Burton Addresses Kincora Vote
Dear Friends and Neighbors,
On Monday night five members of the Board – Scott York, Susan Buckley, Eugene Delgaudio, Stevens Miller, and Lori Waters – approved the Kincora application, which includes 1,400 residential units in an area planned as the County’s premier employment center. I am deeply disappointed in my colleagues’ decision, especially those who professed a commitment to stand by the County’s Comprehensive Plan and to understand the fiscal correlation between residential development and higher taxes. I am also flabbergasted by their willingness to allow the process to be manipulated in such a way that the public had no opportunity to speak to the Board on the final version of the application – a situation I tried to address with a motion to postpone the vote until a later date but which failed 4-5.
My last newsletter described my concerns about this project in great detail. In summary, they included
- The current glut of office space in the region and in the County and the failure of other local mixed-use developments to flourish do not provide great confidence that this project will succeed.
- The proffers, as adopted Monday night, almost force the Board to establish a Community Development Authority (CDA) to finance the necessary road improvements in a meaningful timeframe. CDA’s are an inherently risky financial bet with implications for the County’s fiscal health.
- The loss of tax revenue for repayment of the Route 28 Improvement bonds due to the ridiculously low buy-out requirement for residential units.
- The planning and legal precedents set by the Board’s decision to approve a change to the plan without first undertaking a formal amendment to the plan. It was the requirement that Creekside, Crosstrails, Arcola Center, and Greenvest pursue such a CPAM that provided the public with the opportunity to fully understand the impact of those proposals and to participate fully in the process. After Monday night I do not know whether this or future Boards will ever be able to require such a process again. We have now created a situation that will allow unplanned, unbridled growth by a thousand rezonings.
The final version presented to the Board failed to address any of these concerns in a meaningful manner and I am not sure that my colleagues in the majority truly understood the magnitude of their votes with regards to that last bullet point. They seemed to view the matter as just another rezoning when it was anything but.
As always, a webcast of the meeting is posted on-line. I highly recommend viewing the meeting as it unfolded. I have also included a copy of my final remarks before we took our vote below.
