In the outer suburbs and rural areas, residents find their taxes climbing as the public costs of providing services to sprawl development outstrip tax revenues from new homes and businesses. Smog hovers over the Blue Ridge.
Streams swell with polluted run-off from roads and parking lots.
And in the older suburbs, the quality of community life declines as public infrastructure erodes and neighbors and businesses flee for supposedly greener pastures. Such chronic, interconnected problems are forcing many citizens to wonder who's running Northern Virginia. Surely, voters never asked their government to create more pollution, more traffic jams, and higher taxes. Shrewdly, the developers have targeted key elections at the county level, where crucial decisions are made daily about planning, zoning, infrastructure, and taxes. There are alternative solutions to Northern Virginia's problems of transportation and community planning, but unless the public acts against the manipulation of Northern Virginia's political system by self-serving development interests, those alternatives will never have a fair hearing.