Response to Loudoun Now Article
It used to be that the job of the press was to not only report the news but to investigate stories, learn the facts, and, when necessary, fact check quoted sources. In his recent article in Loudoun Now, Mr. Renss Greene made the statement that:
“Fix Route 15 Now has argued that the process to widen Rt. 15 is taking too long, and has pushed to accelerate it. The organization has sent out regular email newsletters advocating a faster process and construction of roundabouts along the route.”
He did get the first few things correct here. We do think the process has taken too long. We do think that a 10-year timeline is outrageous. We do, in fact, generally agree with what the county is proposing but it should be fairly obvious that we do NOT advocate for the construction of roundabouts on Route 15. We hope this is a typo that will be corrected soon.
Meanwhile, it seems that the Catoctin Coalition, a special interest group which as WE reported on this site, was founded specifically to oppose widening Route 15, has splintered yet again into ANOTHER organization opposed to improvements which is of course, although they put Mr. Adams in as a figurehead, led behind the scenes by the same person now in charge of the original group and consists of the same members. Once again, an attempt to deceive the public about the amount of true support their anti-Route 15 agenda has. We do find it rather ironic that the same people attacking our group for remaining anonymous have forced their own members to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Why is it that despite being interviewed by Loudoun Now for basically every article about Route 15, Ms. Polkey is never asked to justify her group’s stance that single lane roundabouts and no widening is a solution to the safety and congestion problem on Route 15 even though ALL evidence says otherwise? Why wasn’t she asked this time why one anti-route 15 group needed to form another anti-route 15 group? Evidently nobody at Loudoun Now looked into the proposal supposedly submitted by Mr. Lockwood. This did not actually happen. Because they were only able to raise $200 out of the $20,000 needed to hire Mr. Lockwood, the special interest groups merely combined a bunch of his old PowerPoint presentations he gives to various groups around the country into a giant file and sent it to the Board themselves. Of the more than 110 pages they submitted, only a handful have anything to do with Route 15 and none of those address with actual data how the 26,000+ vehicles on Route 15 would be handled. We discovered this with a cursory Google search of Mr. Lockwood’s prior engagements. Again, this is the type of reporting that used to be done by the press looking for the truth.
We also want to make clear that our non-response to this article was due to the fact that we were given mere hours to respond to an email before publishing and we all have our own jobs and families to focus on. We would be happy to answer any questions Loudoun Now may have via email.
-Fix Route 15 Now Team
