Opinion
The Lost Game: Gridiron Memories of November 22, 1963
(Writer’s note: this was written in 2006. Small edits acknowledging the passage of time since are included toward the end of this updated version.)
I was playing quarterback in a high school intramural flag-football championship game around 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963.
The game went into overtime as the class time ground into its last minutes. My team needed a score to even the alternating possession OT (we were ahead of our time) and extend things to the following day. Impatient, I lofted one deep and up for grabs – like Brett Favre occasionally does – that some defender out-jumped my guy for.
BANG! We lost, no tomorrow.
Little did I know that the bang of defeat that had just gone off in my head was the mere echo of a much louder bang that went off almost simultaneously 1,330 miles to the southwest.
That other bang I had yet to hear was one of another kind of defeat that I will, it seems, carry with me to the grave.
Somewhat dejected I headed back to the locker room to shower before heading to my fifth period English class. Someone ran out of the locker room to meet us and said, “The president’s been shot!” Bullshit, that kind of thing doesn’t happen except in history books, I thought, “That’s not funny,” I said.
Inside the Alexandria, Virginia high school, not eight miles from the White House, things seemed normal as I prepared to shower. No solemn faced coaches, no lock down to protect then Republican House Minority Whip Gerald Ford’s sons. “The president’s been shot” was lost beneath what seemed normal adolescent, locker room banter. I began to return to a 15-year-old’s reality: sport, the thought of the girl’s locker room on the other side of a thick cement wall.
Then the PA system crackled and the locker room went unnaturally silent as the principal’s voice, not a secretary’s, asked for attention. A chill went down my spine, perhaps as a subconscious premonition that things were about to change in previously unimaginable ways flashed along sub-atomic particles throughout my brain. The tone first, then the words “President Kennedy has been shot” gravely confirmed what I had immediately denied as a plausible reality. One kid, a little red around the edges for that suburban Alexandria high school said something to the effect of “good.” Though we were casual friends and recent teammates, I started swinging and we went into a pile on the floor only to be quickly pulled apart by classmates and coaches. I had never wanted to damage someone as irrevocably as I did at that moment and the two of us never spoke again, leaving a silent distance between us that precluded the necessity of re-engaging that primal impulse toward some sort of irreversible destruction.
President Kennedy leaves the White House for the final time.
The emotions were immediate, deep and apparently ran in the family. I didn’t find out until years later that at almost the same moment, following a similar remark, my father, a WW II Army veteran who had lived through Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, was decking a total stranger in a D.C. medical building on I Street where he was waiting for my mother to complete a routine checkup.
Across the Potomac River, we sat quietly in our classrooms: no teaching, no discussion, no emergency mentoring. We sat alone, grappling with our thoughts, as was our teacher. The principal came on again and said the president was dead. The reaction was subdued except for a girl named Jacqueline Kennedy – though I think she spelled her first name differently than the president’s wife. Spelling aside she went off, sobbing, hysteria rising. The teacher took her outside the room to settle her down. Didn’t work, she ended up in the infirmary. I sometimes wonder what happened to Jackie Kennedy, my classmate. How did she ride out that 15-year-old’s identification with the now blood-stained Queen of Camelot?
Forty-odd years later I know that day was the measurable beginning of the direction of the balance of my life. Despite the immediate profundity of a presidential assassination, I couldn’t have recognized that JFK’s violent death would lead directly through a five-year span of political upheaval between my formative 15th and 20th birthdays. This and three other domestic assassinations – of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Francis Kennedy – seemed to earmark the time through a litany of foreign political intrigue, murder and assassination that always seemed to lead in one direction – to the right, toward war, toward implicit corporate profiteering from war, toward social division, toward lies.
That is my perception, my belief – the bad guys won. That is my psychological watershed. Rather than living under the auspice of a state favored by both man and God, I was floating through the most recent episode of civilization in decline, fueled by greed, power, murder and conquest.
It took all of those next five years for me to begin to appreciate what had begun during that that lost football game. By 1969 it was becoming apparent that a hopeful youth-driven world counterculture, as well as the best and the brightest within the world political system reflecting or inspiring the social idealism that characterized that counterculture, the Americans named above, Salvadore Allende, Alexander Dubcek, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara and others were beaten.
Around the world we had lost.
We would either be annihilated or assimilated – a foolish, inaccurate footnote to American and World History X – the fiction written by the winners.
