[UPDATED BELOW]
Finally. Times reporter Jason Jacks provides a balanced treatment in this article.
The reporter for the Loudoun Times Mirror has a new report addressing the problems in Sterling – our community in the easternmost part of the county.
A Loudoun supervisor, known for being outspoken with respect to the issue of illegal immigration, is drawing criticism for comparing the district he represents to a sewage pit…
In the nearly eight years she’s lived in Sterling Park, Anne Lawver said her neighborhood has become dotted with boarding houses. Vandalism and litter are also common, she said, as are groups of Hispanic men who “hang about and shout at women driving or walking by.”
“Sadly, I have to agree with Mr. Delgaudio,” she said. “We still love Sterling but are deeply saddened to see it becoming a cesspool.”
Somehow they always seem to find an angle to criticize Eugene Delgaudio for what is wrong in Sterling, while also nailing him for SAYING what is wrong in Sterling. It puts our supervisor in sort of a no-win position.
What we need are more citizens speaking up about the situation in Sterling. Send an e-mail to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors at the following e-mail address:
bos@loudoun.gov
… if you have an opinion on how to fix the problems in our community.
UPDATE: Well, the fecklessness of our Zoning Administration division and – apart from Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio – the Board of Supervisors’ failure to even recognize the problem, is indeed causing a brewing tempest in eastern Loudoun. Following on my June 23 post about a case in point, here is coverage in today’s Examiner.
The problem has been building for years, but up until recently the citizens of Sterling have been relatively mute. Now, I think enough people are realizing that something is seriously wrong, and our supervisor has been making public statements on the problem, picked up by local media, which are galvanizing public opinion, or providing a focal point for public opinion. Judging by the blithe, head-in-the-sand attitude of the other eight supervisors, however, I think it is going to take a mob with torches and pitchforks marching down Harrison Street before anything gets fixed. With the August break approaching, my prediction is they sweep this under the rug and hope we all shut up and go away by September.
UPDATE II: Un-frickin’-believable. ACTivist just informed us that Juanita Toriello – the zoning “inspector” I opined is a major reason zoning enforcement is nonexistent in Sterling – recently checked back in on one of the longstanding “problem houses” on my street (this would have been “House B” mentioned in the June 23 post), with a reported “apologetic tone” to one of our neighbors who filed the initial complaints long ago. This was a house where the owner moved to another part of the county and turned the residence into a boarding house, which at one time had a family upstairs and up to 23 people living in the downstairs, which also had a kitchen illegally installed. Originally, Juanita “inspected” and found no violations except the stove, which she reported would be removed (it never was). So now, perhaps as a result of recent public discussion, Zoning Administration decided to do an actual inspection and guess what: Everyone moved out.
If this indicates the beginning of a trend – namely, Zoning Administration doing its job in Sterling – it will make a HUGE difference. Now, let’s just consider what might have happened if Zoning had been doing its job all along. For starters, by having the laws on the books enforced the residents of Sterling would have enjoyed the quality of life the local government was supposed to be already facilitating. As I explained in the June 23 post, removing the flophouse piece of the illegal employment structure would have dealt a fatal blow to the whole house of cards. If the workers could not be boarded cheaply (and illegally) the corrupt businesses would have had to either start hiring legally or moved somewhere else or found another solution like building their own bunkhouses. I guarantee you Help Save Loudoun would have never been formed, the entire “illegal immigration” controversy of 2007 would not have arisen, and a whole bunch of people who moved out of Sterling Park would still be living here … all as a result of one county agency doing what it was supposed to have been doing.
Thus far this is hearsay and only one house, so we’ll have to wait before declaring any major problems solved, but if more Sterling residents realize how they have been getting the short end of the stick from the county government, it just may be torches-and-pitchforks time.
Great article! I will add this to my reading list.
The ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’, by Bjorn Lomborg is also a worthy read. Lomborg has a about a hundred pages of footnotes in the back of his book, most of them cite documents that are available on the web. His states that many people do not have access to college libraries so he aimed to use a web document when ever possible.
Excuse me, jacob, is Bjorn Lomborg focusing on Sterling? Maybe he has an opinion on how to fix the problems. Who knows? Could be? Those Danes are very internationally alert. He might just be skeptical about the environment in Sterling.
ED is doing what he can while being stopped and attacked by his other supervisors. Maybe if they would let him do what he has been trying to do than these problems wouldn’t have arisen in the first place and may get fixed now. This article has the people that lost against him criticizing what he said while everyone in the blogs and those that live there agree with him that it is turning into a cesspool.
If Mr. Delgaudio truly viewed Sterling as a cesspool, he would not be volunteering to visit with those of us who are most affected by the immigration/zoning/overcrowding/foreclosure issues in Sterling on his personal time.
I have lived next door to a residential cesspool since July, 2005 when an “investor” purchased the home next door to mine. The residence has housed a carpet business, a house cleaning service, and all of the employees of the neighborhood dry cleaner as well as all of these people’s children. Drugs have been sold from basement windows and prostitutes have been brought to the house in the wee hours for entertainment purposes. Vans have been disassembled in the front yard to be used as recliners as cases of corona have been sucked down by construction workers. Children left alone in the house by their parents have hung out of second story windows begging me for food and I have been hissed at as I mow my own lawn. I also had to excavate my back yard where it abuts this property to remove rat burrows. Yesterday, it being the 1st of a month, a new crew of tenants dragged their grassbags into the residence from a white commercial vehicle despite the fact that this property has been put up for sale by the bank. These tenants are the employees of a local re-plumbing company. I have filed more than 7 zoning complaints and although violations were found, no one ever consistently followed up on this property except Mr. Delgaudio.
