"The Bureaucrat You're Looking For?"

"My family and I have lived in Reston since 2001. My experience with the RA is probably just like the average RA Member’s. I’ve asked its blessing in buying, selling, and improving my homes. I’ve been dragged before the Design Review Board to straighten a few things out. Two sons were RA lifeguards. I am an FCPS substitute teacher and a Fairfax Dept of Family Services Volunteer. Mainly, though, I am a proud bureaucrat. I know from experience that cooperative bureaucracy is greater than the sum of its parts. As a Foreign Service Officer for over three decades, my own specific work fit the big picture of representing our country and advancing our national interest in Washington or at U.S. embassies abroad. When I then ran two embassies, it was my job to forge consensus among different USG agencies to promote common policy. I’m the bureaucrat you’re looking for"


How can I not vote for this candidate for the Reston Association Board? Both a sense of humor and a proud bureaucrat.

(From the candidates statements here.)

Reston in the News

Turns out the top ranked story in the Times for the day was this one, reporting on the killing of a Reston couple, allegedly by the boyfriend of the daughter, who has expressed racist and pro-Nazi opinions.

Shared Services and Government as a Platform

GovExec has a piece on this subject by an IBM type.

By the nature of our government (weak executive, decentralized, federal system) we're fated to build such systems incrementally and from the ground up.  For example, the National Finance Center in New Orleans is one of the providers of shared services. Back in the day (i.e., 1968 when I joined ASCS) the agency had several ADP (automated data processing, for you whippersnappers) centers. I assume they were initial steps in the process of using computers to support operations.  Over time, ASCS closed some centers and consolidated in New Orleans and Kansas City.  Over the same time, other USDA agencies were going through the same process, leading finally to USDA taking over the NODPC.  So it came to support Federal personnel salaries and benefits for the whole department, and then to provide similar services for other units of the government.

In a way the process reminds me of the way our planetary system evolved, as I understand it, by the gradual accretion of material.

Because this is a slow process I get very envious of Estonia (as I've previously blogged) which apparently was able to do a top-down implementation.  To use another metaphor, it's rather the difference between a city like Rome, with an ancient history, and a city like Reston, planned and implemented from scratch within one man's lifetime.

Reston From Nothing to Something

This post uses the example of Reston to show how USGeological Survey (home office in Reston) updates its maps, including the process of officially naming geographic features.

Robert Simon, Reston, VW, and Blacks

When I was in the Army, I was stationed for a while at Ft. Belvoir, which is south of DC. I was there long enough that I used the money I'd saved for graduate school (a long story) to buy a gray market VW bug, a 66 with a 1300 cc engine.  (Mine was white, but this picture is correct.)

On weekends friends and I would drive to tourist sites in the DC area: Gettysburg, Fredricksburg, Antietam, etc.

One such weekend jaunt was to the wilds of Fairfax county where Robert Simon's Reston had just opened.  I think we had trouble locating it, and the spring weather was cool and it had rained, so the sightseeing wasn't the best.  Why were we there?  I had the car, so my friends put up with my choices just to get away from the barracks. And I had read something about the "new town" somewhere, perhaps in the Post article mentioned in the wikipedia entry, and was intrigued.

As a good liberal I had followed the stories in the NYTimes and other media about discrimination in housing, redlining, and blockbusting.  I had also imbibed the popular liberal disdain for the way suburbs were developing, for Levittown, and strip malls.  So the whole idea of a planned "town" where the inhabitants could walk to work, where housing was open to all, where the design included European style urban amenities, was very attractive to me.

After I got out of the Army and got the job with USDA/ASCS I lived downtown for 8 years. But then the idea of investing in a house made sense.  So I ended up looking for houses in Reston, finally buying the townhouse we live in now.

Reston has grown and changed over the years.  According to wikipedia it's now about 70 percent white, with the remainder about evenly split among black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. 

I've always wondered why Reston wasn't more attractive to black Washingtonians,  most of whom when they left the city behind seem to have moved to Prince George's county (now 64 percent black) in Maryland.   One of life's mysteries.  As is whatever happened to my VW, which was stolen from my Reston parking space in 1978.  I hope it's still chugging away somewhere.

