Kaine's Appeal to the Exurbs
Democrat Tim Kaine is pushing growth-control measures in fast-growing Loudoun County in hopes of peeling away enough GOP-leaning voters, says the Washington Post this morning.
Kaine is telling voters that their counties need the authority to restrict development if the road network can't handle the extra traffic.
"You have got to connect your land use decisions with transportation decisions," Kaine said. "There are some who find that that is a huge and controversial concept, the notion that we shouldn't just automatically rezone and develop everything when the transportation infrastructure isn't in place to support it. I think that is such a common-sense value."
The Kilgore camp says:
'"This is an attempt by a liberal candidate to provide government with the tools to tell people where they can live," Kilgore spokesman Tim Murtaugh said. "The exurbs are important to us. We feel very good about the fact that people who live there will be on our side."'
posted by Anonymous @ 7:15 AM
5 comments
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5 Comments:
There is a simple formula to winning some votes in the exurbs:
be anti-growth.
If Kaine can paint Kilgore as a road building growth maniac, then it'll help him mightily.
At the same time, Kilgore's road building will help him in mid-range suburb areas.
Some folks are feeling pretty betrayed about this. I know the Homebuilders had been fairly neutral in this race until Kaine took this step, and his fundraising reflected that. The Realtors had endorsed Kilgore, but they are really fired up now.
Prior to this Kaine was not an advocate for an adequate public facilities law, and it is lobbied constantly and introduced every year. Kaine is ripe for the kind of questions he faces that other high profile issue -- is this position the same as the one you had earlier in your career? if you have changed, why? It looks...expedient.
Unless Kaine is proposing to apply adequate public facilities requirements to development by right, he is simply blowing smoke. Virginia law already permits local governments to adopt APF requirements to rezoning requests if done as a part of the locality's comprehensive plan. The City of Chesapeake already has such a requirement in its ordinance.
Toomanytaxes: Understood, so the assumption is he wants to expand the power over those areas where the zoning is already in place or there is no zoning to prevent a new subdivision. Which of course begs the question, what about the "takings" issue and is he ready for the legal battles over compensation.
Well, let's see. We can't put more development in the exurbs, because they don't have the roads in place, and people don't want more density, roads or no roads.
We can't put more development in urban areas because the roads they have are already overcrowded, and people there don't want more density, roads or no roads, Metro or no Metro.
So where are we going to put 2 million more people, UNLESS WE BUILD SOME ROADS?
If we prevent development "by-right" which is onesy-twosy development as compared to rampant development, then what happens to our rights?
If you think screwing around with gas prices is messing with the market, just wait till every juridiction has an APF in place.
If somebody would say something about HOW we are supposed to connect land use with facilities production, maintenance, and operation, then maybe we could talk intelligently about it.
Considering just roads as APF is a joke, but we don't even know how to do that. Are we going to trade homes for cubicles, and roads for elevators so 95% of the population can putatively walk to work? If we take EMR's suggestion, what happens to the multimillion dollar horse industry?
Are we going to limit housing to say half or a third of what it is in Fairfax or Loudoun, or whatever ratio of habitation to road capacity it takes to give everyone free-flowing access? Are we willing to throw in the towel on sprawl in order to do that?
Are we going to pass a Virginia state law that says the District and Feds have to re-allocate the location of a few thousand jobs so people don't have to drive (quite so far) to work?
If, at rush hour, I have a million people driving on 150,000 miles of roads and they are driving 20 miles, how is that any less congested than a million people driving on 150,000 miles of road and driving 5 miles?
If being anti-growth is what it takes to win in the exurbs, what happened in Loudoun, which flip flopped from antigrowth to pro growth? We can't even agree on what "better land use" is, let alone on how to implement it.
Passing adequate public facilites laws is an idea that is as dumb as artificially suppressing gas prices, proffers, or any other political promise to give away free money.
And we are just talking about roads, when the big enchilada is schools, and if the CBF gets it's way, even that will be supplanted by sewer and storm water control.
Those two million people are still coming, and if we don't have adequate public facilities, then we will have inadequate public facilities, housing included.
I can't think of a better way to build a slum.
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