Tulloch, 44, is one of six newly elected supervisors on Loudoun's nine-member board. At the board's first meeting in January, the six newcomers stripped Chairman Scott York of his powers to set the agenda and make committee appointments, and then gave those powers to Tulloch. Immediately and without public notice, Tulloch's board began unraveling some of the strict growth controls that York and the previous board had championed over the past four years--measures that had made Loudoun County a national case study in the pros and cons of fighting suburban sprawl.
With residents of Loudoun having spent a decade trying to decide whether all the growth the county has been experiencing is terrible or terrific, it is not surprising that bitterly bi-polar politics is now the norm. Tulloch's power ploy, in fact, had a familiar ring to it.
Back in 1996, York led his own revolt against a different board chairman when he thought that chairman was too friendly with builders. That set in motion York's own rise to power, as well as an anti- development backlash, which culminated in 1999 when a slate of eight supervisors were elected on a "smart growth" platform. It was an early swing in Loudoun's wild and vengeful politics that has been jolting back and forth ever since.
Is this any way to run a county? Probably not, but finding a middle ground in Loudoun is a hard thing to do. It is two counties, really. The eastern part, where both Tulloch and York are from, sits in the suburban orbit of Washington, D.C., and is densely populated with families who for the most part have only recently moved in. The rural west is dotted with the historic mansions of sixth-generation country aristocrats who still enjoy the fox hunt.
York's approach to growth discouraged development in the rural west by downzoning that land (a strategy his critics called "snob zoning"). Most of Loudoun's continued growth would happen in the suburban east (critics had a slur for this, too: "density packing"). Overall, York's policies cut 80,000 new homes out of Loudoun's comprehensive plan.
Developers, large landowners and property-rights advocates filed more than 200 lawsuits seeking to overturn the plan and the zoning law that went along with it. Their bigger goal, however, was to overturn the board that had written those policies. Builders poured record amounts of money into Loudoun's elections last November, giving most of it to Republican candidates. York, running as an independent, won his at- large race for chairman. But the Republicans won a six-seat majority, setting the stage for emasculating York's powers in January.
During the campaign, Tulloch, who received two-thirds of his donations from real estate interests, said he favored "smart growth." It's clear, however, that Tulloch means something very different by that phrase than York did. In its first meeting, Tulloch's board rolled back Loudoun's program to purchase development rights and put a once-dead highway project back on its agenda.
Tulloch may want to tread carefully, though. In Loudoun County, it always seems the next backlash is an election away. "I don't think you can turn 180 degrees on a heartbeat and have lasting support for that," says Tim Dimos, the mayor of Middleburg, in the county's rural west. "If this pattern continues, in the next election there will probably be a reaction in the other direction."
