The Buckingham Herald Tribblog

Stupid Google. I love them because they give me tons of free software that I use daily (blopspot is owned by Google; the maps I use for the police reports are owned by Google; my gmail account is owned by Google; when my son comes of age, he…kidding), and all I have to do for it is ignore the advertisements that appear just about everywhere on their products.

But about a week ago, I got a message that said my blog was flagged as possible spam because of the incredible number of links to other pages on my site (apparently robot computers set up blogs that all link to the same address and that’s what the HeraldTrib looked like to them; I did not know there was such a thing as a spam blog).

They threatened to delete the blog if I did not respond within three weeks (that leaves about two weeks from now, if you’re not keeping up).

I clicked all the links that tell their robot computer that I actually am a human running a rather popular blog and would they please not shut me down. Their computer admitted that if I was clicking, most likely I was human, so not to worry.

Yet, that got me thinking: if software can be written to create spam-blogs willy-nilly, couldn’t a programmer make software that would know to click the links as a human would?

That leaves me wondering if I have done enough to save the blog. I’ll guess we’ll know in a fortnight. If it does get obliterated, I’ll pop up again elsewhere, and at that point will work to reinstate (or at least recover the links to stories) the HeraldTrib.

Until then, thanks for reading.

I wrote my take on the debate hosted by the Arlington County Democratic Committee in the primary run for the House of Delegates’ 47th District. The five Democrats running for their party’s nomination to replace the retiring Al Eisenberg, covered a number of topics rather civilly (so much for my “Fighting 47th” moniker). I wrote that no one really won the debate, but I thought Adam Parkhomenko (still my First Amendment hero), lost.

That, of course, got people reading, and drew some to comment. Make sure you check it out.

The Green Party has already selected their nominee: Josh Ruebner. The Republicans have not yet fielded a candidate, and my (admittedly limited) contacts say it’s unlikely that they will. Whenever I write something like that, however, I remind myself that reporters do a much better job when they tell people what happened rather that what will happen.

A story in the neighborhood that the greenspace outside the Ballston Commons Mall parking garage would become a performance or presentation space of some kind for use by the mall or the Capitals is just a rumor according to Scott McPartlin, a county planner working on that space.

Arlington County is still working on potential ideas for the site which was most recently set to be a mini-golf course. Ideas that “activate” that space and that are “revenue neutral” are forthcoming, Mr. McPartlin told me yesterday.

As always, you can scroll down to see all the recent stories, or simply click the links below (if the link doesn't work, scroll down to find the story, and email to tell me what's busted: heraldtrib@gmail.com --Steve Thurston).

Headlines from Earlier in the Week:

Sneak Peek at the Madison of Ballston Station (This is the big, new, four-storey building on N. Pershing Drive; formerly Buckingham Village 1).

Bethel Church to "Change the World" (starting with Buckingham).

Democrat House of Delegates Debate (This is the ACDC debate; you'll want to read this).

Police Notes April 10 to 23 (Graffiti, Theft and Police Impersonation).

Arlington Annex with Vic Socotra: Step Back in Time to the Ball-Sellers House. (Vic is back with his second installment. Up next: pools and Nazis! Let me know what you think.)

Hope Holds Rally at the Gates Center (About 50 Latinos came to support Buckinghamster Patrick Hope in his bid for the House of Delegates. Other candidates: please let me know if you're holding a public event in or near Buckingham. I'll do my best to get there. --ST

Labels: 47th, blogging, campaign, debate, google, house of delegates, mini-golf

// posted by Steve Thurston @ 8:36 AM 0 comments

Andres Tobar is quite funny. Miles Grant was often “horrified” at one thing or another. Pat Hope is a big fan of Hubert Humphrey. Alan Howze reminded us that “a rising tide raises all ships.” And Adam Parkhomenko is happy to work for $17,640 a year.

Although I don’t think there was any clear winner in last night’s debate between the five Democrats running for the House of Delegates’ 47th District (Buckingham, Ashton Heights and Arlington Forest are all inside the 47th), I thought Mr. Parkhomenko had the weakest showing. The other four have their strengths, their areas of expertise, and though it’s tough to know what they know outside those areas sometimes, it’s at least clear they have those areas.

If last night’s debate is any indication, it’s tough to see what Mr. Parkhomenko knows about public policy and the Virginia government. After the debate hosted by the Arlington County Democratic Committee, he admitted to me that he’s not a debater, and said that he thought last night’s went better than an earlier debate. However, many of his answers sounded more like post-game banter.

