Coral Gables planning firm Dover, Kohl & Partners is focus of mounting taxpayer anger in Arlington County (VA) -their charrettes are "charades"

Well-meaning but gullible Arlington County residents attending a charrette on Saturday in the Columbia Pike neighborhood of Arlington County (VA), who don't understand that their role in this particular "planning" process: cameo appearances. The pro-development and patronizing Arlington County Board is going to ram high-intensity development down their throats whether they like it or not, regardless of how many suggestions they make on the docs and maps at this charrette or how impassioned and logical their comments. The narrative has already been written -they're just props! And in this case, it's been captured on video here by a front group that's paid for by Arlington County Government. i.e the taxpayers. IF Arlington residents in this neighborhood don't want the unhappy future of more people and traffic congestion that the County Board has in store for it, that's tough. That's how they roll.

http://youtu.be/IUGPi9ggVBw

Coral Gables-based planning firm Dover, Kohl & Partners is the focus of mounting taxpayer anger in Arlington County (VA), where beleaguered residents believe they are trying to ruin their neighborhoods along the Columbia Pike Corridor with MORE intense development in the future, altering the fundamental nature of the neighborhoods and the reasons why some people move into them -and leaving them hefty living expenses tabs in the meantime.

http://www.doverkohl.com/

http://www.arlingtonva.us/departments/CPHD/forums/columbia/current/Columbia_Pike_LandUse_Housing_Study.aspx

Columbia Pike Form-Based Code: http://www.doverkohl.com/project.aspx?id=9&type=1

The savvy, well-informed and heavily-taxed citizens of Arlington County, including many of my friends still living up there, have already been calling the company-led charrettes "charades" for quite a while now, and when taxpayers are paying $5,000 a day in hotel costs for the visitors from South Florida, as some opponents allege, it's REALLY galling.

Hallandale Beach Blog favorite Arlington Yupette and her blog's readers are all over the story and they are NOT mincing words about their disgust and anger, even as the Washington Post is -surprise- completely under-reporting the depth of that animus. http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/

Monday's post is a perfect example, but there are ample examples:

Pike Corridor Post-Redevelopment 'Open Space' : Your Front Lawn

Hi, Yupette,

Talk about a planning charade, tonight's open space planning meeting at the Career Center was a hoot. The County's open space planning consultants talked parks and playgrounds, but the reality is that there won't be much open space left after in-fill yuppification for anything but Pike Corridor residents to hie to existing parks and recreation centers (including the future aquatic center, indoor soccer area, and boathouse) and use single family residential neighborhoods for their parks and recreation.

Read the rest of the post at:
http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/2011/06/pike-corridor-post-redevelopment-open.html

According to reports, Arlington County Yuppie/Infill Czar and Commissioner Chris Zimmerman was present at some of these meetings in order to keep the high-paid consultants in line and not veer from County Board orthodoxy, which is Moscow-on-the-Potomac, circa 1974.

http://audreyclement.org/2011/06/21/recycling-on-columbia-pike/

While it's true that a collaborative community process yields better communities, what you have in Arlington County is a top-down planning process that allows unelected people to have far too much power and influence, and since those people are selected by elected officials to do their bidding, where's the checks-and-balances?

And more importantly, what's the point of participating if you are just a prop and the process is a charade?

The above is not just the favorite template of Arlington County but also the favored plan here of Hallandale Beach under the ruinous reign of Joy Cooper/Mike Good/Mark Antonio & Company.

In Arlington County, because the county government don't miss a single trick -and wants to try to crowd-out opposing points of view- they have even created a 'front' organization that is supported by taxpayer dollars called the Columbia Pike Revitalization Organization -CPRO. They're the ones who made the video at the top of this post.
http://www.columbia-pike.org/

See this story at Greater Greater Washington blog about problems encountered by some residents in the affected area and how they heard about it from the county's top-heavy information distribution system:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/10845/arlington-plans-bike-boulevards-near-columbia-pike/

I've told you all before in this space a little about about the over-size ego and relentless patronizing and condescending tone of Zimmerman, and what's happened to Arlington under his reign of ruin, where middle-class people have to flee.

In South Florida over the past year-and-a-half there have been all sorts of newspaper articles, TV newscast segments and blog posts, esp. by Big Labor-types, calling for liberals to create a group that would be the liberal alternative to the popular Tea Party movement that has fundamentally changed American politics.

But the problem they have is that when you gather lots of people who actually believe in LOTS of government spending -if not more than current- without lots of scrutiny and oversight, much less, a stacked deck of a public policy process, you quickly chase away anyone who knows how to run a successful small business because they know what the reality is of more rules and regulations -less jobs.
And what are you left with?

