At the July 25th Planning Commission meeting Commissioner Ed Fleischman — who served a full career in the Federal Transit Administration — read a prepared statement detailing the ways in which the Town of Middleburg has shown a lack of transparency to the public with its potential annexation proposals, and suggested that the Planning Commission should be reviewing any potential applications for compliance with the Town's Comprehensive Plan in order to determine whether or not they would be in conformance with that Plan — before the Town spent any time or taxpayer monies on further studies — but that prudent procedure had not been followed. Instead, the Town has intentionally run the deal behind closed doors, telling developers not to bring forth formal applications, ostensibly in order to manipulate the process.

During the subsequent Town Council meeting on July 28th multiple residents of Middleburg stood up in opposition to the Town Council's lack of transparency about the four development projects. Residents brought many questions including but not limited to: why the Town has been hiding its talks with developers behind closed doors, what the environmental consequences would be of such sprawling development, and why the Town is fronting for potential applicants instead of letting the applicants bring their own applications, again, as should happen in a standard untamperedwith application process.

The Mayor responded to citizen concerns by asserting that the Town could have gone ahead with these proposals without any public input. Councilman Phillip Miller agreed and flatly told the fomenting public he believes the Town has already gone "above and beyond". The attitude coming from the Mayor and Council is that they are doing the public a favor by having any discussion at all about any of these dangerous projects. By law, they could just do what they wanted. Since then the Town has hired two consultants: Chmura Economics and Urban Limited. The latter touts that it is "designing the future". The project list for Urban Limited includes

Brambleton, Dulles Town Center, Reston Town Center, Fairfax Corner, Willowsford, Landsdowne, and more — every major sprawl project in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties.

The intentions of this Mayor and Council are obvious. There are no preservation consultants on the payroll. Public input has been nothing more than an empty gesture. The people elected to serve the public believe that they know what is best for that public, and that is to get Middleburg primed to become a mixed-use development in Loudoun County.

We have issued a follow-up FOIA request for a copy of the scope of work and contracts with the Town's development consultants, as well as for any past communications that may have occurred about these projects that have not yet come to light. That information will soon be made available on the Preserve Middleburg website.