In six years working for Senator-turned-presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton, “I was right there in the mix” while people were “giving it everything they got.” The question asked the candidates what skills working with other people they would bring to Richmond if they won.

The Democrats are in full campaign now as they have a little more than six weeks until their June 9 primary that will determine who will run against Green Party candidate Josh Ruebner. Republicans have yet to field a candidate. Mr. Parkhomenko has the largest war chest (at nearly $49,000 he is leading the other four in donations by far), and has committed to campaigning and serving, if elected, without an outside job. Delegates are paid $17,640 per year.

Since the candidates are all Democrats, the similarities far outweighed the differences. They are for: same-sex marriage, alternative energy, improved transportation, abortion rights, and better health-care, schools and jobs. I was looking for differences in the candidates, and I spotted them mainly, as I said, in their areas of expertise:

Andres Tobar: immigration issues. Mr. Tobar has had to deal with the issues surrounding immigration his entire life, as his father was from Mexico (the candidate was born in Texas); his current job is as Executive Director of the Shirlington Employment and Education Center, which largely serves an immigrant population supports. I also thought his strongest answer dealt with the question of which program from another state he would import to Virginia if possible, and he answered that he liked Maryland’s driver’s license laws. He said he was afraid that Virginia’s move to restrict licenses to legal residents only would only make illegals likely to drive without a license. “It’s a safety issue, it’s not an immigration issue.”

---

Republicans have yet to field a candidate.

Green Party is running Josh Ruebner.

Democrats will fight for their party's nomination, chosen by primary vote on June 9.

The five Democratic candidates in the race include:

Miles Grant; Patrick Hope; Alan Howze; Adam Parkhomenko; Andreas Tobar.

Full Disclosure: I have known Pat Hope for years and consider him a friend.
--ST

Labels: 47th, campaign, debate, house of delegates

// posted by Steve Thurston @ 3:47 PM 9 comments

A reminder that the Bethel Church (it's the small stone church located on the northeast corner of George Mason Drive at Arlington Blvd.) is holding a community forum this Sunday. Read the full notice here.

The Arlington County Democratic Committee is holding its candidate forum next Tuesday April 21, at the NRECA building on the corner of N. Glebe Road at Wilson Blvd. This is a chance for people to hear from the five Democrats running for the 47th House of Delegates seat. Incumbent Al Eisenberg (D) is not running for reelection. The Democratic primary is set for June 9.

Josh Reubner is running on the Green Party ticket. Chosen by his party a couple weeks back, he does not have a primary to run.

The Republicans have yet to field a candidate, but could do that as late as June 9.

I have quite a few links here.

The annual Arlington Teen Summer Expo takes place Saturday, April 18 from 11a.m. to 1p.m. at the Arlington Career Center, 816 S. Walter Reed Drive. The Expo is an excellent opportunity for teens to get a jump on a summer job, internship or volunteer opportunities. For more information go to www.arlingtonteensummerexpo.com.

“The rise of 400 percent in just one cycle of the event really amazes me,” said Steve Thurston, the HeraldTrib editor. “I couldn’t be happier.” (My homage to Scott McCaffrey.)

The event, Monday Oct. 22, was a casual get-together in a circle of chairs over coffee, cake and cookies. Ms. Hynes opened with some remarks and took questions for about 90 minutes.

If you get a few Buckinghamsters in a room, too, the questions get right to the difficulties facing our neighborhood—increased traffic, affordable housing, what to do with the proposed miniature golf site and day labor issues.

A pared-down version of the questions and answers appears a couple stories below (scroll down, or click this link). Much of the discussion was a conversation, often with the attendees speaking as much as, and over, Ms. Hynes, so the questions and responses required some editing.

The responses Ms. Hynes gave are verbatim in the text below, with portions removed to save space. I wanted all three of the attendees to have about the same amount of space on the blog. The questions generally are edited from the remarks a few people made at once, followed by Ms. Hynes’ response.

HeraldTrib: Tell us why you’re running.
Mary Hynes: ….There are three things that I think we’re going to have to work on, regardless…The first one is how are we dealing with our aging infrastructure, our sewers, our water, our streets, our sidewalks….The second thing is affordable housing….I do want us to keep having places that work well for the folks that have been living in garden apartments and are of lesser means. But I also see this huge hole in our housing stock of garden apartments that people rent, and then when you want to buy there’s really nothing in that starter category anymore….The third thing that I think we have to keep our eye on is what’s happening in human services.….We partner with a lot of non-profits. Some of those non-profits deliver essential services to folks. Some of them are not as economically healthy as I would like to see; they’re not able to offer their employees benefits sometimes, and yet they’re providing essential services.

