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Mike
Corrigan's Letter to the Editor To
the Editor, Fairfax Times (Reston Edition) The
County Executive's letter to Senator Howell and Delegate Plum continues
the charade that the Reston Citizens Association is the sole supporter
of a referendum to determine whether or not Reston should become a town.
Somehow, the fact that over 3,700 Reston residents have petitioned our
elected representatives to allow such a referendum gets ignored. Also
ignored is the fact that legislators submit legislation - not RCA. RCA
has provided our legislators with draft legislation that incorporates
all the lessons we have been able to learn from our own and our
predecessors’ efforts to figure out how to best govern Reston. At some
point it is up to the legislators to take the ball and run with it. The
3,700 petitioners aren’t asking RCA to continue to butt our heads
against the status quo wall. If the draft legislation has shortcomings,
then it is time for our legislators to fix them and get us to a
referendum. The
County Executive needs to brush up on both his history and his
understanding of local government in Virginia. The draft legislation
that we provided is based on the 1979 charter that was approved by the
legislature and voted on in 1980. The county staff was heavily involved
in the development of that charter, as was RCA. The county staff also
prepared a report in 2005 at the request of Supervisor Hudgins on the
impact of a town on the county, based on some preliminary discussions
between RCA and Supervisor Hudgins. Unfortunately, the county staff’s
idea of what the town might be bore no relationship to anything RCA was
proposing, but none-the-less, the county staff was clearly involved. RCA
has assumed that the appropriate way to reach the county staff was
through our elected Supervisor. If, in fact, the County Executive is the
right county official for us to contact, we will be happy to do so in
the future. The fact that a County Executive, rather than the Chairman
of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, responded to a highly political
issue raised by thousands of voters strikes us as, frankly, bizarre. The
idea that towns “balkanize” counties is presumably news to Vienna,
Herndon and Clifton in Fairfax; the seven incorporated towns in Loudoun;
and the almost 200 towns in the rest of Virginia. Towns are part of
counties in Virginia – not entirely separate entities. Within
specifically urban counties, there are some potential conflicts between
towns and counties. These conflicts were recognized by the state
legislature in 1979, as described in the 1979 Report to the Governor and
General Assembly available on the RCA website at http://www.restoncitizensassociation.org/governance/docs/RestonTownStudy1980.pdf.
The conflicts include the ability to annex parts of the county to the
town, to become a city, and to potentially take revenue from the county
without transferring a corresponding level of services from the county
to the town. All of these issues are addressed in both the current
charter and that of 1980. As for the argument that if Reston became a
town, what would happen if other parts of Fairfax with a sense of
community decided to do the same thing, this issue too was addressed in
1980. The legislature then saw Reston, with a limited charter, as an
experiment to see if such an approach could solve the biggest problem
with urbanizing counties – a loss of sense of community and an
estrangement of the citizens from an increasingly remote central
government. If the experiment works, then there would be no reason not
to allow similar communities the same form of limited self-government. It
appears that the bottom line for the county is that Reston becoming a
town might give us some control over how Reston develops when Metro
arrives here, and might somehow negatively impact the Metro plans. RCA
would submit that, on the contrary, a clear statement that the county
has no intention of allowing Reston to have any control over Metro and
its associated development is the surest way to lose the approval of
Reston residents for the Metro plan. It is hard to take the County
Executive’s letter as anything other than such a statement.
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