Everyone on the same page?
Fredericksburg area seeks consensus on dealing with growth

by Robert Burke
for Virginia Business
March 2007

Last year Bob Wilson moved with his wife and two children to the Fredericksburg region. In a certain ironic way, that makes him a small part of one of the area’s most pressing problems. New residents have been coming at an astonishing clip for more than a decade. In just the past six years the strong economy in the Washington, D.C., region has helped push the population here up more than 25 percent to about 300,000 people, making it Virginia’s fastest-growing region.

Wilson hopes to be part of the cure. As the new executive director of the area’s George Washington Regional Commission, he moved to Spotsylvania County last July after working as executive director of a regional planning agency based in Stamford, Conn. “It’s a great place to be a planner; it really is,” he says of his new home.

The job will certainly challenge his skills. Wilson’s mission — as written by the local elected leaders who hired him — is twofold. First, come up with strategies on coping with the region’s growing pains, such as busy roadways and the lack of affordable housing. And second, convince the region’s leaders and residents that a little cooperation now on those problems will pay huge dividends later.

The region includes the city of Fredericksburg and the counties of Stafford, Spotsylvania, King George and Caroline. Of course, there are few complaints about the area’s robust economy. Employment growth has outpaced the state and Northern Virginia for most of the past 15 years, according to the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance, a regional marketing group.
Yet, the good times aren’t being shared equally. Stafford and Spotsylvania are by far the largest localities in population and revenue, which means each locality has its own problems to solve, making a regionwide consensus more difficult to achieve. But if the region can succeed in bringing the kind of jobs, housing and transportation facilities that leaders say they want, the Fredericksburg area could establish itself as a major employment center.

According to regional studies, it has the workers; it just doesn’t have enough local employers. This is the factoid behind a longstanding pitch from the region’s marketers: Its talented labor pool is so grumpy about long commutes to the Washington region that commuters will work for less if they can stay closer to home. According to a 2006 survey done by George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, 62 percent of commuting workers here would give up $5,000 or more in pay in exchange for cutting 30 minutes off their commute, and 29 percent would give up $10,000 in salary. That’s higher than a 2003 survey, which put those numbers at 48 percent and 17 percent, respectively. “People are becoming even more tired of commuting,” says Gene Bailey, director of the regional alliance.

Meanwhile, Wilson’s commission members — all local elected officials — are trying to get their cohorts around the region to pay more attention to land use and transportation. As participants in one of the state’s 21 planning district commissions, that’s a core part of their mission, encouraging regional planning. A first step in this direction is sharing meeting times with a regional transportation planning organization. This helps in the cause of regional cooperation, because the same people who make transportation-policy choices are dealing with land use as well. “This group gets it,” Wilson says. “They understand the link between transportation and land use. They’ve lived with it.”

Wilson has hired experts in demography and transportation to help create a strategy for coping with growth. One of the first projects is a map of the region’s existing development that does not show county boundaries. “It will serve as a starting point for the development of a regional comprehensive plan,” says Wilson. Henry “Hap” Connors Jr., a member of the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors, says the map underscores the new approach many elected officials want to take. “We’re trying to take away the lines and at least start a new conversation that way,” he says. “And we’re learning from others’ mistakes, and trying not to repeat them.”

When it comes to development, though, taking away county lines doesn’t eliminate the competition for tax revenue that good commercial projects in particular can provide. There’s only so much to go around, even in a fast-growing region. An example: Fredericksburg has a new, big-box shopping area, Central Park, which rakes in tax dollars for the city but dumps a lot of its traffic onto Spotsylvania roads, especially crowded state Route 3. “They’re getting the good tax revenues but we’re getting all the traffic,” Connors says.

But Spotsylvania actually has plenty of retail; maybe too much. Its one mall, next to Interstate 95 at Route 3, is undergoing a major renovation and expansion. At the next exit south on the interstate at U.S. 1 is a massive Wal-Mart Supercenter and a cluster of other big-box stores. “We’re hearing from developers that we’re reaching a saturation point on all this retail activity,” says Connors. So the county has targeted its U.S. 1 corridor as a location for corporate offices.

Plus, Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare plans to build a new Spotsylvania Regional Medical Center, a 126-bed hospital that will open on 75 acres next to I-95 in late 2009. That will attract businesses as well, says Connors. “We’re working with several developers to help us create the corporate office parks and proffer some of the infrastructure improvements,” which could include a new stop on the Virginia Railway Express. The county currently doesn’t belong to the VRE system but Connors hopes to change that. “So we’ve got a lot of irons in the fire.”

Stafford County also is looking toward a new hospital, which is scheduled for completion in 2009. Last summer construction began on a 100-bed Stafford Hospital Center, on 73 acres next to U.S. 1 in the middle of the county. That’s being built by MediCorp Health System, which also operates Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg.

Compared with everyone else in the region, Stafford is also out front in attracting federal and defense-related corporate clients. With the Quantico Marine Corps base just to its north, the county is recruiting defense and homeland security firms. It has space, with several new Class A office parks planned or already built. Proximity to Washington is a big plus for this sector, with the county just 25 miles from the Capital Beltway, says Tim Baroody, Stafford’s director of economic development.

Even though Stafford is considered part of the Fredericksburg region, its marketing tries to avoid that detail. “When you talk about Fredericksburg, there is the perception that it’s far away when you’re sitting in” Washington, notes Baroody. Stafford’s closer proximity to Washington gives it an edge, and defense and homeland security firms are responding. This summer the county’s Stafford Regional Airport will host the sixth annual Force Protection Equipment Demonstration, an event expected to draw more than 600 vendors of defense-related gear. “It’s really what we’re all about,” says Baroody. “It’s not that we have forgotten the retail and service jobs; we haven’t. But we have a population that has a strong skill set” and can attract new employers.

To the east, King George County has its own cluster of several thousand defense-related jobs in and around the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren. The Department of Defense’s Base Realignment and Closure process could have hurt Dahlgren but ended up having minimal effect. Caroline County to the south is still far enough away from the pressure of the Washington region that it is trying to direct growth to its southern and western areas.

A big reason Stafford and Spotsylvania see most of the economic development action is because that’s where the people are. Fredericksburg has about 21,000 residents, as does King George. Caroline has more, with 26,000 people. But Stafford and Spotsylvania each have about 120,000 people. In fact one could make a case that this area should be just the two big counties and the city, or be dubbed the Stafford Region, considering the county’s dominance in many categories, such as commercial development, median household income and housing prices. Baroody acknowledges the differences but points out that there are factors that pull the region together — the impact of I-95 and proximity to the cities of Richmond and Washington. “For several reasons, it fits to call us a region,” he says.

Whatever the region’s makeup, Wilson is trying to find a consensus for the future. He knows that commissions like his can do little more than try to persuade its member localities, since they have almost no authority of their own. “We recognize that not all of the recommendations that come out of a regional plan are going to be implemented,” he says. But he brings a fresh perspective, as do his board members, says Spotsylvania’s Connors. “I think we have on the current commission a new generation of leaders who see the value in regional cooperation,” he says.