Sunday, September 23, 2007

Waxpool Fixes: Politics Rather Than Solutions

Waxpool Road in Ashburn is undoubtedly one of the worst bottlenecks in Loudoun County. It's also a daily necessity for residents who commute to jobs in Fairfax County and beyond, and the lifeline upon which Loudoun's high-tech triangle lies.

Over the past several years, supercharged growth in the area has created a colossal traffic impasse on this road that our local leadership seems unable to fix. Residents from Ashburn and throughout Loudoun have repeatedly complained to our supervisor Stephen J. Snow (R-Dulles) about Waxpool congestion, but those pleas have been virtually ignored.

A few months ago, however, Snow suddenly announced the formation of a Waxpool Task Force that was proposed as a citizen/business-led effort to study and find solutions to our traffic nightmare. Although the timing of this initiative was suspect, coming during election season, I was hopeful -- like everyone else in the community -- that perhaps progress could be made.

I attended the first two Waxpool meetings with other residents and recall being immediately struck by three things:

1. Developers who have rezoning applications pending with Loudoun County were up front and center.

2. Supervisor Lori L. Waters (R-Broad Run), whose district encompasses approximately half the Waxpool area, was conspicuously absent. Rather than include her, Snow had invited one of her opponents in the Broad Run race, Jack Ryan.

3. Snow told us that he knew of no other way to resolve our traffic problems except to build more roads. And building roads came at a cost: even more development and traffic, the ultimate Catch-22.

What we would have preferred to hear about were alternative solutions to more roads, such as short-term public transit, telecommuting incentives, traffic-calming ideas and more park-and-ride lots.

I later concluded that these meetings were more about politics than any real attempt to deal with our traffic problems. This was underscored a few weeks later when all of us discovered that we had not been invited to the third meeting of the Waxpool Task Force, where developers, area businesses and others talked in private. Instead of helping the people of his district, Snow had decided to create another do-nothing task force, similar to the Route 50 initiative that effectively neutralized public participation two years ago.

We in Ashburn seem to be left with no voice, few solutions and a representative whose disdainful attitude toward citizen involvement has been made only too clear. Snow acts as if his developer friends were his constituents, and, meanwhile, we all have to wait in endless traffic for solutions that promise to bring more of the same.

Karen J. Ficker

Ashburn Citizens United