Oral History Transcription

Oral History Interview Interviewee: Jean Packard Interviewer: Margaret Shutler Monday, May 2, 2005

MARGARET SHUTLER (MARGARET): Today is the 2nd of May '05, and I am interviewing Jean Packard at Sharon Bulova's office, and I am the interviewer, Margaret Shutler. And so we will begin. I would like you to tell me, if you can, why we are interviewing you. Why are you such an important person?

JEAN PACKARD (JEAN): Well, why am I such an important person? That's a good question. I don't know that I am.

MARGARET: But we think so.

JEAN: Well, I've lived here a long time. I've lived here since 1951. And I guess that makes me one of the older residents. And I was chairman of the Board of Supervisors and president of the Federation of Citizens Association. And I've been actively involved in the county and local politics for many years.

MARGARET: We remember. Even when I said to my children today that I was going to interview you, they said, oh, we remember her. She was in a lot of school things. Well, let's start. What was the first one, what your first position was?

JEAN: My first position was president of my local civic association in Lee Forest, which has about 100 homes in it. And the first major thing that we got involved in is, very exciting, trash pick up. We wanted to be included in the county's pick up rather than having local, private haulers because we were having problems getting ours picked up. So I dutifully appeared before the Board of Supervisors and made our petition. And we got it, and that was my first win. So I had to go on from there. And from there I got involved with Federation and the League of Women Voters, and the various civic activities in the county.

MARGARET: How about your trash pick up now? Is it still pretty good?

JEAN: We're still under the county, and it's still pretty good.

MARGARET: And how did you do that because we need to do that in our area?

JEAN: Well, I think at that time, of course, this was in the 1950s. It may have changed since then. But what we did was just make a petition to the board to be included in the county pick up, and I think you can still do that if you want to. But you have to have a petition with the majority of the residents agreeing because it goes on your tax bill, you see? It comes in your tax bill, which is nice. It's another bill to pay. But it was very easy back in those days.

MARGARET: Well, I think we'd have trouble now getting that many people. Of course, we have 640 families in ours, and we'd never get them all to sign something.

JEAN: Yeah, I've heard, especially in areas where you have pick up twice a week.

MARGARET: And so then from there you proceeded into which is the next important thing?

JEAN: Well, from there I became, belonged to the Federation. Of course, the civic association joined the Federation of Citizens Association. You and I worked up in that. I think that was in about 1960. And then the next big thing we got involved in was the sewer wars in Fairfax County. We were, of course, the county was just growing at an explosive rate, and I think in the 60s we were the fastest growing county in the nation. We had, they estimated, to keep up with the growth of school children in those days, we had to build one new classroom a day. Well, obviously we weren't doing that in Fairfax County. My daughter, whose now in her 40s, she never went to a school that was not crowded. She went to Wakefield Forest Elementary School, and at that time they were on a well, and it was built for 300 students. They had 600 enrolled. And at recess or lunch when all the kids would go to the bathroom and flush, they'd run out of water. And I substituted teaching over there. That was not good at all. But the big thing we got involved in was providing sewers for the county, and the Federation and the League of Women Voters and the county council and PTAs took on the whole development contingent and the Board of Supervisors to defeat a sewer bond issue, but was going to sewer what was then the western part of the county, which is now the 5066 area out there in Chantilly and that area. But it was on sewers, and sewers were fairly like ours where I lived. And the county put on that we under state order that we had to stop all building until we increased the sewer. Well, let me back up. We started by, our group, the Federation, determining that we had very few controls over growth in the county, and one of the very few controls that they had locally that was not state involved was sewers and sewage provision. Well, we citizens, the Federation -- was president at this time -- figured that they weren't doing very well and had begun looking. Now I had a car that would automatically turn into every sewage treatment plant as it passed because went to so many. But we discovered that when the county, that when a rezoning came up and the county said to the public works department, who ran the sewers, is there adequate sewage protection for this area, for the additional people that would come in, and they would come back and say, yes. And we began to dig in a little about that and discovered they were basing it on the size of the pipe only, not the capacity of the sewage treatment plant, but just whether the pipe would physically hold the additional flow into the plant. Well, that wound up by being the plant at Belle Haven, for example, we looked at the records, and in rain storms they were bypassing raw sewage 24 hours a day right into the Potomac River. So we decided that was no good and that our contention was growth was costing us money. We took the county's own figures and discovered that in residential areas, and we were almost entirely residential at that point, was costing us, a new home would take five years before its taxes would begin paying for the services the county was providing. We figured that was probably impractical certainly, well, budget. And we went down to the water control board and said, the county is doing this and polluting the water of the county, which included our drinking water. And the state water control board agreed with us, and they put a moratorium on all building in Fairfax County until the sewage treatment plants were upgraded. The development community went into a tizzy, and so the did the Board of Supervisors, who was at that point kind of development oriented, and growth bigger is better, that kind of thing. And they put on a bond referendum on the ballot that fall, and the bond referendum had two parts to it. One was to upgrade the sewage treatment plants, which is what we proved. The second was to sewer that western part of the county. And, we, being fat and happy, these activists, the whole Board of Supervisors approved that. We citizen activists said, we would pass the referendum if it were just for the treatment plant. But we were not defeated if you do not split it into two parts and give people a chance to vote on each part separately. And the board said, no, we're going to do that. And so we said, we'll defeat. I mean, here we were taking on the entire county, these activists, and we defeated it. And they had to come back and put another bond referendum on within a special election within two or three months, I think, just upgrading the sewage treatment plants. And we had said if you will do that we'll guarantee that we passed it, and by golly we did.

