Hard Lessons of Progress : Voters in Two East Coast Counties Find That It’s Not Always Possible to Seize Control of Their Destinies

On a clear day, Audrey Moore can look from her 11th-floor office a half-dozen miles across the green Virginia countryside to the gleaming glass office towers of Tysons Corner. Once a country store amid cow pastures, it is a city that now has more office space than Miami.

Moore and other residents of these prosperous suburbs west of Washington regard Tysons Corner as the most visible result of years of unrestrained growth, a place of ferocious traffic jams, where restaurants offer a “gridlock relief” happy hour for commuters.

“We’ve got hundreds of miles of clogged roads because the county didn’t phase in development,” Moore said. “They just said to the developers: ‘Y’all come in and go wherever you want.’ It was a free-for-all.”

Now, Moore occupies that 11th-floor office as chairman of Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors, elected overwhelmingly by the voters in November on a promise to slow down development and ease the county’s legendary traffic jams.

But putting the brakes on years of unimpeded growth may be a lot more difficult than some of Moore’s political supporters suspect.

“We’ve already gone past a couple of serious fail-safe points,” admits Denton U. Kent, the deputy county executive in charge of planning and development. Development, he says, “occurred far more rapidly than people anticipated.”

Suburbs Now Urban

Voter revolts similar to the one that swept Moore into the chairman’s office--deposing an incumbent with a more favorable attitude toward development--are likely to become more common across the country. The reason: a suburban office-building boom that began in the late 1970s and continues to pour traffic onto already overloaded streets and freeways, transforming suburban neighborhoods into urban areas.

One of those rebellions is already in high gear in Orange County, like Fairfax County an affluent suburban area studded with clusters of office buildings and bogged down in the commuter traffic these new “suburban downtowns” have generated. Both counties have grown at a breakneck pace, outdistancing the ability of their roads to keep up and fanning a deep resentment in the prosperous suburban neighborhoods where office towers now loom.

In Orange County, the sponsors of an initiative that would link new construction to specific levels of traffic and public services gathered 96,000 petition signatures and forced a reluctant Board of Supervisors to put the measure on the June 7 ballot.

Now, developers nationwide are watching to see what happens at the polls.

“You should all be looking at the vote in June,” Christopher B. Leinberger, author of an Atlantic Monthly article on suburban downtowns, warned developers at a recent Urban Land Institute conference at Tysons Corner. “We’re at the end of an era of relatively little government interference with the development process.”

In Fairfax County, two lessons seem evident from the area’s experience with unrestrained growth:

* Traffic and sprawl can be translated into potent political issues, ignored or downplayed by politicians at their own peril.

* Making a dent in an existing traffic problem is never easy or simple.

In the mid-1970s, the political landscape was different in Fairfax County, and it was then that a general plan--a sort of blueprint for development--was adopted that deliberately did not include enough new roads to accommodate all the houses and offices it envisioned.

As a slow-growth strategy, it was a bust. The development rushed in anyway, and traffic on the existing roads just got worse.

This is the story of the legacy of that era, of the political upheaval that swept Moore into the chairman’s seat by a margin that surprised even her supporters and tilted the Board of Supervisors from pro-growth to slow-growth.

It began a few years ago and a few miles to the west of Tysons Corner, in an area where developers were planning to build an even larger city, around Dulles International Airport east of Washington, a city that eventually could have as much office space as all of Philadelphia.

The area was linked to the rest of the Washington suburbs, however, by roads that are not wide enough to handle the expected traffic, many of them following routes laid out in Colonial times. And that alarmed some of the supervisors.

In late 1986, Moore and three other supervisors on the nine-member board proposed rezoning the airport area and thousands of other acres around the county to cut back on high-rise office construction and put the brakes on development until roads could be improved.

“The developers went up the wall,” recalled Lilla Richards, a community activist who is now a supervisor.

The Chamber of Commerce bought ads saying the proposal would cost the county thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in lost property taxes.

Moore eventually lost the zoning battle, as she had many other skirmishes in her 16 years on the board. Her position long had been that growth was coming to Fairfax County too fast and that roads and other public services were not keeping up.

But the issue continued to simmer, and last year Moore, a Democrat, rode it to victory over the incumbent board chairman, Republican John F. Herrity.

During the campaign, Herrity called Moore “St. Audrey” and ridiculed her as naive. Moore, for her part, warned voters they might soon need “to make an appointment to get on the Beltway.”

Moore won the countywide, at-large race for chairman by a 3-2 margin despite heavy campaign spending by the business community against her. Three like-minded candidates also won, two of them unseating pro-business Republicans and tipping the balance on the board.

Now, the county’s biggest developers are waiting to see what Moore will do.

“I don’t notice any perceptible difference in this board,” developer James T. Lewis says in a seventh-floor board room overlooking the 18th-Century architecture of historic Alexandria, Va.

For the time being, he says, he’s satisfied with Moore.

Lewis, no stranger to controversy, is the developer of a large, architecturally distinguished office building at Tysons Corner, and he already has permission to build two more. But his plans for a 52-story glass office tower across the Potomac River in Maryland--which would have towered over the Washington Monument--were shot down by the Federal Aviation Administration as a hazard to aviation.

Moore, says Lewis, “has gone to herculean lengths to mend fences with the business community” since her election.

In fact, some developers are saying there is not much Moore can do now to slow growth because permission to build new offices, factories and housing on much of the county’s remaining developable land already had been granted by the previous board. And Virginia law does not allow local governments to impose building moratoriums or otherwise interfere with an owner’s right to develop his property.

