After a long and contentious debate during which several motions were introduced and rejected, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors endorsed a proposal Oct. 28 to extend Metrorail along the Dulles Corridor.
Supervisors voted 9-1 to recommend that the Commonwealth Transportation Board — the state's decision-making body — and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority adopt the recommendation to go straight to rail with no intermediary rapid-bus stage. Dranesville District supervisor Stuart Mendelsohn (R) cast the lone dissenting vote. The Board's action follows several nights of public hearings in July during which the majority of testimony supported rail.
DURING THE DISCUSSION, a plan to erect a 2,000-car parking garage near the future Tysons West Station at the corner of Route 7 and Spring Hill Road emerged as a major stumbling block.
"Why are we encouraging as a transit proposal a 2,000-car garage?" Mendelsohn asked. "It just seems to me that from a transportation point of view, the only way we'll really get people to use transit is to make it inconvenient to do something else, like drive," he said. Mendelsohn also offered an amendment asking that the structure be stricken from the plan.
Board chairman Katherine Hanley called Mendelsohn's suggestion "the stick approach" but voted in favor of his amendment. The amendment died when the eight other supervisors rejected it.
"This traffic's going there already," said Supervisor Gerald Connolly (D-Providence), adding that he had recently had lunch with the owners of the Tysons Corner shopping mall, who had expressed the concern that commuters would park in the mall's parking lots if no parking garage were provided.
If the Board turned down the parking garage, he said, "we'll be back here in a few years voting to build a new garage." Connolly offered his own unsuccessful amendment that would have asked the state to guarantee construction of the garage.
Smart-growth advocates said that keeping the parking garage in the plan was symbolic of the Board's poor smart-growth record.
"They have got to learn from Arlington's experience," said Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, noting that Arlington has created pedestrian-friendly development near Metro stations.
"That's of grave concern to us," he added. "This project is going to be a disaster in our view if all they do is put big parking garages along it and keep the rail in the middle of the right of way."
The rail stations should be within walking distance to homes and businesses, not surrounded by big parking structures, he said. Otherwise, the project will reproduce the Vienna Metro Station model, he added. The Vienna Metro Station is considered a smart-growth failure because the station is surrounded by multistory parking garages, with few homes and businesses within walking distance.
While the Coalition for Smarter Growth has endorsed Rail-to-Dulles, Schwartz said the organization might reconsider its position if the accompanying land-use decisions emphasize car trips rather than walking trips. By contrast, the Fairfax County Coalition for Smarter Growth, a local organization, has rejected the rail proposal.
Schwartz said the two groups "took two different tactical routes to the same conclusion," that rail and development need to be linked.
"We made the tactical decision to endorse with provisions, and they didn't trust the authorities to get it right, and they may be proven right," he said.
"We have a difference of opinion on that," said Paul Hughes, the president of the Fairfax County smart-growth organization, who also blasted the garage proposal.
"This 2,000-car garage is literally the antithesis of smart growth, and I think Stu Mendelsohn got it exactly right," he said.
ANOTHER DEBATE centered around the question of raising the tolls on the Dulles Toll Road to pay for part of the project. The Commonwealth of Virginia, which operates the toll road, has suggested tripling the tolls by next year in order to pay for its share, a suggestion supervisors found distasteful.
As part of their official comment on the project, the Board asked that the state consider additional funding sources.
"The strong message was: tripling the tolls is not the way for the state to fund its share."
But the Board did not rule out the possibility that tolls might be increased as the project gets closer to construction.
Fairfax County Executive Anthony Griffin said supervisors can comment to the Commonwealth Transportation Board about tolls, but the decision is not theirs to make.
Thomson Hirst, a business owner along the Dulles Corridor and a proponent of the bus rapid transit option, called the Board's opposition to raising tolls "a fig leaf for politicians to hide behind."
"By their vote [in support of the rail recommendation] the Board is saying, 'We're not going to do anything to stop this increase in tolls,'" he said.
"They're just trying to fool the voters."
Schwartz said he saw overtones of this year's sales tax referendum in the Board's decision.
"They're rushing to move forward with it, probably to keep the momentum going in favor of the sales tax," said Schwartz, who opposes the sales tax increase.
MENDELSOHN ALSO raised the question of noise in the Hallcrest Heights section of McLean and the placement of the rail line in Tysons Corner, which, he said, would not serve as many commuters as some other rail alignments that had been proposed and discarded.
On the issue of noise, he said, "We're talking about putting a major impact through a residential area with an elevated rail system."
John Dittmeier, the acting project manager for WMATA, who was present at the meeting, said that because the Dulles Toll Road was already so loud, residents would barely be able to perceive the additional noise from the Metro.
"There'll always be highway noise, and there'll always be rail noise even with mitigation," he said. "The existing highway noise is so overwhelming that the rail noise does not add to it much."
"It seems to be having your cake and eating it too," said Mendelsohn.