I left Alexandria in 1967 for college. I moved from the specter of the federal capital to Richmond, the historical capital of the American Confederacy that had fought the ascendance of that federal system just over a century earlier. In retrospect it seemed an unconsciously profound symbolic move. Though I was through and through a son of the federal government in whose shadow I was raised by two parents it employed, I was soon to become suspicious, some would say paranoid, about its machinations, its intent, its history.
I followed my intellectual instincts for the next five years, studying sociology and psychology – how society and the human mind work. I guess I wanted to know why I had grown so alienated from the culture in which I lived. Was I crazy or did I live in an insane world? I learned things about myself and my society between 1967 and 1973 and most of what I learned took me back to the day my team lost that high school, intramural football game.
In college I learned that three days before John Kennedy’s inauguration, his predecessor, Dwight David Eisenhower, made an astonishing observation in his farewell address to the nation. I had grown up thinking of Eisenhower as a doddering, old, golf-playing general rewarded with the presidency for a job well done holding the Allied war effort together in Europe during World War II. My interest in the fate of his successor led me to a different view of Eisenhower. It began with that farewell address of Jan. 17, 1961.
Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower at Camp David, April 22, 1961, five days after the first crisis of JFK’s presidency, the failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion.
On that day Eisenhower, the West Point graduate, career military man, general and president who led his country and its allies, first against Nazi Germany and then through the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, told his nation that the greatest threat it faced as he prepared to leave office was that born of its own military and corporate institutions in a profoundly changing American landscape.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” Eisenhower told the American people of the corporate, political, and military landscape that had arisen in the wake of World War II. “The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” Eisenhower concluded.
The career soldier turned politician had apparently not thought it a sin to normalize relations with the Soviet Union, then our recent military ally, and reduce the rapidly expanding American military budget. This belief, according to Eisenhower biographers, led to much behind-the-scene infighting with the evolving military and industrial institutions Eisenhower spoke of at the end of his eight-year presidency.
Less than three years after Eisenhower’s dour warning, his successor had his head blown off in the streets of Dallas, Texas, while I played football a half a continent away. That successor, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had also bucked the American military-corporate apparatus during his presidency, and perhaps fatally, more directly and in more immediate situations than Eisenhower had.
First, just three months in office Kennedy refused to commit to direct American military involvement during the 1961 invasion of Communist Cuba by a CIA-trained militia despite the urging of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA Director Allen Dulles. As a result of the intelligence misinformation and personal coercion he endured during that experience, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as director of the CIA. He also developed enough distrust of the U.S. military command to avoid the armed, likely nuclear confrontation they suggested over Cuba during the missile crisis less than two years later.
President Kennedy addresses the nation on live television during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. and Soviet Union came to the verge of nuclear war according to later unclassified Soviet intelligence documents. It appears that Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s willingness to negotiate a mutually satisfactory compromise – that the Soviets pull their offensive nuclear missiles out of Cuba, and America would dismantle its offensive nuclear missile bases from the Soviet border in Turkey – averted a potential nuclear holocaust.
Kennedy is even reported to have stated the intention of scattering what was threatening to become a rouge intelligence agency resistant to presidential oversight “into a thousand pieces” following a 1964 re-election that seemed a sure thing.
A great deal of debate still exists over whether Kennedy was planning implementation of another post-1964 election plan that would have flown further in the face of Eisenhower’s originally-named American “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex”. That much-discussed plan was a lessening of direct American involvement in Vietnam. That involvement in the fall of 1963 was 16,000 “advisors” compared to the half million combat troops that would be sent there after his death. If true, as key Kennedy insiders assert, that plan reflected JFK’s growing belief that the Vietnam conflict was ultimately a civil war that would have to be won or lost by the South Vietnamese themselves – a decade and the bulk of 65,000 American and two million Vietnamese lives later that belief proved correct.
Many years after the fact I heard a European investigative report that quoted Kennedy archives indicating his ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, reporting back to Washington that presidential directives relayed through the embassy in 1963 ordering CIA operatives in country to back off of aggressive covert actions, including assassinations, were simply being ignored in the field. I wondered then if those “rouge” CIA elements had an inkling those directives would soon change despite Kennedy’s overwhelming popularity as the 1964 election approached?
No, probably just a coincidence that Kennedy was soon shot down like a rabid dog on a parade route whose path had been realigned that day to go down Elm Street in front of the Texas School Book Depository in a town whose mayor was reportedly the brother of Allen Dulles’s former military liaison officer.
