Dunn Wrong

Leesburg Council Member Thomas S. Dunn II recently gave residents of Leesburg Country Club a lesson in facts and fiction. Only it wasn’t the lesson he intended to impart.

On September 27, as the Council prepared to vote to abandon its attempts to buy the property at 1 Country Club Drive at auction, Dunn used his time on the dais to lecture Country Club residents in the audience who opposed the town’s plan to acquire the property to facilitate construction of the proposed Linden Hill access road.

“What I want to try and do a little bit this evening is separate fact from fiction,” he said. “We can create our own facts and call them as such, that this is just the way I want to believe things to be, and I’m gonna call fictional things facts, or my emotions are now facts, or my feelings have become facts, or what somebody told me is fact, or what I read on the internet is fact.  But facts are facts, and they just can’t change.”

However, he didn’t warn the audience that the facts he was about to employ were of the fictional variety.

This was not a spur of the moment speech. Before the meeting, Dunn had asked town staff for information that he would use to support his arguments. He presumably had time to review the information before he spoke.

Afterward, I asked the staff for the same information Dunn had received, so that I could check his facts.

First, Dunn addressed the folks in Country Club who complained that they had not been informed about the Linden Hill Access Road project until fairly recently. He said that, “On Linden Hill, there were 10 different meetings, five of which the Country Club residents were informed about over a couple year time period, as recently as just last week.” This last meeting to which he referred was the .

According to the staff report (which didn’t include the September 20 meeting), Country Club residents were informed only three of the meetings, the first of which was just last year, on July 20, 2010. The September 20 informational meeting was the fourth such meeting, not the fifth.

Dunn then lectured the audience about property values. In support of his position that paying the full asking price for the property at 1 Country Club Drive would actually improve property values in the neighborhood, he significantly understated the average property values in Country Club.

He said that 26 properties had been sold in the neighborhood over the past two years, ranging in price “from the lower $400,000’s to the upper $200,000’s. The average sale price of those 26 sales was about $337,000,” he said.

Wrong again. According to the information sheet prepared by town staff, one property sold for $540,000, another for $478,000 and another for $468,500, all since last May. These are all well above the “lower $400,000’s.”  And the staff report specifically said that the average sale price, not including bank sales or foreclosed properties, was $382,094, not $337,000 as Dunn said twice.

Perhaps Dunn included the foreclosed properties and bank sales in calculating his average? No. Even including those sales, the average sale price of all 26 properties was about $363,000.

For these errors alone, Dunn owes residents of Country Club an apology.  On a quick drive through the neighborhood, I counted 10 “For Sale” signs. I wonder how those homeowners, some of whom might be in the midst of negotiating with buyers, would appreciate the fact that Dunn publicly understated the average value of properties in the neighborhood by $45,000.

I could be charitable and attribute Dunn’s errors to sloppy preparation. But since he had the correct information right in front of him, and since every mistake exaggerated the facts to bolster his arguments, they appear to be something else. Something like fictional things, emotions, feelings, or what somebody (not town staff) told him.

Dunn also attempted to explain why he did not attend the September 20 informational meeting. “It would have been my understanding anyway – I didn’t know about the meeting – that only two council members should go to a meeting and discuss public matters,” he said. Wrong again. The meeting was properly advertised, and any number of council members could have attended.

Dunn ran unsuccessfully against Kristen Umstattd in the last mayoral election, and is thought to have his eye on a rematch in the next election, given his efforts to move the town elections from spring to fall.

His error-laden, condescending performance stands in stark contrast to that of Umstattd, who has been unfailingly polite, patient and gracious to all parties throughout this process.

You can see Dunn’s lecture by visiting the town’s webcast archive, beginning at 2:36 into the September 27 meeting.

I expect that you will learn the same lesson I did – to beware of a politician who claims to have all the facts on his side.