MARGARET: Boy, I wish we had you around now. We could get a few road things passed. So what was your next thing after the sewers?

JEAN: Well, of course, that went on for a long time, and I was heavily involved in sewers. And then there was an election coming up, and I had learned that over a period of years of being involved, you could only do so much as a private citizen, that if you believe in what you're doing and if you think your grounds are right, you've got to be willing to put them on the line to see how many other people you can convince. So I ran for supervisor of what was then Annandale district. And I ran against Audrey, Audrey Moore, in the primary. And Audrey won the primary and went on and I helped her as I could. She became supervisor. Well, at that same election where she was elected, Bill Hufnagel was elected chairman. Well, he had been appointed chairman, and he ran and was elected chairman.

MARGARET: As Annandale District.

JEAN: No, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors. They just changed the law of our form of government, so you elected the chairman at large as we're doing now. He was the first one to be elected at large. And he had a totally new board, almost a new board. He had Jim Scott, and Alan Magazine, and Rufus Phillips, and Audrey. In addition, he had, Martha Pennino, and Jill Alexander, Herb Harris, oh, and Jack Herrity was another new one. So we had eight. He was an independent because he worked for the federal government. He had to run as an independent. Well, he was of the old school of easygoing, southern gentleman, and this new board, which was a gung ho, had the bit between their teeth, and all of them had run on a slow growth platform. It was the first board that had no one on the board that had any connection with the development industry for the first time in Fairfax County's history. We'd already sent a couple of supervisors to jail for a zoning scam previously. This is my own idea, but I don't think he had any idea of how to handle these new young upstarts, and he resigned. I mean, he took office in January, and he resigned, oh, in, say, October or so. Well, they had to have a special election for chairman. I was at a meeting, out at a conference out in Arizona, I mean, out in Wyoming, and I got this frantic call one night at about 11 o'clock, and it said, you'd better come right away to run for chairman of the board. Here I was up to my ears in four tons of paper documents. I was documents officer for this international conference. So I came back after the conference was over and ran. There were several other, there were three other people running. But I won that primary. There was a caucus to pick your nominee, and I was nominated. And I think we only had 60 days. This came as a total surprise for the Democrat party. Bill Hufnagel had alerted the Republicans, and they had their choice all ready to hit the ground running when he made the announcement. Caught the Democrats totally by surprised, but I won that. So I took office in November of that year, and that was a fun three and a half years really.

MARGARET: What did they accomplish while you were in office?

