To Raising Kaine.  Thank you for being fair to the Charlie Hall Campaign.  You have given opportunity after opportunity to Smyth.  In return, her only response was to thumb her nose at the efforts that you have put forth in making sure there is fair and balanced coverage of both candidates.

Good for Raising Kaine.  Where were you last night when the League Moderator required that Charlie go first on each question asked?

They could have used your help to make the process fair.

Glad the voting process is fair.

thanks

So we could have run the debate, except that bloggers were not considered "credentialed" or whatever, plus the LWV had the situation well under control.  Er, not!!! :)

Providence District needs an elected official who will always act with the best interests of the citizens at heart. Linda Smyth is not that person. Charlie Hall is.

Citizens are routinely treated in a demeaning manner by Ms. Smyth, especially those whose opinions differ from hers. She is intentionally discouraging involvement by such citizens.

Charlie Hall has stood up for average citizens and encouraged debate on the future of Providence District. He is the clear choice for those who value such debate as healthy.

We need a change in Fairfax County.  We need fresh thinking.  We need a real commitment to the environment we are so dependent on.  That means, by the way, addressing environmental issues at the level of public policy.  The greenness of one Supervisor's office building in a County of over ONE Million people is irrelevant.

What did the Board do prior to this election year?  They may have a decent record on parks, but they fail in every other area.  They have been PASSIVE on mass transit.  I do not believe that any of the last three Providence District Supervisors did much of anything to address community concerns about land use and sprawl.  I cannot take a Providence District Supervisor who claims to be against sprawl seriously.  There is no record to back up such a claim.

I am surrounded by McMansions crammed into Idylwood Rd between Leesburg Pike and Gallows Rd.  Most of these homes have little room for nature.

Lets do what we can to improve the situation as we look ahead.  Lets put some new folks on the Board of Supervisors. Lets have balance.  Lets go out of our way to give those of us who work 40+ hours a week (Not in Real Estate Development and Not people who attend County Planning meetings for a living) a chance to have input on what happens to our neighborhoods, our quality of life, our streets and our air.

Please take a look at Charlie Hall.  charliehall2007.org If you share these concerns, please vote for Charle Hall on June 12th.

I appreciate you bringing this primary race out into the open and raising the Dem awareness of Fairfax politics, Providence District in particular.

For those of us who have a passion about
  - preserving our quality of life and stable neighborhoods,
  - linking land use and transportation planning(thx, Gov Kaine),
  - development phased with concurrent improvements to roads, schools, parks and sewers,
  - closely monitoring developer promises so citizens and newspapers are not the "enforcers",
  - protecting and expanding our parks to serve the residents of new high density projects,
  - an open government, competitively bid contracts, and no secret policy meetings,
  - consensus in the planning process, not locking citizens out who "can't be counted on" to give the supervisor the answer she wants,
  - providing more efficient use of our existing athletic fields, including school fields,
  - having their opinion count, not belittled and verbally abused when testifying before the Board of Supervisors,
  - a regional transportation system that will service all our county employment nodes,
  - making and equitably enforcing environmental and housing policy,
  - playing by codified rules and not "re-reading" county ordinances and regulations to fit the supervisor whim of the day,
  - create citizen led land use and budget task forces that will evaluate proposed impacts of developments and our government's efficacy....

The vote is for Charlie Hall. He will respect, listen to and represent Providence citizens. He will not continue to blame the Dillon Rule and state legislators, but utilize all the powers the General Assembly has bestowed on counties to control development and create livable communities.

Smyth has failed all the above.

Vote for change - Vote for Democracy - Vote Hall on June 12th.
 

Supervisor Smyth has done far more than simply make her office "green."  Supervisor Smyth has been a leader on the Fairfax Board, implementing county wide policies that reduce carbon emissions, increase tree canopies, protect open spaces, and encourage recycling. On top of that, she led by example, by showing just how simple it is for all of us to do our part to help the environment. Her innovated approach to reduce stormwater runoff at the Providence District office is just one of many examples of Linda Smyth's true devotion to the environment and to improving the lives of Providence residents.

I encourage everyone to take a hard look at the record of Supervisor Smyth. You will find that her passion for the environment, her devotion to transportation solutions, and her dedication to the Providence community is unmatched by anyone else in this race.

