NOVATOWNHALL

In an editorial titled, Ending Government Sponsored Blight, the Washington Examiner adds another outraged voice to the roiling controversy over the Loudoun County Department of Building and Development:

Loudoun County officials have for years looked the other way when confronted with glaring violations of their own zoning ordinances. Angry homeowners have now joined a growing list of Americans demanding strict enforcement of such laws…

Read it all.

Eastern Loudoun is finally getting some attention because the problems have piled up to the point they can no longer be glossed over. The upside is we - especially those of us in Sterling - finally have a voice the county will have to listen to. If you are fed up with the utter uselessness of our Zoning Administration Division, send an e-mail to County Administrator Kirby Bowers and copy the entire Board of Supervisors.

(Heck, copy the Easterner or the Independent while you are at it.)

As I alluded to my letter last week, the county could do a lot worse than to empty the entire Department of Building and Development and hire some of the folks from Herndon to come over and show us how to rebuild it into a functioning government agency.

More on the problems in Loudoun County Zoning Adiministration:

Foreclosure, it’s just a state of mind

Eugene Delgaudio and Jeanne West Team Up to Denounce Zoning Violations in Sterling (includes video of WUSA Channel 9 news report)

Zoning Controversy Continues To Heat Up In Sterling

Loudoun County Focuses On Sterling

Dispatches from Sterling: Government-Sponsored Blight

In Sterling, apparently.

A story circulating in Sterling the past year is the Loudoun County government has cast a blind eye to many instances of squatting; specifically, when a house is foreclosed and everyone is evicted, little by little people show back up and occupy the residence. Sometimes it’s by entering through a rear entrance, sometimes former tenants of these boarding houses still having keys and going in through the front door, usually a strictly nocturnal phenomenon. People have even been seen sleeping on roofs at night, but by morning the houses are empty again.

Complaints to Loudoun County Zoning Administration, needless to say, have resulted in no action.

Well, the new trend we are heralding here at the NOVA TownHall Blog is to transform anecdotes into documented reality, and with evidence coming in from around the community and my own observations from the front driveway, we will continue that trend right here.

Exhibit One: House A from our June 23 post. You know, the one across the street from my house which Loudoun County Zoning assured us idiot citizens was perfectly above-board: “A family of six and two unrelateds” - no reason to inspect.

Well tonight, someone shows up and occupies House A which was supposedly foreclosed and all the boarders evicted from.

There are some lingering bad feelings about this particular residence, mainly because the voluminous collection of refuse in the back yard is still there: thirty to fifty bags of garbage a variety of junkyard-style trash in the yard and the back deck piled with refuse. When the car arrived, neighbors called the police tonight and five Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office cruisers showed up, deputies surrounded the house, knocked on the doors, but whoever was inside did not open up. No warrant, so no authorization to enter.

But let’s hand it to our Sheriff’s Office: they knew the resolution of the June situation and that the house was supposed to be empty, and they did all they could - at the present time. That’s the plus side. The minus side is we still have a festering landfill right here and our government entities are apparently powerless to do anything about it - a situation that could have been entirely avoided if our zoning enforcement officer had done what obviously needed to be done about two months ago when the first complaint was filed!

Thank you, Terry Wharton. I am sure someone, somewhere, is pleased that this property owner like so many others in Sterling was given a free pass.

Alas, we’re not the only ones with a problem caused by a broken Zoning Administration division. This is 504 W. Beech (I will make no attempt to protect anyone’s privacy because this one is so egregious):

The house on the right is 504. Neighbors complained about a boarding house being run from this location for well over a year, and the house was foreclosed several months ago, yet it remained occupied. Neighbors continued to complain to no avail. When the tenants finally left they cleaned the place out, from the major appliances to cabinets to doors to the garage doors.

The house to the left of it has a For Sale sign on it - has been on the market for quite a while. Too bad for them, eh? Laws on the books are not enforced, and the law-abiding citizens of Sterling (who I am convinced our county government considers first-class “chumps”) consequently get hosed.

Yes, even windows were removed. A resident of this court said they watched all this happening, reported it to the appropriate agencies in Leesburg, and were ignored.