JEAN: Well, in the meantime, the development industry had taken this sewer moratorium, this building moratorium to court, and the court said the moratorium is legal and can be put in place, although there was a plan really. They wouldn't take any zonings until they'd gotten this new policy involved. But the court said you can do that if you want to, but first you must clean up some of the backlog of the zoning cases. And the previous boards had been very cavalier in their choice of how rezoning cases would be heard. It wasn't in order. I mean, if you knew somebody you got your case moved up. They had zoning cases, rezoning cases, that had languished there for two and three years and had never been heard, and there were these people just hanging. So we started the marathon. This board doesn't know how good they have it. We were meeting normally every Monday, every week, once a week. The longest board meeting that I chaired began at 9 o'clock in the morning and ended at 3 o'clock the next morning. And we had many Saturday, just to try to clean up this backlog. That marathon rezoning was so funny. We tried to hold them in various places in the county so people could come. We'd cluster them. And this happened to be in McLean, so we clustered all of those in that area and held the hearing in McLean High School. And we had nice, comfortable chairs with the hard backs so you could rest your head, and tables in front. This was fine except the stage was slanted slightly backwards. So every time you sat back in your seat to relax a little, you rolled away from the table towards toward the back of the room. It was a very, well, you can imagine the kind of decisions we were making.

MARGARET: So then you went from being chairman to what was your next thing?

JEAN: Well, then I was defeated in the next election, and from there I worked for NACA, National Association of Counties. I was doing on a grant to travel around the country and talk with local, because there was a segment of the EPA law on water pollution, water control, that required local active officials' input and approval. So I was traveling all around the country talking to local boards of supervisors.

MARGARET: How much of this affected actually our Braddock District?

JEAN: Well, it happened, well, the thing that affected the Braddock District was the fact that over the long run and this protection of the drinking water issue, and, of course, we protected our drinking water. Plus the fact that we tightened up and reorganized the zoning ordinance and the planning division so that there was some coherence so people could count on if there was a rezoning that came up, as in Annandale or Braddock District, that the citizens could understand what was proposed. One of the things that we required was more realistic presentation of rezoning. They used to come in with the most, I remember one that came in, and I think it was in the Annandale District. It was a rezoning that wanted a gas station, filling station. Well, the drawing that they held up looked like the Taj Mahal. They had no more intention, they paid no attention to what they told the board they were going to, and we insisted that, one of the things we insisted upon was that any presentation that was made of that type, they had to do it. It couldn't be a pie in the sky thing. So we tightened up on that. There was a highway overlay corridor which affected a great deal of Annandale because that was, to get them on the proliferation of gas station. We were getting so we had a gas station every 100 feet or so.

MARGARET: I remember when we moved into Annandale, we said Annandale consisted of 20 gas stations.

JEAN: Yes, that's right. And 17 roads, yeah. So we did that, and that affected a great deal of it. The other thing that happened during that was good for Annandale was when I first came here, and I think when you first came here, too, Annandale was spread among three magisterial districts, Annandale, and Mason, and Falls Church. And so as a result, because nobody was really paying attention, and I don't think that the supervisors were working very closely together. Each paid attention to their own. But Annandale was off in a little pocket. I mean, the collection of Annandale was split three ways. So as a result, nobody paid much attention to it. Nobody focused on that. And it just grew. When I first came here, the intersection where Columbia Pike and 236 and Annandale Road, where they all come together, those were all separate. There were, I think, six or seven different roads that came in at different times. That was a terribly dangerous place. Well, of course, we had nothing to do with that, but we did do some planning on getting all those roads together and talking the state into redesigning that intersection.

MARGARET: I'm only confused, I am confused about one thing. You keep speaking about Annandale. I presume Annandale is Braddock District.

JEAN: Annandale used to be Annandale District. Well, we discovered, and this didn't have anything to do with Annandale, except it was divided in three magisterial districts. Centreville, and when redistricting came, Centreville had been in Centreville District, and the community of Centreville was no longer in Centreville District at all. So we decided to, and it was very hectic, to rename as any of the districts as possible, and rename them after historic events or not use place names because places got switched around in redistricting, and that's why Annandale became Braddock since it was divided. It still is divided, of course, in the community of Annandale between Braddock and Mason Districts. But at least it came down from three to two. And the supervisor, Sharon, and Penny Gross from Mason District worked closely together. So Annandale gets the attention it deserves. But, yes, I still use Annandale District. I forget.

MARGARET: I was getting a little confused with so much Annandale. And what changes do you see in the population?