Community Member: How do we maintain housing “mixed” by ethnicity and socio-economic class?
MH: …It is the greatest challenge that we have. And the tools that we have, I think, as a county are pretty limited. There’s no way, for instance, when you’re talking with folks to say, as other places do, you know if you redevelop in this way, so that we have a mixture of affordabilities and a mixture of sizes, we can give you a tax break up front. There’s no way for us to do that right now in Virginia, and yet that’s a tool that works in a lot of other places to hold housing in a mixed environment. Some of this we’re going to have to keep working very closely with the legislature and the governor on.

CM: I am a little curious as to where you stood with the Paradigm development. Was it something you’re in favor of, or, perhaps, may have had a different opinion? [The speaker was referring to the redevelopment of Buckingham Villages 1 and 3. –ST.]
MH: I don’t know all the ins-and-outs of that deal at all. I certainly supported holding onto as many affordable units as we could figure out to do, and I do support finding ways to do affordable home ownership. How that’s all going to fit together there, I don’t know as much about it as I, perhaps, ought to….It’s an expensive precedent, we cannot afford, I don’t think, to do that in every place that an owner is willing to not go to the maximum density.

CM: How do you feel about affordable housing as it is spread throughout Arlington right now?
MH: I think we’re going to have to get smarter about spreading it out. Finding the right strategies to do that is going to be the sort of forward thinking that we need to do, whether it is allowing things, commercial areas on these other roads to get a little higher so that we can have some housing. Another idea that I’m interested in…they call them accessory dwelling units, really basement apartments or garages in single family neighborhoods that become a small apartment…. We’re not going to solve it only on the corridors.

CM: With all of this increased density throughout the county, what will the impact on the infrastructure be, and who’s going to monitor that? You’re talking about putting more people into garages and basement apartments, it’s a hidden kind of thing.
MH: …We’re under a court order to upgrade our sewer treatment plant and deal with that…and it’s a capacity issue as well as an upgrading of the technology that manages the sewer. We have major storm water maintenance issues in this community, and the county board has begun to address that, but it’s going to continue to be an issue.…We need to get a really strong matrix in place that says as we do this development, these are the ancillary things that we need to pay attention to.

HT: You live in Lyon Village, and I believe you were on the first group of people to fight against “The View at Clarendon” the mixed-use redevelopment of the First Baptist Church.
MH: I would characterize it slightly differently. The Baptist church was kind of moving along, it was supposed to get to the county board, and the county board decided that they would have the manager convene a working group of neighbors, housing advocates and church people to work through the issue. I was one of the two neighborhood representatives to that round table….We tried to come to a consensus position….Lots of people have different perceptions of what happened. In the end where I came down was that I believe that 10 storeys was too tall for that location. I was very grateful that the manager preserved the three-storey portion of the building that’s the day care center….But the 10 storey portion is across from a number of single-family homes. And the zoning change that was necessary to allow that 10 storey building changed a 30-year agreement…that the neighborhood had come to rely on.…In the end, no compromise was reached, and so the board voted for it, and then the neighbors sued. I have not had a role to play since the roundtable really ended.

HT: So you weren’t part of the suit?
MH: No. No.

HT: My big question with affordable housing, with density is that nobody wants encroachment in their neighborhoods, but don’t we all have to suck it up a little?
MH: In any community process, Steve, I think that’s true, you cannot satisfy everybody….One of the ways that I’d like to see us proceed moving forward is to help neighborhoods envision what might come….In the system we have now, you might hear about [developers’ ideas] long after the developers have gone to talk to the county, and there might be one or two things on the table. What I think would be much more useful is a process that’s kind of like what they did on Columbia Pike, where the neighbors sat down and said, “Gosh, if this is going to redevelop, and if it revitalizes, we might get some more services, and we might get some housing, or some business incubators,”….So let us think about what the economics would be of encouraging a developer to build the kind of thing we’d like, and then what more are we willing to give to help afford those things that we might like. And do it long before the developer comes in so that the community is kind of coalesced around the notion of these shapes and these kinds of services would be important to us.

HT: What sort of pressure would you put on communities to say, “You’ve got to do your part too?”
MH: I think that it does have to be said. And I think we also have to listen carefully to what neighbors say. You know, change is hard, and people say “no” in the beginning….But somebody else owns this [property] and we can’t say “no.”….The more information I gave people [at school board functions] and the more they had the opportunity to understand sort of the landscape, the more willing they were to participate. It’s when they feel like you’re holding information back or the deal’s already done that you get the cynicism, people really dig their heels in.

