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• Aerial photos: Click here to view Development Watch 2.0, an overview of some major projects
Just about every week in the Fredericksburg area, elected officials and developers sit down to negotiate what can be built on some plot of land.
Both sides don their best poker faces and play their cards close to their vests.
Neither side may know exactly when to hold 'em or when to fold 'em, but government officials are becoming wilier players. They are learning the value of the cards they hold, when to raise the stakes and how to bluff.
That's welcome news to Spotsylvania County resident Merle Witt, who leads the Committee of 500, an activist group.
"Past boards basically came and played the hands they were dealt," Witt said. "This board is playing a little more proactive.
"They're at least helping call the game--seven-card stud, or whatever. They're at least getting out front a little bit and saying, 'This is what we expect.'"
A good example is the recent stare-down that could be called Chancellorsville hold 'em.
Developers had offered to hand over some historically significant acreage related to the Civil War Battle of Chancellorsville in return for permission to build a 2,000-home Town of Chancellorsville on the Mullins farm.
Turn down the town, farm owner John Mullins told Spotsylvania supervisors, and he would build the smaller number of houses, stores and offices already allowed under county zoning rules--without preserving any land or making any proffers.
The board called his bluff. In March 2003, supervisors rejected the town plan.
Earlier this year, Mullins sold some of the residential land to luxury homebuilder Toll Brothers Inc.
In July, supervisors took steps to cut off public water and sewer access to Mullins' 55 acres of commercially zoned land fronting State Route 3. Without utilities, Mullins would have had a hard time attracting businesses.
Meanwhile, supervisors were talking behind the scenes to Mullins and Spotsylvania-based Tricord Inc. about a compromise deal that would make everyone happy. Tricord eventually bought more than 225 acres of the farm and sold 140 acres of it to the Civil War Preservation Trust.
Supervisor Hap Connors smiled and shook his head when asked if the utilities maneuver was intended to pull Mullins to the negotiating table.
"We have a lot of tools at our disposal, and we should be using them more often to do what is best for the common good as opposed to what benefits private interests," he said.
Former Stafford County Supervisor David Beiler said more localities should follow that example.
"The Spotsylvania board right now is the perfect role model for how a local governing body ought to operate," he said. "[Chairman] Bob Hagan and Hap Connors have done a tremendous job leading the county in the right direction."
New leaders, new controlsA short time ago, regional leaders weren't willing to stand up to developers that way.
But that is changing as area voters increasingly demand limits on sprawl and other side effects of unlimited growth.
In 1998, the Silver Cos. easily persuaded the Fredericksburg City Council to rezone 544 acres along the Rappahannock River for Celebrate Virginia, a proposed collection of hotels, restaurants and shops.
The controversial vote, which came at the end of a packed public hearing, prompted a backlash at the polls.
Over the next four years, slow-growth activists ousted the six council members who voted for the rezoning without demanding anything more than what Silver had originally offered.
County residents also got busy at the polls.
In 1999, Stafford voters traded two longtime incumbent supervisors who had served on the board since the early 1970s for newcomers. The election of Pete Fields and Jack Cavalier began a movement that would, in the next two years, lead to the replacement of six of the seven supervisors--all established politicians with decades of service--by newcomers who vowed to usher in a new era of smart growth.
Last year, Spotsylvania voters booted veteran Supervisors Mary Lee Carter and Benjamin Pitts in favor of Vince Onorato and Chris Yakabouski, who both won the backing of anti-sprawl groups. Their victories insured a solid five-man slow-growth majority on the seven-seat board.
In recent years, both county boards have passed measures to help guide growth and shift more of the infrastructure costs of new homes to developers.
Stafford and Spotsylvania have increased their proffer guidelines from a few thousand dollars per house to more than $20,000 per house. Both counties have also boosted zoning and building-permit fees to keep those departments self-sufficient.
Spotsylvania passed a comprehensive downzoning of the county in 2002--and reaffirmed it last year after a legal challenge--which reduced by nearly half the number of homes that could be built without board permission.
Spotsylvania Supervisor Gary Jackson describes these changes as part of a "natural evolution" in planning the county's future.
"We're getting smarter and we are applying that knowledge," he said. "That's the trend you want to see."
Both Spotsylvania and Stafford have seen a sharp reduction in residential rezonings.
Stafford has approved only a couple, totaling around 100 homes, since the new proffer guidelines went into effect in 2000. Spotsylvania supervisors have approved only a single residential rezoning in the past 18 months, Planning Director Ric Goss said.
"I think that speaks volumes," he said.
Spotsylvania's Hagan said he starts each rezoning discussion with the presumption that the rezoning isn't critical to the welfare of the county.
"The default in any rezoning is to simply do nothing," he said. "The proffers by a developer in any rezoning case need to be such that it is absolutely impossible to pass on the opportunity presented to the county."
Now that the demand to rezone land has cooled, county leaders are looking for ways to control projects that don't require rezonings, mostly large-lot subdivisions.
