August 2006

Check it out here(www.draftgilmore.org)

Would Gilmore’s entrance ruin Allen’s chances?

Delegate Bob Marshall dropped quite a bombshell at the Dulles South CPAM meeting last night, reading the Planning Commission an opinion from the AG’s office that the CPAMs could not be voted on without an official map showing VDOT generated cost estimates for needed road improvements. He was immediately accosted by former Loudoun BOS Chair Dale Polen-Myers and Sterling District Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio in the hallway, ranting that this was ridiculous and that they could then use this reasoning to stop the Route 50 traffic calming initiative.

Does anyone not believe that Bob Marshall is a conservative Republican? Apparently not by LCRC standards. What was Delgaudio doing at this hearing in such a prominent role outside of his district? Could it be the Shockey connection, who owns land in the area and are his biggest campaign supporters?

The audience of commenters was obviously stacked with developer and engineering company employees, most of whom live outside of the affected area. One of the first commenters was from Laurel, Maryland. Anyone against the CPAM is painted as a tea sipping fox hunter from the horse country.Â

Bob Marshall is a good man looking out for his constituents and asking for reasonable analysis of the future traffic impacts of huge scale development (which by the way increased from 28,000 units to 33,000 units almost overnight). The sitting Republican supervisors are pounding the last nail in their electoral coffin with this mess.

There is quite a bit of consternation in political circles of all stripes in Loudoun County about a unified independent slate of supervisor candidates in 2007. Both traditional political parties are worried that this would create an unknown dynamic, and special interest groups are worried that such a development could make reaching their electoral goals more difficult and uncertain.

Conventional wisdom holds that independent bids are a huge uphill battle, but Loudoun County has two established Independent supervisors in Jim Burton of the Blue Ridge District and Chairman Scott York. Both started out in the Republican Party but left over growth issues. The Republican Party is in trouble electorally over growth issues, but the Democrats seem to want to continue to commit electoral suicide by nominating left of center candidates with an over emphasis on non-local issues. LCDC Chairman Thom Beres seems overly giddy in recent quotes, while Suzanne Volpe (where’s LCRC Chairman Paul Protic?) seems totally out of touch with reality in her public professions of a Republican sweep.

Several well qualified moderate candidates are currently struggling with where to run. While the LCRC operates as a closed private club, the LCDC is more welcoming. However, Loudoun County is generally conservative and the Dems are struggling to contain their own fringe elements.

Does Scott York have big enough coattails to lead an Independent slate? Will the LCRC and LCDC move to capture the center and these candidates, or will they continue to play hard to their bases leaving the majority middle unclaimed?

Eric Lundberg, Chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Committee has sent around information reminding us that the President will be making a joint appearance in the Mt. Vernon area late this afternoon as part of a fundraising event.Â

Eric reports that “ground zero” (I would have used a different term) will be at the intersection of Mt. Vernon Memorial Highway and Ferry Landing Road. The President is expected to arrive between 1645 and 1730 this afternoon.  Eric also reports that Democrats are planning a counter-demonstration (not clear whether it’s against Bush, Allen, both of them, or all of us).Â

If you can get away, try to be there.

UPDATE: apparently this was a bi-partisan event, with almost as many Ds as Rs out to show their support for Senator Allen and the President (that IS what the D’s were there for, isn’t it?). The blog world was well represented with such luminaries as NLS and Kenton Ngo (Kenton videotaping furiously – Kenton, lightning won’t strike twice). The Post apparently will run a story tomorrow. Apparently a good time was had by all, especially the lovely Dem lady who invited one of our stalwarts to “Go to Hell, “ sophisticated political discourse that until recently, apparently, was the sole property of our commenter MOM. The Dems seem to be trying to beat us at our own crass game. I say keep them out of such longshoreman talk and leave it for us to use on each other.

I want to thank RedState.com for putting Too Conservative on their blog state link list.

See their favorite Republican blogs state by state here.

Well the Convention has come and past.

I was back in Virginia for about a week, and now I am back in Texas.

I wanted to congratulate Supervisor Stewart for winning the convention, and wish him luck into November. He has my full support, and I hope he will come on TC for a live-blog chat.

An article in the Washington Post today discusses what the development industry sees as undue political influence on the recent VDOT traffic impact study for the proposed Dulles South mega-development. I don’t know all of the details, but it seems to me that it would be expected that there would be significant oversight of the study by the VDOT brass since this was touted as a pilot project study. I also don’t believe that it would surprise anyone that adding 28,000 homes just off already congested Route 50 with minimal improvements outside of the proposed neighborhoodswould add significantly to traffic congestion regionally.

Once again this shows the inequities of the disbursement of transportation dollars in Virginia, with NoVA gettting the shaft. But it also shows that the increasing divide and venom between opposing sides of the development issue assures that any study supporting anything favorable to the other side of the debate is viewed as flawed or politically corrupted.Â

Getting truly unbiased information on this issue may be impossible, but some common sense should prevail here. Must NoVA continue to grow at an unsustainable pace to the detriment of existing citizens?

Mitch is on vacation at the beach . Vincent is hunkering down for the full force of first semester in Texas. The Scouts are vacationing in Canada with the Youngs (actually, it’s fun to say that, but Canada is a very, very big country). Loudoun Insider – I’m not sure what he/she’s up to at the moment. But we’re all recharging our batteries before Labor Day and what looks like a very interesting political season. The Allen/Webb contest has, if polls are to be believed, tightened up, at least momentarily. The Middle East continues to be a spewing cess-pool of violence and strife that has political implications for Senate and Congressional candidates around the country, including Virginia. We now have interestingly contrasting candidates, if not a scheduled election, for Chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. We could use some rain and a break in the heat and humidity (although reports indicate that it’s a little better than it has been). The Blog Conference in Martinsville is scheduled for this coming weekend. It seems unlikely that I will be back in time, but if I were, I would try to convince Jaded JD that he and I should attend disguised in a Vaudeville horse’s costume. You would easily know who we are (unless some other pseudonymous bloggers try the same thing) but you wouldn’t necessarily know which end is which – we may take turns to fool those of you who assume that I am always a horse’s ass). JD is a fine gentleman of great personal dignity, so I must make the skeptical observation that it is unlikely he will go for this clever ruse that I have proposed. I tried to arrange a carpool to the event with James Young and James Martin (I strongly feel you can’t have too many Jameses in one car), but that plan also died aborning. Of course, there are severe practical problems in driving a car wearing a Vaudeville Horse costume.

Enjoy the remainder of August. If something really earth-shaking occurs, I may bestir myself to post.  Â