Reston Has a Forest

Local photographer won a photo contest for urban forests.  Have I mentioned the two deer seen twice this week outside my townhouse?

Reston and Tall Buildings

Matt Yglesias dislikes DC's low buildings--says true urban advantages come from high density and tall buildings.  Along those lines, the father of Reston is interviewed here and says:

"Tall buildings are good because they preserve open space. If you take a tall building and take it all down to two, three or four stories, you use up all the grass and use up all the open space. So if you have a tall building, you are helping the community."

 The original plans for Reston had more townhouses and fewer single-family houses, but that mix didn't sell well in the 1960's and 1970's.  Times have changed.  The Post had an article today on the redevelopment near Mount Vernon square, which is the location of the original main DC library.  Apparently there's now good demand for downtown apartments from people like Mr. Yglesias.

How Great We Are

Apparently, in addition to being the, or one of the, wealthiest county in the country, we also are healthy, according to this piece in the Reston Patch. The discussion is actually based on Congressional districts, not counties, but it's much the same.  Joe Moran's district includes the Dems closer to the Potomac as well as Reston. According to the map, I should have a few more good years before I kick the bucket, which is nice to know.

Sidewalks and Paths in Reston III

I've blogged on this before, but here's a new perspective on paths versus sidewalks in Reston: paths accommodate strollers, sidewalks create unsettled norms: if a stroller meets a couple walking, who has right-of-way.

Sidewalks and Paths in Reston II

This is an add-on to my previous post.  Took a walk down Freetown yesterday.  It's an area of single-family homes on both sides of the road, with a sidewalk on one side. Most of the homeowners had cleared their portion of the sidewalk so I only had to walk in the road a couple places.  It gives another perspective on paths and sidewalks. 

Presumably, in the beginning there were cities and country. Cities, and only cities, had sidewalks.  And sidewalks were on the land of, or bordered the land of, owners of private property. So there was a neat division: owners cleared their walks, the city cleared their streets.  Meanwhile in the country the county plowed the roads.

Then we come to the mid-20th century with property developments and planned towns.  And road were separated from the private property owners.  So you begin to have "orphan sidewalks", where the old rule that the property owner was responsible didn't and couldn't work. And thus you have the pattern of Reston, where Reston Association clears its paths, VDOT clears its streets, and the sidewalks (which may be on Reston property or on VDOT right-of-way, I'm not sure but both are possible) go uncleared.

Sidewalks and Paths in Reston

In Robert Simons' original vision of Reston, walkers and cars would be separated; cars would have streets and roads, and walkers paths which went through the woods, instead of sidewalks paralleling the roads.  That was the way Reston developed for the first 10-15 years, but then it became apparent that walkers preferred to walk by the side of the road, even when it meant walking on grass or in the mud, rather than following the path.  So gradually Reston has added sidewalks to its paths (Colts Neck Road got a sidewalk south of South Lakes Drive just last summer.)

Why the preference? Often the roads are more direct than the paths.  And the roads feel safer because you're visible to all. And we're all used to walking by the roads.

Our recent snow storm showed one virtue of Simons' vision: snowplows inevitably throw the snow from the street onto the sidewalk, creating an almost impassible barrier to cross, and a forbidding prospect to walk along.  Meanwhile Reston Association is able to send a plow (small Cat, I suspect) down the paths and clear them off quite well, yielding to the weight of snow only when trying to break through the snowplowed-barrier.

A Bit on Reston

Q: What is the biggest change you have seen in Reston during your time here?
A: Without question it would be the number of jobs.  In the beginning Reston was slated for one job per household, which would mean 22,000 jobs.  Now there are close to three jobs per household.

From an interview with a guy who's been in Reston longer than I.  Robert Simon thought Reston should be a place where people lived and worked, a source neither of jobs for outside commuters nor of commuters for outside jobs.  That vision was flawed, perhaps because he didn't allow for the impact of Dulles airport and the access road to the Beltway.  That allowed the development of the parallel toll road and made the area attractive for businesses with lots of air traffic. Another omission was the development of the military-industrial complex.  And finally, he missed the development of the government-contractor complex.  Both complexes meant big outfits developed which needed easy access to both federal offices mostly in DC and to the nation.  So jobs developed along the Dulles corridor.