Transparency

By Charles Houston

Two Sculptures

On Saturday Sept. 31, our Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a Board Member Initiative proposed jointly by an unexpected pairing of supervisors, one, the most conservative Board member and the other, the most liberal. The BMI – their proposal – would have the County commission two sculptures, one of Ronald Reagan and one of Jane Fonda. Most in the audience in the Board Room weren’t paying much attention. Others looked on with puzzlement. The mythical statues were paired in one co-sponsored BMI and were approved by the Board.

That paragraph is fiction, made to illustrate a point.  With a 6 to 3 Democratic majority, perhaps the Fonda statue could have been approved by itself and the GOP icon dismissed. So, why the compromise? It was probably simple horse-trading. I’m guessing, fictionally, that the two supervisors had struck an arrangement on another matter and as a result one owed the other support on something else, like the make-believe sculptures. We don’t expect public officials to sit silently in a bubble, not talking to their peers. Most of us probably accept that officials will talk privately. It’s the shady “back-room deals” (as they say in Washington) that we want illuminated. Loudoun solves some of this through televised and archived videos of its many committee meetings and by compliance with FOIA. Overkill? Or is something missed? Regardless, it’s foolish to think that two officials don’t talk privately about issues.

Some readers may still think all this actually happened. Nope, look at some clues: The Board does not meet on Saturdays. There are only 30 days in September. The second paragraph opens by saying the first one is “fiction” and that the sculptures are “mythical.” Got it?

We tend to rely on a fair press to sniff these things out for us.

Faw – E – Yuh

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exists at the Federal, state and local level. It’s usually taken seriously but I strongly suspect that sometimes FOIA strictures are purposefully dodged. A few years ago, Amazon considered Loudoun for its mammoth satellite headquarters, which would have set off an explosion of sprawl. That bothered me, so I filed a FOIA request about it. The response was carefully worded to claim an exemption from FOIA. I kept at it with more requests, none of which were honored. My final request was simple: “I request copies of documents that discuss Amazon’s potential impact on roads in the area.” Simple, but I got this amazing answer: “No such records exist.” Ridiculous!  

I finally gave up.

There are a number of exemptions from FOIA, such as health records or items related to negotiations about real estate or contracts. (Congress exempted itself from FOIA, by the way. Typical.) Somewhere in the recesses of my hippocampus is a memory of a FOIA exemption for conversations between just two officials. Is that exemption real? Please use the comment feature and let me know.

I strongly suspect that the two-person exemption is used, even if that exemption is a chimera. For the fictional Reagan – Fonda statues, the sponsoring Supervisors would first have talked at length with each other, followed by a series of negotiations with their colleagues. FOIA mandates transparency but what would that have meant in this instance? Some wonks would have followed every conversation. Others would not have cared.  Again, we have to rely on the media.

Other matters have great importance, such as budgeting. There, I think the more transparency the better. Our Board of Supervisors does a good job of providing a detailed agenda of upcoming meetings, followed by an open meeting that’s also televised and archived. Good, though there’s probably much background horse-trading that we never see. I accept that, just as I’m happy to eat sausage but don’t want to see it being made. Afterall, the final documents get public hearings. If we don’t like the result, sooner or later we get to vote  and voting works. After some atrocious actions in 2004 by a cabal within the Board (led by a controversial guy named Tulloch,) at the next election the cabal members were ousted.

Opacity

The Loudoun County School System (LCPS) has a long and well-deserved reputation for purposefully being opaque. Many feel that the System’s executives often contrive to leave the School Board in the dark, while both the System and the School Board do the same to our Board of Supervisors. Eric Williams has been Superintendent since 2014 so perhaps it’s not fair to paint him with that brush. His predecessor, though, was publicly spanked by a former Board of Supervisors Chairman: “Edgar Hatrick has served this county well for many years, but we are now in the 21st century. Many things have to change. And unfortunately, sometimes in order for change to happen, change has to first happen at the top.”

Hatrick inspired the first letter I ever wrote to an editor, after he said that people here weren’t paying enough in property taxes and that New Jersey’s higher tax rates were more appropriate. My letter was short and characteristic: “Hatrick, who says we should pay more taxes, should be run out of town on a rail.” Not sure if the paper printed that letter, but I was right. 

Williams has not upset me, unless he was in charge during the whiteboard scandal: As a fiscal year was ending, LCPS had a surplus. That would never do, so it immediately bought enough electronic whiteboards to soak up that money. This technology is now ubiquitous, but at the time such devices were an expensive luxury.  

 Fire!

A public agency that fails to be transparent or to respond to citizens can get burned. Our Fire-Rescue Department is clearly guilty. It says the Philomont Fire Station needs to relocate and expand, so our Nov. 3 ballot asks if we should issue bonds of $29,516,000.00 to build a new station. Worse, that new station would be built on the grounds of what was a well-respected horse show for 62 years.

Remember the recent fight over a similar fire station in historic Aldie? Its outraged citizens forced Fire-Rescue to choose another location. For Philomont, emails went unanswered and COVID was used as an excuse to avoid meetings. Finally, one meeting was eventually held, but Fire-Rescue refused to answer pointed questions. Transparent? No way.

 Please vote “NO” on that bond until this is resolved.

Water and Sewer

A new proposal would extend public water and sewer into part of our rural area to serve a County facility, but has sparked an uproar among conservationists. They feel that this would give developers a big step towards full public utilities in the west, bringing sprawl all over western Loudoun. While this contretemps is out in the open, true transparency would disclose who is behind this effort very bad, bad idea. The media needs to get to work. To residents, I say Faw – E-Yuh.

COVID

What do I think? In concept transparency is a good idea, but in reality, much of any disclosure is boring, or might not matter all that much. Elections do give us the final recourse. We should always push for openness and candor, though not expect to see every single thing. Most times I really don’t care that much, and count on our newspapers to report the facts. Fortunately, I respect our Board of Supervisors and never have any sense that something is amiss.

I’ll blame my passivity on COVID overload.

Charles Houston developed office buildings in Atlanta, and has lived in Paeonian Springs for over 20 years.