Coincidence too, I expect that a former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald worked in that School Book Depository. Oswald was the prodigal American son, who had “defected” to the Soviet Union with a perfect command of the Russian language following his assignment to a top-secret American military intelligence base in Japan from which American U-2 spy flights were launched over the Soviet Union. Later, the prodigal son would reconsider that defection – perhaps because the Soviets thought he was an American spy and kept a close check on him. I sometimes wonder at the benevolence of a nation that would welcome back its prodigal son with camera equipment to start a “new” career, rather than a little prison time for his alleged departure with top-secret information that was claimed to have compromised America’s U-2 spy missions. But how could his native land stay mad at the whimsical Oswald, who despite his highly public pro-Castro activities in New Orleans, cultivated associations with a number of right-wing, anti-Castro associates based in both New Orleans and Miami as he “floundered” philosophically in the years between Russia and Dallas?
Above, JFK and Ike at Camp David in the days after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba – likely when the sitting president found out he had been lied to by the CIA about the previous president’s authorizations, or lack thereof, for a CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba. Photographer Paul Vathis wrote ‘They looked so lonely.’ Below, Vathis’s photo juxtaposed on the wall of the Newseum in D.C. with mob-connected Jack Ruby’s silencing of Lee Harvey Oswald, who died claiming he was set up as a patsy in the JFK assassination. JFK photo sources, credits: Public Domain; White House Photographs; John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; Robert Knudson; Paul Vathis; Abraham Zapruder; “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” Nigel Turner-produced British TV documentary series; AP; Roger Bianchini at Newseum, Washington D.C.
Pondering these things after launching my own college term paper research on the JFK assassination in 1969, I told my mother, “There are circumstances leading a lot of people to think your old (CIA) bosses were behind it.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, the way they talked about him,” she surprised me with a frank appraisal of her early 1960s superiors at the top of the American intelligence apparatus.
And now 59 years gone from that day in 1963, I remain the paranoid-tinged, conspiracy freak sitting alone in the dark corners of dark bars, reflecting on the familiarity of low times and low lies glowering at me from the “enduring freedom” of a television screen hovering slightly above my still focused eye.
And now I recall, as I did in 2006 when this personal memoir was written 43 years gone from that long-lost childhood football game, I find myself still choking down one final coincidence – that the U.S. president (George W. Bush) gesturing at me from that screen, circa 2006, explaining the necessity of this country’s ongoing military-industrial occupation of Iraq, one of the world’s two primary oil fields, and the ultimate evil of its oil-rich neighbor Iran, is heir to a family legacy the roots of which run deep into Texas oil, American politics, and the directorship of the CIA.
Roger Bianchini
Front Royal, Virginia
(Writer’s note: First published on November 22, 2013 as part of a pull-out section of the Warren County Report on the ongoing significance of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 50 years later.)
Opinion
Commentary: Vape Shop regulations – Discriminatory or Failure to Act?
I read in a recent local publication (NVDaily: “Front Royal Council Discusses Vape Shop Boom,” March 17th) that Front Royal is struggling to explain the proliferation of vape shops within the town limits. The current shop count as indicated by the source was a total of 11 retail outlets. Recent concern expressed by Mayor Cockrell as a result of an abundance of negative social media outpouring, compelled the mayor to address this issue in a recent Town Council work session. In attendance was Laura Kopishke, Director of Planning and Zoning for Front Royal. Kopishke is quoted as saying:
“We are not soliciting but we are also not discriminating against them either so vape stores fall under retail uses — they are selling a product,” Kopishke said. “We cannot discriminate against that product that they sell.”
Additionally, Council Member Amber Morris is also quoted as concurring with the opinion rendered by Kopishke by stating that:
“The problem that we ran into was the only thing we could do was tighten our zoning regulations because, as a pretty conservative council who also enjoys free enterprise, at what point do we start regulating businesses and … at what point do you say ‘we just don’t like your type of business’ and it’s discriminatory,” Morris said.
As a town property owner and layman in government affairs, I cannot accept these statements at face value. The Commonwealth of Virginia, based upon moral ground, quality of life, and in protecting the good of the Commonwealth, has and does restrict business activity that could be deemed as corruptive or detrimental to the moral turpitude of the community. You will not find gambling establishments, title loans, internet cafes, private liquor stores, houses of ill repute, Strip Clubs, bars (where food does not count for 51% of revenue) and recreational marijuana dispensaries — yet. Somehow, the state has found that restrictions of these establishments is not discriminatory.
