Greenvest CEO Jim Duszynski and Vice President for Planning and Zoning, Packie Crown, last week described their plans for four major developments north and south of Route 50 just east of the junction of Routes 50 and 15, as a well-researched, professionally articulated, rational and flexible response to what this organization, history, and serious regional planners everywhere recognize as inevitable growth in eastern Loudoun County.

The issues are straightforward, according to Duszynski: how best to plan and fund public infrastructure and services for 15,000 new homes and everything associated with the people who will live in them: their cars, their children, their jobs, and the physical facilities necessary to support them.

Asked if he believed Greenvest's "$192 million to improve roads" was a definitive solution to the increase in traffic associated with the four projects, Duszynki laughed and responded, "Definitive? No, of course not. But it's an excellent plan, worked out by some of the brightest people in the business, working closely with representatives of all those with a stake in both a sensible and aesthetically pleasing solution."

Greenvest's proposal, he noted, allows timely and appropriate construction based on the best available planning data, with a suggested approach to infrastructure funding that has worked well in other jurisdictions.

The funding plan proposed by Greenvest, in brief, would finance roughly $400 million in road improvements with government bonds, backed by revenues generated by annual "fees" (in essence, a special local tax), averaging around $2,000 per year, paid by those who bought homes in the four developments.

"Given the projected growth and household income figures for Loudoun, the approach should work well here," Crown added.

Both executives agreed that, although the plan suggested by Greenvest was not the ONLY approach to funding, it was, in their view, the best.

Asked whether ANY highway funding or construction plan could really be considered adequate to handle current rates of growth, Duszynski noted that highway planners are inevitably constrained by the accuracy of growth projections, and that, in his view, the key to successful growth management lay in providing more than just roads to address new residents' needs to work, shop, educate their children, and be sure of adequate access to emergency care and other social services.

Greenvest insists that their "holistic" approach to planning provides both the vision and flexibility required to be truly responsible developers. New roads alone, for example, are clearly inadequate to meet the communication needs of new residents in the 21st century.

Fiber to the Home

"I think telecommuting is the only answer to traffic that we're going to see in our lifetime," Duszynski asserted, noting that high-speed broadband fiber connections to the internet, would be available to every single home, business, and public service facility in the new developments.

"Our offices are in Leesburg and my family and I live in Haymarket," he said grimacing. "I understand fully the frustration of driving to work every morning."

Although Greenvest's Broad Run Village and Arcola, north of Route 50, and Lenah and Greenfields, south of the highway, are not adjacent to each other, Crown and Duszynski both insist that, ideally, they should be seen, as part of a well integrated and functionally interconnected corridor, linking the Howard Hughes research campus in the northwest to the main George Mason campus in the southeast.

Roads, trails, a necklace of parks, high-speed fiber, refined architecture and landscaping are planned to work together to make the inevitable development between those two centers both functional and beautiful.

Asked about the almost visceral reactions in slow-growth circles produced by the very mention of 15,000 new homes, Duszynski noted that such growth was projected "over the course of the next twenty years," with best estimates of the pattern of growth following a bell-curve course.

Observing that formal governmental and legal constraints on unrestricted growth would also remain in place, Greenvest's executives explained that permitting processes alone would affect the pace of construction.

Greenvest also believes that wider public awareness of the true scale, scope, and integrity of Greenvest's "vision" will not only allay fears, but will build enthusiasm for their approach.

Our "holistic" vision Duszynski insists, reflects the hard work and sensitive analysis of some of the world's best talent on the problems of transportation and communication infrastructure; safety; education; adequate and affordable workforce housing; parkland and recreation.

Quoting their company's published statement of principles both Crown and Duzynski concluded by reiterating their personal and professional commitment to building communities that would be attractive for a lifetime: "Unique, service-oriented, and aesthetically pleasing."