It gets worse. There is another specific case going on right now which may be far more revealing than either of these, because evidence is piling up about a home purchasing mortgage-and-refinancing scam which might explain much of what has been happening in our area. It appears some of these boarding houses have been the result of a loophole in lending practices, in which someone can buy multiple residences, sell and refinance them several times over, then leave with a wad of cash and sticking the lending institutions with the bill. In the lag time between purchase and physical foreclosure, the residence is rented out to illegal boarders, and the rent money kept as additional profit. Banks, and eventually taxpayers, are left to pick up the final bills.

More to come - I expect MUCH more - on that matter. The Loudoun County government, in particular the Zoning Administration division and possibly the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office and some other departments, definitely has some ’splainin’ to do, if you ask me.

UPDATE: A group of Loudoun citizens met tonight to discuss these and other issues, and the consensus was we really need to find out whether any of the members of our Board of Supervisors - beside Eugene Delgaudio - is even conscious of what is happening here. The violations would not likely be allowed to stand if they were occurring anywhere other than in Sterling.

Something is very fishy in our county government, folks. I sense a groundswell of outrage from the citizens in eastern Loudoun.

UPDATE: The car in front of House A was gone by 6:30 the next morning, and did not return last night. Yesterday afternoon someone looked in the backyard and said the gate was open and it was relatively clean, so thank goodness for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office! Even though they would not have had to be there if Zoning had done its job in the first place, our deputies do get results just by maintaining a presence. UPDATE II: Another neighbor informs me the bags of trash had been removed over a week ago so all that was back there when the deputies came was junk like car seat, wire spool, miscellaneous construction-related trash.

In a singular demonstration of professional collegiality, Sterling District Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio and the woman he defeated for that office in the November 2007 election, Jeanne West, were the key spokespersons in the WUSA Channel 9 news report aired tonight at 11:00 pm. Both went on record to denounce zoning violations that have persisted in Sterling.

Click here to watch the video on the WUSA site.

The backdrop for the story was this scene at the intersection of Johnson and Beech - which is right across the street from Jeanne’s house - where digging equipment and cable for the Verizon FIOS installation project have been illegally stored on a neighborhood street.

It was quite a surprise to see Eugene and Jeanne as the co-subjects of the news piece, but I think the profusion of zoning violations in Sterling has brought us to the point that everyone in the community needs to come together to seek a solution. Congrats, and THANK YOU, to the two of them for finding this common ground.

The news story did not touch on whether this was the same equipment that had been parked across the street from MY house several weeks ago. In fact, I am not sure if they even mentioned Verizon by name. But it’s a good start to bringing public awareness to this problem, which I definitely plan to continue pursuing.

The video is priceless and quite flattering to both of these esteemed public figures.

I just got word that local television station WUSA 9 is filming in the neighborhoods of Sterling right now, focusing on blighted houses and Verizon equipment parked on our streets. The report will likely be aired on the late news tonight.

UPDATE: Heh. Here is what Channel 9 was filming.

Apparently a group of residents from neighboring houses came out to see the camera crew, and told them that there were indeed people working on the Verizon FIOS project living here.

This is around the corner from my house, about 1/4 mile away from “House A.” I wonder, now that everyone got kicked out of House A, if some of them just moved around the corner. I’m going to go by in a little while and see if any of the same trucks show up. In any case, it looks like the tactic is to just move the equipment to another street and hope nobody notices.

Being on the street, this violation should be addressed by the Sheriff’s Office, and hopefully someone will call it in or maybe some deputy will see tonight’s report. Then, it will be moved into a driveway, and it will be the Loudoun County zoning enforcement team’s turn to shine.

Ahem.

For those who are not caught up, here are my reports from

June 23

July 2.

In addition, here is my letter in today’s Independent:

Enforce the Zoning

I read with interest your front page story on “eastern Loudoun initiatives” under consideration by our Board of Supervisors. For residents of Sterling who wonder why our zoning laws have been so flagrantly abused the past few years, with overcrowded houses allowed to persist and commercial enterprises allowed to operate out of neighborhood homes, I may have found part of the answer.

I recently did some research as a result of a “problem house” on our street which, once again, Loudoun County Zoning refused to do anything about. I wrote a story detailing this case on June 23 at novatownhall.com. It turns out that the only member of the Loudoun County zoning enforcement team who speaks Spanish - and therefore, for obvious reasons, the point person for inspections of overcrowding and other complaints in Sterling - told a college publication last summer that in addition to working for Loudoun County, she is “continuing to help immigrants though part-time work for an immigration law firm.”