Furthermore, the Town of Front Royal’s Zoning Chapter 171-1(A)(B) provides town leadership the authority to classify districts in order to “regulate, restrict, permit, prohibit and determine the following: The use of land, buildings, structures and other premises for agricultural, business, industrial, residential, floodplain and other specific uses”.
Upon review of the Town of Front Royal’s Zoning Code, the Community Business District (C-1), which encompasses most if not all of the commercial corridors through town, does indeed list retail establishment uses as By-Right. Of course, Vape Shops fall under this retail guideline. There are about 40-plus/minus uses that are approved without requiring a Special Use Permit, and then another 20 uses approved via Special Use permitting. What is interesting are the retail “exceptions” further explained in Section 175-39.C of the Zoning Code. Retail establishments are not permitted to engage in transactions that are: “inclusive of coal, wood, oil, and lumberyards, accessory uses, adult bookstores (stores engaged in the sale of magazines and other publications of sexually-oriented nature), massage parlors and stores engaged in the sale of sexual aids, devices and merchandise.” – (Amended 7-25-05, 7-28-08 and 6-22-15-Effective Upon Passage)
This seems odd. Under current Council’s and Administration’s logic, these exclusions would be discriminatory to entrepreneurs that desire to engage is such business activity. While some of these industries may seem unsavory and operating contrary to the common good, why can’t vape/tobacco/THC shops be inclusive/included on this list, or at the bare minimum be removed from the retail category? Why can’t council change their zoning ordinances to place Vape Shops under a C-1 Commercial category where a Special Use Permit can/must be sought? Or better yet, create a special zoning district called the Cannabis Business District (CBD—No Pun intended). This would give Council the leverage it needs to control the influx and eventually control the districts where marijuana would be permitted to be sold. Once Cannabis licenses are granted — and it is currently planned that the State issue just 400 retail licenses statewide to sell marijuana — it is my opinion that competitive forces will force non-cannabis licensed vape shop owners out of business.
I agree with statements by Morris suggesting that vape shops are simply establishing locational dominance to aid in their business activities if they apply and are awarded a recreational THC license. However, I do not agree with the fact that Front Royal’s hands are completely tied or even tied at all in dealing with this influx.
As new or newly legal products and technologies enter the market, the Town must stay ahead of this curve to plan for future impacts. I am afraid it may be too late for the 11 existing businesses, but now is the time to end the influx, better control it, and direct where you will allow the future Marijuana shops to operate. This is not discriminatory. — This is planning. You have the tools. Use them. People don’t plan to fail, but they do fail to plan.
By Gregory A. Harold
(Editor’s note: Harold is a former member of the re-formed FR-WC EDA Board of Directors.)
Opinion
It’s not complicated
At the March 7, 2023, Board of Supervisors meeting, it was reported that homeowners of Warren County did a “good job” and “successfully” appealed over-assessments totaling $30.6M. And the knife twist: None of the under-assessed objected to their great good fortune.
A $30.6M error is not “a good job” by homeowners. It is the failure of the Board to ensure an accurate, uniform, consistent, and equitable valuation based on fact as required of the licensed mass assessor they contracted and oversee. The knee-jerk reaction to glaring inconsistency and inexplicable numeric discrepancies was to go to ground “on the advice of an attorney.”
Stop looking at the evidence!
It was easy to speak eloquently about the worrisome impact of a 40% increase in property assessments on demographics of a certain age, but where the rubber meets the road, “Your three minutes are up.” The video is available online. It is a must-see master class in spin and obfuscation.
Tax rates based on inconsistent, grossly inaccurate assessments can not be fair and impartial. It’s not complicated.
C.A. Wulf
Warren County
Editor note: There is a link to the video in the story below.
Opinion
Commentary: The Big Chill
Running the gauntlet of life
I’m reminded of a time when Graham Nash (of the musical band Crosby, Stills and Nash) visited Winchester Cathedral at Hampshire, England. He noticed a gravestone that caused him to ponder a bit and wrote down what eventually became lyrics to the song, ‘Winchester Cathedral,’
“I was standing on the grave of a soldier that died in 1799, and the date he died was a birthday, and I noticed it was mine. My head didn’t know just who I was, and I was spinning back in time.” I’ll stop there but suffice it to say this song will catch your attention. The grave at Graham’s feet was that of a young lieutenant killed in battle a couple hundred years before. This young officer had a long and promising life in front of him but collided with a bullet that changed all that. Essentially, the grave marker is all that remains of this person and countless others just like him – to include you and I one day.
