what new development might do to traffic in and around Loudoun County. The report in question is a first-of-its-kind VDOT study, estimating that a proposed rezoning of land west of Dulles International Airport would add about 300,000 daily car trips to the region by 2025. It was only earlier this year that the General Assembly authorized VDOT to conduct such an examination. Fast-growth advocates argue that the agency chose to write its debut report on Loudoun -- where the debate between slow- and fast-growthers is red-hot -- because it would benefit Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) as he pressures legislators to pass road-improvement legislation.

In particular, the Right Growth Policy Institute in late August pointed to e-mails written by state officials indicating that Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer altered the wording of the final report to foster skepticism about new development in Loudoun. They also say e-mails show that VDOT's engineers were uncomfortable entering a political fight in the state.

But developers and their supporters are unpersuasive when they attack a report that provides needed information to policymakers and residents in Loudoun County as they consider how fast their community should change. That 28,000 new homes in the area by 2025 would add up to an infrastructural disaster -- for both the county's commuters and schoolchildren -- is an evident fact that deserves Mr. Homer's rhetorical emphasis.

Whether VDOT's engineers liked it or not, when the legislature gave VDOT the power to review the effects of development proposals, the agency was thrown into the state's biggest political debate of the year. If it had chosen to examine another county where development issues didn't loom quite as large, slow-growth activists could just have easily accused VDOT of ignoring the area of the state with the most pressing need for such a study. Even if Mr. Kaine prodded VDOT to look at Loudoun, he was merely keeping a promise he made in his campaign: to study and try to solve Northern Virginia's traffic crisis.