Northern Virginia The commonwealth's richest planning district is scrambling to meet prosperity's demands. One observer calls the state's support a "nonpartisan failure."

Francois Haeringer's L'Auberge Chez Francois in Great Falls loads the menu with what residents in this region demand: the best of everything.

By Lisa K. Garcia
Francois Haeringer was tired of downtown Washington, D.C., so 24 years ago he moved his French restaurant to a comparatively rural setting in Fairfax County’s Great Falls. His high-class clientele moved with him.

Ask the owner of L’Auberge Chez Francois about his restaurant’s patrons and in his still-heavy accent he says, as a French chef should: "It’s nobody’s business. It’s a good clientele." In the same breath he garnishes the conversation with the names of notables like Nancy Reagan, who is among the rich and famous who have dined at his tables. For 52 years Haeringer has operated his restaurant with such care that diners must call four weeks in advance to reserve a table and the opportunity to spend $38 to $47 on a four-course meal — not including wine, tax or gratuity.

Fine dining hasn’t changed, but the region has. The greater Washington area, as many economic developers, planners and analysts refer to the region surrounding the nation’s capital, is a gold mine. There’s a boom in the Northern Virginia Planning District, composed of Loudoun, Prince William, Arlington and Fairfax counties as well as the independent cities of Fairfax, Manassas, Manassas Park, Alexandria and Falls Church. This economically supercharged region is experiencing record-setting population and job growth and an incredibly low unemployment rate.

What makes a region once dominated by the federal government so hot? The information-technology industry drives the economy, but it still benefits from its proximity to $65 billion in annual government spending.

People here no longer call it the info-tech industry, though. It’s the infocom industry — information and communications, with powerhouses like UUNet Technologies in Fairfax, founded in 1987 and recognized as the first commercial Internet service provider. The company is now part of MCI WorldCom, which also has major operations in the region. The federal government incubated the Internet here and helped spawn the infocom industry’s foundation. It’s a place Fortune magazine calls the Netplex, and it is home to Internet giant America Online, headquartered at Dulles.

There are so many high-technology start-ups and expanding established firms that one 1998 study concluded 22,000 jobs went unfilled because there weren’t enough skilled workers.

In other words, there are plenty of people with disposable income to enjoy Friday evening meals at L’Auberge Chez Francois. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the average Northern Virginian earns about 40 percent more than the average Virginian. Alexandria is first in the state in per-capita income. Adjectives like "affluent" and "well-educated" are understatements in promotional materials describing the district’s localities.

McLean, also in Fairfax County, is a community of 60,000 that boasts a strong housing mix, with homes priced from the high $200,000s up to several million dollars. The average household income there is $126,400. Residents in one small district pay an additional tax to fund a community center with tennis courts, a theater and an art museum.

Although most high-tech firms are in Fairfax County, the surrounding counties are feeling their influence as well. America Online, headquartered in Loudoun County, is building a $520 million technology center in Prince William County. Loudoun County has so many people moving in that it expects to enroll 2,500 new students annually for the foreseeable future.

"Northern Virginia is a phenomenal success story and has been since 1955," says John "Til" Hazel Jr., a lawyer and developer in the region for 40 years. Hazel cautions that Northern Virginia’s success will last only if the government invests in the infrastructure and services that growth requires. Significant money and resources must be put into education, technology, transportation and related infrastructure, he says.

He calls the state’s lack of support for Northern Virginia a "nonpartisan failure." But across the commonwealth people are beginning to recognize the importance of this region’s economy. "Sixty percent of [Virginia’s] new jobs in the last decade were created in Northern Virginia," Hazel says. "The future of infocom is the future of Northern Virginia, and the future of Northern Virginia is the future of the state."

Already well-known nationally and internationally for its infocom economy, Northern Virginia, unfortunately, is also well-known for traffic jams and work-force shortages. Ken Billingsley, director of demographics and economic analysis for the planning district, says the accelerated population growth has dominated the headlines for 50 years.

"When the next census comes out, it will be the first story we read about again," Billingsley says. "The region has grown by about 31,000 people a year during the decade of the ’90s, to more than 1.7 million. It’s more populous than 14 states and all but the five largest U.S. cities."

Billingsley agrees with Hazel’s sentiments about the future. Prosperity comes with its own set of problems, and by ignoring them the region could lose the very industries that fuel its economy.

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Fresh-out-of-college technology em-ployees get signing bonuses to lure them to Northern Virginia. So do school bus drivers. Bus drivers in Fairfax County get a $500 signing bonus.

Traditionally, this part-time job hasn’t been an income boon for anyone. There’s chronic high turnover. But in a tight labor market it is even more difficult to snag drivers. Kitty Porterfield, director of communications for Fairfax County Public Schools, says the shortage has been a problem in recent years but reached a critical stage at the end of the last academic year. "As better-paying jobs became available, it became harder to find drivers," she says.

In order to attract new ones, the school system pays $10.80 an hour plus the signing bonus and "excellent benefits." There is even a bonus for drivers who scout new prospects — a technique borrowed straight from the recruitment manuals of high-tech firms. The school system added several new drivers to this year’s team but still came up short. Students for 22 of the county’s schools are picked up late so the drivers can cover more than one route.

In July, the unemployment rate hit a 10-year low of 1.6 percent, according to figures from the Virginia Employment Commission. That’s good news for workers, but not for employers.

