Neither Anti-Growth Nor Hysterical
Much effort is being made to portray opponents of Pay and Go as either hysterical or anti-growth. It is being suggest that those who are asking questions about the how, where, when, why, and what's the cost of growth are somehow asking inappropriate questions and that, conversely, growth is an undeniable good regardless of where it happens, how it impacts on communities, and what it costs the taxpayers. But it is not Pay and Go's opponents who are hysterical. The only hysterical people are Pay and Go's proponents.
Hysteria is the force behind Pay and Go. Hysteria is what prompted five members of the County Council to abandon the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance in order fix a problem that doesn't exist. These are the hysterical arguments they made.
- We are losing the building race to Fairfax and that we'll be left behind economically if we don't try to spur development.
- We have no construction activity.
- Developers don't know what it will cost and the hurdles are too hard to jump through.
- The County has an anti-growth stance that is keeping growth out.
- Our commercial tax base has fallen and we must build more.
The facts are that:
- In some years we built more than Fairfax, in some years we build less, but if you look at the Nineties so far we've been competitive.
- Whatever Fairfax builds has nothing to do with what we can support.
- We are building 3,000 housing units a year and we have a commercial pipeline of approved, ready to build projects equal to 125,000 jobs.
- Developers knew what the costs were under the old system - they had to pay for necessary improvements. And that process said that unless adequate facilities existed or were in the CIP, no project could go forward that the infrastructure didn't support. This onerous process produced a pipeline of 35,000 houses and 125,000 jobs.
- What has slowed new construction is the market. We have an office vacancy rate of almost 18% compared to 8% in Fairfax. It's hard to build more new office space, when existing space sits vacant and can be rented for less than newly constructed space. Also, Fairfax's location has helped it to better service the Feds while Montgomery has focused on building a new technology corridor which has been harder to grow.
- The commercial tax base fell, but not because buildings or businesses disappeared. Commercial taxes fell because the Recession brought real estate prices down to earth and ended speculative building, and also left the County (and others) with enormous amounts of empty offices. Commercial assessments (and therefore taxes) are based on rents and in a glutted office market, rents fell, assessments fell, and tax collections fell. Our vacancy rate doesn't have a thing to do with County growth policies and everything to do with the market. Reducing vacancy rates and raising rents will not be helped by encouraging more speculative building.
The facts do not support the hysterical rationalizations behind Pay and Go. At the same time, opposition to Pay and Go can not be equated with being anti-growth. And to cast the debate this way is to obscure the real issues at stake here.
The opponents of Pay and Go, and communities that opposed the 3 million square feet of development in Friendship Heights and the American Dream in Silver Spring, are not anti-growth. Everyone has agreed that there will be more growth, no one proposed that the County should be put under a moratorium. We have consistently questioned the level of growth, how it affects our communities and how it affects us as taxpayers. These are important questions and we have every right to ask them. In case you haven't noticed, this County has a serious problems in provision of public facilities and services. Our roads and schools are over-crowded. Services, such as police, fire, recreation libraries, are severely strained. In some parts of the County the services, roads and schools are inadequate, in other parts the infrastructure is badly in need of repair. At our current rate of growth it will take to 2012 to clear the backlog in school modernizations. We have overcrowded classrooms and buildings, so that we can't simply add a class or two in a school in order to relieve over-crowding. At our current rate of growth we will soon have 140,000 or more children in our schools and an increase of 20,000 students is possible. We are pulling a fire truck and personnel from the down county, diminishing services there, in order to fulfill a service gap in the up-county. These are not hysterics, they are real problems.
Where did these problems come from? They came from the last period of rapid growth that spread the development out into areas that lacked the infrastructure to support it, forcing the County to forego maintenance and modernization, in order provide new facilities. Road construction program could not keep pace with the development. All this growth, according to the pro-rapid growth advocates should have paid for everything it required and more. County residents everywhere should have been enjoying more services and lower taxes, but this never happened. Growth generated more needs than it produced a tax base to support those needs. And growth was not required to pay for the infrastructure to support it, so that we're left with inadequate capital to fund necessary improvements. To meet those needs we would have had to raise taxes, but doing that would have tipped the hat and revealed what many of us knew- growth was producing more liabilities than assets.
That's what makes this discussion so maddening. Proponents of Pay and Go and advocates of rapid growth are prescribing the disease to cure the disease. They're advocating more growth and even lower developer payments to solve an infrastructure shortfall caused by rapid growth and inadequate developer payments. There is no logic to their logic, only hysteria whining away in the background. What is the so-called "anti-growth" hysteria asking for? To start with no one has asked for a moratorium on development. In Silver Spring we pushed for a project large enough to spur revitalization without overwhelming surrounding residential communities. In Friendship Heights, communities were willing to support up to 1 million square feet of new development.
Opponents of Pay and Go want the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance left intact. We want no projects where the infrastructure can't support them. Most of us would support impact fees to ensure that infrastructure costs are borne by development and not passed on to taxpayers and we opposed the Pay and Go fee system which: 1) collects about a fourth of the road costs and none of the other costs and 2) allows projects to go forward even when the County has no plans in the CIP to provide the rest of the infrastructure.
We want a school test that doesn't require an entire cluster to reach 110% of capacity before it is considered for moratoria. We want lower class sizes, schools that are not over-crowded and that are renovated at a reasonable point in their life-cycles, and we want an end to musical boundaries that create room for new developments by breaking up neighborhood schools.
We want the quality of life in the County protected and enhanced. We don't want new services for new developments paid for by reducing services elsewhere. We want new libraries and parks where they are needed, and where they exist we want them properly maintained.
We want development that fits in our communities. We don't want road standards lowered to make the numbers work for a developer. We want road improvements that provide permanent improvements and don't just offer temporary relief. Fixing a road should be done to make it better and not just to enable the next developer to refill it to the bursting point.
We don't want accelerated residential growth when the school capital budgets are based on adding 3,000 houses a year and we have a 15 year backlog of modernizations. We don't want commercial projects that siphon jobs and economic activity away from existing vacant office space. We don't want to hurt existing businesses in core areas struggling to revitalize where the County already has a significant infrastructure development.
We want to think about the nature of growth. How much is needed, when does it become harmful? Where does it compliment our infrastructure, where does it force us to make new investments? How do you strike a balance between enough development to spark economic activity and so much development that residential neighborhoods lose their attractiveness? How many jobs do you need to maintain low unemployment and how many jobs leads to an untenable increase in out of County commuters, or spurs more residential growth than we can support?
This is not an argument about no growth and it can't be that asking serious public policy questions equates with being anti-growth. Between no-growth and pro-growth, there is a third position: sensible growth. A system that is not growing rapidly is not necessarily a stagnant system. It is possible that between no-growth and pro-growth there is a place called stability or an equilibrium state. It seems that some of us are trying to find that place, eschewing both extremes, and asking instead how do we build a stable, sustainable community and how do we manage growth to meet that end.
We are concerned about the health of the entire community. Developers are a part of that, but neither the biggest nor most important part. Our greatest assets are our citizens and our quality of life. As long as the quality of life is good, developers will find work, but if they sacrifice our quality of life for their short term profits they will find themselves without a sustainable future here. They of course will simply move on to invest and develop the next county up the line whose attractiveness will have increased in proportion to which ours has dimmed. The other 99.9% of us who live and work here will spend the rest of our lives trying to dig out from the mess they left behind.
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