Loudoun Businesses Say Tax Deal Didn't Work

Owners Near Route 28 Paid to Improve the Highway; Now They Say Their Needs Are Being Ignored

When businesses along Route 28 took the unusual step of taxing themselves to build a wider, better highway, they expected easier access would mean more customers. Instead, they say, the changes have left them off the side of the road, out of sight and hard to find.

"We literally had people calling us on cellphones saying: 'I can see you, but I can't get to you. Bring me in.' That kind of thing," said Craig Fritsche, vice president of Tart Lumber Co. on the southeast corner of Route 28 and Church Road. "We've been orphaned by all the interchanges being built and by the way they were built."

Property owners along Route 28 agreed nearly 20 years ago to pay extra taxes to finance new lanes and at least 10 interchanges in a first-of-its-kind effort to transform the road. The heavily used section between Route 50 in Fairfax County and Route 7 in Loudoun County would change from a stop-and-go jam into a high-capacity, limited-access highway.

Six of the 10 interchanges are complete or nearly so, and design work on the final four is scheduled to begin soon, Fairfax officials said last week. With each new interchange, Route 28 is rapidly morphing into the high-speed freeway local officials imagined.

But the public-private partnership was intended not only to relieve congestion. It was also supposed to promote economic growth by providing better access to nearby Dulles International Airport, to large employers such as AOL and to other places, including a Wegmans grocery store.

The owners of Tart thought the changes would be so dramatic that they donated land to the effort in addition to agreeing to the tax.

Individual cases of reduced access are common casualties of major improvements such as those planned for Route 28. But Fritsche and some other business owners say their plight has been needlessly worsened by two factors: The Virginia Department of Transportation designed interchanges that have cut off critical local roads, and the agency has failed to make promised improvements to smaller roads that would have provided direct access.

The business owners also say some of the road closures are unnecessary. They say the closures do more than threaten the livelihood of businesses; public safety is threatened by limiting access for police and fire officials. Some of their accusations are backed by a powerful coalition of public officials, including fire officials, state lawmakers and state Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer.

"They wanted to shut this road down just because some engineer said, 'We should shut it down,' " said Michael Lindsay of Lindsay Volkswagen of Dulles, a neighbor of Tart Lumber, which relies on Cedar Green Road for access to Route 28. The state plans to close Cedar Green once an interchange at Sterling Boulevard opens to the south, but Lindsay and many others say that allowing right turns on and off Cedar Green poses no safety threat to traffic.

Homer ordered a new study of the Cedar Green intersection, which was scheduled to close next week but will remain open while the study is conducted. He said a final decision will be made by Transportation Department Commissioner David S. Ekern.

Homer said he appreciates that property owners who bought into the special tax district did so with the promise of a deeper commitment to road improvements than Virginia has delivered.

But he and others also said the Transportation Department must balance that against what they fear could be a number of other requests. By allowing one at-grade access point to remain open, the department could invite businesses at other locations to lobby for similar changes. Eventually, such efforts could thwart the larger goal, which is improving traffic along increasingly crowded Route 28.

Gerald E. Connolly (D), chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, said: "You've got a sort of classic clash here between individual business owners and their needs and desires versus the greater common good of trying to move large volumes of traffic along a very congested highway."