JEAN: Oh, my gracious. It's over a million now. I think it was probably about 40,000 when I took office. And, of course, it was growing by leaps and bounds then. And also the diversity in population (indiscernible) from Washington. One of the problems with metro is all designed to go from the suburbs, the outer wing, into the District, and now people don't work in the District nearly as much. And the foreign born people who moved in, it makes quite a difference in what it looked like then. When I took over, we were a bedroom community. I'd say that less than 10 percent of the county had a commercial business at all. And people wanted it that way at that time in the 50s, and so people, to them mixing commercial or store, industrial and residential was to many people who moved out here a symptom of urban blight, and they wanted them separated. They didn't want to have anything to do with it. They didn't want gas stations. They didn't want 7-Elevens. They didn't want anything except row after row of houses and green lawns. So that was one. And then you tried to get a little density and a little mixed use in an area, and the people who lived in the community didn't want it. They would fight against it. I think that was, of course, in hindsight, that was one of our problems. So they kept moving out, and moving out, and moving out in the county and had rezonings because the state has ruled where private property rights, and the whole county had been zoned at one acre, oh, way back in the early 50s. I'd say the entire county rezoned to one unit per acre. And because of that, you could develop that without coming to the county and asking for anything additional, and you could just do it. You didn't have to ask permission from anybody, and the county had to provide the schools, and the fire, and the police, and all of the other things. And it was bad.

MARGARET: So when was it changed to now you can do, my house is on a third of an acre, and down the way from me it's a quarter of an acre.

JEAN: Well, those required rezonings from the county, you could do that. You could bring it down. But then you had to go and ask permission from somebody. You had to say to the county what you were going to do, when you were going to do it, and how you were going to do it. So I remember when your neighborhood of Rutherford came in, which is right behind mine of Lee Forest, and we were first. You came second. And Rutherford was rezoned while I was chairman. No, I'm sorry. They were developing on the other side from Rutherford. And the Rutherford people came in and said, why, we're so crowded we don't need those people over there. And I kept thinking, I finally said, you know, I used back to where Rutherford is now and listen to the whippoorwills. We didn't want you either. Many people who figured that the place was always the way it was when they moved in and never changed. But they didn't want any other change after that. They liked the status quo. But at least we got, and we began demanding more things of developers before they granted rezonings, proffers they called it. To widen the streets in front of their property, to provide sewers, or to provide whatever, or restrict the density. Maybe they would come in and they'd want 50 houses, and we would say, no, 35 is all you can have in there. Or have very specific areas and flood plains, that kind of thing.

MARGARET: And so from there you advanced to what was your next position?

JEAN: Oh dear. From there I went I went to working on Capitol Hill for a while representing, we were a lobbying firm representing various counties. We had one in Texas, and one in Ohio, and people who, they could send personnel. They couldn't have an office here, they couldn't afford it, so we would represent them if anything came up.

MARGARET: So what was your next Braddock District thing?

JEAN: I don't think there was anything except I was back to being a citizen activist. I was still active in the Federation and the League of Women Voters, and still taking action, but mainly county wide, I don't know that I focused particularly on Braddock District except having lived here and still living here. I took particular interest in that and testified in rezoning cases and things like that.

MARGARET: Now I have noticed that on Hummer Road there is a park. I think it's called Hidden Oaks, and a building in there is named for Fred Packard. How come he got a building named after him? I presume that's your husband.

JEAN: That was my husband, yes, who's gone now. He died in 1981. But Fred was hired in 1960 as the first director of parks of Fairfax County. He had been working with National Park Service. And so he was director of parks for about, he was executive director of parks. And he was also wearing the hat of the regional park authority executive director at that time, too, because that was just getting started.

MARGARET: And the regional parks came before the county parks?