Lots of patronizing people who want to tell others how to live their lives.

Arlington County is full of these sorts of people, befitting one of the most liberal places in the entire country, but even there, liberal people with successful businesses of their own and who actually have to meet a payroll, have come to see see the reality that the Arlington County government's spending and chronic edifice-complex is beyond out-of-control as that term is generally understood in the U.S., and seems more Soviet-like than even I and others have pointed out from different political and writing perches over the past 15 years.

At some point, as no doubt some of you are already saying to yourself, you run out of people to tax to build your castles in the sky.
And who are tired of being told what to do by others.

For all their talk about diversity, how is shutting-down one of the few low-to-middle class housing sites in the county so that wealthy people can move in -and build and pay lots of taxes to the county- an actually strategy?
But there it is and was discussed by Yupette in the recent past, as I've noted here

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Arlington%20Yupette

See also:
http://piketowncenter.com/2011/03/plenary-group-eyes-greenbrier-apartments-for-redevelopment/

What happens when liberals who are forever patting themselves on the back with their boasts about their commitment to diversity, chase all the actual living and breathing diversity out of the county, only making it Richer and Whiter?
A lot of things, but in Arlington, heartfelt remorse is NOT one of them.

And seriously, when almost all of the county administrators involved in the planning and bureaucratization of normal social life in Arlington live elsewhere, how can there not be a real dis-connect between County Hall and the average Arlington taxpayer, who seems to be paying for everyone else's needs but their own?

Well, we will see the answer to those questions in Arlington County, because eventually, the people with the golden goose get tired of gold-plating everyone else's neighborhood but theirs.

Keep up the good work, Yupette!

Meanwhile, back in my former home, Arlington County (VA), Extravagant Local Govt. Spending Central, similarities to So. Florida abound

Oh dear!
Somebody is using someone else's wallet, purse, debit and credit cards to do some early Christmas Shopping for all kinds of un-necessary things, and one of the suspects is a member of the Usual Suspects in Northern Virgina.

That person's name is Chris Zimmerman, the very self-involved Arlington County Board and WMATA Board member who went ballistic when average citizens -and Boy Scouts- wanted to start post-9/11 Arlington County Commission meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's all-too-true: One of the main reasons that people leave Arlington County, VA is Comm. Chris Zimmerman, a condescending, know-it-all liberal bureaucrat with a tin ear and yen for raising taxes for pet projects.

Arlington Yupette, the sensible, dependable and common sense blog friend of all well-informed and discerning citizen taxpayers in Arlington County (VA) -where your faithful blogger Dave lived from 1989 to 2003- along with her observant, hyper-vigilant but still severely put-upon readers, are literally breathing fire after the latest examples of illogical upside-down, run-amok government spending priorities among Zimmerman and the Arlington County government and the Arlington School Board, the twin pillars that compose Arlington's sprawling Extravagant Govt. Spending Central colossus.
http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/

That refrain sounds familiar, can you hum a few bars?
I can definitely name that song in two notes!
And it definitely smells familiar, too.

The only difference from Broward County is the absence -so far- of photos of FBI agents arresting Arlington elected officials.

Christmas in October continues this evening at the County Board meeting. Items on the agenda include gifts for the Artisphere, the Washington Golf and Country Club, and an $82 million pot of gold from establishing a special tax district encompassing Crystal City, Pentagon City, and Potomac Yards for the County's Board's pet vanity projects (Fisette's Aquatic Center, Zimmerman's light rail, etc).

The Arlington Sun Gazette slammed both Sally Baird and the Arlington School System today, providing a laundry list of serious problems and failures ranging from extravagant unnecessary spending to a drop-out rate that's a "barely-concealed scandal".

The current mendacious shell games up there in Arlington, especially with the special taxing districts, Business Improvements Districts, (BIDs), which have been so successful in Washington, D.C. after some early problems, recalls the 'funny business' I've written about here in the past per Charles Rabin's excellent coverage in the Miami Herald of the the multiple CRAs in the City of Miami, which have former White Knight Marc Sarnoff's fingerprints all over them.

'Funny business' that is, if by 'funny business,' you mean barely-concealed personal agendas being played-out with taxpayer/business money.
I do!

My July 30th post on this subject was: It can't be said better than this - Howard Troxler in 7/29/10 St. Pete Times: St. Petersburg's cynical plan to thwart Amendment 4 (redux)
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/it-cant-be-said-better-than-this-howard.html

Comm. Sarnoff's fairly rapid descent into meddling mediocrity and curious, not-to-say questionable policy/ethical choices and words, has led many Miami-area civic activists and reporters and columnists I know and trust, who once regarded him as a breath of fresh air, to privately admit that Sarnoff is the latest South Florida pol to "go over to the Dark Side."

