What does the Arlington County government have against its two nature centers, which are beloved by so many across the community?
Another budget season is coming and going with very little interest among staff or (with one exception) County Board members in providing Long Branch and Gulf Branch nature centers with modest additional resources in staffing and, if not full facelifts, perhaps modest, refreshing nips-and-tucks.
The result of such ambivalence at the top, we fear, is going to result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the nature centers still open far fewer hours than pre-COVID (um, why?) and with the aging facilities continuing to deteriorate, loyal visitors will abandon them, then the government poobahs and poobettes will wring their hands and proclaim, “We tried, but there just isn’t any interest, so let’s close them up.”
Give County Board member Libby Garvey credit; she uses budget work sessions and other meetings to press the case for aiding the facilities. But it seems none among her four colleagues has much interest. Do they perhaps consider Arlington, and by extension themselves, too hip for such old-school venues as nature centers? (If so, we don’t know whether to laugh ... or cry.)
It wouldn’t take much, in a county budget of $1.5 billion a year, to spruce up the nature centers and get them back running on pre-COVID schedules.
Kicking the can down the road is merely putting more nails in their eventual coffins. And what a loss that would be.
