In 1994, Patty Snow fled the maddening, traffic-choked, strip-malled sprawl of Silicon Valley for a tranquil life in Virginia horse country.
Five years later, she's living in the more and more maddening, traffic-choked, strip-malled sprawl of Leesburg, Virginia.
What the tech boom did to the once-tranquil towns south of San Francisco, it is now doing to formerly bucolic Loudoun County, where two of Snow's neighbors are AOL and MCI WorldCom.
Last week, when AOL and a coalition of other Northern Virginia businesses and chambers of commerce called REGION proposed raising local taxes to pay for new roads and schools in the region, Snow cried, "Enough!"
"Many of us look up to high tech companies and their leaders as visionaries of the future," she fired off in a letter she hopes will be published by the Washington Post.
"Unfortunately, the members of REGION have no vision for the future of this area other than to have taxpayers finance the roads and fatten the pockets of the developers as their land value increases, the sprawl continues, and the quality of life diminishes."
Snow is not alone in her anger. A growing chorus of Virginia voices is accusing tech titans and local business leaders of fostering shortsighted and environmentally bankrupt development projects in once-rural areas, then fobbing them off on local taxpayers.
Citizens groups like the Sustainable Loudoun Network, to which Snow belongs, have banded together to champion what they believe are more carefully crafted growth plans.
The root of the problematic growth in Northern Virginia's rural regions is simple, said E.M. Risse, head of Synergy Planning, a Fairfax, Virginia consulting firm focused on land use strategies.
Big tech companies moved to places like Loudoun County because the land was cheap. But the land was cheap because it was rural -- it didn't have the roads and services to support big businesses.
Once the companies were there, though, they needed the roads, the new housing developments for their employees, malls where those employees could shop, and so on.
"Now these companies have morphed into land developers, and they want the public to subsidize roads to their cheap land," said Risse.
In Loudoun County alone, development plans call for up to 400 million square feet of new office space -- twice that of Manhattan -- and it's going to cost more to build the new roads and services to support the development than businesses will bring back in tax revenue, said Risse. Moreover, it will inevitably create development ripples that spread further and further afield.
"What they risk creating out there is another center-point of a 45-minute [drive] radius of sprawl."
Smart business development, he said, would focus on bringing new businesses to areas already served by the Washington Metro system.
Building around the established infrastructure is not really a viable solution, said Bruce McCleod, a spokesman for REGION. "This area is expected to grow by two million people over the next 20 years. It's not realistic to expect all those people to move into the developed core."
By creating work in the suburbs where people live, tech companies are reducing the classic congestion problems of employees commuting from suburban bedroom communities to a central business district, he said.
He dismisses much of the "smart growth" activism as reactionary. "A lot of what they consider 'smart growth' is growth that happens somewhere else."
Not that growth isn't problematic, he said.
Most Northern Virginia business leaders agree with the activists that their region is under strain, but argue that strain is the inevitable result of otherwise desirable growth.
"To have an asset like AOL in your county is a good thing," said Randy Collins, president of the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce. "The growth has brought lots of good things."
He calls the notion that businesses moved to Loudoun just for cheap land "hogwash." For one thing, Loudoun County is home to Dulles International Airport, and that's a big perk for busy execs.
But more than that, Loudoun is just attractive, he said.
"Loudoun has a rural character and a country feel that you can't get anywhere else" in the region, he said, and that was a major draw for companies. "Loudoun is the only place in the Metro Area that offers that kind of quality of life."
A quality of life, of course, that many like Patty Snow feel is now imperiled. Collins himself acknowledges that his county's character is changing.
"The downside is, obviously, that a lot of the rolling countryside has been developed into shopping centers."
As for complaints about tax increases, Collins and others suggest those might better be levied against the Virginia state government than against local business leaders. High growth areas like Loudoun and Fairfax Counties generate enormous tax revenues for the State government in Richmond, but Richmond doesn't give back in kind.
"There's a big disconnect between the money coming from here and the money coming back," said Tony Howard, spokesman for the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce.
The REGION coalition has proposed changes to the tax law that would let local counties keep more of what they generate.
Meanwhile, groups like the Sustainable Loudoun Network, the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, and the DC-based Coalition for Smarter Growth are scrambling to offer alternatives to wholesale suburban sprawl.
In addition to promoting development around existing infrastructure, the SLN and others fight individual development projects they deem shortsighted. They have pushed proposals to sharply limit where developers can build new offices, homes, and shopping centers.
That has local business leaders miffed.
"They say they advocate smart growth, but really they advocate no growth," said Fairfax County's Howard. "But if the jobs weren't here, they'd have to move out of the region. The simple truth is, the economy is going gangbusters, and when that happens, the infrastructure can't keep up."
Sure, said Snow, herself a product engineer at a telecom company. But that doesn't mean you have to build with blinders on.
"If future development isn't addressed intelligently, it's just going to be another Silicon Valley here in every way, shape and form," she said.
