Janet Clarke, the newly minted Supervisor from Blue Ridge, has apparently dropped her campaign pose of being democratically responsive. Fresh into her new job, she’s telling us what she’s going to do without asking us folk in Lovettsville what we think about it at a hearing or public meeting.
She’s dictating to us folk who live in and near Lovettsville, in the Catoctin District, a magisterial district that she does not represent, where she insists that the County build a new middle school and a new high school.
In fact and in truth, we don’t have the students in Lovettsville to justify these schools, we are at the County’s edge, close to the Potomac and thus not “centrally located,” and for these and other reasons, many parents are of the firm view that we don’t need and don’t want these schools here.
It is fascinating how people come to Western Loudoun from elsewhere and want to change what we have. They come from Fairfax, as Ms. Clarke did, saying that they love our open country and then, shortly thereafter, they set themselves to marginalizing working farms, paving dirt roads, straightening the smooth turns of a country road so they can better speed on it, cutting down trees, driving out wild life, and squandering the resources including our challenged waterways that made this rolling land in Loudoun a natural treasure.
Those of us who have been here for a while who have helped Johnny (and Mary Jo) learn to read, sent our children on a school bus or drove them ourselves and neither our children nor any of us parents were the worse for wear. When I was a kid in New York, I traveled by bus and subway across a fair distance in the Bronx to get to high school. My daughter’s travel was shorter and faster than my own – not that I ever complained about my own daily odyssey.
So this declaration of intent by Ms. Clarke is not really about helping Johnny to read. It’s about building schools that we don’t need in places that don’t make sense in order to spur residential development that would not otherwise occur without the infrastructure that a school requires.
It’s the field of schemes – build it and we shall pay -- our taxpayer dollars spent widening roads, providing water, sewer and electrical infrastructure so that the developer won’t have to spend those funds himself – Loudoun’s down home version of corporate welfare.
Supervisor Clark insists it would be “shameful” if these schools weren’t built in Lovettsville. What is truly “shameful” is Ms. Clarke telling us what to do, deciding our fate, calling us all names, without a single public hearing on the matter.
Incidentally, Lovettsville’s actual representative for the Catoctin District, Geary Higgins, told us during the recent campaign how he restored homes, loved the environment, and proposed to listen carefully to what the voters wanted. Now that he’s elected, however, he has made his position clear on these schools – he’ll do what Ms. Clarke, the Board’s new Vice Chair, wants, also without first hearing what the citizens want. So we are on notice that we have an echo, not a voice in Mr. Higgins’s notion of “stewardship” for our district – and that he is as undemocratic as Ms. Clarke.
An election is a transforming experience because only then do we find out what we got. Sorry to say, early indications are that what we got is highly indifferent to democratic – small d – principles by which elected officials invite the public to say what they want, and to object to what they don’t want, rather than being told by the political class what they’re going to get.
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