To the Editor:
In his Dec. 10 article "Town in Reston's Future?" Jeff Green quotes Vera Hannigan on the failure of the Reston governance movement in 1988: "'Suzi Jones led that charge and Suzi pulled the plug on it. It's her fault that we don't have a town today,' Hannigan said." In fact, the movement, even though it had strong support at an open and well-attended community forum, was killed because of opposition from the Reston Board of Commerce and the decision of the Reston Community Association to withhold support. One of the most outspoken business critics of the town movement was Karl Ingebritsen, then an official of Tetra Partnerships, a developer and manager of office buildings and other commercial properties in Reston.  RBC and Karl, one of the board's founders and its original interim president, said town governance would force the owners of commercial properties to raise their rents to cover local taxes, thereby making Reston less competitive with properties elsewhere in the Dulles Corridor. Tom D'Alesandro, then a new member of the top leadership at Reston Land Corp., Reston's developer, delivered some well-timed remarks at an RBC meeting in which he said governance would put an anti-competitive burden on commercial property owners.

As the governance task force headed by Suzi struggled to maintain momentum in the face of this significant opposition from the business community, Reston Citizens Association declined to endorse the drive for town status — another major blow.
Nobody pulled any plug on the ship of governance. It was torpedoed from a couple of directions.

The case for governance was persuasive 15 years ago; it is more persuasive today. With town status, Reston very likely would have been a major player in the negotiations about how far Metrorail would be extended in the first phase. A professional planning staff would have been able to show just how disastrous it would be for traffic to make Wiehle Avenue the first-phase terminus for Metrorail. A Reston Town Council very likely would have worked closely with the Herndon Council on a common strategy that would have avoided what recently happened. And, to be sure, the president of the Reston Association wouldn't find herself being admonished to hurry up and finish her remarks by the chairman of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors.

With its own, very limited government, Reston would have been able to mount in a more timely fashion the long-overdue problems of urban runoff caused by engineering practices from the 1960s and 1970s that turn lazy streams into raging torrents that destabilize big chunks of open space.

With governance, Reston would be far more likely to come to a productive consensus on how to tackle the problems of neighborhoods that don't age well and start to become shabby.

Without governance, Reston is at the mercy of the county government. I choose my words carefully. The indifference with which the county government generally views Reston is plainly visible in the mediocre low-density development that the county has carried out on the land it owns in the Town Center District. The single exception is the subsidized row houses.
When governance was being proposed in 1988, its supporters provided ample documentation to refute claims that town status would result in "another layer of taxes."  Actually, some services now provided by cluster associations, and which are not tax-deductible, would be deductible under the umbrella of a municipal government.  Analyses from the period showed that many homeowners would actually end up paying less overall. If all or most of Reston Association's services were absorbed by a town government, there would be even more tax-deductibility.

When governance was torpedoed in 1988, Reston lost a huge opportunity to shape its own destiny. Unfortunately, even if the community comes together on a new governance effort, the roadblocks that surely will be erected in Richmond and at the Fairfax Government Center will be formidable enough to make 1988 happen all over again.

Tom Grubisich
Santa Monica, Calif. 
(During the governance debate in the late 1980s, Tom Grubisich was editor of The Connection.)

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