JEAN: Well, the regional parks are set up under a state law to set up regional multijurisdictional area. And that was done along about the same time -- well, no. I think the county had already had had a park system, such as it was. I mean, it had a park authority, which was a volunteer board at that time and still is. But they had no staff, and I think the only thing that, they ran Great Falls Park under the National Park Service. They ran that. And that was all. So they hired Fred because the County was growing so explosively that the Board of Supervisors and the Park Authority felt that they needed a paid, full time staff member to build up the park system. So that was the first property he bought it what is now Hidden Oaks. And he bought that, it was a private home without about 40 acres, something like that. And he bought that as the first headquarters. He bought it from the Mars and established the headquarters there. And in that house, my daughter at four learned to climb trees in the mulberry tree that was in the front yard. And they were there. Well, he was only with the park authority for two years, but during that time he began developing the park system. And his theory was to provide parks near schools, especially elementary schools. They should have some open space near them. And one of his stories was when he went to the Board of Supervisors to ask permission to buy, they had the money, but it was $10,000 an acre. And he wanted to buy four acres, and at that time it was such a tremendous amount, he figured he'd better get the okay of the Board of Supervisors before he bought it. He also acquired the land where Burke Lake is now for Burke Lake.

MARGARET: Was that part of the Brown property then?

JEAN: Yes, it was. Well, Martin Webb had some property there, too. He had to buy, what they did was he bought the land, the lake itself is owned by the state game and inland fisheries, and then there's a ring around the lake, which is the park, which is Fairfax County Park Authority. Martin Webb, yes, it was right next to Judge Brown's property. In fact, I think they bought it from him, partly from him and partly from Martin Webb because one of the things that, it was a swamp and a lowland area. And Martin Webb had said to Fred that he'd be willing to sell him the land if Fred promised that they would not disturb the pair of beavers that were living there. So Fred blankly promised, of course, he had no idea. Now they're overrun with beavers and they're trapping them and moving them elsewhere. But he acquired that lake for the dam. So that was a good thing. He acquired I've forgotten how much property.

MARGARET: Now what parks do we have at Braddock District? Do you know?

JEAN: The little pocket park in the center of Annandale --

MARGARET: That little tiny one, yeah. It's the triangle between the three streets. That's the only park? Oh, we must have more parks in our district.

JEAN: Lake Accotink. Oh, Lake Accotink, that's right. Lake Accotink is in Braddock District. And they've had the problem there with siltation and getting that dredged, which is very expensive. And what in the world do you with the stuff once it's pulled out? That's one of the difficulties that many lakes in the county are having. But I think that's the major one.

MARGARET: I was thinking the same. What was the thing that you felt most satisfied with in all your accomplishments that you've done?

JEAN: Well, I think the thing I feel most accomplished and it's still being accomplished, but the focus on the environment. There had been until we started in the 70s, started pushing it, there had been no interest in the environment at all in this county. So as far as preserving natural areas and saving the trees. At the time that the boom was going on, it was a habit, not the habit, but it happened often, a developer would have a big tract of land, and he clear cut it and strip it.

MARGARET: They still do.

JEAN: They still do, but not as much. But this would sit for three and four years while they went out to generate some interest that somebody would come along and buy it. And I could remember various places that just sat and, of course, just waste away because there was nothing to hold the soil that was all washing into the streams, and the Occoquan reservoir, and down in to the Potomac. And now you have to cover your land. You cannot strip it bare like that and just let it sit. You have to replant it within, I don't know, two or three days so that the soil won't wash away. They are still taking a lot of trees, but we do have requirements in the zoning ordinance that if they cut down the trees, they have to replace the tree canopy would be within 10 years. They have to plant enough trees so that tree canopy would be restored within 10 years. One of the things we have discovered that has slowed us down in the county, in Braddock as well as other parts of the county, it's not so much in Braddock now because it's pretty well developed. But when a developer wants to do something and is hindered by whatever the county rules and regulations are, bypassed the county because they have a great hold at Richmond in the General Assembly. So they go down there, and they'll get it all passed that you cannot do thus and so, whatever it is they want to do. One of the examples that I find is very bad, and this happened in the building, is that the building code, for example. We have to operate under the state building code. The state building code is a cap, not a floor, where you cannot do anything more than the building code requires, for example, elevators. A building that's four stories high doesn't need an elevator. And the county cannot require that there be an elevator in because the state says no. So the state limits you to what you can do and tells you what you can and can't often to the detriment of any local jurisdiction wanting to put things into --

MARGARET: Finding that on the roads.

JEAN: Yes, very much so. And who you send to Richmond. They don't like us in Richmond. We're the 800 pound gorilla. So they're going to teach us a lesson, I suspect.