This song’s tempo is rather slow but does get in a hurry now and again. My team of soldiers and I used to increase the volume during the high tempo parts of the song and speed down the streets of Kunduz and Kandahar to minimize the chances of getting shot. I kept thinking, I wonder if this officer had the same adventuresome life experiences that I had replete with romantic trysts, the sting of battle and other adrenaline filled excursions before he went down? No one alive today has any idea of that lieutenant’s life experiences, nor will they know any of mine. All that he experienced and knew and all the knowledge he accumulated died with him. I was quite sure I was going to end up just like him on several occasions in various conflict zones. A frequent musing went something like this, “Why didn’t I choose a different path in life – perhaps one down a more lead-free lane.”
I tried to be normal but the alternative lifestyle of being a normal person and driving back and forth to work amongst the masses was not appealing either, so what do you do? If you hold on too tight, you’ll have a dismal existence, so you may as well come to grips with your mortality and just go for it. It’s not the years in your life but the life in your years I keep telling myself. Everyone you know will cease to exist one day soon, so enjoy the ride while you can. That is the reality for all of us.
Getting back to our soldier at the Cathedral for a moment. Aside from a gravestone, there is no record that his family, or his friends ever existed or any memory of the sunny days or cool things they witnessed. One simply lives and dies, and the world turns, and it will continue to do so with no regard to how self-centered and concerned about the here and now that we may be.
Join me for a quick mind melt. For example, if you are 50 years old today, it is unlikely that anyone will speak your name 50 years from now, nor will they speak the name of anyone you associated with 75 years from now. Fifty years ago, is only 1973. Think about it for a minute. How often do you think about any of your relatives or friends that died over 50 years ago? First, you must be about 60 years old to even have known them at all. If their closest friends aren’t thinking about them – who is? It’s a rhetorical question. The year 1799 was 220 years ago. Countless generations of people have walked the earth before and after. One day 200 years from now, in the year 2223 someone will look at your gravestone and wonder the same. In short, it really comes down to “Out with the old and in with the new and what you do during your brief excursion on earth is largely up to you.”
As Stephen Jobs once said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
Hunter S. Thompson sort of reflects the road I’ve taken, although my parents oriented me along a proper azimuth with a healthy dose of Sunday School during my developmental years. Nowadays, my friends tell me I have more lives than a cat and some say, “God must be watching over you.” So, I’ve got that going for me – which is nice. Many of the people around me were not so fortunate though. Death is always close. The end of “your run” is always just a foot away. Ponder that the next time you are traveling down Route 340 at night.
While in Afghanistan in 2011, the Taliban blew up the front gate of our compound and poured through the breach throwing grenades and shooting people. The initial explosion knocked out all the power and scattered body parts all over the place. I had been out running around the compound for physical training earlier that morning and was getting dressed when the explosion occurred. As I dropped down to the floor in the dark to find my eyeglasses, a stream of bullets stitched across the walls of my room. Had I been standing – I wouldn’t be writing this. That’s the difference in life and death. Most of it is chance. There’s an old saying, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” Often luck will save a man. It did that day.
In another instance, I missed the doomed ‘Lockerbie flight’ on 21 December 1988 because of delayed dry-cleaning in the little town of Swaebisch Gmuend, Germany. With nothing to wear on my two-week journey home, I changed my flight to the following day. Otherwise, my originally scheduled connecting flight from London Heathrow to JFK in New York was the flight that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Picture from YouTube. Sky Limited. June 30, 2019
In fact, my friends in Charlotte, NC saw my name amongst the list of dead in the USA Today paper on Christmas Eve and called my house to offer condolences. They were rather elated when I answered the phone. Countless families and acquaintances of those killed experienced a horrible Christmas in December 1988. The gauntlet of life is strewn with potholes and chance. Sometimes the ride is relatively easy and other times – it’s incredibly remarkable and sometimes it’s short. Sometimes your run gets interrupted prematurely and sometimes you can sustain life for 5 score.
