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Va. City's Slow-Growth Policy Intrigues Planners, Rankles Developers

Here in the land of shopping malls, farmland and sprawling subdivisions near Virginia Beach, they may have found a solution to the crowded schools, choked roads and stretched budgets that bedevil Washington's fast-growing outer suburbs: Don't build new houses until there's room in the classrooms and on the highways.

Under a first-of-its-kind policy in Virginia, builders in Chesapeake who want to rezone land for new houses are given a thumbs-down by city officials if the neighborhoods would bring in too many children and too many cars.

The city's slow-growth policy has captured the attention of activists, planners, civic leaders and builders in Northern Virginia, where property rights reign supreme and politicians rarely deny landowners the right to build.

Although Maryland empowers counties to control the pace of construction, Virginia law restricts such efforts, and builders have won court cases against local governments that tried.

But as Northern Virginia jurisdictions search for ways to grow without being buried by the cost of serving new residents, the debate over whether to mimic Chesapeake-style slow-growth policies has become intense.

In Prince William County, planning commissioners have endorsed a proposal that closely resembles the Chesapeake policy, and supervisors will vote on the idea this summer. And in Loudoun County, elected leaders on Tuesday will debate whether slowing development should be the top priority in the county's new strategic plan.

"We would like to encourage a much tighter standard," said Prince William Planning Commission member Billy W. Isbell (Woodbridge), a proponent of Chesapeake-style policies. "We are not going to make it illegal to develop. But it's going to be tougher to develop out where there are fewer services."

Peggy Maio, a slow-growth activist in Loudoun County, said supervisors have a responsibility to delay new homes while the county spends money to improve roads and schools for current residents.

"We [need] to make sure that communities already here get what they need," she said. "We just need some political will."

But Prince William developer Kenneth O. Thompson, a harsh critic of slow-growth policies, said forcing new residents to foot the entire bill for facilities that serve all residents is unfair and illegal.

"If the county proceeds with something like this here, they will be inundated with litigation," he said. "The facts indicate that these things just do not work."

Chesapeake officials, politicians and community leaders suggest that despite continued criticism and some notable exceptions, the development policy has begun to produce the results advocates had promised. Home builders and some business leaders, meanwhile, say it threatens economic development and unfairly blames developers for the city's problems.

The Chesapeake policy establishes crowding standards for schools and rates roads on their ability to handle increased traffic. It applies only to newly proposed construction, not to projects approved earlier but not yet built.

If, for example, a developer proposes building a neighborhood that county planners estimate would send a school's enrollment to 120 percent of its recommended capacity, the planners recommend that City Council members reject the project. A development that would increase traffic to the point that a nearby road or intersection receives a grade of E or F on an A to F scale also draws an automatic recommendation for denial.

City Council members are not required to follow staff recommendations to deny rezoning applications, although city officials said such advice carries a great deal of weight.

"It cannot be a litmus test. You have to reserve to the government some legislative discretion," said City Attorney Ronald J. Hallman. But "all things being equal," council members "would more than likely deny" approval of a project recommended for rejection.

Chesapeake's policy stops short of tougher measures that have been enacted elsewhere.

In Montgomery County, for example, planning staff members can automatically delay any construction if they can show that it would overwhelm schools, roads or other facilities -- a policy credited with keeping some of the county's rural land from development.

Even with such tools at their disposal, Maryland counties have struggled to cope with the costs of population growth. Such pressure prompted the Maryland legislature this year to adopt Democratic Gov. Parris N. Glendening's so-called Smart Growth plan, which is aimed at slowing suburban sprawl by steering state money for roads, sewers and other projects to already-developed areas.

In Chesapeake, alarmed civic leaders came up with their new rules after the city grew from 150,000 in 1990 to 182,000 by 1995. Schools were quickly crowded, forcing an increasing number of students to be taught in temporary trailers.

Since the rules were enacted, the number of occupancy permits issued for new homes in Chesapeake has dropped by more than 50 percent. And the city's population, which had been growing by about 4 percent a year for a decade, has slowed to an increase of about 1.5 percent a year.

"I want to make it very clear that this is working," said City Council member John M. de Triquet, a chief proponent of the slow-growth policy. "We need a city that is managed in an orderly way, that is growing in a predictable, understandable way. That's growth management."

At the same time, economic development in the city does not appear to have suffered. New business growth and job growth in the city has picked up in the last two years, according to the city's economic development office.

In 1995 and 1996, 2,034 jobs were added in the city, compared with slightly more than 1,000 jobs in the previous two years. Several major companies, including Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, have opened large manufacturing and distribution facilities here during the last two years.

"It's hard to argue with the [new] policy in Chesapeake," said Bill Halloran, executive director of the Chesapeake division for the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce. "It doesn't go so far as to choke off economic growth."

Developers and home builders in Chesapeake have staunchly opposed the two-year-old policy from its beginning. They say it has shifted construction of homes to areas of the city already zoned for residential uses and has driven up land prices by as much as 25 percent.

"It has forced development to where existing zoning is," said Greg Dodd, vice president of an engineering firm that represents home builders. "But these areas may not have infrastructure either, so the city gains nothing."

Builders say they have become easy targets for blame. They said the problems associated with growth should be the responsibility of the local government, which they say has failed to set enough money aside for road and school improvements.

They note that the city has lowered tax rates twice in the 1990s. That's an indication that budget woes might not be as serious as city leaders suggest or that city officials have contributed to the growth problems by rebating money to taxpayers -- a politically popular move -- rather than building roads and schools, builders say.

"It's popular to just blame the developer, but I think it takes a lot of work to look ahead at those needs," said R.J. Nutter, a land-use lawyer who works in nearby Virginia Beach. "Some of this has to be borne by the municipal governments, who should spend prospectively on areas where development is occurring."

Finally, home builders and members of the business community say they are worried that activists and elected leaders may go even further, seeking legislation to stop virtually all development.

"The chamber's position always has been that we don't want anything that chokes off growth completely," Halloran said. "You have to understand that you can't have economic growth without some residential growth."

Meanwhile, some slow-growth advocates are just as unhappy with Chesapeake's new policy, saying it doesn't go far enough and has too many loopholes that allow development.

The city's policy does allow for exceptions: Standards are eased for commercial and industrial developments and for homes built exclusively to serve elderly residents with no school-age children. Projects designed as planned developments -- in which builders have an overall plan for a neighborhood and develop it in stages -- do not have to meet the standards, either.

In addition, City Council members have informally waived the school standards for very small residential developments that might add only one or two students to an already crowded middle school.

Those exceptions worry Gene Waters, the president of the city's civic association.

"For years, the developers here could build anything they wanted to whenever they wanted to," Waters said. "When you allow single-family houses, you are obligating the city to pay out money. We aren't saying not to build. We are saying to wait."