Tag: McIntosh Village

Fate can teach us fiscal sustainability

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

In a somewhat puzzling change of venue, Staunton’s city council will be meeting Wednesday evening to discuss the Comprehensive Plan update not at city hall—where its chambers have more room, better seating and the proceedings can be readily videotaped—but in the second-floor meeting room of the Staunton Public Library. The ostensible reason for this choice is to bring the discussion into more of a community setting, which doesn’t speak well of the council’s perspective on its own digs. But given that the community is invited to watch but not speak at this last public airing of the update before a council vote later in the month, you do have to wonder about the logic of it all.

But let me not quibble. With the deadline for public input now past, it will be interesting to see just which of the plan’s shortcomings will be addressed and how, and whether they will be deemed sufficient to send the whole exercise back to the Comprehensive Plan Commission for revisions. That seems unlikely, even though some of the update’s omissions are rather glaring, as I recently documented. That’s not how these meetings usually work.  But one of those omissions—any  acknowledgment of the city’s huge unfunded liability to replace a leaky and brittle century-old water delivery system—when viewed in the context of the McIntosh Village development, which recently received qualified approval, underscores an even more fundamental hole at the center of the plan: its failure to address issues of fiscal accountability. And that all by itself should compel a do-over.

Just as the “comprehensive” plan conveniently ignores major capital improvement expenses that will become unavoidable over the next 20 years, so the McIntosh Village application was processed without any true understanding of what it ultimately will cost the city. Unlike infill development, which is how the comprehensive plan assumes the city will add most new housing over the next couple of decades, and which benefits from existing city infrastructure, McIntosh Village will add 267 new homes over a five-year period. That’s 267 homes that will have to be serviced by thousands of feet of new roads, new curbs, new water lines, new sewer lines and new storm water management systems. Once in place, all that new infrastructure will become the city’s responsibility in perpetuity to maintain, upgrade as needed and eventually replace.  

How much will that cost? No clue. But as with the ignored water mains that supply Staunton with its water, this is the kind of predictable but significant expense that the Comprehensive Plan doesn’t recognize—not just at McIntosh Village, but in numerous other parts of the city where such development can be reasonably expected, such as the large open tracts zoned for low-density residential housing along Springhill Road. There simply is no city policy that requires a staff assessment of what financial obligations Staunton is accepting when it approves a new development.

A housing development isn’t only a financial burden, of course. Improved property adds to the real estate tax base, the residents who fill its homes presumably spend money in local businesses and thereby pay city sales tax, and so on. But just as any well-run business won’t undertake a significant expansion without preparing a spreadsheet that balances expected costs against anticipated revenues, a city shouldn’t willy-nilly take on 40- or 50-year obligations without a clear-eyed understanding of what that means for city residents.

This isn’t a revolutionary idea, although admittedly it remains somewhat rare among municipalities. But consider the example of a city northeast of Dallas, Texas, with a population of roughly 23,000, or just a bit smaller than Staunton. Fate—yes, that’s the name of the city—adopted its first comprehensive plan in 2015, then updated it five years later. It’s worth a look, if only to dispel any notion that the Lone Star State is completely allergic to any kind of land use planning. Apparently, that’s true for only some parts of the state.

As Fate would have it (sorry, couldn’t resist), any proposed developments within the city have to provide answers to four basic questions:

  • What infrastructure costs will be created?
  • What long-term maintenance obligations will result?
  • What tax revenue will be generated?
  • Does the math work over the long-term?

Or as the city explains at more length, its comprehensive plan includes a “fiscal sustainability” policy, which “means that over a long-term period the City of Fate will be able to cover its cost obligations and provide high service quality for its residents without major increases in property tax rates, high levels of debt through bond issuances, or degradation of city facilities due to lack of maintenance staff or resources. To maintain fiscal sustainability it is therefore critical that we  evaluate new development proposals not only against our adopted development regulations and construction standards but also in relation to the fiscal productivity of the project” [emphasis added].

There’s a whole lot more explanation in Fate’s comprehensive plan for anyone who wants to get into the weeds, including a definition of fiscal productivity and a sample of the spreadsheet the city uses in its evaluation, but the bottom line is simply this: “These contributions and costs are compared to one another to ultimately determine if a project is going to contribute to the long-term fiscal sustainability of the city, or whether it will serve as a financial drain on our city’s taxpayers.”  The remarkable thing about that statement is that it comes from a city marked by explosive growth, with a population that is expanding almost 8% annually—precisely the kind of city most susceptible to the municipal version of a Ponzi scheme, in which current residents get the benefit of a sudden infusion into the tax base while the cost of paying for its long-term obligations are kicked down the road.

We’re seeing now how that works out long-term, and it’s not pretty. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t adjust course for the benefit of future Stauntonians by having a comprehensive plan that adds fiscal sustainability to inclusivity, harmony, and all of the other aspirational values it embraces.

