By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
The Fairfax County Government Center, a 670,000-square-foot hulking horseshoe of an edifice, is so big that if you straightened it out and stood it on its side, it would stretch 90 stories into the sky.
In that case, it would be perfectly suited to anchor the kind of pedestrian-friendly, transit-dependent community of homes, shops and jobs that county officials say is essential in Fairfax to reduce traffic, keep quality of life high and limit climate-changing carbon emissions.
But as it is, the five-story mass of granite and glass, which rises squatly from an isolated, 86-acre sea of asphalt and lawn near Fair Oaks Mall, is suited to nothing of the sort. For years, critics have said the government center is an emblem of sprawl: far from Metrorail, sequestered by divided highways, intimidating to walkers and bicycle riders.
With its million-dollar utility bill, this seat of county government seems at odds with a new initiative to paint Fairfax green.
Even Gerald E. Connolly, the chairman of the Board of Supervisors and author of the campaign, concedes that in a county that practically defined sprawl, it will take more than a truckload of low-wattage light bulbs and a few hybrid cars (in a fleet of more than 6,000) to transform a government with a physical form that mirrors the expansive suburb it serves.
"You can't even find the place," Stewart Schwartz, director of the D.C.-based Coalition for Smarter Growth, said of the government center. "It's always been a symbol of spread-out, automobile-dependent development."
In his "Cool Counties" initiative announced two weeks ago, Connolly set out to make Fairfax a symbol of something entirely different: eco-friendliness and compact, urban development patterns. The multimillion-dollar program, being developed with the Sierra Club, is intended to decrease government emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases by increasing the use of wind power, clean-burning vehicles and environmentally friendly building techniques.
The program would also encourage greener living among the county's nearly 1.1 million residents by providing incentives, such as tax breaks, to motorists, developers and homeowners for certain "green" initiatives.
"We need to be replacing those vehicles with hybrids," Connolly said. "We need to be replacing light bulbs with longer-lasting, eco-friendly fixtures. We need to be looking at retrofitting the buildings in terms of storm water."
Even by Connolly's reckoning, the task will be daunting, particularly at the main government center -- a campus built to serve a car-driven culture at a time when energy conservation and carbon reduction were not nearly the political priorities they are today. The center opened in 1992 to great controversy over its $100 million price tag but not over its location, fuel efficiency or access to transit. That criticism came later.
And now, with Connolly's initiative, the building's five-story atrium and cavernous corridors of empty space seem even more out of step. The place is so big, sitting on a campus alongside two smaller government buildings, that infrequent visitors regularly get lost navigating it. Lisa Sprouse of Centreville, entering the building for a tai chi class on a recent evening, said the first time she visited the complex she didn't know which building she was looking for.
"I was impressed -- it's in a very beautiful setting," said Sprouse, who moved to Fairfax from Pennsylvania 12 years ago. "But I was in the wrong building. I was like, 'Oh, okay. They've got two buildings.' "
Actually, Fairfax has 170, excluding schools -- spread across the county. Consider these numbers:
· Of about 11,000 county employees, only 135 are known to use bus, rail or vanpools to get to work, according to county data. The ratio is even smaller at the 2,900-parking-spot government center, where about 1,700 county workers are based.
· The campus is about six miles west of the nearest Metrorail station -- in Vienna (the entire county is served by only five stations, compared with much-smaller Arlington County's 11). When the government center opened 15 years ago, it was surrounded by undeveloped land. Now, condominiums, townhouses and strip malls are within view, but they are not readily accessible by foot.
· The main building sits at the headwaters of Difficult Run, the largest watershed in the county. Years before Fairfax imposed rigorous regulations for storm-water management on new development, its own headquarters began pouring millions of gallons of runoff into the watershed. Unmanaged storm water can cause damaging erosion and pour roadway pollutants, such as oil, into waterways.
"It's so very, horrifyingly ironic," said Stella Koch, the Virginia conservation associate of the Audubon Naturalist Society. "If you had to pick the very worst place to develop, it would be at the headwaters of Difficult Run. What we know now is not what we knew then."
Koch, Connolly and others argue, however, that the contrast between the government center's form and Cool Counties' vision underscores Fairfax's continuing evolution into a more urban community. Its residents are demanding more action from government to improve transit, conserve land and energy, and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide believed to contribute to global warming.
The county has taken measurable steps to conserve. Wind power accounts for 5 percent of its energy consumption; under Cool Counties, it would rise to 10 percent. Last year, the county replaced thousands of light fixtures, lighting control software and fan motors at a cost of nearly $1 million and with an estimated annual energy savings of more than $100,000. It has opened two "green" fire stations, built largely with recycled materials and energy-efficient systems. It has adopted a far-reaching policy to encourage transit-oriented development.
"We would be the first civilization in history that doesn't rebuild its communities," Schwartz said, arguing that it is not too late for Fairfax to change course. "Think how many times Rome has been rebuilt over the centuries. Or London."
Connolly envisions a future in which the government center is surrounded by a more urban feel: affordable housing for county workers, more commerce and jobs -- and even an extension of Metrorail along Interstate 66.
But Rome was neither built nor rebuilt in a day. And even county officials acknowledge that the government center has a long way to go. On a recent weekday, an empty Fairfax Connector bus rumbled through the massive parking lot, creeping from shelter to shelter in a vain search for a rider. Not a single pedestrian was in view on the sidewalks and trails leading away from the building.
The county's spokeswoman, Merni Fitzgerald, said the complex is "pedestrian-friendly" and within reach, on foot, of restaurants, shops and a grocery store. But Fitzgerald also allowed that she had never actually walked to any of them from the main building.
"That's the challenge," Connolly said. "That's why I'm launching the initiative. We start from a low base, and we've got to get crackin' on serious measures that change the way we've done business in the past.
"If we don't start somewhere, where will we start?"
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