CM: A mini-golf course has been proposed for the space at the corner of N. Glebe Road and N. Randolph Street. This is a time when county staff has come to the community and said “A mini-golf course is what is needed.” The county board often just rubber stamps what is given to them from staff. Could you comment on that?
MH: I think what I was known for, Bernie, on the school side was asking a lot of questions. And saying to the staff “How did you reach this conclusion?” “What goals are you trying to accomplish?” “How does this fit into what else is going on?” And I plan to do that if I’m elected to the county board.

CM: The county staff is suggesting a General Land Use Plan change for the Bob Peck site to allow a taller building and more density. The staff has been pushing this all along. Once you start changing the GLUP, it opens the door to too much revision.
MH: One of the things that I’ve learned, Bernie, living where I’ve lived for so long is that the real history is in the neighborhood people….The county will say, “We’re going to do this,” when in fact there’s a lawsuit that says “No, you really can’t do that.” I’ve learned to ask the people in the neighborhood…

The battles that we’ll have to face in the future is that some change is going to have to come….Bob Peck is a great example….There’s a death [in the Peck family] and all of a sudden people are saying, “Well how does this now fit in the fabric that’s built up around it?”…I am not of the mind that things have to be as high as we possibly can think about it, nor as dense as we possibly can. I want to make sure that we’re thoughtful and careful about where our transitions are. I think what we’re seeing now is a willingness by many on the county board to undue those arrangements for a variety of reasons, some of which I don’t understand….I think that site [the Bob Peck site at the corner of N. Glebe Road and Wilson Boulevard] is going to be a huge challenge….

I think affordable housing makes it harder to have a rational conversation because it brings a whole set of people in who, they really don’t care what happens, if in fact we get some more affordable housing because they feel it is such an important crisis, and we should be willing to do just about anything to solve it….I can promise you that I will ask the question everytime: “Who’s at the table? Is everybody who ought to be there involved and participating? Are we sending the notices even if people aren’t showing up?” I learned that on the school side.

CM: If the Glebe Market goes away in a year or so, and day laborers congregate there, where are they going to go? (If the space currently planned for the mini-golf course becomes a park only with trees and benches, how do we stop people from going there?) There’s a need to look at what’s going on with that piece of property now within close proximity to the actions a few block away. Where are you on day laborer sites?
MH: I was really supportive of the opening of SEEC [the day laborer site in South Arlington]….I thought it met a whole lot of needs, and it dealt with what was getting to be a pretty unruly situation….I guess I didn’t know that people were gathering up here….Well maybe we do need to look for another location….

There is [a domino effect]. The people who live in the neighborhoods are often more aware of these kinds of issues that anyone of us can be on the county board.

Labels: BV1, BV3, debate, politics, schools

// posted by Steve Thurston @ 8:54 PM 0 comments

The candidates will make brief statements, followed by responses to questions from the audience. School board candidate Abby Raphael will also make a statement and respond to questions.

Want to read up on the candidates' positions? Candidates' responses to questions from FOSA are posted on the FOSA blog.

Sponsors include: Friends of South Arlington, Claremont Citizens Association, Douglas Park Civic Association, Barcroft Schools and Civic League, Alcova Heights Civic Association and Columbia Heights Civic Association.

Labels: candidate, debate, politics

// posted by Steve Thurston @ 9:12 AM 0 comments

The forum will be held at the Arlington Oaks Community Center, 4490 N. Pershing Dr. (at the corner of N. Pershing and N. 2nd Street, across N. Pershing from Culpepper Gardens). Parking is limited to on-street, so walk if you can.

The general election is Tuesday Nov. 6, with 13 seats from school board to Virginia Senate up for grabs.

Mr. Ruebner made a splash in local politics last year when he won five percent of the county vote against Democrat Chris Zimmerman, who won the three-way board race in a landslide against Mr. Ruebner and Mike McMenamin, the Republican candidate. (Mr. McMenamin is running again this year, and we’re hoping to find a date for his Meet-n-Greet. The three other board candidates have been contacted.)

Mr. Ruebner’s platform promotes affordable housing and critiques overdevelopment and gentrification in the county, campaign materials say. His web site mentions his support of racial and economic diversity. He stands against the use of trolley cars on Columbia Pike (near where he lives) as a “boondoggle” for businesses and a county board that wants to gentrify that South Arlington neighborhood, his web site says.

Food and beverages will be served--watch this space and other places for more about this.

Labels: candidate, debate, election, vote

// posted by Steve Thurston @ 11:09 AM 1 comments