Fairfax County's Shrinking Public Voice
June 18, 2026
When the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors describes concerned homeowners as "a couple of loud people who are living next door," residents should take notice. That's exactly what Chairman Jeff McKay said at the June 16 meeting of the Board of Supervisors' Council for Economic Opportunity — and the comment, made in passing while discussing how to repurpose obsolete office buildings, says more about the direction of county governance than any single policy proposal could.
It's worth sitting with that phrase for a moment. The "loud people" McKay is describing are homeowners and taxpayers. They are the neighbors who will live next to a converted office tower long after the developers, consultants, and county staff have moved on to the next project. For most of them, the public hearing is the only venue where their voice counts before a binding decision is made. They show up without a law firm on retainer, without a lobbying contract, and without a seat at the roundtable where developers get to make their pitch directly to the Board. Calling that "loud" isn't just dismissive — it reframes basic civic participation as an obstacle to be managed rather than a right to be respected.
A Real Problem, Honestly Stated
To be clear: the underlying issue is real, and county leaders are right to take it seriously. At the same meeting, Barry Bass, co-founder of Silverline Equities, estimated that roughly 10% of Fairfax County's office stock — about 18 million square feet — has little realistic future as commercial space and will need to be repurposed or torn down. Rob Ward of Clark Construction put it even more plainly: "Some of these buildings shouldn't be here anymore."
They're not wrong. Vacant office buildings drag down the leasing market, erode the county's commercial tax base, and quietly shift more of the fiscal burden onto residential property owners. Nobody benefits from rows of half-empty office parks sitting idle for years while the county waits for a market that isn't coming back.
The Wrong Fix for the Right Problem
Where things go off the rails is the proposed remedy. Faced with a slow approval process, the instinct on display at this meeting wasn't to streamline review or improve communication with residents — it was to start treating resident input itself as the bottleneck.
Chairman McKay has invoked the need to understand what "the silent majority needs" as justification for more aggressive development action — a framing that conveniently casts every resident who shows up to ask questions as an unrepresentative outlier. Franconia District Supervisor Rodney Lusk went further, suggesting that public skepticism toward these projects is really a matter of residents needing more "education" — as if concern about scale, traffic, schools, or infrastructure reflects a knowledge gap rather than a legitimate stake in the outcome.
This is the "county of yes" in action: yes to developers asking for creativity, flexibility, and speed; and a steadily shrinking welcome for the civic process that gives ordinary residents any say at all.
What Residents Should Be Watching
Repurposing Fairfax County's aging office inventory is a worthy, even urgent, goal. Nobody is serious about the county's fiscal health disputes that. But how that transformation happens matters just as much as whether it happens.
There's a real difference between a county that solves hard problems in partnership with the communities affected by them and one that solves those problems around them while quietly redefining public input as noise to be managed. The first is responsive governance. The second is government by invitation only — and residents who've been told their voice is "loud" should ask themselves which one they're getting.
CFGF will continue tracking this issue as it develops. If you attended the June 16 meeting or have thoughts on how the Board is handling office-to-residential conversions in your district, we want to hear from you.