John Foust, 51, resigned Dec. 4 as president and member of the board of directors of the McLean Citizens Association (MCA ) to run for the office of Dranesville District Supervisor.
He filed a statement of organization for “John Foust for Supervisor” with the Electoral Board in Fairfax County Monday, Dec. 9.
Foust, a Democrat who ran for the 34th District seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1999, said the race for supervisor makes it impossible for him to continue to serve on a nonpartisan board. Jan Periello, first vice president, has assumed duties as president.
Foust is a lawyer who founded his own firm in Tysons Corner in 1991. The practice emphasizes commercial litigation and construction law.
“IT’S GOING WELL. I am getting a lot of positive feedback,” he said.
Foust is running, he said, because “I have always believed in public service and have always been involved in the community in one way or another.
“I see this as an outstanding opportunity to provide good public service. Right now, the thing that concerns me the most is sprawl and the lack of green space. I want to make our community more livable,” Foust said.
“There will always be the issue of education. We have to always be pushing for the best public education available.
“We have [traffic] congestion, and public transit offers the greatest bang for the buck to improve our quality of life.
“I think targeted road improvements at ramps and intersections — not necessarily new roads, but improving what we’ve got — would be a high priority,” Foust said.
“Real estate property taxes will be an important issue” in the campaign for supervisor, he said. “We have to stop the spiraling increase in property taxes.
“We have to develop a partnership between local and state government, rather than an antagonistic relationship,” Foust said.
“We need to do a real serious job of education, and convincing state government it is serving the same people as local government.
“We have to get to the place where we are working together on behalf of the taxpayers and citizens.
“There are lots of things we can do in that regard, with an adequate public-facilities ordinance, we won’t continue this [pace of] development without public facilities being in place.
“There has to be a greater return on taxes paid to Richmond,” Foust said. “The formula needs to be more fair for education and transportation.”
Foust and his wife, Marilyn, a physician with Foxhall OB-GYNs, live in McLean with their two teen-aged sons, one in private school and one in parochial school.
“Both my wife and I have a commitment to education,” Foust said. “I am a lawyer with a masters and she is a doctor, and we put ourselves through school. We paid just about every nickel from our own part-time jobs. It meant that much to us.
“I have demonstrated a deep commitment to my community, and one of the most important things we can do is to provide an excellent public-school system. We do it for the kids.” Foust said.
I have attended public, private and parochial schools.
Just before announcing his resignation from the MCA Dec. 4, Foust presided over a contentious issue involving an application by Verizon, which wants to add a second story to its mechanical substation on Chain Bridge Road in McLean.
Foust said the MCA should not supplant the neighbors own attempts to negotiate for better terms.
“They are adamant that the donations were not acceptable, and they wanted to be free to negotiate for themselves.
“It is just unfortunate that Verizon is being so unreasonable,” he said.