""You can't fight City Hall," the adage goes. Maybe. But you sure can boss around the Board of Supervisors (and City Council, too—see "Crowning glory"). Local government doesn't just listen to citizens who come out to speak at public meetings—whenever it can, it will bow to pressure, particularly when it comes from neighborhood associations, even when doing so is in direct contrast to its own policies.

This is how the system is designed to work: Localities create "comprehensive plans" to guide the decisions of its governing boards. When developers come in with new projects, government staff use those comp plans as their Bibles to justify every change to a development that they recommend. So developers change their plans because of the comp plan, thinking it will make city councils or boards of supervisors more likely to give the green light.

But developers had better do their homework about which comp plan policies really matter to those boards. The most commonly compromised policy in Albemarle County is the one that says that neighborhoods should be connected. The comp plan "requires interconnected streets within developments and between developments so that pedestrians can walk easily to many destinations, traffic has alternative routes, and car trips are reduced in number and length."

Because the comp plan "requires" connectivity, county staff will fight hard to get (often reluctant) developers to connect to other neighborhoods. But the developer soon discovers that "requires" has a far different definition than they thought, mostly because county leaders don't have the stomach to tell residents of adjoining neighborhoods that they have to share their streets with other neighborhoods. The compromise solution is to make developers set aside the land for a future connection—to be made only if the older neighborhood wants it.

Thus Biscuit Run—the largest proposed residential development in county history, with 3,100 units on 820 acres of land—will directly connect with exactly...one neighborhood around it. That single neighborhood, the Southwood trailer park, is slated to be redeveloped as mixed-income housing. Residents who live on all other sides of the project showed up at the meetings, particularly residents from Mill Creek South (itself a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs, the development pattern the county says it wants to stop), and made sure that only a bicycle path would link it to Biscuit Run.

One can sympathize with the plight of the neighbors. They bought their property, thinking that they would be the last to come along. Now a road might bring in scads of cars that could maim their children and drive down their property values. Why should they have to suffer because the guy who owns the land next to them wants to make a buck developing it?

I feel sorry for them, but also see that their comfort comes at the expense of other neighbors who might not be so organized but might very well have greater cause for complaint. In general, future residents and those who don't come to meetings—often poorer residents—lose out to well-organized, well-educated and often wealthy residents. This all isn't particularly new, or unique—just about every town falls prey to it somehow. But it can be the price of public input.

And sometimes that public input only amounts to one person. In early talks about the most recently approved section of Hollymead Town Center, the county Planning Commission was set to O.K. the idea of a multistory parking deck—something the county says it wants to encourage in order to reduce the amount of farm land paved over for cars. But all those ideals went out the window with a few words from one woman, who had bought a townhome that would face the parking garage.

"You're talking about blocking our mountain view or our view of the sky," said Ellen Newberry. "It will be like living across from a factory."

The developers—who probably got comments from county staff suggesting that they build a parking deck—had to go back to the drawing board because a lone woman spoke out at a meeting.

Sometimes those changes don't contradict the comprehensive plan as directly but nonetheless amount to concessions made because no one from another side was there to argue against them. In August, residents from Forest Lakes in northern Albemarle successfully fended off advances from the Places29 master planners, who proposed a connector to Route 29N that might have gone through a trailer park. Forest Lakes neighbors thought it could drive down their property values to have to travel in sight of mobile homes. So the Planning Commission moved the connection to make it go through county land on the other side of Forest Lakes.

Potentially, that's good or bad for the trailer park residents—it could be good because a road doesn't cut through their neighborhood, or it could be bad because they are more isolated and mass transit is less accessible. In either case, no one from the trailer park was there to say one way or the other." (Will Goldsmith, C-Ville Weekly, January 1, 2008)