Our Man in Arlington

The Arlington County Board held its traditional New Year’s Day meeting last Saturday. It’s going to be another active year, if the statements of the members are any indication.

The meeting room was filled with the usual assortment of county board junkies. The January 1 meeting is the one chance of the year to see a microcosm of the community’s activists of all persuasions. Everyone wants to see the starting flag drop, the opening bell ring, the “they’re off!”

According to custom, the incoming chair of the County Board gives the principal address. For those of you new to Arlington or its governmental processes, a new chair is elected every year from the sitting board members.

The new chair for 2005 is Jay Fisette, a veteran member of the board and a former chair. His catch phrase was “managing the maturing of our vision as an urban community.” To use a more common phrase, Fisette’s is a “quality of life” agenda.

Fisette’s first goal was keeping Arlington on track in developing a world-class urban community. This includes encouraging the highest quality development concentrated in Arlington’s urban corridors to protect another Arlington quality, vibrant residential neighborhoods. He specifically mentioned three “key investments”: a conference center in Pentagon City, further development in Court House Plaza, and Center Place in Rosslyn. To those, he added sustaining the board’s commitment to smart growth along the Columbia Pike Corridor and in South Arlington’s Nauck neighborhood.

His second goal was to encourage diversity, which unless carefully managed can be a conflicting goal. Top on his agenda was stronger commitment to affordable housing, citing with alarm that Arlington has lost 47% of its affordable housing stock in the last four years. The remarkably shortsighted suit successfully brought by developers who challenged the negotiation procedures used by the County Board to get some affordable housing in new high-density multi-use projects may provide a stumbling block, however.

Every other member of the County Board stressed affordable housing in their brief remarks. Based on that poll, I would guess that affordable housing will be the number one item on the agenda this year.

Fisette’s last two goals were to promote a healthier Arlington and to get a bigger bang for our buck, to use my terminology. He plans to continue his programs to get Arlingtonians out of the house and out of their cars and walk. This includes development that encourages rather than discourages walking. Riding bikes is good, too, and Arlington has developed a national reputation for providing bike-friendly urban spaces.

The bigger bang for the buck is simply doing an even better job of eliminating waste and spending money wisely. Fisette will promote the creation of a Committee on Program Performance consisting of two County Board members, the County Manager, the Commissioner of Revenue, and the chair of the Fiscal Affairs Advisory Board to create a program of independent audits of county services.

Other members of the County Board had their programs, too. One of the more interesting was Board Member Walter Tejada’s goal to create of a non-profit center in Arlington, similar to a business incubator, to promote the growth of non-profit initiatives in the county. But we will have to get to those in another column.

In its own way, the County Board has set our goals for the coming year. Richard Barton may be emailed at rbarton@towervillas.com