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UNBRIDLED GROWTH: |
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The County government's love affair with growth requires County residents to forget the lessons of our recent past. It is simply not the case that slow-growth policies, impact fees, and regulations have created the County's economic problems and that salvation lies in dismantling these things. The fact is that much of the problem confronting the County today stems from a legacy of too much growth, too little regulation, and tax-payers, rather than developers, being left with the bill for that growth. To begin with, we only had one brief slow-growth period during the Potter administration, and that had more to do with the recession than with public policy. Preceding Potter and the recession, we had experienced explosive growth, the legacy of which was over-crowded schools, grid-locked transportation and expanding services. Voter and tax-payer resentment had its genesis in that period during which everything seemed to get worse and County budgets and taxes soared. Development in those days did not pay its way and it left the home-owner with the bills. County regulations did little to discourage growth, zoning policies fed growth, and the lack of impact fees insured that County tax-payers took the hit. The County knew it did not have the resources to pay for needed roads or schools, and also knew that they weren't going to get it from Annapolis, yet they permitted developments to proceed. What they must have been thinking is, "Home-owners will gladly pay more, once we mess up their roads and schools enough." Now that all the projects they approved are built, class-size approaches 30 in many places, and the roads don't work, pro-growth forces are saying, "See, if we had more growth, we'd have more taxes and we could pay to fix this. We better set those developers free." They never say, "Yes, this will produce more taxes, but of course that will be eaten up by the new services we have to provide." Unbridled growth produces only one thing: more growth. Each increment of growth is expected to pay for the last one, while requiring future growth to off-set its own impact. To make matters worse, the County adopted Pay-Go legislation which allowed development to go anywhere, whether or not the necessary schools or roads were in place or even planned. And the cost to them for doing this was even less than before - they paid about a fourth of the cost of the roads, but not a dime for schools, fire service, parks or any other infrastructure needs. Such growth didn't help alleviate existing problems, instead it made them worse. Fortunately, a citizen alliance successfully worked to have this legislation repealed. Then there's the plan for Clarksville. Here the County is preparing to saddle tax-payers with a quarter billion dollar responsibility. We'll be lucky if children born two generations from now will see the pay-back from that one. The biggest project this county has envisioned, the monument to its pro-growth ideology, will not come close to paying for itself in most of our lifetimes, it will be a net tax burden for all of us, and it single-handedly destroys the myth that we must have growth if we're to reduce the middle-class tax burden. What all these actions do, along with a slavish devotion to growth as a good in and of itself, is to undermine faith in government and the legitimacy of taxes. We have reached a point where more revenue is needed to pay for past policy decisions, or we must cut services. People don't understand why they must pay more just to receive the same (or diminished) services. Decisions that clogged their roads and schools actually were made years earlier, so their impact is long removed from the legislation that created the impact. Consequently, people see worsened conditions without seeing the root causes. Only the taxman remains ever present in their minds as they think, "I'm paying more and getting less. What gives here?" Pro-growth advocates play on this unease and offer a simple panacea - more growth will pay taxes so you don't have to. And politicians are too careful being chummy with developers so that in the next campaign for re-election, or in pursuit of the governorship, they can say, "I am business's friend. I understand your pain, I want to clear away those obstacles to your growth." No one wants to talk about how we got in this mess in the first place. Stuck in the middle are the voters left to chose between more taxes, less services, and worsened living conditions. As a starting point, this County needs more impact fees that cover the cost of development (and you can include WSSC in this one.) Our competitors in Northern Virginia collect them. Our own Poolesville collects a bigger impact fee than the County ever proposed and they don't even provide the schools. Developers say that the fee will be passed on to future buyers. Maybe yes, maybe not. Unfortunately in Germantown, the developers have convinced the County to turn their responsibility into a County tax on new home buyers (almost $1000 a year above existing taxes). They say that the result is that they won't charge as much for their houses, but does anyone really believe that if they could have sold their houses for $10,000 more, that they wouldn't have. The market sets the price of the house. More likely is that someone's profits would be reduced - please pause while we all weep - but it won't put them out of business. If you're a developer and you look at the fees and the actual construction costs and you realize that with the market being what it is, that you can't get the price you "need" for house you want to build, the first thing you do is go to the guy selling the land and tell him his price has to come down. This happens all the time when the sellers lot price won't support the price of the house that a developer needs to build. Instead of letting the market adjust the costs and profits of speculators and developers, the County has stepped in a way that guarantees these parties their maximum profits and saddles the homeowner with the maximum expense. There's something wrong with this. It is, in fact, the great irony of this debate about taxes and growth in our county that for the vast majority of homeowners, parents and voters the reality is reduced services for more taxes, while the developers are demanding less responsibility and less taxes. Our beleaguered middle-class is told that the County can no longer afford to provide the quality of life that made this place so attractive at the same time it throws millions in subsidies into the pockets of millionaires. We make great claims about ending welfare, but we're really only changing the beneficiaries. What we've done is to recast developers as the new poster children of the Nineties. This blind devotion to growth is great - if you're a developer or a tumor - , but it doesn't work so well for the rest of us who are better served by priorities that strengthen our communities and our schools.
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