Like redefining a stream from perennial to intermittent so developers could build more houses at Wedderburn?

I see you've eaten the bait about that silly parking lot project. ooooohh, county staff built her an environmentally friendly parking lot that she's taking full credit for when in fact, she really had nothing to do with that project.

Increasing tree canopies?? Have you driven down Gallows Road any time recently, specifically between Tysons and the Dunn Loring Metro station? Um, our land has been decimated by developers.

Clearly, Linda Smyth is too busy for real democracy or real debate because her schedule is so busy, so I'm too busy to vote for her. I'll be voting for Charlie Hall. He seems like a Democrat who cares. Smyth hides behind Connolly's political machine...she's been his puppet too long now. It's time for some independent thinking on that board. A former journalist fits the bill.

Frankly, I also don't like watching and reading how citizens are demeaned by Smyth at supervisor meetings. That's just wrong.

It is not all that hard to nibble around the edges of sound environmental policy.  There are lots of pretty minor but good-sounding things to do. Green roofs, tree planting funds, replacing the County fleet with hybrid cars, these all fall in that category.  The Board has also enacted some good-sounding environmental plans on paper, but dedicated funding and specific implementation plans are sorely lacking.

We currently face two enormous environmental challenges in Northern Virginia -- reducing the carbon emissions that hasten global warming and reducing the flow of pollutants in our streams that are destroying the Chesapeake Bay.

While the Board is in the process of devising a Cool Counties program to address the former, it will not be unveiled until this summer, and all press reports to date say it relies on incentive programs.  Incentives are good, but they are not enough.  We need to follow California and support its demand for an EPA decision allowing it to stringently regulate automobile emissions.  Once California receives that permission, Virginia can follow suit.  Our Board needs to push Richmond to support California's request and follow swiftly in its footsteps.  And while the Board has just released a new Tree Action Plan that envisions a network of wooded greenways growing along existing corridors of transportation, recreation and water, there is as yet no dedidated funding for it in the County budget, nor is it tied into the Cool Counties program.  These are good plans on paper, but that is all.

On the second front, Linda Smyth should be held  personally responsible for the County's unexplained year-long delay in even starting watershed planning for the Accotink watershed, which has its headwaters in Providence District and lies entirely within Fairfax County.  If you check Linda's Providence Newsletters over the last year, you will see that this process was first scheduled to start in the Spring of 2006, then delayed to the Fall, then to the Spring of this year.  And here in late May the County's watershed website still shows no action, although I understand that there has been some advertising for a consultant to bid on a contract to advise the still unappointed Steering Committee.  The City of Fairfax has already commenced independent action to help protect other headwaters of Accotink Creek within its jurisdiction, but it is past time for the County to take the lead.

Linda should also be held personally responsible for the County's failure to enact any plan over the past two years to protect intermittent streams.  In 2003, one of the Accotink's headwater springs, located on the Wedderburn property coveted by developers, was classified by the BOS as a protected perennial stream, entitled to a 100 foot vegetative buffer.  Developers undid the rigorous 26-factor analysis supporting this decision with a few photographs in August 2004 showing a dry stream after 21 days of drought. 

Linda allowed this to happen as an "administrative decision" reclassifying the stream as "intermittent," without notice to citizens or any kind of public hearing or appeal.  She actually castigated citizens for bringing the testimony of six national and world renowned stream sediment ecologists (the specialty is called benthology) who testified before the Board that this decision was wrong, because the moisture in stream sediments still supports critical water-cleansing micro-fauna even when the stream appears dry.  At the Wedderburn property, a stone spring house over 100 years old attested to the constant flow of the steam, but all Linda and the Board cared about was the developers' photos. 

While the regulations allowing for stream declassification have since been tightened, two years later we still have no plan for protecting true intermittent streams that also play a critical role in protecting water quality.

Meanwhile, Virginia is NOT going to meet its 2010 water quality deadlines under the Chesapeake Bay agreement, and the Bay itself continues to experience record "dead zones."

I know who the true environmentalist in this race is, and it is not Linda Smyth.

Remember to vote here (on the RK front page, not on this blog) and on June 12th.  Our future is at stake.

Posting a comment isn't the same as voting!  Make sure to go to the home page to vote!

I want to vote on the RK endorsement but cannot find where on the page to do so.  There's so much here, but no link that says "Vote here."  I find much discussion, rules, etc. etc. but don't see where to vote. 

