LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMUNITY-OWNED NEWS SOURCE
LoudounNow
[ Vol. 4, No. 27 ]
■ PUBLIC AND LEGAL NOTICES - PAGE 34 ■ EMPLOYMENT PAGE 40
■ RESOURCE DIRECTORY PAGE 41 [ May 23, 2019 ]
[ loudounnow.com ]
Planners Slash Draft Comp Plan Housing Numbers BY RENSS GREENE
8,759 human trafficking cases and provided 10,615 victims with resources. During that timeframe, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated 282 federal human trafficking prosecutions and charged 553 defendants with the crime—241 more prosecutions and 22 more charges than it made in the previous 12 months. In Virginia from 2007 to June 2018, the hotline reported 1,120 human trafficking cases, with 156 in 2017 alone—70 percent more than the 92 cases it reported in 2012. According to Kay Duffield, the executive director of the NOVA Human Trafficking Initiative, Virginia is ranked sixth in the nation for the number of active human trafficking cases. Most of those cases stem from the eastern district, where Loudoun is located. “I think people in Northern Virginia want to believe that we’re unique—we like to live in our own bubble,” Woolf said. “Human trafficking is present and it can affect any of our families.”
County planners have proposed drastic reductions to the Planning Commission’s controversial recommendation for increased housing in the county’s Transition Policy Area. The Board of Supervisors saw those recommendations during Monday night’s work session on the draft comprehensive plan. Under current planning policies, more than 29,000 new residential units are expected to be built in the county by 2040; the Planning Commission’s draft almost doubles that to more than 56,000. Under the commission’s recommendation, the 36-square-mile Transition Policy Area, which buffers rural west from suburban and urban east and is only about 7 percent of the county’s area, would absorb more than half of the difference in housing between the plans. That amounts to about 19,000 new homes allowed in the transition area—over 15,000 more than the current plan. But county planners cut that recommendation for new transition-area residential development back to 6,800, only 3,060 more than the homes that can be built in the transition area under existing policy. Their markups to the Planning Commission’s draft focused on fewer houses, lower densities, a greater variety of housing types, and more protection for watersheds. Director of Planning and Zoning Alaina Ray noted that under the current plan, there are still 5,086 homes that can still be built in the transition area—2,600 of which are already permitted and could start construction at any time. In particular, county staff members removed much of the potential for townhomes in the transition area, focusing instead on single-family homes or duplex, triplex and quadruplex housing. They also put work into one of the Planning Commission’s more well-received recommendations, phasing development. Development in certain areas of the county would be discouraged under the new plan until
TRAFFICKING >> 34
COMP PLAN >> 46
Patrick Szabo/Loudoun Now
NOVA Human Trafficking Initiative Operations Director Anna Hansen describes the living room at the organization’s Reston drop in center where the victims they help comfortably unwind.
Modern Day Slavery
Human Trafficking: A Worldwide, Local Issue BY PATRICK SZABO After three years dealing with “sore and exhausted” bodies caused by forced sexual encounters with 10-20 men each day, women victimized by a commercial sex ring in Sterling escaped their captors in summer 2018, but more than likely are back at it again elsewhere—involved in the often-misconceived world of human trafficking. To many, the phrase describes a fantastical underground world where vulnerable teenage girls are kidnapped and forced into prostitution, like the one portrayed in the 2009 blockbuster “Taken.” But here in Loudoun, that world is just as much a reality as it is anywhere else on earth. According to an April 2019 statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, 33-year-old Luis Bonilla-Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, coerced Hispanic women who spoke little to no English and were struggling to pay their bills to have commercial sex encounters with 10-20 men each day between 2015 and 2018 at his home in Ster-
ling. He and his 23-year-old co-conspirator were arrested last summer, and Bonilla-Hernandez was sentenced to more than two years in prison last month. According to The Hill, human trafficking is a nearly $32 billion-a-year enterprise in the U.S. that sees traffickers compel tens of thousands of people, mainly young women, to engage in commercial sex or forced, unfair labor. It’s the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, behind drug trafficking. According to Bill Woolf, the executive director of Just Ask Prevention and a former 18-year Fairfax County police officer who once acted as the co-director of the Northern Virginia Human Trafficking Task Force, the term “compelling” has many different connotations, like manipulation and physical force. Woolf said that 85 percent of human trafficking victims have been coerced, forced or defrauded to labor or sell sex. According to a 2018 U.S. Department of State report, the national human trafficking hotline from July 2017 to June 2018 received 62,835 calls, identified
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