Anyone needing a reminder of the importance of citizen involvement in the pending update of Isle of Wight County’s Comprehensive Plan should simply listen to county supervisors’ recent discussion of a controversial roundabout on Turner Drive.

The point was made during an exchange between Supervisor William McCarty and county Transportation Coordinator Jamie Oliver that no public hearing was necessary on the $7 million-plus solution for potential commercial and residential development, due to the fact that citizens had the chance to opine on that development before the Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 2020 and on the roundabout specifically before supervisors’ 2023 vote to seek VDOT funding. In the mindset of the current ruling class in Isle of Wight and Smithfield, the citizenry, largely by not participating in the writing of the Comprehensive Plan or speaking ahead of a vote that was tucked in supervisors’ consent agenda, blessed the rapid growth that now threatens our small-town lifestyle.

Heaven help us.

If county officials are going to put that much stock in the opportunities they provide for Comprehensive Plan feedback, citizens must participate robustly in the current update of that plan.

A new online survey is a convenient way to do so. Visit https://bit.ly/3CbYAyp and complete a short survey with broad, but important, questions about your views on the county’s challenges and opportunities, such as: 

• When you think about the number and variety of places to live, work and shop in Isle of Wight County, would you like to see more, about the same, or fewer of the following types of places?
• What are the biggest growth issues facing Isle of Wight in the next 5 to 10 years?   

The 10 minutes or so it will take you to complete the survey is a good investment of time for anyone concerned about the future of this community. We applaud county officials for making it available, and encourage them to release the aggregate data after the survey closes on Nov. 22.

As citizens have learned the hard way — from Mallory Pointe to the Grange at 10Main to Sweetgrass — opposing residential development one project at a time is an ineffective way to control residential growth that is overwhelming road infrastructure and threatening to do the same to school infrastructure.

And while we applaud citizen activism on the question of growth and development in this fall’s Smithfield Town Council election, we’ve seen many examples over the years of candidates running and being elected with good intentions, then succumbing to pro-growth forces after taking office.

Getting our arms around residential growth in this community requires first rewriting town and county comprehensive plans that serve as flashing billboards to out-of-town developers whose interest is their own enrichment rather than this community’s treasured way of life.