realloudoun

In its never ending effort to increase opacity in government, the all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors voted unanimously the other day (to find a record of this action by the Board, simply go to the Board’s award-winning user unfriendly local government website; click on “Board of Supervisors”; click on  “Board Documents”; click on “Board of Supervisors Business Meetings, Public Hearings and Special Meetings”; click on “Business Meetings, Public Hearings”; click on “2013”; click on “09-04-13 BOS Meeting”; click on “09-04-13 BOS Action Reportrv”; download the extremely convenient pdf file; open it on your pdf reader; and scroll down to Item 17 — it’s as simple as that) to eliminate the nuisance of writing up minutes of the Board’s meetings, starting this coming January.

Explaining that it is a terrible burden on the poor overworked staff to actually have to prepare and make available to the public a summary of the Board’s deliberations, public comments, and votes, Continue reading →

Still marveling over the new policy enunciated the other week by our developer-controlled all-Republican (but I repeat myself) Loudoun Board of Supervisors: to wit, that it is now the taxpayers’ job to save land speculators and developers from the financial consequences of their own stupid business decisions.

In addition to approving 100 new homes on what had been a commercially zoned property in the “University Center” area in Ashburn, the Board also gave megadeveloper Toll Brothers a similar fat gift by flipping one of their commercially zoned properties to high-density residential in the “Avonlea Reserve,” adding another 100 new homes.

The cost to the taxpayers of these moves? According to the standard formula used by the public schools to calculate how much the steady-state student population increases with each new home built in the county, it will mean $760,000 a year — that’s forever into the future — in increased school costs, plus $5.6 million in new school construction costs.

The rationale the Board gave for their generosity  Continue reading →

Against some formidable competition, Supervisor Suzanne Volpe (R-Algonkian) last week took a commanding — and perhaps indomitable — lead in the race for the coveted Dumbest Supervisor award among the all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors.

The occasion was the Board’s recent snappy 5-3 vote (with Supervisor Janet “Profiles in Courage” Clarke, R-Blue Ridge, abstaining) to approve one of more than a half dozen pending rezoning applications from developers seeking to convert commercial property to residential, which will add some 10,000 new homes to the county — despite a backlog of 25,000 approved residential lots. Continue reading →

As perenially ethically challenged Loudoun Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio (R-Sterling) explained in his one- year late non-apology apology last week, all of his financial and ethical misconduct was just a result of his not being “careful” enough. Yes, who among us, in a moment of inattention, has not  misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars in public assets, abused employees, turned an elected office into a full-time fundraising operation, and lied repeatedly about it to fellow officials, the media, and the public?

In taking charge of Delgaudio’s office budget, the full, all-Republican Board of Supervisors  was supposedly chastening Delgaudio for precisely these abuses, in which he used funds intended for constituent service and legitimate government expenses instead for personal political operations. One thing the Board did not mention among Delgaudio’s many misuses of funds was the tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money he routinely handed over to his former aide Donny Ferguson — ostensibly for “graphic design” services for his “news(sic)letters” and other mailings, but at rates that  should have raised the eyebrows of any sentient human being — $750 to design a postcard, thousands of dollars for each “news(sic)letter.”

Continue reading →

Joe May, the very conservative Republican who represented Loudoun in the state legislature for donkey’s years, was defeated in June in a Republican primary that mobilized the usual 2,000 Republican crazies for whom no candidate is ever conservative enough, unless perhaps he favors the right of the unborn to bear arms.

May’s mistake was to vote in favor of the very conservative Virginia Republican governor’s plan that coupled a very modest tax increase to pay for long-delayed and much-needed roads.

So his successful Republican challenger, Tea Party crazy and developer (of course: this is Loudoun) David LaRock, has figured out how to avoid that dangerous mistake. He has been sending out a blitz of very expensive mailers in the last couple of weeks in which he vows to build much needed roads, but cut taxes.

No sense in obeying the laws of arithmetic if it just means you get defeated by the local Republican zealots for your pains. Continue reading →