One last story regarding the gauntlet of life. I was introduced to members of the Kaiserslautern Ski Club over Veterans Day weekend in the year 2000. We were all there to go skiing on a glacier in the little town of Kaprun, Austria – one of few places in Europe with skiing that early in the season. On Friday, the 10th of November I met a father and his son who were members of the ski club. We were playing water polo in the lodge pool that evening. They were celebrating his son’s birthday. His mother and other siblings were unable to come along. The following morning (November 11th), we were in a cue boarding the monorail-like train for an ascent into the mountain tunnel to the glacier at the top. At the last moment, my shoestring came untied and I stopped to tie it. That 10 second pause caused me to miss the train. They were the last ones on the train as it reached capacity, and I was forced to wait for a follow-on train.
I was the only one in my little group that didn’t get on that train. Within 10 minutes, 155 people on that train were dead. An unauthorized kerosene heater had leaked over time in the driver’s compartment and somehow caught fire after the train entered the mountain tunnel. Fire rapidly spread through the polyurethane-lined train. The skiers were trapped in the tunnel and were incinerated or died of smoke inhalation. Later that evening, I had the painful experience of informing the wife that her husband and son were killed in what became known as the Kaprun Ski Disaster. [Caption by; BBC News. Europe] For her family, that day will live in infamy and their family will never be the same. For me, after more than 20 years since Kaprun, I’m still navigating my way through the gauntlet of life hoping to arrive in the grave worn out and reveling in all the unreal experiences a full life has afforded me. But as alluded to earlier, no one will have any idea of those experiences fifty years from now. Just a tombstone with the remnants of a dead soldier below it. As the French say, C’est la vie…..(such is life)
Opinion
Questions about recent assessments
When you hear, “It’s complicated,” in answer to your questions on the recent property reassessment, ask who walked the property, and check the DPOR website to see if they have a residential real estate appraiser’s license.
When I asked those questions, I got two different names; neither were licensed appraisers. The guy I met to appeal the assessment was not licensed either. That explained what I see as a convoluted mishmash of under and over-valued properties without basis, in fact. It has resulted in inequitable taxation and a database of inaccurate assessments used by mortgage and insurance companies.
Do not take my word for it. Anyone can access the database by Googling the Virginia Mass Appraisal website, finding the assessed value of just the building, and calculating the dollars per square foot of living space. Comparing that same number to the average $/sf for properties actually sold in the County, to neighbors with similar properties, and to our elected official’s homes was a real wake-up call. Assessors do not enter homes, so finished basements ought to increase, not decrease, the price per square foot that you’ve just found by this comparison method.
No need to trust my judgment. You can assign this as homework to your age-appropriate children. Or, you can pay your assigned property tax for another four years without question.
C.A. Wulf
Warren County
Opinion
Commentary: Can carriage houses and granny flats ease the housing crisis?
Whether carriage houses, in-law suites, English basements, or granny flats, what all accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have in common – the reason their backers love them and why few folks think of them as a possible solution to the housing crisis – is that they blend in with the neighborhood.
A garage-to-accessory dwelling unit conversion in Richmond. (Wyatt Gordon)
A bill patroned by Del. Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville, this year would have expanded permission to build such supplemental housing across the commonwealth, but the proposal was killed on a party-line vote in a Republican-controlled House subcommittee last month. If ADUs are as unobtrusive as their supporters say, then why won’t Virginia legislators make it easier to build them?
An ADU for who?
As defined according to Hudson’s HB 2100, an ADU is “an independent dwelling unit on a single-family dwelling lot with its own living, bathroom, and kitchen space. An ADU may be within or attached to a single-family dwelling or in a detached structure on a lot containing a single-family dwelling.” In short, no matter what form it takes, adding an ADU to a single-family parcel enables two households to live on a lot that would otherwise be home to just one.
Doubling housing density without significantly altering the neighborhood character can prove especially appealing in cities like Charlottesville, where demand is plentiful, and vacant lots are not. As retirees, tech professionals, and folks affiliated with the University of Virginia have poured into town over the last few decades, the housing supply has remained stagnant.
Unable to find a place to call home in Charlottesville, ever more people who work in the city are forced to live further out, causing congestion and long commutes. With an abundance of garages, barns, and carriage houses in the region, relatively quick upgrades to ADUs could yield big results for Hudson’s district.
“If you’re looking for ways to put more missing middle housing into really hot housing markets like ours, ADUs can be a great option,” she said. “Sometimes folks build them to have a rental income stream, to age in place, to help someone recovering from an injury or illness, or to house multiple generations on the same property.”