Last Sunday, when he could have been at home with his wife and children, he was at my house to see how things were going at this property and to make sure my family was o.k. That is the kind of attention these problems deserve. Mr. Delgaudio uses strong language to get people’s attention focused on problems that need to be addressed. While I do believe we need to keep issues of immigration, zoning/overcrowding and foreclosure separated, they all need to be addressed quickly and effectively.
Lovisa,
clicked on the wrong article this belongs under the eco-freaks post. Oh well.
BarbaraN,
Eugene doesn’t seem to have “personal” time and has endless energy. My hat is off to the man regardless how he presents himself at times. He truly is concerned for his district, constituents and all of Loudoun county.
I completely agree with BarbaraN. And I will raise my over-sized glass to him, for any man that puts as much time and energy into doing the right thing and never backing down is inspirational.
[...] you read the following, you can find more on this topic at this post, a week [...]
Brilliant blog topic and I concur with every word, Joe. Now….if you can convince Ed to break his addiction to the developer’s teat, I’d be most appreciative. Delgaudio….we’re so close to being aligned in all 100% of Party issues right now, you don’t even know. All you need to do is realize that offering developer corporations welfare at the expense of citizens is NOT a republican hallmark.
I will see what I can find out about that. I don’t know how you guys manage to keep such a close eye on the BOS proceedings! I swear, I have seen exactly ONE BOS meeting on the Loudoun County Govt channel, and since then every time I turn it on it’s just Muzak playing over an advertisement for dog grooming or what have you. Do you watch them on the Web or what?
Joe, you can watch the webcast of public hearins and business meetings live from the loudoun.gov site. The link is in the right hand sidebar. Past meetings are archived with the agenda of each meeting.
No one truly knows how hard Eugene Delgaudio is working to restore Sterling to its once tranquil atmosphere.
Thank you, Eugene, for all you’re doing!
OK I now have to repeat myself again on another site because of the lack of experience that people seem to have with the Hispanic community. I have grown up in Spanish Harlem and been to other latin countries so I have observed similar behaviors in NYC and abroad.
1. Not all hispanics are illegal, but too many are. They are also the number one violators of coming here illegally mainly for geographical reasons; they have easiest access to the US via water and land. They also tend to have the highest incidents of illegal indentification such as stolen social security numbers. This is how they survive and make a life for themselves here even though on the Mexican-Guatemalan border, the Mexican government imposes heavy punishment for those who try to sneak across the border. (google National Geographic and the Other Border of Mexico)
2. Not all hispanics are litterbugs, but many are because they have a different standard of maintenance of the interior and exterior of their homes.
3. Not all criminals are hispanic but many are along with other minority /majority groups. Salvadoran gangs are prevalent in Northern Virginia all the way down to Blacksburg. They are there staking territories.
4. Educated hispanics tend to have more pride in their standard of living even if all they can do here is work in fast food but many are not educated and cannot communicate well and are illiterate in their native tongue.
With that being said, when is the last time you have seen ghanaian/ vietnamese services for naturalization in Northern Virginia? Not too many are there? There are a plethora of latin stores for wiring money to families in central and south america, for getting “identification” so that they can legally work here. But what would happen if i went to one of these latin countries and expected to work there and have the government pay for my health services? I’d be in jail or deported right back here. Please don’t feel pity for the illegal immigrants they came here knowing full well what they’ve done. I would not be welcome illegally in their countries. But I might be able to let weeds and such grow without any repercussions. A neighbor of mine who had a wonderful garden in front of his home now has rented his property to a hispanic family, who now have let the garden get over grown by weeds. They happened to live a few doors down from the house they rent now and their original home was even in worse condition hey left than when the people who sold it to them. I knew the previous owners of both these homes and they took much better care of their homes and were of other ethnic backgrounds. Granted other ethnicities also have different standards of living but by and large every overcrowded home I have seen in Northern Virginia is occupied by hispanics who have no consideration for the maintenance of their home and how it affects the people who live around them.
Finally what right do you have to thwart the mission of a county supervisor that is trying to clean up Sterling??? I want to hug Rudy Giuliani for cleaning NYC because it is nothing like it was when I was growing up there. Change takes time and often it is a painful process, but I believe that it is because of Delgaudio’s efforts that we have a more family friendly Sterling that honors it students academic achievements, creates opportunities for the youth to have extra curricular activities, that monitors criminal activity to keep families safe and does not ignore the illegal immigration problem like the county wants to do . Delgaudio takes the time to get to know his constituents, help recognize exemplary businesses in our community. He is a fiscal conservative because it takes less money to get the job done.
Just ask Loudoun County schools who in their welcome packet to new teachers put hard candy along with plastic trinkets, what a waste, I would rather have teachers receive a better pay check. And over kill on technology, these kids don’t need all the extra laptops and technology in their schools. I have seen LCD panels lie dormant in classrooms.
More money is not the solution, cutting waste is and there is a lot of it.
Ditto on Delgaudio: Love him or hate him, everyone has to admit he works hard in Sterling.
Suburbanite – thanks for the info, I need to make time to watch those meetings so I know what everyone is talking about.
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As Joe pointed out. It the same people who bash Delgaudio for his tactics and rhetoric then turn around and blame him for being the supervisor of sterling while conditions worsened. A foolish assertion.
Such are the tactics of those more interested in grinding axes than solving problem.
[...] Loudoun County Focuses On Sterling [...]