Tag Archives: Loudoun GOP

Scott York, ethics champion!

Scott York (R-Kincora), our very, very sensitive and oh-so-misunderstood chairman of the Loudoun Board of Supervisors, was apparently hoping — that is, before the story broke in today’s Washington Post — that fellow Republican Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio’s flagrant misuse of his office could be quietly hushed up.

It was a reasonable hope, given that our local Loudoun newspapers these days view their job of “reporting” on local government as limited to reprinting the press releases handed them by York and his Republican colleagues (so much easier than that tiresome business of checking out the possibility — as difficult as I know this is for a highly trained journalist to believe about any politician — that some elected officials just might possibly not be telling the whole story).

If you read to the bottom of the Washington Post investigation about Delgaudio’s finagling, it’s apparent that the former aide of Delgaudio’s who finally balked at being told by her boss to spend most of her time, as a county employee, soliciting large potential campaign donors for him, went to the Post and blew the whistle in public only after waiting weeks for action from York on her complaint — with no response.

Here’s what the Post story reported:

Mateer [the former Delgaudio aide] said her complaint has gone nowhere. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chairman Scott K. York (R-At Large) initially contacted her to request copies of her records and asked whether she would be willing to come forward, she said. Mateer and one of Delgaudio’s senior aides have since tried to contact York but have not received a response from him or from the county, they said.

In an interview, York said there was nothing that could be done about Mateer’s claims of a hostile work environment; part-time county aides are not protected by the county’s grievance policy.

The kind of leadership we have come to expect!

 

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Look busy!

Great news for the agoraphobic:

Our fearless Board of Supervisors is (weather permitting) plunging ahead this week with its unfunded chemical assault on the great outdoors. According to a press release from the county (see below), 9 parks will be hosed down with hundreds of gallons of a pesticide called Talstar P, part of the local Republican campaign to pretend to be doing something about Lyme disease.

As reported previously, the local Republican party has for very strange reasons fallen under the spell of a fringe group that goes around spreading scientific misinformation and promoting quack treatments for this tick-borne infection. An essential part of their campaign is to grossly exaggerate the number of cases that occur and to spread hysteria and panic about it.

The Board spent its first three months in office going through minute line items in the county budget to find highly fiscally conservative cost-savings, which culminated in axing a series of $500 or $1,000 grants to arts, literacy, community, and cultural organizations. But when it came to approving $20,000 to spray parks, the Board decided it didn’t even have to include the cost in the budget at all—adopting a resolution stating that the cost “is yet to be determined.”

Apparently when you spend that kind of dough without budgeting for it, you also don’t have to do even the most rudimentary cost-benefit analysis. Continue reading

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Forget it, Ken—You’re going to hell anyway

Our leading local political ambulance chaser, “Ken” Reid, the very proud (and, it turns out, very vain, but that’s another story) new Republican supervisor from Leesburg, has been trying very hard to ingratiate himself with the Christian fundamentalist wing of the local GOP.

In addition to sprinkling off-key pieties into his official utterances  (“I truly believe we’re doing God’s work”) Reid has been playing to this crowd for some time by modestly extolling himself as “The Jew Who Saved Christmas.”

This self-designation is based on Reid’s efforts while on the Leesburg Town Council to have a Christmas tree put up on public property, and more recently on his small but extremely noisy part in opposing the county policy that opened the courthouse lawn to any citizen group that wants to put up a display—as opposed to the flagrantly unconstitutional endorsement of a single religion that prevailed in the past, when a very tasteful display of the brightly colored Holy Family reigned in solitary splendor each Christmas season on the courthouse grounds. Continue reading

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Payoffs, paybacks, and suckups

If there is a theme emerging in what might charitably be called the governance style of our new all-Republican board of supervisors, it is not only paying off generous campaign contributors and getting back at perceived enemies, but also a desperate desire to catch the eye of the higher GOP powers-that-be with showy displays of fealty to the party’s ideological issues du jour. Continue reading

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We’ve got our orders

The head of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, that well-connected lobby of developers, road pavers, asphalt producers, and other public spirited citizens, remarked not long ago that the real problem in Virginia was that transportation policymakers were listening “too much” to “small neighborhoods” and “small groups”—also known as the people who actually live in the places where his totally disinterested big group wants to build new six-lane highways.

Luckily in Loudoun, we don’t have that problem any more, thanks to our new all-Republican local government.

Immediately upon taking office in January, the new Board of Supervisors—with no public discussion and no notice—made sure that from now on “small neighborhoods,” or for that matter any neighborhoods, will no longer be able to get in the way of the NVTA’s long-cherished dream of running new multi-lane north-south highways through existing communities, which will do wonders for major commercial property developers and nothing at all to relieve the traffic congestion on east-west routes actually used by commuters: Continue reading

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