Absentee owners vs. Staunton NIMBY

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

One of the biggest housing developments ever proposed for Staunton recently cleared a number of procedural hurdles, gaining preliminary planning commission and city council approval to move forward with plans to build 267 single-family homes on the city’s south side. But despite providing a much-needed addition to the city’s housing stock, McIntosh Village is bringing with it a whole lot of angst and hair-pulling—and, we may hope, a lesson about property rights and the importance of being aware of what’s going on around us.

The city’s tentative thumbs-up to this outsized development comes with a score of caveats and requirements, many of which any project of this size would command, but many in response to objections raised by residents of the adjacent Green Spring Valley development. That includes such understandable concerns as the insufficient number of access roads to the property and the effects on neighboring homes of the blasting that will be needed for site development, as well as more conventional worries about increased stormwater run-off and increased local traffic.

But then there are the objections that suggest, bottom-line, that the only acceptable use of the 77-acres at issue is to leave them . . . undisturbed. To not build anything. One local resident said she had moved to Green Spring valley for its “quiet, peaceful nature.” Another lamented the destruction of the area’s “natural beauty” and urged that more trees in the development be preserved and a wider buffer be required. A third declared that he was “Staunton born and bred” and that while he wanted to see the city grow, he did not want it to change.  A fourth insisted that the reason the land in question had not been developed was because it isn’t suitable for development, which amounted to a snake-eating-its-tail kind of logic.

All this and more was delivered in public hearings and without obvious embarrassment at such a stunning display of entitled behavior. These were supposedly reasonable objections by one set of property owners about plans by other property owners to develop their land in conformity with existing zoning and other regulations—but what they really were was a complaint that someone was robbing them of a pastoral idyll that wasn’t theirs in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, they should have bought that land themselves . . .

. . . which is not as far-fetched as it might sound. It would, however, require more thought than the Green Spring Valley complainers exhibited. It also suggests that the neighbors of any sizeable piece of vacant land in Staunton should be asking the questions that Green Spring Valley residents didn’t: Who owns it? How much did they pay for it? What are their plans for how that land is to be used?

A first clue in this instance is the working name for the proposed development, McIntosh Village. That’s a reference to Bruce McIntosh II, a wealthy resident of Loudon County who lived in a 5,000-square-foot 1860 colonial house on 133 acres in Waterford until he died, three years ago. More than 30 years ago he sold one of this family’s two farms and invested the proceeds in Staunton and Augusta County real estate, but he never lived here. His land just sat there, idle, lulling folks into thinking this would be the status quo forever—until September of 2024, when Bruce McIntosh’s estate sold 11 contiguous parcels, amounting to slightly more than 100 acres, to Staunton Augusta Properties for a mere $500,000.

Let that sink in a moment. For less than the assessed value of just two of the homes backing onto the proposed new development, all the land for McIntosh Village—and then some—could have been purchased by the people who now are complaining that someone will be paving their paradise. Whether individually or as a group, perhaps united under the umbrella of a non-profit limited liability corporation, the people who are predicting a coming onslaught of noise, dust, earth tremors and radon gas could instead have bought their very own private park. But of course, that would have required forethought, research and planning, for which developers apparently have cornered the market. It would have meant someone looking out a window and musing, “Gee, I wonder what’s going to happen to all that empty land zoned R-2 just sitting there?”

Make no mistake: this isn’t the last time this sort of thing may happen. For all the nonsense emanating from city officials about Staunton running out of empty land, there’s still a surprising amount of it, and that’s without harping on whether it makes sense to have an ag-forestal area inside the city limits. And a fair proportion of that vacant land is owned by people who don’t live in Staunton, nor in Augusta County—people who, like Bruce McIntosh, view it merely as an investment, which is not the same as investing in Staunton.

Some of the vacant land is quite extensive, like the 34.3- acre parcel at 502 Old Greenville Road, or the 21.32 acres at 70 Carann Street, both zoned R-2 and both adjacent to the future McIntosh Village. The owner of the first parcel lives in Alabama. The owner of the second lives in Sacramento.  Or consider a couple of smaller parcels, such as the vacant four acres, zoned R-2 and R-3, directly behind the city’s new J&DR Court building. That owner lives in South Carolina. Then there’s a vacant 6.3 acres, zoned R-2, at 721 Paul Street, owned by someone in Charlottesville—closer to home, to be sure, but still at a remove. How much concern will any of those absentee owners have for the sensibilities of their neighbors when the time comes to unload their property?

Are there more absentee owners? Undoubtedly, but it doesn’t appear that anyone at the city has made an effort to track them, which means we’re always vulnerable to surprises like McIntosh Village. And absentee ownership, it should be noted, can carry negative consequences for developed property, too, as reflected in recurring complaints of neglect and deferred maintenance of rental housing, especially in the West End. When someone living in another state, or even in a distant part of Virginia, owns a rental property in Staunton solely as an “investment,” there’s little incentive in an extraordinarily tight housing market to do more than the bare minimum to maintain it.

At least the folks who eventually move into McIntosh Village will have paid for the property they live in. Maybe by then their neighbors will get over their resentments and make them feel welcome.