…I wanted to remind folks of the serious threat we continue to face in protecting our rural areas.
Preserving and protecting our Rural Crescent is essential to the quality of life of every family in Prince William County. The Rural Crescent is our community’s firewall against irrational overdevelopment. Breaching this protection will exacerbate our development problems, adding more gridlock to already impossibly congested roads and packing even more kids into classrooms that are already bursting at the seams.
Make no mistake, this is not just about the rural areas of the County. If we allow the Rural Crescent to be demolished, this incursion will have a cascading effect over every corner of Prince William County.
I made a promise to preserve and protect the Rural Crescent when I first ran for the Board of County Supervisors, and I will continue to keep that promise.
This issue has no regard for Republicans or Democrats, as, unfortunately, I have seen Board colleagues from both political parties advocate for the chipping away of protections implemented to protect our precious open spaces. At a recent forum, Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey Stewart affirmed his support for dismantling the Rural Crescent when he said, “We have to allow developers the ability to build out the county.” This is exactly what is happening as special interests have persistently launched one attack after another to either diminish or totally eliminate the Rural Crescent for their own financial benefit.
Recently, the County Planning Office announced the results of a series of public meetings used to collect feedback from citizens, and it’s clear the views of the majority of citizens who participated in the process were largely ignored. The report offers recommendations that start the process of actually dismantling the Rural Crescent rather than protecting or enhancing it.
The heart of the Planning Office recommendation is to develop a “Transition Ribbon” in the Rural Crescent that rolls out the red carpet for developers to concentrate higher density housing developments in areas that are now designated for farms and smaller communities.
The plan, as currently proposed, will lead to more traffic on already gridlocked roads, more trailers at our schools, more kids in already packed classrooms, longer response times for already overstressed emergency responders, higher taxes for current residents, and a much lower quality of life in Prince William County.
We cannot allow these policy changes to be rammed through to reward the special interest groups that are looking to “build out the county.”
We need to stand firm on protecting the Rural Crescent. For once lost, it will be lost forever.
Over the past few years, many of us have stood together in fighting against the special interests who wanted to ram the Bi-County Parkway through the Rural Crescent and against Dominion Power and the large data centers from slapping up overhead powerlines that could have scarred our rural areas.
We must stand together again to prevent the destruction of the Rural Crescent.
Sincerely,
Pete