Playback is hell

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Playback is hell				December 27, 2006

This week the airwaves will be humming with playbacks and reminiscences of the year that was. Whether 2006 is worth playing back is open to question, but, like it or not, we’ll be subjected to rotating faces of dead dignitaries and entertainers and endless discussions of what pass for major events.

What we won’t see are the faces of the thousands of Iraqis and American troops who also died during the year. Thanks to the governmental blinders imposed on such reflections, we shall, as we have in past years, accept their anonymous passing without protest.

The question now is whether 2006 will simply blend into 2007 in a constant continuum of sameness. I suspect that it will.

Despite the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq, which the president has already consigned to the ignominy of his disdain, yet more troops will be sent to Iraq in the hopeless quest for an illusory victory. We shall stubbornly maintain our refusal to engage Syria and Iran, and, ignoring the sensible pleas of former president Jimmy Carter, we shall continue to accept an apartheid state in Palestine. In short, lacking diplomacy and political solutions, the Middle East will continue to boil, and more American lives will needlessly be sacrificed.

In Virginia, 2006 was a mixed bag. While legislative gay bashing continued apace and resulted in further discrimination against one segment of our population, transportation problems were left to rot on the compost heap by an inactive and fiscally divided Senate and General Assembly. Macaca man went out and Webb the Bush-basher came in.

In Williamsburg and James City, the plague of growth that afflicted 2006 will most certainly continue.

This year, rural lands committees came and went, offering Band-Aids for cuts that simply won’t heal. Botched plans for Matoaka Elementary School and Warhill High School sent questions of gymnasium sizes, eminent domain and budget overruns cruising onto the front page of the Gazette for weeks.

New density proposals for Williamsburg ignited bonfires of protest, while acreage proposals and zoning changes instigated by the latest rural lands committee in James City found the Planning Commission, the Board of Supervisors and Gazette publisher-editorialist W.C. O’Donovan looking for Monica the swami in their attempt to make sense of what it all meant. Supervisor Jim Icenhour got so exercised that he wrote an essay for the Gazette in which he toted up the growth numbers and came up with a sum that will please no one.

While preserving rural lands is an estimable goal, the problem we’re facing involves more the issue of population growth. You can cluster until the cows come home to enhance green space, but the fact is that you’re not doing a whit to ease the constantly growing need for additional schools, parks, roads, police, water and a plethora of other things if you don’t limit severely the number of residences, clustered or not, on any potential development site.

Fed up with the traffic congestion and the lackadaisical attitude of the state legislature relative to questions of transportation, schools and other growth issues, Prince William supervisor W.S. Covington III has proposed freezing housing construction for one year in that county. And his fellow supervisors agree. “I think to get the attention of the General Assembly and the governor, this would be a shot across the bow to say we need some help dealing with these types of problems,” said supervisor John Jenkins.

Obviously there are state-locality legal issues with such a proposal, and developers who have previously been riding the gravy train are cranked up in opposition. But if more localities were to take such a stance, word might spread to the chuckleheads up in Richmond that growth is a statewide issue that must be addressed.

In addition, it would allow for an exhaustive study, perhaps in conjunction with future Comprehensive Plans, of the effect of overpopulation and the steps that must be taken to bring impending development more in line with what cities and counties can afford in terms of services. Obviously we can’t remain on the reactive treadmill of more people, more schools, more roads and more water forever.

The alternative is to do nothing. Let schools bulge, let water be rationed, let taxes rise, let parks and recreation facilities overflow and let roads become clogged to the point that people simply throw up their hands and leave. Or refuse to come in the first place.

As in the case of Iraq, I suspect we’ll continue to stumble down the same congested growth road in 2007 that we have plodded along in 2006. We’ll simply throw more of the same at the problem in the hope that it will go away and we can declare victory.

In the process, we, our city, our county and our country will become more encoiled in the snaky twinings of choking lifelessness than Troy’s lamentable Laocoon and his sons.