Arlington’s naysayer-in-chief is now its chair. Will she move the county forward?

Two years ago, Libby Garvey was the lone voice on the Arlington County Board opposing most of the county’s major capital projects. On January 1, she was elected the board’s chair.

Garvey has spent most of the last two years being most vocal about what she was against. We’re familiar with her opposition to the controversial Columbia Pike and Crystal City streetcar, but that was only the most visible such campaign.

The streetcar represented a compromise among unattainable ideals. Metro is too expensive to build under Columbia Pike, and a dedicated bus or rail lane is not physically possible. Yet the street is reaching the limit of what more and larger buses could achieve, making some higher-capacity transit solution necessary.

Not being able to offer high speeds, however, made the project’s costs look less worthwhile, and Garvey led the fight against the project, even going to Richmond to try to talk Virginia officials out of sending state money to Arlington County.

This was always about much more than the streetcar

Garvey’s opposition fit into a broader backlash against the Democratic Party establishment in Arlington. A disaffected group including Peter Rousselot, a former county party chairman who formed the anti-streetcar group, Garvey, and John Vihstadt attacked the county board’s actions and spending, sometimes fairly, sometimes deceptively.

Some residents were frustrated with ways the county government had been unresponsive and non-transparent. Others wanted to see a more conservative shift amid a period of economic difficulty, where sequestration and BRAC cut incomes and removed federal jobs.

Rousselot, later joined by Garvey, waged a campaign against county spending with high-profile projects like the Artisphere in Rosslyn or an aquatic center in Long Bridge Park. The streetcar was the biggest fight, and Rousselot’s group won over some voters who genuinely didn’t support it after weighing the pros and cons, but also fooled many others with impractical comparisons to imaginary, unrealistic “alternatives.”

What’s next, for Garvey and for Arlington?

A year after the county board suddenly reversed course and canceled the streetcar, the county’s current vision is drastically less ambitious than it was five or ten years ago. The only ideas for transportation in Garvey’s public statements thus far are small-scale bus improvements like letting people pay the fare before boarding and having signals give them more green time — potentially valuable, certainly, but ultimately likely to have minor impact at best on Columbia Pike’s and Crystal City’s transit capacity needs.

Garvey has also started criticizing county officials for not moving faster to implement these, even though it was clear when the streetcar was canceled that it would take time to replace a transportation project decades in the making.

A big part of the reason for choosing rail, with its concomitant costs, was to drive significant new development to Columbia Pike, to make it the next booming corridor like (though somewhat more modest than) Rosslyn-Ballston. The plan also used the revenue from this development to pay for large quantities of new and preserved affordable housing.

People can debate whether the streetcar would have done this, or that the reason it’s not happening now isn’t because of the economy instead, but right now the idea that Columbia Pike will ignite into the county’s next big growth area (while protecting lower-income residents) seems distant.

The rhetoric from Arlington used to be one of great vision — that Arlington could grow substantially without adding traffic, could use transit to enormously improve people’s mobility and reduce car dependence, and could provide first-class public services to make the county a top place to live. Now the talk at the county board is mostly about customer service, civic participation, and sign regulations — again, all valuable, to be sure, but without big ideas.

It’s not just Arlington. There has been a similar trend in many jurisdictions around the region to shrink our ambition and work on little things. But this isn’t the kind of thinking that propelled Arlington to transform itself when Metro arrived.

Garvey gains an opponent

Perhaps the coming year will offer opportunities for Arlingtonians to choose a vision once more. Planning Commission member Erik Gutshall has announced he will challenge Garvey for the Democratic nomination in June.

Gutshall said he wants “to engage our community in a forward-looking vision for Arlington.” We can look forward to hearing more about what kind of vision he might have in mind. Meanwhile, Garvey will have a few months to start articulating some vision of her own.

It’s always easier to criticize the work of others than to get something done yourself. Denouncing the county’s work from the sidelines helped Garvey get into office and elect some allies. This year will be a chance for her to demonstrate she can also lead — or have this turn at the chair be her last.