If it had passed, Hudson’s proposal would have set consistent standards for ADUs across the commonwealth on everything from setbacks to owner occupancy requirements, ending the current patchwork of rules and regulations that often make ADUs technically legal but practically unfeasible.
While critics often decry the Dillon Rule for hindering localities’ ability to tailor the public policy to their needs, in this instance, Hudson hoped to use its power to streamline ADUs standards and make it easier to build the additional housing her constituents require.
“This is an example where the local authority is sometimes used to stop homeowners and businesses from constructing ADUs which are good for their bottom line as well as our housing supply,” she said. “These are units that the building industry would love to be able to build for homeowners if the regulations would get out of the way of the people who want them.”
An ADU with alley access in Richmond’s Fan neighborhood. (Wyatt Gordon)
Localities lean no
Nothing is currently stopping localities in Virginia from streamlining ADU standards and adopting a more permissive approach to supplemental dwellings. In light of such existing authority, many of the commonwealth’s cities and counties viewed Hudson’s bill as a state-level overstep that would diminish their discretion over land use rules and regulations. That’s why Joe Lerch, director of local government policy for the Virginia Association of Counties, opposed the proposal.
“Many counties exercise their authority to allow for the inclusion of ADUs within their zoning ordinances,” Lerch wrote in an email. “In doing so, they determine the context of where ADUs can be reasonably accommodated to meet the needs of residents and homeowners. A one-size-fits-all mandate to authorize an ADU wherever a single-family dwelling exists excludes input from citizens and communities on how ADUs can fit within existing and proposed residential developments.”
Other groups, like the Coalition for Smarter Growth, support ADUs in principle but had concerns that a statewide override of localities’ permitting processes could inadvertently cause more sprawl.
“It’s important that affordable places to live are located closer to existing services, public transit, and jobs,” said Stewart Schwartz, the Coalition’s executive director. “More and more people who live farther out choke our transportation systems with car drivers, and that means a greater loss of farms and forests as well as more greenhouse gas emissions. There is an awful lot of demand to live in walkable, urban neighborhoods, but often there aren’t any options. ADUs are a good option.”
Such concerns may have easily been assuaged with more time and stronger stakeholder engagement. The vast majority of suburban sprawl comes from the expansion of single-family home subdivisions, not the infill construction which typifies ADUs.
“Based on the work that I have done, I think I would be aware of a lot of new greenfield ADUs being built, but I just haven’t heard of that happening,” said Emily Hamilton, a researcher with the Mercatus Institute, an economic markets research center at George Mason University. “For ADUs to lead to more sprawl than the status quo, they would have to be changing developers’ calculations on subdivisions, and that seems highly unlikely to me.”
“Not nearly enough housing”
In response to the opposition, Hudson ultimately proposed a substitute version of HB 2100 that watered down the bill to include no requirements on localities. Instead, the proposal would have formed a state-level advisory panel to merely offer guidance on how to encourage the development of ADUs across the commonwealth.
Even in California, where a slew of bills have made it easier for homeowners to build tens of thousands of new ADUs in recent years, attic apartments and carriage houses are not significant solutions to the housing crisis.
“It’s not nearly enough housing to meet the need,” explained Hamilton. “ADUs are simply a smart first step that gives homeowners more rights to put their homes to a slightly more marginally intensive use when it makes sense to them.”
Hudson had hoped that her calls to reduce regulations on homeowners and builders might garner her ADU bill bipartisan support, especially given Gov. Youngkin’s recent remarks railing against localities’ exclusionary land use rules.
“Bills like this are a direct response to the governor’s call for some cross-partisan work on housing affordability,” Hudson said. “Anybody who is listening to Virginians knows that cost of living tops the list of things keeping people up at night, and housing is the biggest slice of anybody’s paycheck. This is a very practical thing we can do to put more units on properties where the owners want them.”
by Wyatt Gordon, Virginia Mercury
Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on Facebook and Twitter.
Opinion
Commentary: Farewell and adieu – Possible pitfalls and historical context of pending legislative retirements
I was something of a young pup in the Virginia Capitol press corps, at least in terms of tenure on the beat, if not age, in 2001 when an astonishing number of exits from the Senate and House of Delegates shook Capitol Square.
Almost all of the 12 delegates who announced their exits ahead of the 2001 elections for the 100 House seats were Democrats. Many of them, just a few years earlier when their party held the majority, pretty much ran things. Among the retirees were the immediate past House speaker, Tom Moss, and the former majority leader, C. Richard “Dickie” Cranwell.
