The recent Town Hall Forum at Woodlea Manor turned into a game of softball. Some members of the Leesburg Town Council are making the rounds of HOAs expressing their frustration over the lost opportunity to provide water and sewer to Crosstrail and to receive the enormous tax revenue that this proposed development will produce not for Leesburg but for Loudoun County. Seeming to forget that Woodlea is in Loudoun County and that we all benefit from a more fiscally sound County, the Town vs. Peterson game began on a recent Thursday night.
Susan Horne, managing Team Leesburg and actually pitching some very nice compliments about the Peterson Companies by noting the wonderful mixed use developments they are known for, sent Susan Swift to the plate. Town planner Swift took a swing at transportation, airport, and utility issues. Despite pitchers planted by Team Leesburg in the audience who delivered several underhanded softballs, Swift whiffed each toss. The umpire called three strikes.
Hoping to get a hit for the Town, Kelly Burke assumed the pitcher’s mound and sent a curve ball to Swift on roads, which Swift fouled to left field.
Sandy Kane was then sent in as a relief pitcher and asked Swift with a slow slider about residential traffic. Swift bunted a foul.
Sensing a need for yet a better pitcher, manager Horne called on Bill Whyte from the airport commission. After warming up with an explanation of the effects of Gelignite, he stated the first Leesburg Airport had closed because of noise. This was ruled a foul ball which actually traveled backwards over the catcher’s head. The ump explained that Arthur Godfrey, who owned the original grass strip runway, wanted a longer paved runway for his soon-to-be-acquired DC-3, which accounted for the new airport location.
This sent retired pitcher Burke into contortions of body and face that worried some in the audience that a medical emergency was about to occur.
The inning ended. Team Peterson was up to bat. Leading off was Jeff Saxe with Mike Banzhaf on deck. Saxe lit up the big screen with an impressive PowerPoint presentation of all the features of Crosstrail - restaurants like Coastal Flats, a 12 to 14 screen movie theater, well known stores and shops all closely connected to high-end class A office space, a residential community, a school site, and parkland. Three bases, Live, Work, and Play were all tagged. A homerun for Saxe.
Banzhaf looked ready for a fight as he strode to the plate, and hit three long balls on annexation, water, and roads. As he swung at water, Burke again came unglued and questioned his source of information from the Town staff. Some poor staffer may be cut.
All this was too much for manager Horne who tried to call the game on account of too much raining good news from Peterson. The umpire ruled that that Peterson had the right to finish the inning.
Despite heavy promotion, so few fans turned out at Woodlea, future minor league games like this may be in doubt.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Monday, August 21, 2006
Birth of the Blogs – from Feed to Plastic
Back in the stone age of the Internet, May of 1995, to be exact, my nephew Steven Johnson, who was working on his PhD at Columbia University, started the first on-line magazine, FEED. Steven assembled some of his friends, many of whom were college classmates from Brown and up and coming writers and journalists, raised some capital from friends and family, and built a website. This was a time when there were no HTML editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, which today make designing a Web site almost as easy as writing an essay in Word. No $10 a month hosting companies existed.
In addition to FEED’s professional staff of writers, FEED had a section called “Filter”. This was where anyone could express their thoughts by writing short articles on subjects that struck their fancy. Other readers could comment on these Filter posts. Often lively discussions developed.
Reviewers in major media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek, heaped praise on this leading edge and edgy “E-zine”, a word FEED helped coin. In 1995 Newsweek ran an article on the pioneers of the then new Internet. Among those singled out was Steven Johnson along with Bill Gates and other household names.
Steven’s business model was based on ads that would be placed on FEEDs website and the revenue would pay the overhead costs, including website design, maintenance, hosting, rent, and stipends for the writers, and a return on the investors’ investment. However, advertisers were skeptical about spending anything but meager amounts on web ads. In July 2000 as the economy weakened FEED merged with another popular media website, suck.com, and became Automatic Media in order to consolidate overhead. Lycos provided an infusion of capital and for a very short while it appeared that Automatic Media coupled with yet another Johnson Concept. “Plastic”, would be the “new new” thing in the world of on-line literature. Plastic was to be a community weblog, authored by thousands of people.
In the heat of this battle for survival Steven Johnson went to San Francisco to pitch an idea to Evan Williams. Williams was working with a couple of friends on a Web-based software concept they called Blogger, which they had developed to make the expensive and complicated process of creating a weblog or “blog” easy and relatively simple. Steven wanted to connect Blogger and Plastic. His idea was to have the two connect to each other, so that interesting ideas and links would "trickle up" from the individual blogs to the group blog at Plastic.
Data on the Internet moves at the speed of light and while Evans was considering all this, the dot com meltdown was building at Internet speed. By the spring of 2001 Automatic Media was history with only a post on their website that created almost as much attention as all the articles posted over the past six years. Johnson’s farewell said, “We are feeling the effects of the recent chill. As of today, we are in suspended animation, cooled to a temperature at which our metabolic rate is near zero.” Suck said simply, “has gone fishin’.”
Remember that great line from The Graduate, “Son, the future is plastic”.
