LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMUNITY-OWNED NEWS SOURCE
LoudounNow
[ Vol. 4, No. 21 ]
■ PUBLIC AND LEGAL NOTICES - PAGE 32 ■ EMPLOYMENT PAGE 36
■ RESOURCE DIRECTORY PAGE 39 [ April 25, 2019 ]
[ loudounnow.com ]
County Grants $1.8M to Nonprofits; OAR, Mobile Hope Left Out BY RENSS GREENE
ally be disastrous, and I hate to say it: it’s going to be hard to get it right.” At the heart of much of the debate around the comprehensive plan and protecting Loudoun’s rural reaches is the open question of housing development. The county Planning Commission spent months laboring over the new plan, heavily focused on finding places for
County supervisors have approved $1.7 million in grants to Loudoun nonprofits, with missions ranging from feeding the hungry, to preventing teen suicide, to sheltering abused women. The county government is several years into a project to score nonprofits competing for grants according to consistent criteria, in an effort to keep political influence from the Board of Supervisors out of the decision. But once again, the results of that process brought protests from some of the nonprofits that lost out on funding. One of those is the organization that won the largest grant out of all the competitors last year, restorative justice and re-entry nonprofit Opportunities, Alternatives and Resources, better known as OAR. Last year, the county awarded $145,658 to OAR, which provides people in the Loudoun jail with classes and programs such as fatherhood, life skills, anger management, employment skills and post-release case management. That was $35,658 more than the next-largest grant, which went to Loudoun Hunger Relief, the county’s largest hunger nonprofit and food pantry. With that grant, OAR went on to expand its program in Loudoun’s jail. This year, the nonprofit requested $143,188 in county grant money, but will receive nothing. OAR Loudoun County jail programs coordinator Jessica Ray said the nonprofit has made “significant progress in integrating OAR as a central part of the reentry community”—even hosting the county’s Loudoun Re-Entry Advisory Council at the nonprofit’s Leesburg office, rather than meeting in the county government center. “If there is legitimacy to your agenda of public safety, it would be short-sighted to pull service that focus on criminogenic risk factors and evidence-based practices,” Ray told supervisors. She also presented them with a stack of 10 letters from inmates currently participating in OAR’s programs, with names redacted. “OAR has done more for me through their programs than one could imagine,”
COMP PLAN >> 18
GRANTS >> 18
Renss Greene/Loudoun Now
Representatives from the coalition of organizations, led by the Loudoun County Preservation and Conservation Coalition, gather around a copy of the thick binder full of analysis and recommendations for the county’s new comprehensive plan.
At a ‘Precipice,’ Agriculture and Rural Interests Push on Comp Plan BY RENSS GREENE As county supervisors enter what are expected to be the closing weeks of a years-long, much-delayed process to write a new comprehensive plan, the farmers and lovers of green and rural spaces are making one last push to protect their way of life. The comprehensive plan has taken three years to arrive on the county board’s dais. Supervisors plan to hold only five work sessions on the comprehensive plan, between April 3 to June 5, bound by a statutory requirement to review the plan within 90 days of the Planning Commission’s endorsement, although some supervisors have already wondered openly about taking longer. The plan arrives on their desks in the final year of the board’s term, as supervisors begin campaigning for reelection or other office.
SHARE YOUR VIEWS The Board of Supervisors will hold public hearings on the new comprehensive plan Wednesday, April 24 at 6 p.m. at the county government center in Leesburg, and Saturday, April 27 at 9 a.m. at the Loudoun County Public Schools Administration Building, 21000 Education Court in Broadlands. See the current comprehensive plan and the latest draft of the county’s new comprehensive plan at loudoun.gov/compplan, and see the Loudoun County Preservation and Conservation Coalition’s analysis and recommendations at loudouncoalition.org.
As they begin their work, supervisors will have with them a thick, 247-page binder of recommendations and analyses from a group of agricultural, outdoor, and conservation groups and towns led by the Loudoun County Preservation and Conservation Coalition. “I consider this a precipice moment for Loudoun,” said Middleburg Mayor Bridge Littleton. “I really, really do, because if we get this wrong … it could re-
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