The reason was redistricting.
In 2001, for the first time in Virginia history, Republicans dictated the decennial reapportionment by virtue of House and Senate majorities they won in 1999. In so doing, aided by quantum advances in digitized demography and computer technology, they redrew the lines to the Democrats’ maximum disadvantage. So surgically precise was the digital remapping that Republicans were able to select the exact block on which Cranwell resided and place it into a Republican-voting district where his chances at reelection ranged from nil to nada.
As of last Friday, the number of announced House retirements had reached 14, eclipsing 2001’s high water mark, according to a tabulation by the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan tracker of money in state politics. Add in six senators’ retirements, many with decades of tenure, and 20 pending departures that represent the aggregate loss of 325 years of legislative experience. Six of the announced farewells are from lawmakers with 20 or more years of experience, and they account for 204 of those years, or 63% of the cumulative institutional memory loss.
Another 12 delegates and one senator are also leaving their seats to seek another office rather than seek reelection — many of them are delegates avoiding a primary clash with another sitting delegate. The senator, Jennifer McClellan, D- Richmond, left to fill the vacant congressional seat of the late Rep. Don McEachin.
The reason, again: redistricting. But this time it wasn’t partisan.
Four years ago, Virginians approved a statewide referendum establishing a nonpartisan commission to take over the nakedly partisan process that the Legislature had always handled. After the commission’s abject failure to do its one job, the task was taken over by the Virginia Supreme Court. This yielded dramatically reconfigured legislative and Congressional lines which, refreshingly, showed no regard for incumbency.
In the House, there are 22 districts in which two or more incumbents reside, including 20 that pair sitting delegates of the same party.
In the Senate, eight of the 40 districts pit two incumbents against each other, including six in which sitting senators are of the same party. Those include the districts of retiring Sens. Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, and Tommy Norment, R-Williamsburg, who have swapped the powerful title of majority leader back and forth for most of the past decade, depending on whose party held the slim majority.
How the departures will affect the partisan balance of power in the General Assembly that will take its seat next January is hard to predict. A gauntlet of primaries — many of them sure to be bruising — cloud this fall’s general election contests.
The infusion of new blood into the process is healthy and inevitable. Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond-area political analyst and retired dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, calls Virginia’s new nonpartisan redistricting system “a backdoor term limits law” for the number of incumbents it has pushed from the stage.
“If you like term limits, then you think this is fantastic. If not, then it’s problematic,” he said.
New lawmakers come to Richmond with new perspectives. They are less bound to the hoary traditions of the House and Senate or the norms of political deportment and increasingly act as mavericks. They’ve also, in recent years, tended to be more doctrinaire – Democrats who tend to be more liberal and Republicans who are more conservative or “Trumpy” — which confounds the lost legislative art of compromise.
Another consequence of losing so much collective experience, particularly in the Senate, is an indirect shift of power away from elected lawmakers, Holsworth said.
“That’s going to be a challenge,” he said. Newbies who replace veteran leaders who bring decades of institutional knowledge to their powerful roles overseeing critical policy areas of government will face a time-consuming learning curve. Until the replacements learn the ropes, the process seeks out others to fill the expertise gap.
“The challenge is that power doesn’t go away. That power goes to the staffs and to the lobbyists,” Holsworth said. “That power will still be there, but a lot of it won’t be in the hands of legislators until they catch up.”
Lobbyists and legislative staff in Virginia already enjoy outsized importance and input by virtue of one of the most abbreviated annual legislative calendars in America. Our General Assembly has routinely busted its deadlines for finishing essential work within those truncated timelines throughout the 21st century.
“The other person who will benefit from this will be the governor. He has a large staff and advisers to help him,” he added.
Finally, there’s a wistfulness at seeing these legislators who have been fixtures on Capitol Square for generations leave. Like them or not, these are the personalities that animate the staid, unchanging, dry-as-dust legislative process. The friendships they forge over those decades of service can’t just be turned off on the way out the door.
But for every one of the long legislative careers that end this year — some of which, like Saslaw’s and that of Del. Ken Plum, D-Fairfax, exceed 40 years — there was that scary first day of their freshman terms when they were at the bottom looking up and asking directions to the restrooms.
Even in an institution with historical roots, more than 400 years old, change remains the only constant.
by Bob Lewis, Virginia Mercury
Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on Facebook and Twitter.