Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 5 · column 1 of 4 · from the scan, no model involved
As the winds of change sharply now accelerate
the pace of growth here, the powerfully beautiful Virginia Piedmont countryside of Rappahannock and our neighboring counties move today like a great ship without a captain into new and uncharted waters.
Recently elected Virginia Governor Tim Kaine has made sharply clear his intention to play a firm hand in this huge issue here, specifically by creating a block on new rural residential sprawl which does not already have the transportation road system to support it.
After more than more than 300 years of human settlement, the open fields and pastures of this region now face large new forces at work, threatening to make this a very different and uncomfortable place in which to work and live.
Measured by the experience of counties east of us around Washington, the pace of change here in the years just ahead is going to be greater than in all of the past three centuries combined.
Who could have imagined a few years back that Loudoun would recently become the fastest growing comity in America (at 30 percent a year)? It seems like only yesterday that State Police Sgt. Archie Smith remarked to me — in 1964 — that he could get out of his cruiser on then-two lane Route 7 near Leesburg any evening, he down on the road and safely go to sleep.
New forces at work
With an expanding grid of four-lane highways, the powerful fields and hills of the Virginia Piedmont hqve become interlocked with the central dynamics of eastern urban America, squarely facing Greater Washington’s westward march.
States to the north and neighboring counties such as Fairfax and Prince William are hard evidence of what happens in the fast growth lane — urban sprawl, plastic malls, and soaring demand for public services at a heavy growing cost to the families who live and pay taxes next door to us ( property taxes 300 percent higher.)
Planners and supervisors in these Piedmont counties, except Loudoun only recently, have shown a street savvy realization of the impact of
92.1%