Board Chair Phyllis Randall talks plans for upcoming year

And yes, Randall, who was the first woman of color to be elected as county chair, is seeking reelection.

“I decided I want to run again because of so many things that we’ve started that I don’t feel we have completed yet and I want to complete,” Randall told Loudoun Times-Mirror in an interview.

Although the Randall won’t launch her re-election campaign formally until March, she said “it’s no secret that I plan to run again.”

In the past 18 months, Democrat Phyllis Randall, who, as Loudoun’s chair at-large, has overseen the overhaul of the county’s land use plan in 2019, a mammoth undertaking that took three years to complete because the plan hadn’t been updated since 2001. Since then, Loudoun’s population has more than doubled.

“It’s been phenomenal to watch this county kind of grow up, from being the little sister to Fairfax County and in the Washington, D.C., area to really being a powerhouse now,” Randall said.

Based on the 2020 US Census, Loudoun’s population has grown by 35% to 420,959 since 2010 alone. The eastern half of the county is home to the nation’s largest concentration of data centers, occupying 25 million square feet with at least 4 million square feet in development, according to a Loudoun Economic Development study. Managing development in the county has posed challenges for Randall and her colleagues on the board who have to contend with scarce land and a growing population. One of those challenges include what Randall calls “attainable” housing for all its residents. It also includes laying down regulations to ensure that Loudoun preserves its rural character, while promoting walkable communities in proximity of newly opened Silver Line Metro stations.

She also was successful in securing passage of the county’s first Unmet Housing Needs Strategic Plan in September 2021 that, for the first time, tackled how the county will meet the needs of those residents who can ill-afford the high rents or purchase prices. She along with like-minded colleagues has pursued environmental and energy policies that will put Loudoun on a track to a net-zero future in line with state goals, and managed to maintain personal property tax at 80% of their assessed value.

The zoning rewrite will be “huge,” Randall said, because it will spell out where development can take place. For instance, the zoning rewrite will dictate how and where new data centers should be located and how existing data centers should be treated in the context of the 2019 land use plan. Supervisor Mike Turner, D-Ashburn, who chairs the Board’s Transportation and Land Use Committee, has been overseeing how data center growth will take place in future, considering that its growth until now remained unchecked.

Although the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) finally opened doors to its much-awaited Silver Line extension out to two stations in Loudoun and the Washington Dulles Airport in mid November under Randall’s watch, she is quick to credit her predecessor, and her present colleague Supervisor Matthew Letourneau, R-Dulles, for their decisive 5-4 vote of approval for the project in 2012, which otherwise would have sunk.

Randall is concerned about maintaining a balance between maintaining reasonable tax rates for Loudoun residents and having enough money to pay for county government services. In July, Loudoun instituted a voluntary 5 cents plastic bags tax from which revenues the county receives are directed toward educating the public about managing waste and funding the purchase of reusable bags for those in the Women, Infants and Children program, a supplemental food program that offers nutritional counseling and education for pregnant or lactating women, infants and children five years or younger who meet income, medical and nutritional criteria. Participants in SNAP also receive the reusable bags.

She is adamant about maintaining the plastic bags tax, which isn’t hard because residents can bring their own reusable bags and that it helps women and children in need. She also is insistent that the cigarette tax stay in place because its revenues are used to fund the housing trust program that supports building affordable housing in the county.

Randall is equally aware that the county can’t provide all the services to its residents so she wants to partner with the nonprofit and faith communities that already are providing myriad services like shelters for abused women, hunger relief, mental health counseling and the ilk. “Our faith and nonprofit partners are a force multiplier, and they allow us to do what government cannot or is unable to do,” Randall said. At her behest, she said, the board approved an initiative to get these two sectors to work with the county government. “So we give some of these nonprofits a steady stream of income to do what we cannot do,” Randall said. As a result, the Leesburg-based Loudoun Abused Women’s Shelter, or LAWS, where women can flee from domestic abuse situations, and HealthWorks for Northern Virginia, which assists residents who do not have good dental or medical insurance, receive county funding.

Going forward, Randall said, “one of the things I really, really want to do is to put in a place a nonprofit campus, where a person who may be in place in their life in need of critical assistance can go to one place instead of roaming to seven different locations seeking assistance.”

It would be a one-stop shop for services like career counseling, mental health services, medical and dental services, and housing assistance for those who can ill-afford them. To that end, Randall said she wants to hold a summit as early as this summer where she can bring nonprofits, faith-based communities as well as various stakeholders including developers to brainstorm how they can pull off such a campus.

At the Board’s last public hearing, a Randall-spearheaded initiative ensured tax relief for spouses and families of U.S. military service members who died in the line of duty, as opposed to the battlefield, owing to PTSD or exposure to “burn pits.” Under this action, Loudoun will allow these spouses to pay one cent, as opposed to the current 89 cents, per $100 of assessed property value.

“This is a big deal because Loudoun will be the first locality in the Commonwealth to offer this relief,” she added.

In the waning days of December, she helped persuade the majority of the Board members despite pushback from certain members of the public to study the impacts of segregated schools in Loudoun while backing a draft resolution, introduced by Juli Briskman, D-Algonkian, that would require county government to ensure that racial equity and fairness is paramount in all its dealings.

As the target of attacks by the Loudoun County Republican Committee on Twitter for policies ranging from her push to seek equity in all county operations to criticizing frequent attacks on the county’s election officers, Randall remains unfazed and unapologetic about her views.

“I will always be forthright and transparent about things that are important to me,” Randall said.

Randall is frustrated with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R, who made Loudoun County “a springboard for his governorship.” She acknowledges now that Youngkin made the right call with the Grand Jury’s empaneling and investigation of the two sexual assaults committed by the same person within months at two separate Loudoun County public schools.

“Clearly, there are issues in Loudoun schools that need to be highlighted and dealt with,” Randall said. At the same time, she rued that Youngkin is maligning Loudoun in his bid for a higher office than the governorship of Virginia. In August, Youngkin decrying, the FBI raid on former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, tweeted: “This same DOJ labeled parents in Loudoun County as terrorists and failed to enforce federal law to protect Justices in their homes. Selective, politically motivated actions have no place in our democracy.”

She said there is a “fringe of people on the right” who are outside the mainstream of the Republican Party who have no qualms about making claims that Loudoun teachers are indoctrinating children about Critical Race Theory, a cross-disciplinary examination by social and civil-rights scholars that laws, social and political movements and media shape, and are shaped by social conceptions of race and ethnicity. They are saying “disgusting things” about teachers and parents. “It’s not true,” she emphasized.

Loudoun public schools and its teachers are among the best in the nation, she said. These remarks are hurting “our teachers and schools.” Calling such remarks “ugly, divisive, callous, and damaging,” Randall said, “I will not appease them.”