MARGARET: Do you remember when the Beltway was built?

JEAN: Yes.

MARGARET: What was it like before the Beltway?

JEAN: You had to go through town to get to anywhere. It was miserable. Of course, everything went into Washington, but there was no cross county. It was very difficult to get anywhere across the county wherever you wanted to go. But I remember when the Beltway, it had been built into bits and pieces, and I remember when they finally got the last section built there was a big headline in the Washington Post, said, The Beltway is Buckled. And for the first time, you could get on and drive all, and a lot of people did. They got on and just drove all the way around just for the joy of all that. But it was lovely then. It was wonderful. And now, of course, it's so crowded.

MARGARET: Now it's going to be widened again.

JEAN: Widened again. Oh yes. And the Fairfax Parkway, once again, there again to get attention of the state to get the money to build a road, and maintenance is the same way. One of the problems we have up here, of course, is the maintenance budget. It's never enough for us because for many years, I don't know whether they still do it or not, the highway department divvied out the money based on laying miles of road, not how much traffic that road carried, but how many actual miles there were per lane. Well, of course, you get 64 down around Richmond and some of those big ones. They got a lot of the money down there in Richmond. At rush hour on 64, it kind of looks like the Beltway at 3 a.m. up here. But that held us back a lot, especially on maintenance because there was never enough money up here for the maintenance.

MARGARET: Still not.

JEAN: Still not. I don't know that there ever will be. That's why so much focus on telecommuting and metro and other highway transportation.

MARGARET: How many of the new things do you remember coming in, I mean, that you didn't have when you first started out in your career?

JEAN: Oh, for goodness sakes. Of course, the Beltway, which you already mentioned.

MARGARET: Electronic stuff? You couldn't have been using computers and stuff.

JEAN: Cable television, of course, we had never heard of. In fact, when I lived about three blocks off of 236, our subdivision. And when we first came, 236 was two lanes and our mailboxes were on 236 on the other side of the road from where lived. And when we came from Lincolnia to Annandale when 236, there is a two lane road. There was not enough site distance to pass anything for that entire stretch. And so if you got behind this little truck, you stayed behind this little truck until you got to Annandale. And so the widening of that road was a big thing. Now they're talking about widening it again. And just the community college was a big thing. George Mason. A lot's happened in 50 years, probably half of which I've forgotten.

MARGARET: If you had to go into Washington for anything, how long did it take you to get there?

JEAN: Well, because there wasn't much traffic. Shirley Highway was built about that time. And that made, I don't remember ever going into Washington when we didn't have Shirley Highway. I think that was about the same time, and that made a tremendous amount of difference, I would think. And, of course, then it was 30 minutes. We thought 30 minutes was more than adequate for where we wanted into Washington because there weren't the traffic lights, and there weren't the traffic.

MARGARET: I hear you saying Shirley Highway, which is what I also call it. But, of course, now it is what?

JEAN: 95 or 395.

MARGARET: 395.

JEAN: But it's still Shirley Highway. It's still named after Mr. Shirley.

MARGARET: Who was Mr. Shirley?

JEAN: Mr. Shirley was an early, very early Secretary of Transportation of roads at that time. So when Shirley Highway was built, they named it after him.

MARGARET: That makes sense.

JEAN: Of course, nobody ever knows who he was.

MARGARET: I don't hear anybody say Shirley Highway anymore.

JEAN: A lot of people don't since they changed it. I don't think most people, except older people who have lived here a long time, even know Shirley Highway, know what it is.

MARGARET: Too bad. How do you feel about changing the names like we're changing everything, like the bridge that used to have a nifty name that goes over the Potomac.

JEAN: Cabin John.

MARGARET: Yeah.

JEAN: Oh, well, I still call it the Cabin John Bridge and not the American Legion Bridge.

MARGARET: Awkward name anyway, isn't it? However, I'd better not say anything about that.

JEAN: Yeah, I suppose not.

MARGARET: We're apt to run into trouble. We appreciate your having come to be interviewed. And we've learned a lot, and I think people are going to be really interested to read all of our history. And our time is up. Thank you, Jean Packard, very much.

(END OF INTERVIEW)