Comments At Arlington County Board Meeting, July 10, 2024.
I have concerns about the proposed CIP, principal among them the use of doublespeak to describe priorities and projects. Specifically I’m concerned about the use of the buzz word “resiliency” throughout. Nowhere is the meaning of this term defined. Yet it is used 13 times in the Manager’s Message and 19 times in the PowerPoint presentation.
For example, the Manager says:
“My proposed CIP is intended to do the same for the next few years—enable the County to be responsive to change through investments in resiliency and maintain financial flexibility.”
There are 9 projects in the CIP that use the term “resiliency”.
- Natural Resiliency Program ($5.555M)
- Energy Resilience Planning & Development ($4.153M)
- Lubber Run Resiliency Hub ($2.462M)
- Flood Resiliency Design & Construction Guideline $.150M
- Stream Resiliency Program ($13.810M)
- Gulf Branch Stream Resiliency ($3.120)
- Regional Source Water Resiliency ($.061M)
- Transmission Mains Resiliency ($4.205)
- USACE Coastal Storm Resiliency ($5.900M)
Over 10 years these projects will expend approximately $40 milllion in taxpayer money. Yet there are only 2 on the list whose purpose I can guess based on familiarity with the issue—namely, the “Stream Resiliency Program” and “Gulf Branch Stream Resiliency”.
These two projects will employ a widely discredited technology called “stream restoration” to flatten stream beds and clear cut stream banks to promote erosion control and have engendered a lot of public opposition due to their adverse environmental impacts.
Here it is evident that the real purpose of the term resiliency is to obfuscate the actual purpose of the project and thereby keep the opposition at bay.
According to William Lutz, co-author of the SEC’s “Plain English Handbook” and author of “Doublespeak” and 16 other books, this is precisely what the Orwellian concept of doublespeak is intended to do.
“In a democracy, we decide what policies and candidates to back by listening to the public discourse. If the discussion is carried out in doublespeak, organizations deliberately mislead the people so they don’t really know what’s going on, and we wind up making decisions of social importance on the wrong basis.”
Another concern I have with the CIP is its assumption that as long as certain benchmark financial ratios are met, the expenditures in it are prudent. The CIP includes an outlay of $180 million for the new Career Center High School with an operating capacity of 1,619 students, which is double the price of a new high school elsewhere in Virginia, including the new George Mason High School in Falls Church City priced at $72.9 million for 1,448 students. If the sky is limit for new schools for which we have comparable data, how prudent are other projections in the CIP?