VA: Arlington Green Party Endorses Proposal for Representative Government

The Sun Gazette reports that the Arlington Green Party has come out in support of a proposed change to the current for of Arlington County's government:

The Arlington Green Party has become the first major county organization to endorse the proposed referendum to change the form of the county government.

At its January meeting, the party voted to endorse efforts of the Arlington Professional Firefighters and Paramedics Association and Arlington Coalition of Police in their effort to garner enough signatures to get the proposal on the ballot.

Switching from the current form of government, where day-to-day authority is delegated to an unelected county manager, to a form where more power is vested in elected officials, would serve the community well, Green Party official John Reeder said.

Last year, Reeder was a Green Party candidate for the County Board.  From his campaign website:

Arlington’s top-down government is increasingly indifferent to the needs of Arlington residents, and is run by a political machine that ignores the environment, preservation of existing neighborhoods, and the well being of low and moderate income residents. The five machine Democrats on the city council (county board) vote unanimously nearly every time on every important item. The diverse needs of Arlington’s population go unfilled as Democratic Party policies dominate.

In the past decade, the Arlington county board spent tens of millions of dollars on vanity projects that benefit developers, but have only marginal, if any, benefits for Arlington residents. The same county board refused in 2006 to come up with a few million dollars so that mentally and physically impaired residents can become independent outside their families and remain in Arlington in group homes. It turned a blind eye to preserving historic, 1930s era, garden apartment complexes where 70-and 80-year old grandmothers and working class folks lived for 60 years.

The same county board that has bragged about its environmental record, but has virtually no recycling in Arlington parks, commercial buildings, and for the two-thirds of residents who live in multi-family units, and just looks the other way as the tree canopy disappears to the bulldozer and chainsaw, and McMansions pave over Arlington’s picturesque old neighborhoods.