Under Virginia’s conservative legal tradition, a measure like the Orange County slow-growth initiative isn’t possible. Nor could Fairfax County pass a law like the one in effect across the Potomac River in Montgomery County, Md., which--like the Orange County measure--permits new development only when roads and other services are adequate to handle them.

Builder Protection

And Virginia’s local governments can’t require builders to contribute funds to the building of roads next to their new offices or factories, as many places in other states--including California--have been doing.

Instead, Virginia has a cumbersome system of voluntary developer contributions that requires a lot more cooperation and negotiation between the Board of Supervisors and the developers.

And so a sort of uneasy truce has been established between Moore, her allies on the board and the developers, with Moore adopting a conciliatory stance.

“I never spent much time before with the business community,” says the soft-spoken Moore. “I had youngsters in school and didn’t go to dinners and happy hours and all that stuff.

“But I have been going in the last six months. I know the jury’s still out on me.”

With few avenues available to her to slow the pace of growth, Moore has done something that some observers find ironic: She has emphasized road building in her first few months in office.

While developers point to a much-improved traffic flow through the glass canyons of Tysons Corner in the past few years because of widened roads and intersections, getting there from elsewhere in the county is still a trying experience. And the Capital Beltway around Washington still often turns into a parking lot at rush hour.

“The problem for this board is that when you run a campaign and you tell people you’re going to do something, you better do it,” says former board Chairman Herrity, now exiled to his insurance firm a few blocks from the county office building in downtown Fairfax. “My opponent doesn’t have a legal way to do that, and people are suffering from overloaded expectations.

“As far as I can see, it’s business as usual after all the campaign pyrotechnics.”

Nonetheless, Moore said in an interview that she will probably revive her controversial proposal to rezone 10,000 acres of county land, including much of the land around Dulles International Airport, to prevent the enormous amount of high-rise office construction planned for the area.

Compromise Reached

She has already won a compromise with the county’s biggest developers: They agreed to drop a plan to ask the Legislature to pass a law preventing the rezoning. In return, Moore said, she agreed to phase in any rezoning of the 10,000 acres gradually.

Fairfax County, like Orange County, is one of the fastest-growing and most affluent places in the country. Federal employees began spilling out of the District of Columbia as early as the 1950s, looking for inexpensive housing. Shopping malls followed the new subdivisions, and then boxy glass office buildings began to sprout around the county in the 1970s, soon filling with defense contractors and others.

The Fairfax County economy is diverse, with a healthy sprinkling of computer companies and other high-tech firms. Its citizens are affluent and well-educated, and its growth in the past 30 years has been close to phenomenal.

From a sleepy farming area of 41,000 in 1940, Fairfax County has grown into a booming case of suburban sprawl. By 1995, according to planners, northern Virginia will have more jobs than Washington, D.C.

It also will have tremendous traffic problems, transportation experts say. Roads were built out from Washington like spokes in the 1950s, when everyone assumed people would live in Fairfax County’s burgeoning subdivisions and commute across the Potomac River into Washington to work. It hasn’t worked out that way; half of the county’s workers are now employed within its boundaries.

It was in 1975 that the supervisors approved the current comprehensive plan for the county and purposely did not provide for enough roads to keep up with the plan, hoping that would slow development.

Most of the new construction back then was homes, and the county’s commercial tax base was shrinking. The board soon changed course and embarked on an ambitious plan to bring in offices and factories.

The drive for commercial construction exceeded the board’s wildest dreams. And so did the traffic.

Republican northern Virginia has been starved for years for road money by a rural Legislature that is responsible for all of the state’s roads, even the local ones.

To raise road-building funds, Moore has proposed a $150-million bond issue, which must be approved by the voters, and is trying to extract more money from developers. But she concedes that what she is trying to put together is a drop in the bucket, contrasted with the estimated $4 billion in road work the county needs.

Proceeding cautiously on the issue of rezoning, Moore has asked for an overhaul of the county’s general plan, which could take as long as a year. Zoning changes at Dulles Airport could be tied into that process.

But Lilla Richards, one of Moore’s new allies on the board who is privately described by developers here as “out of the political mainstream,” is getting restive.

“There’s an atmosphere here of waiting for the other shoe to drop that doesn’t help anybody, including developers who need to know what’s going to happen so they can plan their projects,” says Richards, whose resume as a community activist runs to a full page.

“I’m ready to get on with it, but the majority of the board feels we should go through these steps first. But we make changes in the ordinance every day, generally to loosen it up for developers. And the longer we wait, the more plans are filed for the airport area.”

In the long run, however, economic forces on the national level may do more to slow growth in Fairfax County than the Board of Supervisors. Tax reform in 1986 ended many tax incentives to build offices, hotels and other commercial buildings, and the recession many economists expect after more than five years of prosperity may also put a dent in the county’s growth.

The planners at the county office building in the city of Fairfax have already noticed that the total number of building permits issued has begun to tilt toward residential construction after running about even with commercial construction for years.

“Until the market sends signals to people that it’s saturated, growth won’t slow,” says Kent, the county planner. “Short of that, there’s no way the public can ordain a change.”

A few blocks away are the offices of A.J. Dwoskin & Associates. Albert J. Dwoskin is an independent-minded developer who has taken a cynical view of both sides of the growth controversy while paying out of his own pocket for a consultant’s study suggesting ways to solve the traffic problem.

“I think each side will take certain actions and declare victory,” Dwoskin says. “I think the county will tinker with the zoning ordinance to reduce the permitted density, for instance.

“But the neighboring counties have thousands of acres of developable land left, and the people who move there will still be driving over our roads no matter what we do.”