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Have Projects, Will Spend
Have Projects, Will SpendIs the economy achieving what years of effort by the Fauquier business community has been unable to accomplish — putting truth in the advertising that greets our commuters and our visitors at every boundary: Welcome to business-friendly Fauquier?
Perhaps.
The idea is supported by the supervisors recently floating the idea that the county could eliminate the economic development department without missing a beat. The response to the suggestion was immediate and overwhelming and entirely negative, and the supervisors backpedaled with remarkable alacrity.
Then county government cut the engineering department. The layoffs were presented as being budget driven, but almost everyone who commented on the cutbacks for our story a few weeks ago noted that the department — rightly or wrongly — has been widely perceived as obstructionist when it comes to development, especially business development, in Fauquier County.
The recession has made economic development a whole, whole lot more attractive, even here, and, we believe, a lot more people are going to be pushing its merits in the days ahead. They are going to be demanding, with a far stronger and more forceful voice, that we live up to our boundary boasts — or take those ridiculous signs down if we cannot.
Our voice will be solidly joined...if economic development can be directed and confined to the service districts.
And the only way that's going to happen is if we come up with a way to provide services.
The stimulus money represents the best chance we have ever had, likely will ever have again.
County leaders need to be in Richmond, or have someone representing them in Richmond, camping on Tim Kaine's lawn, there to convince the governor of the worthiness of investing federal stimulus dollars in Fauquier County infrastructure.
For a start, our very proximity to the nation's capital makes viable service districts attractive. Having viable services districts provides another option for businesses that want to be close to the city but aren't crazy about adding to Northern Virginia's maddening and seemingly intractable transportation problems.
Is there anything that is as certain to strike a responsive cord with the governor?
Closer to home, open-space preservation is so strong in Fauquier County that it is, for all practical purposes, a governmental imperative. Gov. Kaine has been a champion, and campaigned on a pledge to add 400,000 acres to Virginia's stockpile of preserved land.
Channeling growth and development into service districts is the surest way we know to preserve our farmland.
For a third, our county leaders or their lobbyists can tell the governor some of this federal money could be spent hereabouts on very short notice.
Connecting Catlett, Calverton and Midland to public sewer in Vint Hill and Bealeton, for instance, is, for all practical purposes, a shovel-ready project. Of course, of course, there are huge engineering challenges to be met, but getting started on digging the main lines? That's a slam dunk.
And hiring sufficient engineers to get these projects moving at warp speed? That ought to be a slam dunk, too, because federal money needs to be spent on white-collar jobs, as well as blue, if this economy is going to get righted.
Providing services to service districts and thereby containing economic development where it is meant to be is only part of the equation. Producing jobs, plenty of them, jobs that will likely last long enough to see us through this recession, is another part. And well-spent federal dollars will finally provide redress for the alarming public-health concerns associated with faulty and failing drainfields in southern Fauquier.
Three strikes, and we're in.
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