Arlington’s embrace of a more urban future was among the topics of discussion as local candidates recently competed in the political equivalent of speed-dating.
Hosted Oct. 6 by the League of Women Voters of Arlington & Alexandria City, the event gave voters the chance to spend 15 minutes at the table with each aspirant for County Board and School Board posts. When time was called, candidates stayed put and attendees rotated to the next table over the course of two hours.
Seven of the eight candidates for the local offices were on hand. Republican County Board contender Juan Carlos Fierro had a previous engagement, but his campaign left literature on the table he would have occupied.
“I’m here to listen,” said Democratic County Board nominee JD Spain, Sr., who acknowledged that when it came to the county government he hopes to help lead, “we have not always done a good job with that.”
Having come out on top in the June Democratic primary, Spain is the odds-on favorite to succeed current County Board Chair Libby Garvey, who has held the post since winning a special election in 2012. It is the lone County Board seat on the Nov. 5 ballot.
Spain and the other two County Board candidates on hand — independent Audrey Clement and Forward Party candidate Madison Granger — heard impassioned, and sometimes contradictory, messages from voters.
After fielding generally hostile comments about Arlington’s currently-in-limbo Missing Middle housing policy (“it doesn’t resolve the affordability issue,” one of those at his table said), Spain came upon a supporter of an increase in housing density.
“We need growth,” said Susan English, sharing Spain’s table with three others for that round.
The challenge, English acknowledged, is that “we’re trying to retrofit it” on top of a still somewhat suburban county environment.
Two tables over, where Granger was holding court, the talk also was of housing policy. The endorsee of the nascent Forward Party said she was hopeful county leaders would not appeal the recent court ruling invalidating key elements of Missing Middle, alternately known as Expanded Housing Options, or EHO.
“I’d like to see the county government go back to the drawing board,” Granger said, calling the court ruling an “opportunity for us to build a better policy.”
At the table of Clement, who has been running for local office as a self-described protest candidate for a decade, local activist Margaret McKelvey was attempting to win the candidate’s backing for local regulation, and perhaps prohibition, of gas-powered leaf-blowers. It is perhaps not this campaign season’s signature issue, but one that still draws passionate responses.
Clement said she’d be interested in hearing more and having staff come up with draft proposals, but added the county probably would first have to receive authorization from the General Assembly.
“It seems to me… it would be very difficult” to pass an ordinance absent the state’s okay, Clement said.
“It would need legislation from Richmond,” she said. (That’s something that McKelvey and fellow boosters have been working on, even though they believe there could be ways to circumvent that eventuality.)
School Board candidates James “Vell” Rives IV, Kathleen Clark, Zuraya Tapia-Hadley and Paul Weiss also were on hand fielding questions. As the Democratic endorsees, Tapia-Hadley and Clark are favored in the heavily Democratic community to succeed School Board members Cristina Diaz-Torres and David Priddy, who did not seek second four-year terms.
The County Board race will be run under ranked-choice voting, with the School Board race being decided by the traditional winner(s)-take-all format.
Kicking off the forum at Walter Reed Community Center, local League of Women Voters president Pamela Berg asked participants to make their points as passionately as desired, but give the candidates the time to respond.
“It’s easy to get excited about subjects,” she said.
And Berg was proved right: One group was so engrossed in its conversation with Spain that it blew past its allotted 15 minutes and kept on talking.
At the same time as the Arlington forum, the local League of Women Voters was holding a similar event in Alexandria, having invited candidates for city offices there to participate.
