When Libby Garvey first came aboard the Arlington County Board via a 2012 special election, she joined on the dais four entrenched incumbents: Chris Zimmerman, Mary Hynes, Walter Tejada and Jay Fisette.
Though just 12 years have passed, it often feels, at least to those who lived through it, like several political lifetimes.
Her four original seat-mates were all gone by 2017, several others came and went in intervening years, and the departure of Garvey, who has opted against a re-election bid, will break that last generational link to that earlier era.
Those engaged in Arlington politics seldom take off the blinders to view the broader Northern Virginia scene, but if they did, they would see certain similarities between Garvey and the late Fairfax County Board of Supervisors member Audrey Moore.
Each spent some of her governing tenure marginalized and even at times belittled by colleagues – Moore, a Democrat who represented the Annandale part of the county, for pressing, in Fairfax’s go-go-go 1970s and 1980s, for a slowdown in the pace of growth, and Garvey, also a Democrat, for her steadfast, and at first isolated and unaided, opposition to the proposed Columbia Pike streetcar project.
And in the end, each had something akin to the last laugh. Moore ended up riding voters’ concerns that unchecked development was running amok to a 1987 victory as Board of Supervisors chairman (albeit lasting just a single, generally unhappy term), and Garvey held up the streetcar project until sentiment began to shift her way, ultimately causing the project to be scuttled.
Garvey’s relationship with the Arlington Democratic establishment has run hot and cold over the past dozen years, to the point that one wag dubbed her Arlington’s first “Libby-tarian” elected official.
She dances to the tempo set by her own muse, is comfortable in her own political skin and, if others don’t like it, she sees that as their concern, not hers. That marks a self-assuredness not unlike that of her streetcar nemesis Chris Zimmerman – or Audrey Moore, for that matter.
