Real Crosstrails losers are Loudoun residents
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On July 17, I found myself alone on the losing side of a vote on the Crosstrails rezoning. But the real losers are the people of Loudoun County.
Let me count the ways:
Taxes. More than $20 million in cash was proffered on the Crosstrails project for improvements to county, regional and Leesburg roads. Now that burden will fall to the county and taxpayers. Why should the residents of my Dulles District have to cough up to fix roads in Leesburg when the developer would have paid for them? Not to mention the lost 1.2-million-square-fee of office space which could have boosted our commercial tax base and lightened the load on residential taxpayers.
2. Water. Crosstrails would have supplied the infrastructure for providing water service to the area – a task that will now fall on the Town of Leesburg, which already cites infrastructure expenditures as justification for doubling rates for out-of-town users. This means the denial of Crosstrails will likely lead to higher water service charges for Rivercreek and the County.
3. Seniors. I'm told Loudoun already has the third highest over-55 population per capita in the Commonwealth, and the number will double in the next 10 years. We need senior housing of the type envisioned at Crosstrails.
4. Community. The best way to stop sprawl and end traffic congestion in Loudoun is to create true communities with the housing, jobs, shopping and recreation people want and need. That’s what Crosstrails would do – not to mention the amenities, including a movie complex, it would offer residents in Leesburg and to the west. Instead, the Board has voted to leave this area essentially unplanned and subject to sprawl-inducing by-right development.
5. Process. Six months ago, the Board of Supervisors amended the Comprehensive Plan to allow for a mixed use development in this area of Leesburg, and seven members of the Board were in attendance at a joint meeting with the Leesburg Town Council where it was agreed that this rezoning application would be deferred until September. What happened in a week? Not to mention that Board Chairman Scott York’s admission that the base zoning is unreasonable provides grounds for a legal challenge.
No matter what your views are on the debate about growth, there are right ways and wrong ways to go about doing County business. As the Crosstrails debacle demonstrates, the on-again, off-again practices of this “just-say-no” Board are rapidly destroying Loudoun’s credibility as a place to do business, opening us up to legal liability, contributing to higher taxes, impeding our ability to untangle our traffic snarls and depriving current and future residents of the benefits of true communities.
All losses the people of Loudoun County can no longer afford to bear.
Steve Snow
Supervisor, Dulles District
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