Evan Williams sold his web-based software, Blogger, to Google for pre IPO Google stock, worth – use your imagination. (You are reading this on a site developed with Blogger.)
Steven Johnson became a best selling author, (Everything Bad is Good for You, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.) His newest book, The Ghost Map will be released in October.
Today you can find Steven Johnson writing his blog.
In addition to FEED’s professional staff of writers, FEED had a section called “Filter”. This was where anyone could express their thoughts by writing short articles on subjects that struck their fancy. Other readers could comment on these Filter posts. Often lively discussions developed.
Reviewers in major media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek, heaped praise on this leading edge and edgy “E-zine”, a word FEED helped coin. In 1995 Newsweek ran an article on the pioneers of the then new Internet. Among those singled out was Steven Johnson along with Bill Gates and other household names.
Steven’s business model was based on ads that would be placed on FEEDs website and the revenue would pay the overhead costs, including website design, maintenance, hosting, rent, and stipends for the writers, and a return on the investors’ investment. However, advertisers were skeptical about spending anything but meager amounts on web ads. In July 2000 as the economy weakened FEED merged with another popular media website, suck.com, and became Automatic Media in order to consolidate overhead. Lycos provided an infusion of capital and for a very short while it appeared that Automatic Media coupled with yet another Johnson Concept. “Plastic”, would be the “new new” thing in the world of on-line literature. Plastic was to be a community weblog, authored by thousands of people.
In the heat of this battle for survival Steven Johnson went to San Francisco to pitch an idea to Evan Williams. Williams was working with a couple of friends on a Web-based software concept they called Blogger, which they had developed to make the expensive and complicated process of creating a weblog or “blog” easy and relatively simple. Steven wanted to connect Blogger and Plastic. His idea was to have the two connect to each other, so that interesting ideas and links would "trickle up" from the individual blogs to the group blog at Plastic.
Data on the Internet moves at the speed of light and while Evans was considering all this, the dot com meltdown was building at Internet speed. By the spring of 2001 Automatic Media was history with only a post on their website that created almost as much attention as all the articles posted over the past six years. Johnson’s farewell said, “We are feeling the effects of the recent chill. As of today, we are in suspended animation, cooled to a temperature at which our metabolic rate is near zero.” Suck said simply, “has gone fishin’.”
Remember that great line from The Graduate, “Son, the future is plastic”.
Evan Williams sold his web-based software, Blogger, to Google for pre IPO Google stock, worth – use your imagination. (You are reading this on a site developed with Blogger.)
Steven Johnson became a best selling author, (Everything Bad is Good for You, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.) His newest book, The Ghost Map will be released in October.
Today you can find Steven Johnson writing his blog.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Water Water Every Where, but…
I think it was former Leesburg Mayor Kenneth B. Rollins who said, “Control the toilets and you control growth.” I know Kenny, who died in 1988, is looking down on us today with a big grin. Kenny was a first rate politician. He served 14 years (1963-1973 and 1978-1982) as Mayor of Leesburg. He was also a member of the Virginia House of Delegates for many years. He sat on the State Water Control Board. Ah, the fun he is missing. The Town of Leesburg and Loudoun County are locked in a battle royal over who has the right to provide water and sewer service to certain parts of the County adjoining the Town.
The show begins with four of the Town Council members and a cadre of staff showing up at Home Owner Association (HOA) board meetings, whining of unfair treatment by the County. Often their allotted 15 minutes stretches on to well over half-an-hour with HOA board members checking their watches knowing that issues on swimming pool throw-up, trash can containment, and dog poop are still on the agenda and are the priority concerns of their constituents. Not sewer service to some foreign land.
Where’s the beef? Call it Crosstrail, Phil Bolen Park, and Riverside Park. Crosstrail is in the Town’s swat team’s cross hairs as the County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors are soon to vote on this rezoning. The Town gets no vote and no revenue from Crosstrail. Why not? Simple, not so many years ago a former Town Council urged on by today’s Mayor Umstattd refused to annex any more land into the Town. Land you don’t own you can not tax or rezone. Now that a source of major tax revenue appears, the Town Council wants to bring The Peterson Company’s land into the town.
Understandably Peterson has said, “No thank you”. Why start the rezoning process all over again with the Town and wait two years for a decision? As for water and sewer? Town water delivered to the County costs twice as much as Town water delivered to property within the Town. Go figure, but better yet go to Loudoun Citizens for Fair Water Rates. The folks from The Peterson Companies have, and they don’t like what they read. So will anyone else owning land along the Town boundaries.
The show begins with four of the Town Council members and a cadre of staff showing up at Home Owner Association (HOA) board meetings, whining of unfair treatment by the County. Often their allotted 15 minutes stretches on to well over half-an-hour with HOA board members checking their watches knowing that issues on swimming pool throw-up, trash can containment, and dog poop are still on the agenda and are the priority concerns of their constituents. Not sewer service to some foreign land.