Spotsylvania is examining a program to purchase development rights as a way to control suburban sprawl.
Last year, Stafford became the first county in the state to charge fees based on how much traffic a project creates. The county also is lobbying the General Assembly for authority to charge a similar fee based on how many schoolchildren a project would generate, and authority to deny building permits to projects that would stress county schools, roads or other services beyond their limits.
"If we didn't already have all these plans that aren't paying their own way, it would be easier to consider rezonings that do pay their own way," Stafford Supervisor Pete Fields said.
"But as long as the developers' lobby denies us the tools to make existing growth on the books pay for itself, we can't possibly allow any new growth to happen, at least not fairly."
Developers adaptDespite all the new rules, developers have still found a way to keep up the pace of growth in the area.
In Stafford, they stopped asking for rezonings when the price of proffers skyrocketed. Instead, they began subdividing the county's rural land into 3-acre lots, skipping a rezoning and proffers.
More than a quarter of Stafford's agriculturally zoned land has been platted for development, most of it in the past four years. Now that the most easily developed agricultural land has been consumed, developers once again are asking for rezonings.
Since May, Stafford has seen four proposals that would require residential rezonings. Together, they would create 12,000 new houses on 4,000 acres from Widewater to White Oak.
The developers and landowners still know how to play tough. Take Sherwood, a proposed 2,950-home, age-restricted golf-course community Silver wants to develop in southern Stafford.
After Fields and other supervisors balked at the idea of dense development in the rural area, Hunter Greenlaw, who owns a portion of the 1,200-acre tract, said he had a backup contract. It would turn his portion of the property into an auto-refurbishing plant with a modular-housing subdivision for its employees.
"They went down the list of by-right uses and tried to figure out what would be the most objectionable to the neighbors and found that industry to make a threat, basically," former Supervisor Beiler said.
Greenlaw says he has a signed contract, but Fields and others remain skeptical.
"The dead giveaway is the threat of adjacent employee housing. That simply isn't done," Beiler said. "The idea of a company townthe last one was probably in West Virginia 50 years ago."
Most developers are going about things a little differently. They've learned that three things are key: building public support, addressing conservation issues, and making the project pay off for the locality.
These days, most big residential projects include a retail aspect to provide sales-tax revenue for the locality. And virtually every large-scale residential project is vetted through neighbors at town-hall-style meetings before developers formally ask the county to consider rezoning land.
Whether the community meetings are simple question-and-answer sessions in a firehouse or school cafeteria, elaborately planned weeklong architectural brainstorming sessions led by expert urban planners, or folksy conferences on the front porches of affected neighbors, developers, residents and county leaders alike say they appreciate the opportunity to informally talk the project through.
"I kind of wish everyone would do it," said Stafford Supervisor Mark Osborn, who attended Maryland Development Co.'s meetings in advance of announcing changes to Leeland Station this summer. "Maybe we should start requiring it."
When developers wait until a public hearing to share their plans, it's often too late to incorporate any public input.
Developers have also learned that their projects are looked upon more favorably if they cooperate with supervisors on popular conservation projects.
For example, Tricord's participation in the Mullins farm deal virtually guarantees the Spotsylvania board will approve a rezoning that allows an age-restricted subdivision on the remainder of the property.
In Stafford, Silver has partnered with George Washington's Fredericksburg Foundation on Sherwood. It has promised to give the foundation--which owns Ferry Farm and Kenmore--an 1810 house and $3.5 million if the rezoning is approved. The land the house sits on once belonged to George Washington's mother, Mary Ball Washington.
Another developer, Stafford Associates, has also partnered with the foundation to preserve the site of a Colonial iron-smelting operation owned by George Washington's father in exchange for allowing townhouses in its project. Stafford supervisors unanimously approved those changes earlier this month.
Though such examples of cooperation are becoming more frequent, a certain natural tension exists between governing boards and developers.
"That's a very accurate and nice way to describe it," Jackson said recently. "I wouldn't call it adversarial, and it shouldn't be. On the other hand, neither of us should roll over for the other."
If both do their jobs correctly, the end result will be more win-win than winner-take-all.
David Lesser, vice president for the Fried Cos., notes that his company won a rezoning for its Lee's Parke subdivision based, in part, on projections that it would generate a $5 million surplus for Spotsylvania.
That figure was based on an average home price of $325,000. Lesser said builders have sold some houses in the development for more than $550,000, which could mean a much larger chunk of change for Spotsylvania.
"It will be a boon to the county," Lesser said. "It will produce a synergy and economic development in an area of Spotsylvania County that previously had none."
Hagan offers the Mullins farm deal as further evidence of an agreement that works for both the developer and the county.
"At the end of the day, both sides have to simply be honest about what they need and what they want," he said. "If they are, everyone can come out of it with something positive."
To reach GEORGE WHITEHURST: 540/374-5438 gwhitehurst@freelancestar.com
