It’s Department of “Health,” not “Brain”

2006 December 1

by thudfactor

I was about to post a diatribe on Fairfax County’s “insane banning of homecooked meals”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/28/AR2006112801583.html in homeless shelters and soup kitchens when I discovered they’d already “changed their minds”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001405.html. The County Board of Supervisors blames it on overzealous Department of Health employees, but I’m not convinced. After all, this is the same county that tried to ban “sleeping anywhere in your house but your bedroom”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53240-2001Jan26?language=printer lo these many years ago. (That decision was reversed after international ridicule.)

The Department of Health said they didn’t want the homeless to get food poisoning, a ludicrous notion since the alternative to a soup kitchen is probably scrounging for discarded leftovers. But anyway, the decision has been reversed.

Interestingly, while looking through the archives for the Fairfax bedroom story I see “I blogged about the disgraced Rep. Foley”:http://www.thudfactor.com/wordpress/2002/05/09/again-with-the-lazy-legislation/ and his “Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act”:http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.1142 back in 2002 which I see is _still_ in committee after several years.

Comments leave one →

2006 December 7

Susan Reed permalink

“After all, this is the same county that tried to ban sleeping anywhere in your house but your bedroom lo these many years ago. (That decision was reversed after international ridicule.)”

I have to take issue with this statement. If you read the article you linked to carefully, the county board did not instigate the proposed senate bill and the proposal caught most of the County Board Supervisors by surprise. So, the county did not try to ban “sleeping anywhere in your house by your bedroom.”

The Post’s article made it sound as if a new ordinance/zoning law was a done deal. I was upset, too, until I saw the actual text of the proposed law. That was very short and to the point, and I had to wonder why the Post chose not to print the text of the bill. If the actual text had been printed, perhaps more people would have seen it for what it was, an attempt to give Fairfax County permission to enact zoning ordinances that took into account room function and occupancy, which the state had not previously granted the county. But that wouldn’t have caused a big furor or made as controversial a story.

The proposed law stated: “The board may adopt an ordinance that provides that the occupancy limitations of the maintenance provisions of the Uniform Statewide Building Code shall apply to dwelling units within the county, except that such ordinance may require that habitable spaces such as kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms and family rooms shall not be occupied for sleeping purposes. The provisions of an ordinance adopted pursuant to this section may be enforced by injunction, abatement, or any other available equitable or legal remedy.”

Notice the use of the phrases, “the board may adopt an ordinance” and “may require.” The bill did not create a Fairfax County ordinance of any kind, but simply permitted Fairfax County to enact such ordinance, if it chose to.

Virginia is a “Dillon Rule” state, where most of the power is vested in the state rather than in the localities — the localities can do little other than what the state specifically allows. This issue around the actual senate bill would have made an excellent lead into a story on why Virginia localities need to have state permission to structure laws pertinent to local needs and issues, but that didn’t happen. That might have been more useful for Virginians, espcially the many people who move here from “home rule” states.

2006 December 8

thudfactor permalink

Hello Susan, and welcome to Thudfactor!

The Bill ( “SB 925, 2001″:http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?011+sum+SB925 ) would have affected only those counties in Virginia run on the “Urban County Executive” model, which effectively means to Fairfax County alone (if the synopsis on the VA senate site is to be believed).

Senator Byrne — the person who proposed the bill — is Fairfax’s State Senator. Ticer of Fairfax was a co-patron. Most if not all of Fairfax’s state senators voted in support of the bill.

Fairfax county senators introduced the bill, then voted in a block to help pass it. I think it’s fair to blame Fairfax.

You are right that the board would have had to enact an ordinance. Are you saying they would not have? Perhaps some of them were surprised, but I find it hard to believe that such a narrowly worded law targeting Fairfax alone was introduced without at least some on the County board knowing about it and assuming they could get an ordinance passed.

Likewise, I find it hard to believe that the bill (narrowly worded, affects one county) was _in actuality_ a stand-in bill to expose the greater statewide need for local control. That might be an issue in general, but the issue of *this* bill was narrowly and specifically: should Fairfax County be allowed to tell its citizens where in their houses they are allowed to sleep?

If you want to have a more broad discussion on the rights of county government, then support a more broad bill.

2006 December 8

Susan Reed permalink

One of my points was that the reporting lead one to believe that the senate bill itself would have created new zoning laws, when it didn’t. You may be right as to the motivations. I cannot speculate as to whether there would have a move by the county government to change the laws soon after this passed and I would want more convincing evidence before I could go as far as to say that the board supervisors were in collusion with the senators on this. I do think that there would have been quite a bit of protest from county citizens had such laws been proposed at the county level.

I did not support this senate bill. I do think that any zoning regulation that dictates which room a person may sleep in is utterly asinine and had Fairfax County tried to do so, I would have complained loudly to my county supervisor and to the board chair.

Nor, I do not think that the bill itself was an attempt to challenge Dillon rule government, but I do know that, because of the Dillon rule, Fairfax County (or any other county), had to have state law changed in order to enact zoning regulations that had occupancy criteria different from what the state had already specifically allowed the counties to have.

I became interested in why did this local issue have to be taken to the state level and wondered why that was not being discussed? While I was aware of the Dillon rule before, this incident really got me into how it was affecting local governments. I started to pay attention to how it affected other issues as well, particularly transportation and transit.

On another note, I would consider Patsy Ticer more as Alexandria’s state senator, rather than a “Fairfax County” senator. Her district was mostly the City of Alexandria plus parts of Arlington county and the parts of Fairfax County nearest Alexandria.

Hmm. I’m really surprized that Arlington County isn’t run under an “urban county executive.” Is the Arlington County government structure that different from Fairfax’s?

2006 December 8

thudfactor permalink

Arlington County uses the “County Manager Plan” as opposed to the “Urban County Executive.” You can “compare and contrast here”:http://www.dhcd.virginia.gov/CD/CLG/PDFs/alt.co.gov.06.pdf (PDF). Fortunately, the chart has Fairfax right next to Arlington.

My more general point is I feel Fairfax has been particularly hostile to economically disadvantaged; rather than trying to solve or alleviate the problems of the economically disadvantaged, they seem eager to drive them across county lines.

Move aside, and let the man go through.

It’s Department of “Health,” not “Brain”

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