Just like Broward County Comm. Kristen Jacobs up here, which I wrote about the day before the August primary election.
That August 23rd post was Broward political insider wisely intones the truth: "Kristin Jacobs has gone over to the Dark Side."
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/broward-political-insider-wisely.html

For more on Chris Zimmerman, see this,
http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/2010/06/please-help-chris-zimmerman.html and then David Alpert's excellent piece from last Sept. 29th,
Innovation resistance at Metro, part 1: The value of "bottom-up"
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=3655

His piece appears on his excellent public policy blog GreaterGreaterWashington, which lacks a mirror site of similar scope and quality in South Florida, though to be 100% honest, his site often fails to take into account the role of the average DC-area taxpayer, who doesn't want to keep paying for transportation experiments that benefit a very small number of people.
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/

You can be very pro-transit like me, but also accept the fact that some transportation or public policy projects pushed for funding are either turkeys or white elephants to be.
Being pro-transit doesn't mean having to also be intellectually dishonest, though that sometimes was the case in Arlington, just as it is here in South Florida.
Like I need to tell you, dear readers.

Another couple of things on Chris Zimmerman from an email I sent to Transit Miami founder Gabriel Lopez-Bernal in 2008. http://www.transitmiami.com/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/24/AR2008042403382.html

The Washington Post

Hired Riders to Assess Metro
Critics See Waste, Say There's No Mystery to Poor Service

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 25, 2008; B01

The Metro board yesterday approved spending as much as $1 million over five years to hire professional "mystery riders" to assess the quality of service on trains and buses.

But some rider advocates questioned the expense and said the transit agency could get equally valuable information from its riders, who already bombard Metro with more than 3,000 complaints a month.

Much like the mystery shoppers of retail, the undercover Metro riders would take trips on Metrorail and Metrobus. Armed with a checklist of criteria that includes cleanliness and on-time performance, the mystery riders would travel on nearly all routes, evaluate the service from a customer's perspective and provide feedback to Metro, officials said. The information would be used to help Metro identify and correct problems.

"We want to know what works and doesn't work, and what can be made better," said Metro board Chairman Chris Zimmerman, who represents Arlington County and pushed for the program as part of Metro's goal to improve service.

Metro already hears from many customers about what does not work. The agency receives between 3,000 and 4,000 complaints a month, according to agency reports. The most common complaints are late buses, rude and discourteous behavior, and a lack of reliability for MetroAccess, the paratransit service. More than 1.2 million trips are taken systemwide on an average weekday.

Zimmerman said the mystery-rider program is needed because "we can't afford to wait until there's a complaint" to improve service.

The board authorized the agency to hire a company to assess 95 percent of Metrorail and Metrobus service, according to Donna Murray, Metro's manager of consumer research. Metro would pay $175,000 for the first year's work, according to the board resolution. The $1 million budget covers three years, plus two one-year options to renew the deal. The program could begin by late August, she said.

Murray said she could not provide an estimate of how many mystery riders would be deployed.

Metro had a similar program several years ago that used trained volunteers. Maryland board member Peter Benjamin asked why the agency needed to spend money to hire professionals.

The earlier program produced unreliable results skewed by riders' subjectivity, said Sara Wilson, Metro's assistant general manager for corporate strategy. "We'd only get the results of the person who rode the X2 every day."

The new proposal drew a mixed reaction from rider groups.

Nancy Iacomini, who chairs the Metro-appointed Riders' Advisory Council, said it was a "great idea" to have "people deployed in an organized fashion to every bus line and train line at different times of the day." Relying on customer complaints as feedback provides only part of the picture, she said.

But Jack Corbett, of MetroRiders. org, urged the agency to "listen to its own riders with its own staff and use the million dollars for something that would benefit the riders."

He added, "You don't need a professional to determine that lights aren't lit, or that the air conditioning isn't working, or that the trains are 30 minutes late."

The larger issue, he said, is that the amount of feedback Metro receives -- whether from real riders or hired ones -- is irrelevant if the agency does not use it. The agency is making critical decisions about rail and bus service as it drafts next year's budget, but riders' opinions are not being taken into consideration, Corbett said.

Reader comments are at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/24/AR2008042403382_Comments.html

____________________________________________________

Saturday April 26th, 2008

Dear Gabriel:

Given what I know about some of your upcoming career choices, from your emails, I thought you'd find Richard Florida's appearance on C-SPAN's Book TV this weekend of some value.

