realloudoun

When we last left the touching tale of the efforts by the son of Supervisor Geary Higgins’s (R-Catoctin) appointee to the Historic District Review Committee to build a tasteful 20,000-square-foot mansion on a hill in a national historic district, the matter was scheduled soon to come up before the committee for consideration.

A reasonable question of course was whether Lewis Leigh would recuse himself from voting on his own son’s application to build a house within the protected Shelburne Glebe district — where Leigh Senior also owns property, a fact he highlighted in supposedly establishing his “qualifications” to be a member of the committee. (That was rather interesting in itself, given that by statute members are supposed to have some expertise in historic preservation. Under the reasoning championed by Higgins and the rest of the all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors, apparently disliking government regulation and having a track record trying to evade said regulations makes one an expert on said regulations.)

At the meeting last week, Lewis Leigh took the offensive on the matter: brandishing a letter he obtained from county attorney John Roberts, Leigh declared that he was not legally obligated to recuse himself Continue reading →

Our intrepid all-republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors last night did what all skilled politicians do when a controversial scheme they were hoping to slip through without anyone noticing blows up in their face: Run for cover, and blame others!

The Board voted last night to “refer to committee” Supervisor Janet Clarke’s quarter-baked, secretly developed plan to abolish a dozen citizen advisory boards, including the Rural Economic Development Commission and the Historic District Review Committee. Clarke’s plan triggered a (completely predictable to anyone who has a clue) outraged reaction from the members of the REDC, who held an emergency meeting yesterday morning and issued a strongly worded protest; they were particularly incensed that they had never been consulted or informed about the plan and only learned of it indirectly over the weekend.

Clarke’s plan, it turns out, had in fact been ordered up by Chairman Scott York. But York, seeing which way the wind was blowing, quickly went into full CYA mode, trying to remove his fingerprints from the scheme as fast as humanly possible. He assured the REDC that there had been a “misunderstanding” and that he supported their work. Now many politicians in such a bind resort to such tried and true rhetorical dodges as saying that there were “misunderstandings” or that the proposal was merely a “starting point for discussion.” You don’t normally expect, however, a politician to argue as a point in his favor, “I was on repeated taxpayer-funded  junkets to Germany so  didn’t have a clue what was going on.” But that’s what York told the REDC yesterday, according to Leesburg Today: “York said he had not put any effort into it, being involved with other things and being out of the country at times.”

Additional facts about how Clarke went about her “study” underscore that it was a hatchet job from the get-go, determined to trump up some justification for getting rid of what this Board of Supervisors obviously considers a major irritant: to wit, any official venues where differing views can be aired and citizens involved in the business of county government. Continue reading →

Aside from the sheer political ineptness of drawing up in complete secrecy a plan to eliminate a dozen important government advisory commissions — and, even more incredibly, doing so without even consulting or informing the members of the committees to be abolished, or the citizen constituencies they represent — Loudoun Supervisor Janet Clarke (R-Blue Ridge) has ably demonstrated why this is a bad idea: if you don’t bother to gather any facts, you make yourself look like an idiot. Continue reading →

More dumbfounding details have emerged about the no-warning plan which Supervisor Janet Clarke (R-Blue Ridge) sprung a couple of days ago to immediately terminate the Rural Economic Development Commission, the Historic District Review Committee, and a dozen other county boards and commissions that just happen to represent interests which the all-Republican Board of Supervisors sees as a threat to its absolute control of local government:

Not only did Clarke or the Board fail to give the public any warning that such a sweeping government reorganization plan was being considered at all — much less that it will be taken up and voted on tomorrow — but she did not even talk to the committees affected or the constituencies they represent. The members of the REDC only learned about the proposal indirectly over the weekend: in other words three days before the Supervisors plan to move on the proposal. Continue reading →

Our all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors have pulled off yet another political power grab, getting a bill passed in Richmond to make Loudoun the only county in the entire state in which the Board of Supervisors, and not the judges of the Circuit Court, will henceforth get to appoint the local Board of Equalization — an anachronistic but incredibly powerful body that has complete authority to revise real estate assessments. Continue reading →