Several groups are trying to address the worker shortage. A subgroup of the Potomac Knowledgeway — a nonprofit organization that promotes the region’s high-tech industries — issued a work-force report last summer. It summarized eight strategies that companies use to fill vacant jobs. At the top of the list was "steal employees from one another."

In the end, the Potomac Knowledge-way suggested three main courses of action to combat the problem: petition the federal government to change its experience qualifications under government contracts; work with educators to enhance and support work-force development programs; and provide an instructional resource on internship programs and practices.

"Anyone who wants a job here can find it," says Mark Gibb. The Planning District’s executive director says every retail store window carries a "Help Wanted" sign. High-tech firms are even paying college students who intern in the summers high hourly rates to get them to telecommute during the school year.

In September 1998, The Potomac Knowledgeway announced the results of a study — co-sponsored by Price-waterhouseCoopers, Hale & Dorr LLP, Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology and the Greater Washington Initiative — that analyzed the infocom industry and trends in the Internet-related segments of the region. Most striking, perhaps, was the finding that the government-dominated economy was fast being eclipsed by employment in the infocom industry. The study found that "employment in the region’s infocom industry totals 328,000, nearly equal to the federal government’s 340,000." That was 1998. Today, Stephen Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, says the infocom industry surpasses the federal government, not only as the region’s major employer, but also as its major job creator.

The downside of this explosive growth in jobs, Fuller says, is a work-force shortage. For every technology job created, more than two service-related jobs spring forth. So when data shows more than 20,000 technology jobs go unfilled in a single year, Fuller says with confidence that more than 40,000 total jobs go unfilled for lack of workers.

Fuller, who does economic analysis of Northern Virginia and the greater Washington area, calls Northern Virginia an "extroverted economy" full of entrepreneurs, start-up businesses and people willing to take risks. So tackling the work-force shortage has become a critical priority.

George Mason University in Fairfax created an aggressive recruiting program in 1998 to get transfer students in technology majors. The program, called Top HATS — High Achieving Technology Students — seeks students who have a 3.7 or higher grade point average in a community college, where they are already taking challenging courses such as calculus. High-tech firms help sponsor the program with $5,000 contributions, for which they get one student intern.

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Veronica Hudak-Moe of Reston is a systems analyst at Oberthur Card Systems. She says she would be miserable if she lived anyplace where she had to travel more than 30 minutes to get to work. She’s pushing her self-imposed limit when she spends 30 minutes some afternoons to travel 11 miles. If the traffic gets any worse, she may move.

"There is no avoiding rush hour. There is even [heavy] traffic on the weekends," she says. The former New Jersey resident, who moved to Northern Virginia in 1990, says Washington-area drivers are some of the worst. "I completely understand road rage," Hudak-Moe says.

Her sentiments reflect the area’s transportation problem, which only worsens as the population grows with the economy. Most roadways and the mass transit system were designed to get people from the suburbs into Washington, D.C. Business growth in outlying areas has created new commuting patterns, however, and a new set of headaches in a region where residents are wedded to their sport utility vehicles.

So much is happening in terms of road development and study in the region that the Virginia Department of Transportation has designated a significant portion of its Web site to plans and overviews of projects here. The largest, begun just this year, is the rebuilding of the Springfield Mixing Bowl.

Considered one of the East Coast’s busiest interchanges, the confluence of interstates 95, 395 and 495 handles more than 370,000 vehicles a day. VDOT calls it the worst bottleneck on the Capital Beltway. During a recent two-year study, the interchange logged 179 accidents — making it the most dangerous spot on the 64-mile Beltway. The eight-phase project is expected to span eight years and cost an estimated $350 million.

Moving people in Northern Virginia does not just happen in cars. The Metro system does its share of shuffling commuters, too. The Northern Virginia 2020 Transportation Plan, a $26 billion wish list, includes pedestrian and bike paths as well as improved roads and rail systems.

Arlington County Board Member Chris Zimmerman and Alexandria City Council Member Lois Walker are both members of the Metro board of directors. They are promoting a proposal to install five miles of light rail that would connect their jurisdictions and help prevent a transportation overload from the proposed redevelopment of a 300-acre railyard.

The estimated $200 million to $300 million project would install rail lines for a trolley-like system that is more flexible than Metro and more efficient than bus service. It can run in mixed traffic since its rails are embedded directly into roads used by cars. Zimmerman says the system could handle 20,000 to 30,000 passengers daily from the 10 million square feet of proposed development in Potomac Yard and the already densely populated areas nearby.

Zimmerman says imposing thousands more people on the present road system is unrealistic, and although the economic engine is running fast now, inattention to related infrastructure could cause that engine to seize up.

Gov. Jim Gilmore plans to grease the machine with greenbacks.

In a speech he gave last summer in Northern Virginia, the governor touted a plan that "will mean more than $2.5 billion in new money for transportation over the next six years." He went on to say that $137 million would be directed toward 10 major projects here.

"You face the longest daily commutes and the most severe congestion in Virginia," Gilmore said in his address. He also appointed local business leaders to gather ideas to "make significant changes in how we do business, how we get to work, and where we work" — including telecommuting and the use of flex time. That committee’s plan is still in the works.

Northern Virginia developer Hazel, however, is pessimistic about the outcome. He says Gilmore’s plan is a "non-plan."

"Infrastructure is the key," he says. "If the political world is in denial, then we will continue to have growth problems."