Of course, there is no stigma whatsoever in advocating for “immigrants” and every American should have the freedom to take civic action on matters he or she feels strongly about. But there seems to be a blatant and unconscionable conflict of interest when the one person who is supposed to be Sterling’s chief enforcement officer is also doing legal work on behalf of those so often involved in the alleged violations here.

Most Sterling residents who have attempted to file zoning violation complaints are familiar with the excuses the county’s zoning personnel give us for doing nothing, such as “Virginia’s laws are not strong enough” to allow more rigorous enforcement. But think about this: In the neighboring town of Herndon, when the new mayor and town council first took office in July, 2006, the town had nearly 90 cases of unresolved zoning violations. As of a couple months ago, that number was hovering between five and ten, because Herndon hired additional Spanish-speaking zoning inspectors, some on a part-time basis, with the charge to get the problem fixed.

It appears what is really lacking in Loudoun County is the will to enforce the zoning laws and, at least in regard to Sterling, our county government does not really want to fix the problems.

Maybe Loudoun County Administrator Kirby Bowers should make a phone call to Herndon Mayor Steve DeBenedittis. I am certain “Mayor Steve” would furnish some references of zoning inspectors who could bring an attitude adjustment to our Department of Building and Development.

Joe Budzinski
Sterling

[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.”

Go read all of that.

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.

Found in a Freep post: It is reported in a Spanish-language paper that both John McCain and Barack Obama told the NALEO Conference audience they would push for comprehensive immigration reform before the 100th day of their presidency.

I imagine no one has fallen off their chair from learning this.

But don’t plan that Election Day fishing trip before reading this article on the impact each candidate will likely have on the Supreme Court.

[After you read the following, you can find more on this topic at this post, a week later]

This is what “blight” looks like from the house across the street, and this is how it is allowed to happen. (click on photos for larger images)

For all of you who don’t have firsthand familiarity with the illegal alien problem in Northern Virginia, let me share a true-life story which might help paint the picture of what has been happening here in Sterling for the past five to seven years. In sum, I believe segments of our government at every level are at war with the legal residents of our nation, an economic war conducted on behalf of powerful business interests, a war that most citizens don’t even realize has already been declared on them.

I am going to relate this tale about Sterling to demonstrate what has gone wrong at the micro level - because the macro-level issues have been so thoroughly politicized that most people who are not on the front lines can’t make heads or tails of the controversy. Facts about border security and what the federal government is or isn’t doing are remote and opaque. Facts about what is happening at the neighborhood level are much easier to grasp.

In most American communities, where the rubber hits the road on the illegal immigration problem lies in the actions of three local government functions: Public safety, business licensing and zoning enforcement. We have covered the first two in substantial depth on this blog over the years (check here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) We’ve touched on zoning, but it is time to probe a little further.

When we turn over this particular log, as most Sterling residents know and which was amply testified to at the May 14 community meeting, the reality is not pretty. Both the Sheriff’s Office and the Zoning Administration division received abysmally low grades from local residents.

This was no major surprise to me.

From my personal experience with filing zoning violation complaints in Loudoun County for the past two-plus years, I believe the Zoning Administration division of the Department of Building and Development is worse than ineffective. From my vantage point, I believe this particular section of the county government is, like Robert Mugabe’s Ministry of Justice, “part of the problem.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Here in Northern Virginia, we are particularly affected by the illegal migration problem because so many illegal aliens have moved here.

It’s almost as if key local government agencies have made a conscious decision to ignore certain sections of Title 8 of the U.S. Code.

Get the full picture of this travesty of justice, at Blog Fu.

UPDATE: Blog Fu is not letting up.

Even the scorn of the top Virginia blog will not be enough to turn an election. By my own personal observation, the blogosphere has roughly 10% penetration into reality, which means 100% reprobation by a blog with 100% influence will only affect 1 in 10 actual votes. But here in June 2008, these messages should be viewed by the McCain campaign as deadly serious shots across the bow. There is still plenty of time for both presidential campaigns to make major path adjustments.

