The annual gathering of Northern Virginia local-government leaders, sponsored by a consortium of business organizations, used to be enlightening, perhaps even verging on entertaining – if only because there at times could be political friction between those representing the inner suburbs and their counterparts in the outer. Friction is good!
With the Democratic takeover of every nook and cranny of our region, those distinctions between inner and outer jurisdictions today exist only in theory, and even then only peripherally. So it’s little surprise that the elected leaders who came together Aug. 21 for the 2023 installment largely were all singing from the same songbook.
And regardless of whether they are right or they are wrong on the issues, that’s unfortunate.
Without a variety of points of view, and without swing voters holding them accountable as used to be the case in Fairfax and elsewhere, local leaders – no matter how competent or independent-minded at the start – inevitably slide into sclerotic groupthink.
In this, they are enabled by an ever-increasing corps of local-government bureaucrats. In most Northern Virginia jurisdictions these days, that is where the real power brokers can be found.
It’s not the elected officials’ fault that they all are from the same political party and largely share the same point of view. But we still pine for the good ol’ days.
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As an aside, was it really necessary for the sponsoring organizations of this regional elected-officials summit to shoehorn U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) onto the program?
No offense to Warner, who’s probably no worse than any typical senator, but the chief responsibility of those 100 individuals largely boils down to talking incessantly and appropriating funds – funds an insolvent federal government doesn’t have – to buy off one constituency or another.
That’s a far cry from the real-world responsibilities of local leaders, whose messages were diluted by unnecessarily dropping a “special guest star” into the mix.