Where’s the beef? Call it Crosstrail, Phil Bolen Park, and Riverside Park. Crosstrail is in the Town’s swat team’s cross hairs as the County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors are soon to vote on this rezoning. The Town gets no vote and no revenue from Crosstrail. Why not? Simple, not so many years ago a former Town Council urged on by today’s Mayor Umstattd refused to annex any more land into the Town. Land you don’t own you can not tax or rezone. Now that a source of major tax revenue appears, the Town Council wants to bring The Peterson Company’s land into the town.
Understandably Peterson has said, “No thank you”. Why start the rezoning process all over again with the Town and wait two years for a decision? As for water and sewer? Town water delivered to the County costs twice as much as Town water delivered to property within the Town. Go figure, but better yet go to Loudoun Citizens for Fair Water Rates. The folks from The Peterson Companies have, and they don’t like what they read. So will anyone else owning land along the Town boundaries.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Judgment Day
Recently the Town of Leesburg lost a round in court when Loudoun Circuit Court Judge James Chamblin ruled in favor of Centex Homes who had filed a by-right development plan for the Meadowbrook property. Once again the Leesburg taxpayers are bearing the cost of litigation that should never have taken place. It all started a year ago when the Town Council down-planned this land in the face of pleadings by Centex that a compromise was possible. This left Centex with only the option, to develop this land as “by-right” with one home per acre instead of a density level that would be negotiated through a proffered rezoning.
By down-planning the R-1 zoned Meadowbrook property from a recommendation of 2 to 5 dwelling units per acre to not more than 1 dwelling unit per acre, the last Town Council basically forced Centex to go with by-right, un-proffered development with no regional road improvements, no dedicated school sites, no parkland, no cash proffers, and no mixed use non-residential components. Undoubtedly, the Town does not like the specter of over 300 acres of this by-right development at its southern entrance and would prefer Centex to keep the land in sod farm use. But, Judge Chamblin apparently saw the Town's motives at play and ordered the Town to start processing the Centex by-right plan without delay.
I hope this new Town Council will be more flexible than the last. If not, it is likely the Town will be spending over $20 million to bring Battlefield Parkway to Rt. 15, and millions more to widen Rt. 15. An invitation to Centex by the Town to develop a Plan Amendment for this property might avoid continuing litigation and open this proposal up for reasonable negotiations.
Now more litigation is being threatened by some Council member over the right to provide water and sewer service to the proposed Crosstrail development. As I have said before, that horse left the barn years ago when Mayor Umstattd and her supporters on the Council rejected the idea of annexing any more land into the Town. The Town can not shove pipes into the County unless the County agrees to it. The Town can not make zoning decisions on land that is in the County. Of course the Town can petition the County and make their views known, just like any other citizen, but the Town does not have a vote on County land use issues.
If all this was not enough, threats of more litigation are being made over an easement granted long-ago by the Town for access to Peterson’s Crosstrail property. This relatively small part of this planned development is within the Town, so the issue needs to be resolved with the Town. Let’s hope the Leesburg taxpayers do not once again have to pay for more expensive litigation.
Unheard from yet are our neighbors in the NE quadrant just outside of the Town boundary who are served by Town water and sewer. They are still smarting from the 100% increase in their utility bills from the Town. Stay tuned.
By down-planning the R-1 zoned Meadowbrook property from a recommendation of 2 to 5 dwelling units per acre to not more than 1 dwelling unit per acre, the last Town Council basically forced Centex to go with by-right, un-proffered development with no regional road improvements, no dedicated school sites, no parkland, no cash proffers, and no mixed use non-residential components. Undoubtedly, the Town does not like the specter of over 300 acres of this by-right development at its southern entrance and would prefer Centex to keep the land in sod farm use. But, Judge Chamblin apparently saw the Town's motives at play and ordered the Town to start processing the Centex by-right plan without delay.
I hope this new Town Council will be more flexible than the last. If not, it is likely the Town will be spending over $20 million to bring Battlefield Parkway to Rt. 15, and millions more to widen Rt. 15. An invitation to Centex by the Town to develop a Plan Amendment for this property might avoid continuing litigation and open this proposal up for reasonable negotiations.
Now more litigation is being threatened by some Council member over the right to provide water and sewer service to the proposed Crosstrail development. As I have said before, that horse left the barn years ago when Mayor Umstattd and her supporters on the Council rejected the idea of annexing any more land into the Town. The Town can not shove pipes into the County unless the County agrees to it. The Town can not make zoning decisions on land that is in the County. Of course the Town can petition the County and make their views known, just like any other citizen, but the Town does not have a vote on County land use issues.
If all this was not enough, threats of more litigation are being made over an easement granted long-ago by the Town for access to Peterson’s Crosstrail property. This relatively small part of this planned development is within the Town, so the issue needs to be resolved with the Town. Let’s hope the Leesburg taxpayers do not once again have to pay for more expensive litigation.
Unheard from yet are our neighbors in the NE quadrant just outside of the Town boundary who are served by Town water and sewer. They are still smarting from the 100% increase in their utility bills from the Town. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Sign of the Times?
Last year at this time, we had Town signage advising tourists of August Court Days. This year, we have signs up advising them to be concerned about pandemic flu. Brilliant. This will ensure that those tourists spend their dollars in Leesburg.
Submitted to Leadership Leesburg by one of our roving reporters
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