He's a really interesting guy to listen to.

Florida's book was "Who's Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life"

As for my own thoughts about this WaPo transit story, which I found amusing because of my own heavy daily use of the Metro for 15 years, plus the occasional bus ride during heavy snow, here's a couple of things to consider as you ponder whether or not it makes sense to use the

$1 Million towards professional surveying/inspection vs. simply relying on rider comments
and complaints, assuming those actually made it to their rightful place in the food chain:

The Chris Zimmerman referenced above was already an Arlington County Commissioner while I lived there, and is/was a first-rate JERK!

(Just as is the case in the City of Hallandale Beach, where I live, an incumbent like Zimmerman benefits from the fact that though it's a very liberal place, all members of the Arlington County Board are elected at-large, and there are no term limits.)

While he was Chairman of the County Board, he tried to actively prevent the Board from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before the meetings started, even after 9/11.

Things came to a crescendo in March of 2002, before a packed room and TV cameras present from every Washington-area TV station, he was made an object of ridicule by the entire area, after numerous Washington Post editorials and attacks on him during prior Board resident's comment periods.

That happened when a vocal critic of the Board's refusal to say the Pledge stood up in the Board auditorium and started reciting it before the meeting, and, like energized marionettes, the County Board jumped up and followed suit with the recitation, which the public was already doing.

Now usually I really wouldn't care about that sort of issue, but sometimes small issues highlight a much larger perception problem an elected official has, a blind spot if you will.

Such was the case here with Chris Zimmerman.

If they stumble over something so small due to sheer petty ego and personal pique, how can you really trust their judgment on something important?

Zimmerman made such a point of saying that it shouldn't be necessary for County Board members to say the Pledge at the beginning of their own meetings, that it proved terribly embarrassing later -and showed him for the creepy hypocrite I always thought he was- when he was on various appointed boards and commissions, like with METRO, the Northern Virgina Transportation Comm. and VIRGINIA RAILWAY EXPRESS, and what's the first thing they do at every single meeting?

Exactly!

(If you can believe it, the NVTC's website is www.thinkoutsidethecar.org )

So, Zimmerman had no problem reciting the Pledge publicly while on a Board that he was appointed to, he just had his personal/political/philosophical reservations about doing the same thing for a Board that he was actually elected to by Arlington County voters.

It was a hard slap in the face to Arlington's residents and a valuable lesson I'll never forgot in judging elected officials' behavior and hypocrisy.

And this is the great genius behind the $1 million decision in Washington.

Honestly, in all my myriad experiences in Washington, over 15 years, even when I disagreed with people on an issue, I always tried my best to keep things civil -and classy!

Frankly, I actually enjoyed the company of some people who disagreed with me on public policy issues more than some who agreed, esp. if they liked sports or film, not surprisingly.

But, that being said, Zimmerman was the closest thing to a 1930's Stalinist government
goon/henchman as I ever met.

Really.

That he was smart and should've known better only made it worse, not unlike the situation with State Sen. Steve Geller, who chooses to use his talents and abilities to help Steve Geller, not to help under-served segments of society who could use his help and influence to get a fair shake and see their causes given a seat at the table, like older Foster Kids who'll soon be on their own, Haitian-American social services groups, et al.

That's one of the principal reasons I so detest Geller.

He's so damn self-serving, almost as if it's very transparency made it funny or amusing.
It's not.

Zimmerman acted like he could do pretty much whatever he liked and residents just had to lump it, because the board was all Democrats and they couldn't deny him.

Well, I was a (moderate) Democrat, too, like most of the County, but I wanted diversity of ideas on the County Board, too, to generate outside-the-box thinking about the problems where I lived, not a choir singing songs pre-approved by Zimmerman.

(Photos and info on my old neighborhood in Arlington:

http://www.arlingtonva.us/Departments/CPHD/ons/pdf/GlebeWoodFinalReport.pdf

Did you ever see my old South beach Hoosier blog post where I mentioned that my old townhouse was where President Ford's daughter Susan lived, while he was President?

When I left, it still had the old Secret Service-installed communications system throughout.)

Frankly, as I later explained it to some people, Zimmerman sometimes acted like Arlington County taxpayers were merely guinea pigs in some Pol. Sci. experiment he needed to do in order to earn his PhD. dissertation at U-W in Madison.

His creepy and diabolical personality were such that I knew quite a few folks who were deeply involved in the Arlington community -people I wish we had dozens of clones of, down here!- who were popular and well-respected, but who made no secret to me of their hate for him.

If current blog technology had existed back then, Zimmerman would have been my Arlington-based blog's favorite political pinata!