A Chance to Add Your Voice To Community Goals on Growth

If you drive a car or use the Metro, if you have a school-age child, if you or your family members play an organized sport or walk on a public trail, you should be concerned about where Fairfax County is headed.

After decades of "build first, plan later," Fairfax has overstrained its roads, schools and parks, yet massive development proposals keep coming, without clear answers for how the pieces will fit.

On Tuesday, you have an opportunity to help create a better way to plan the county's future -- one that reflects broad community needs and values.

At a town hall meeting in Oakton High School's auditorium, Fairfax residents will unveil and discuss the first draft of a 12-point Citizens' Agenda for Responsible Growth -- a plan for Fairfax's future that we are asking all residents to help create.

The meeting, which will run from 7:30 to 9 p.m., will touch on certain hot issues, such as Tysons Corner rail and the expansion at Fort Belvoir. But the main goal of the Citizens' Agenda is to lay out broad citizen priorities for Fairfax. The agenda is nonpartisan and nonpolitical and is not directed at any specific officials.

The Citizens' Agenda, which you can read at http://www.fairfaxcitizensagenda.org , has several key, common-sense goals:

· End the practice of "blind planning," in which development is approved without clear estimates of traffic, school and other impacts.

· Establish strong enforcement of developer promises and code compliance, whether it's saving trees or building roofs to the proper height.

· Offer strategies that enable schools, parks and key transit corridors such as Route 1 to adapt to increased growth.

· Change the role of residents in Fairfax County planning, giving them a central role in land use decisions that affect our future.

Why is a Citizens' Agenda important now, and why should you take the time to get involved?

Major transit and development decisions are being made that will have enormous impacts in virtually every area of Fairfax: from Tysons Corner to western Fairfax, Annandale and Route 1.

Unless residents declare a positive public agenda, we will continue to be victimized by agendas that undervalue our quality of life.

I urge you to join us Oct. 3 and to take part in this community discussion in the coming months.

Those who can't speak that night will be invited to write down key priorities for improving our quality of life. Participants will be asked to take the Citizens' Agenda back to homeowners associations for their opinions.

Our goal is to return in February 2007, to ratify a true community vision for our future that we can present to supervisors and to any candidates in the 2007 state and local elections.

In the end, only residents -- not developers or county planners -- can answer one simple question: What kind of community do we want to live in? On Oct. 3, we need you to help answer that question and to help create a future we all can live with.

Charles Hall, who lives on Blake Park Court near the Vienna Metro station, is chairman of the Providence District Council, one of the civic groups organizing a town hall meeting and the Citizens' Agenda.