Never mind, I finally saw the tiny little box on on the left... with so much on the left and right margins, it was tough to find.

If you post with some ridiculous name such as "NOT" Joe Bloh you do not deserve to be taken seriously.

The only pro-Smyth person posting on this string does not choose to stand behind his/her comments.  Why?

If Charlie Hall prevails in the primary you will need the support of Not Luke Vaughn's Baton. The time to lay the foundation for party unity in the general is now.

Say whatever you want about Smyth, but you are going to need her supporters in a few weeks, assuming Hall wins the nomination. Something you might want to think about before you play blog enforcer.

Democrats know how to rally to their own when faced with a challenger, but there is not even a whiff of a Republican challenger for the Providence seat in the general election this Fall. This June 12th primary, ladies and gentlemen, is IT!

Also, what I would most fear is a Republican challenger running against Linda on a "manage growth" platform like Charlie's... for example has anyone seen Gary Baise's campaign literature?  Linda could very well go down in defeat to a Republican.

Rumors are spreading that you, Lee Diamond, quit the Fairfax County Democratic Committee.  Word has it that you planned to work/volunteer for Becky Cate or Charlie Hall if one of them entered the race as an Independent candidate for Providence Supervisor.  Turned out Charlie chose to pursue a Democratic nomination at the last minute, which made you look kind of silly in the eyes of a number of Providence/FCDC members.

Is that true?  I ask this respectfully, since a a few Dems may have had a good laugh at your comment and this blog post:

http://www.raisingka...

If true, how can you be so righteous, claim that change is in the air in local politics, and attempt to scare off anonymous bloggers when you may have disenfranchised yourself from the local Democratic Party?  Hope this was not true.

Please set the record straight.  Thanks.

I find personal attacks (your post starts with the words "Rumors are spreading that you...") by anonymous partisans on people brave enough to post under their own names to be one of the most objectionable practices found in blogs.

I'll need time when I'm not busy to think about untangling a previous post.  I will say that I stand behind what I write.  That should count for something, especially when the person asking me a question is......Anonymous!  Also, I don't think this election is about Linda so much.  Our neighborhoods do need forceful representation on the Board of Supervisors.

For me, the Hall-Smyth race is not about politics.  It is about sane land use.  I live surrounded by the Fairfax Board's handiwork of McMansions.  Most Democrats pay lip service to environmental stewardship.  Unfortunately, we don't have as many following through.  In particular, those in power.

What I do on county races is driven by my having been driven into the red zone by our current crop of failed leaders on land use, mass transit, living wage etc.

I love the way machine Democrats have such fondness for attacking reformers.

The grassroots activists have done so much more for the Democratic Party than the machine since 2005 that it is ridiculous.

I have lived in Fairfax for 15 years.  I've lived in Providence for 15 years.  Maybe next year, there will be Democrats on the Board of Supervisors who are not owned by special interests.  Right now, I don't know that we are in such a good position on that score.

1) Land use - Linda's record is, to put it mildly, disappointing

2) willingness to engage / listen -  Smyth has refused to engage this community.  We were willing to listen to what she had to say, but she had nothing to say to us.  That is also a factor

3)clear manipulation of the debate, both in the ground rules that were supposed to exclude this community, and the failure to abide by the ground rules in a fashion designed to assist Smyth.  She could have pointed out that the questions were not being alternated, but chose instead to keep the advantage she was being given.  That to me bespeaks someone afraid of letting her opponent have the opportunity to rebut was she says.

I think the choice is easy.

Charlie Hall sounds great.  He says: - Listen to the Public.  Support me. 

But there is a problem in what Charlie says.

FIRST:  The public did speak.  The overwhelming majority want to make Metro West a model for Smart Growth.

SECOND: A small minority calling themselves Fair Growth does not want to concentrate development at Metro.  Instead they want to spread new development out - they want SPRAWL. 

Doing what Fair Growth wants - doing what Charlie Hall wants -  will aggravate traffic problems, worsen global warming, spoil Fairfax County for our children, and ironically, ignore what the vast majority of the public wants. 

Even at the meeting Charlie sponsored more people spoke up for Smart Growth at Metro West and rejected Fair Growth SPRAWL.

Charlie Hall should listen to the Public - and support Metro West.