GAZETTE COLUMN: CLARKE AND HIGGINS – WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN ELECTION MAKES by John P. Flannery

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.

GAZETTE COLUMN: MANIPULATE LOUDOUN! by John P. Flannery

What School is supposed to be about.

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There’s a relatively new group in town.

They call themselves “Educate Loudoun!”

Now doesn’t that sound arrogant?

These folk are going to “educate” us about what we want and need in Loudoun County.

This Johnny-come-lately group sprung into existence at the sound of the first spring peepers – and now they presume to commend who should be our school board members in the upcoming election.

They say they are a political action committee (“PAC”) that’s going to contribute to right-thinking candidates.

The blogs are alive with the sound of gossip about this group and the message is clear - Caveat Voter!

Let’s deconstruct this group and find out what makes it tick

It was founded by the current School Board Chairman, John Stevens (Potomac), who no doubt expects to be endorsed by the PAC he created when he announces, any day now, to succeed himself. 

Another founder, who has underwritten this group, is Telos, a hi-tech government contractor.  I want Telos to tell us how it hopes to “help” us.  Telos’ CEO John Wood has contributed about a third of the funds, at $5,000, that make up the PAC’s war chest. 

On their web site, Mr. Wood explains that he sees our educational system as “a catalyst of economic growth,” that shall encourage families “to move here and stay here,” because of the “long term investment” that “Educate!” reportedly supports, meaning an accelerated building development of even more schools than presently scheduled. 

In other words, they prefer that hard-earned and scant tax payer money from our property assessments underwrite infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, etc.) favoring even more development in a county struggling to recover the home asset value we’ve lost in the ongoing recession.  Overdevelopment can only dilute our most important asset, the value of our homes.

One commentator, Erv Addison, wrote a recent letter, stating that he might support this group if they meant charter schools when they said “new public school choices for all families.”    

When Mr. Addison asked “Educate!” what they really supported, he learned that the “Educate!” founders couldn’t agree.  Nor could they say whether they were for performance pay for teachers.  I would oppose the group if they support charter schools or performance pay.  But neither of us can dispel the group’s enforced “ambiguity and uncertainty” - as Mr. Addison aptly described their stonewalling practices.

Mr. Wood claimed he suffered no disqualifying conflict of interest in advancing this group, not while Telos employee, Robert Dupree, was a school board member (indeed, the Chairman), nor now while Telos employee, Ralph Buona, is a Republican candidate for the Board of Supervisors.

County-wide, Telos and Mr. Wood personally have contributed a total of $7,050.00 (on 10/23/10, and on 3/31/11) to Scott York’s campaign coffers.  That contribution is 15% of York’s entire fund-raising effort.  (Interestingly, Mr. Wood’s contribution bore an Illinois home address.  Tell us John that you’re a Loudoun resident (and this is some oversight)). See Campaign Report - http://inter4.loudoun.gov/Default.aspx?tabid=344&fmpath=/Electoral%20Board/2010%20Campaign%20Finance%20Reports.

Incidentally, it appears that, on the same day, March 29, 2011, that Telos contributed $213.18 in catering costs, Mr. York received an additional $6,150.00 in checks dated that same day from, among others, William Hazel, the Lansdowne Development Group, and the Virginia Investment Partnership.  Did you host a fund-raiser, John, in order to impress upon Mr. York your concern about education?

Telos won’t tell us plainly what they really want.  But it appears that it’s about asphalt and development rather than much having to do with educating our young.  Voters and candidates would be well advised to steer clear of this group.