If John McCain is truly going to stick with promising amnesty for illegals as one of his first priorities in office, he is dead meat in November. I don’t know if Bob Barr is going to be a viable alternative. I think trying to convince Barack Obama that he might, in fact, consider the welfare of African-American workers would be a more realistic course of action for immigration-enforcement supporters. There is plenty of time to work on that angle, and John McCain seems intent on making that scenario a reality.

[UPDATE: Dan Genz of the Examiner reports the crackdown won’t be all it’s cracked up to be or all that Sheriff Simpson requested. This does not bode too well for much change in eastern Loudoun.]

Loudoun County Sheriff Steve Simpson announced yesterday that the federal bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has approved the Loudoun Sheriff’s Office for participation in the federal 287(g) program, which provides authority and additional tools for local government agencies to enforce federal immigration laws.

It’s about time.

Help Save Loudoun presented a detailed proposal on the 287(g) program to the Loudoun Board of Supervisors in October, 2006.

NVTH readers may recall that the Sheriff’s changing stance on 287(g) was a controversial issue in the county last year. The Joseph Passarelli tragedy highlighted the spectacular failure of local law enforcement agencies, who had the illegal alien, hit-and-run driver in custody 23 times and let him go in every single instance. Let’s hope the new, formal relationship between our Sheriff’s Office and ICE will also lead to a reversal of what is perceived in Sterling to be a very hands-off approach to illegal aliens by local law enforcement.

The problem as we see it in Sterling appears as follows: Illegal aliens are a sticky wicket for certain local government agencies - specifically, the Sheriff’s Office and the Zoning Enforcement Team - to deal with, so representatives of those agencies routinely give illegal aliens a free pass for infractions that would land citizens in a heap of trouble. If you or I had a DUI incident, turned our residence into a boarding house or began running a construction-related subcontracting business out of our home, we would be spanked legally and financially in short order. Illegals, however, seem to get away with stuff like this all the time. At a “community meeting” a few weeks ago, that was the dominant complaint from the citizens - of ALL ethnic groups - who attended. What we want is for our Sheriff’s Office to apply the same rules to illegal aliens that apply to us, and the new agreement with ICE provides an opportunity for hope that infractions under the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Office will now be dealt with more effectively. (The Zoning Enforcement Team, alas, may be beyond hope, and that is a blog post for another day).

So let’s hope that the continual DUI infractions, assorted related crimes, and crimes of every sort will now begin to abate as the Sheriff’s Office takes a more proactive stance on apprehending and processing illegal aliens suspected of violations. When word gets out that Loudoun County is once more under the rule of law, our community may become a less attractive location for illegal migrant workers.

As reported in today’s New York Times, even the Bush administration has been taking a harder line on illegals which is nothing short of a miracle; so while we can’t expect him to be transformed into Sheriff Joe overnight, we should expect Sheriff Steve Simpson to instill a culture of enforcing the rule of law throughout his department.

In case any of our readers are not clued in about why it is important for local government agencies to have all the necessary tools and authority to apprehend illegal alien criminals rather then let them slip through the net, this seems as good a time as any for another illegal alien recent crime round-up. Most of these links, below the fold, are from our vigilant, esteemed reader Lynn.

Read the rest of this entry »

Western civilization, born in ancient Greece and Rome, nurtured in Northern Europe, and matured in the United States and Canada, is dying.  More specifically, we are killing ourselves.  According to the CDC, the (age adjusted) white fertility rate in 2005 was only 1,840 live births per 1000 women aged 15-44, well below the replacement birth rate (See Table 15).  To compare apples to apples, that CDC report of non-age-adjusted white fertility rate was 58.4 live births in 2004.  Meanwhile the abortion rate was 10 per 1,000 women in that age group.  That would work out to another 469 live births, putting the total fertility rate up over 2,300 per 1,000 white women of child-bearing age, well above the replacement rate.

Blacks fare a little better.  Although their abortion rate (28 vs. 10) was higher, the Black Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was 2,020. The Hispanic abortion rate is 26.0 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, but their TFR is 2,824.5.  (The rate for Mexicans in America was 3,021.0!)

The same trend is occurring in Europe, Russia, and Japan.

We are told that the wages of Sin is Death (Romans 6:23).  We are dying.