Loudoun County is located adjacent to Fairfax County in northern Virginia and contains Washington Dulles International Airport. The County had experienced tremendous growth pressures throughout the 1980's and the comprehensive plan it had adopted in 1979 was in need of updating and rethinking. Local preservationists felt development was out of control and local developers believed they were under attack. Everybody wanted a new plan - although for different reasons.

A sense of urgency prompted County government to create a vision for its future that would resolve some of these conflicts and concerns. County planning staff developed a vision that would re-capture the County's historic development patterns in the rural areas (hamlets and villages surrounded by farms) and absorb new urban development in compact, “traditional” towns (narrow, connected streets, human-scale architecture, etc.). 

The planners’ vision was embraced by the Board of Supervisors and well-received by the general public, but when the Board hurriedly attempted to implement the planning concepts through changes to the zoning ordinance in late 1988, backlash from landowners was extraordinary. They feared the new rules would be too restrictive and would cause the recent rapid increases in their land values to decline with equal rapidity. 

So the County had to start over, using a planning process that was "bottom up" rather than "top down". The formal public participation process began in early 1990 and continued through September 1991 when the new General Plan, "Choices and Changes" was adopted.

The goals of the General Plan process were twofold:

	To establish a new, updated and effective growth  management program suited to the huge amounts of  population growth on the horizon.
	To foster broad political support among the diverse and  conflicting groups of citizens and businesses in the County.

The process used to prepare the new General Plan might be called "trials, tribulations and satisfaction." It included over 100 public meetings, in addition to numerous drafts and re-drafts of policies, action programs and plan maps. The Board of Supervisors was primarily responsible for the process, while the County Planning Department and other development-related agencies were responsible for the technical aspects of plan development. Staff prepared policy ideas in text and graphic form, and then held work sessions with appointed and elected officials as well as citizen groups to refine those ideas. This process was repeated numerous times in order to steadily work toward consensus on a broad range of complex and innovative policies and action recommendations. 

Public input during the planning process shaped the plan that was finally adopted. This included a written survey on planning issues, mailed to every postal patron (4,000 citizens responded); eight public forums (attended by 250 people); Planning Commission work sessions and public hearings; and a series of Round Table Forums with special interest group representatives. 

The basic policies of this General Plan are similar to the original "vision" ideas created by the staff in 1988, but because they were reached through a process of involvement, discussion, debate and ferment, they are more refined, more practical, and more acceptable to the general public and to key interest groups. 

The Planning Commission certified its draft Plan to the Board of Supervisors in mid-1991. The Board adopted the Plan on September 17, 1991. In 1994, the General Plan was selected by the American Planning Association as the best new plan in the United States for jurisdictions of less than 100,000 people. (When the General Plan was adopted, Loudoun had less than 90,000 people. It now has over 125,000).

Milton Herd