Most Fairfax County residents don’t favor renaming Lee Highway and Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway. The surprising news flies in the face of Fairfax’s electoral history. After all, it’s been 20 years since a Republican presidential nominee won Washington, D.C.’s inner suburbs.
Despite this, the county’s “Confederate Names Task Force” (CNTF) went against the results of its own survey and voted to remain the roads in question.
The renaming may cost as much as $4.2 million.
As The Federalist reports:
Of the 40,870 responses, 23,500, or about 57.5 percent of respondents, expressed their desire for the road names to remain the same. Another 16,265, or 40 percent of respondents, said they wanted the road names changed (about 2.5 percent of respondents had no opinion or their opinion was unclear). Even if we isolate only the mail responses (96.3 percent of responses), the vote is still strongly in favor of preserving the names: 57.3 percent pro-names, 40.6 percent anti-names.
Yet the task force’s vote was even more lopsided in favor of changing the names: 20 out of 26 CNTF members (77 percent) voted to change Lee Highway and 19 out of 26 with one abstention (73 percent) voted to change Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway. Thus the CNTF ignored the opinions of a clear majority of queried Fairfax County residents who responded to the survey.
Moreover, the CNTF acknowledged that the survey elicited more responses than any other recent survey sent by Fairfax County to local residents. Yet, said another CNTF member, “the [CNTF’s] recommendation is not driven by responses.” One wonders, then, what their purpose was?
During a previous CNTF meeting, it was also acknowledged that the total cost of renaming just these two roads would cost between $1 to $4.2 million. “That’s a big number, but in the scheme of things, it’s not a big percentage of the county’s overall budget,” noted one of the CNTF members.