Conflict zone: the future of

Loudoun County's past

by Megan Cummings

Conservationists and property-rights activists are battling on both the local and national levels over the future of the area surrounding Loudoun County’s U.S. Route 15, a dividing line between the suburban east and rural west.

At issue is whether or not the federal government should designate a 175-mile corridor between Gettysburg, Pa., and Charlottesville, Va., as a national heritage site, a label that would allow the area’s cultural, historic and recreational places to be marketed under the National Park Service name.

The Journey Through Hallowed Ground (JTHG) Partnership is a coalition of local and national business, non-profit, conservation and environmental groups who are lobbying Congress to approve the needed legislation.

If it's approved, sites along the corridor would be unified under the new designation. However, many of the counties along U.S. Rt. 15 are rapidly growing, bringing more residents, traffic and development into the potential national heritage area. Loudoun County has one of the nation’s highest growth rates, and its suburban landscape is moving rapidly into the rural west.

Twenty-three places in Loudoun County would be included in the national heritage area, including the Leesburg and Middleburg historic districts and Oak Hill, the home of President James Monroe.

The most vocal critics of former Sen. George Allen’s Senate bill and Rep. Frank Wolf’s House bill have been property-rights activists, especially the conservative Center for Public Policy Research, which has called the proposal a prime example of “pork-barrel politics.” These groups worry that the act does not provide enough land-use protection for property owners whose land would fall within the jurisdiction of the JTHG management. They also believe land-use decisions should be made by local governments.

“It’s not a question of preservation, but a question of who should be doing it,” Peyton Knight, the center’s director for environmental and regulatory affairs, said. “The federal government should leave management totally up to local governments.”

The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors is the only county government included in the JTHG area that has not approved a resolution of support for the JTHG project. It voted 4-4-1 against in 2006.

By not voting to support the act, the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors shows it wants to keep land-use planning at the local level, Knight said.

Repeated calls to members of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors for comment were not returned.
However, JTHG Communications Manager Abigail DeLashmutt said the JTHG had no effect on land-use authority and that the bill provided adequate protection for property rights. She also said the Partnership did not need permission from the board to establish a national heritage region in Loudoun County.

“[The Loudoun County] Board of Supervisors is a notoriously divided board,” she said. “There are a core group of supervisors who are ambivalent [about the legislation]. We don’t need to wait for support from the board. Loudoun County is a great friend, but the supervisors are not on board yet.”

The JTHG act does have many supporters among Loudoun County’s environmental and smart-growth activists, whose burgeoning influence in the county’s debate over land-use planning could make them a powerful force in lobbying the board in the future.
“I believe the board is opposed to anything they deem detrimental to developer interests,” said Nancy West, the chair of the Loudoun County Goose Creek Association. Goose Creek Historic District is one of six historic districts protected by Loudoun County and it would become a part of the JTHG.

“The pro-development supervisors overlook the inherent financial benefit in this initiative as a tourism feature in that visitors will continue to visit this area for its beauty, historic value and sense of place,” she said.

Andrea McGimsey is the Eastern Loudoun County Field Director for the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), a non-profit group that protects the Virginia Piedmont region’s environment. She said PEC supported 100 percent of the JTHG project, and that PEC was fighting similar opponents as the JTHG, but on the local political level.

McGimsey is also the campaign director of a grassroots smart-growth organization, the Campaign for Loudoun’s Future, because she is concerned about how uncontrolled growth is destroying the county’s rural landscape, she said.

Loudoun County began to grow in the early 1960s with the construction of Dulles International Airport in the southeastern part of the county. It has continued to grow, and between 2000 and 2004, Loudoun’s population increased 41 percent.

While developers are rushing to capitalize on the county’s growth, slow-growth activists are calling for more zoning restrictions that would limit sprawl and preserve rural areas. The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors held two public hearings the week of Oct. 8 about an amendment that would allow more homes to be built along a large swath of land north and south of U.S. Rt. 50, just east of U.S. Rt. 15.

However, DeLashmutt emphasized that the JTHG does not take a pro-growth or anti-growth stance.

“Planned growth is what you want,” she said. “There is a way to make development work with the landscape, but it is unrealistic not to expect any growth.”

Knight countered that JTHG does have an anti-growth agenda. He said the vice-chairman on the JTHG’s Board of Directors was a senior vice president at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an organization that has placed the JTHG area on the list of the “11 Most Endangered Places” because of the threat of uncontrolled growth.

“All [the JTHG] talk about is development,” he said. “It is disingenuous for them not to discuss growth.”

Loudoun County resident John Grigsby volunteers with the conservative NoVa Town Hall organization because he believes the land-use restrictions in smart-growth planning hurt the middle class. Knight discussed the JTHG at an Oct. 24 NoVa Town Hall meeting in Leesburg.

“My view of smart-growth is elitism according to the concern for some noble good,” Grigsby said.
Leo Schwartz, the chairman of the Virginia Land Rights Coalition, questioned the federal government’s right to intervene in local land-use planning.

“With all this talk about Thomas Jefferson and preserving ideals of the Founding Fathers, [the members of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership] are being hypocrites,” Schwartz said. “The Founders believed in small and local government and a system of federalism and government subsidiary.”

McGimsey challenged these arguments of property rights activists by saying, “Whose taxes are paying for your property rights? Mine are.”

“The program is entirely opt-in and opt-out,” DeLashmutt said, emphasizing that no landowner would be compelled to participate in the JTHG. She also said that section nine of the bill required that the project’s management entity receive consent from landowners in the JTHG.

Nevertheless, there have been other citizen concerns that the corridor’s east-to-west boundaries are too fluid and wide.

“My wife and I and two neighbors appeared at a supervisors’ meeting on Sept. 12 and when I saw the [JTHG] map there, it got me excited because nobody realizes how much land [the proposal] covers,” Madison County resident Randall Lillard said. He owns a beef cattle farm near the Shenandoah National Park. He said he was frustrated with the National Park Service’s needless bureaucracy and control of the area.

Knight, Schwartz and Lillard all disapproved of the proposed management entity that would control the JTHG because taxpayers would have no say in determining its leadership.

“The preservationist interest groups couldn’t ask for much more than what this legislation would provide them: A congressionally ordained, members-only club, funded by taxpayers, for the purpose of making taxpayers live under the club’s rules,” Knight said in his testimony before the House Committee on Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Recreation and Public Lands on Sept. 28.

For now, as the JTHG debate wages on in the halls of Congress and on Loudoun County’s back roads, landowners and the area’s cultural, historic and recreational sites will maintain the status quo: a sometimes strained co-existence.