Coffee With Libby Garvey

Arlington County's long time County Board and School Board member talks about local government in Arlington and Alexandria

Libby Garvey held elective office in Arlington County for 28 years. Now retired from public service, Garvey was a School Board member for 15 years and three months and a member of the County Board for 12 years and nine months. She chaired the School Board five times and the County Board three times.

Garvey, who has lived near the Arlington-Alexandria border for decades, has perspectives on local government in Northern Virginia informed by her years of experience and her extensive network of friends and former colleagues.

Garvey said, “The County Board ended up being the most interesting and most fun because you have a whole breadth of topics and you have all kinds of support. The work is similar, but it’s more varied.” While on the County Board, Garvey said, “I got to be ‘in the room where it happened’ for a number of important issues, such as when Amazon chose Arlington for its HQ2.”

“On the School Board, I had a hand in building or renovating, pretty much almost every school in the county—elementary schools, middle schools, Wakefield, Washington-Liberty, all the high schools— because boards before me for many years had deferred maintenance and had closed school buildings,” Garvey said, “Then, we had this population explosion.”

Garvey chaired the Arlington County Board during the pandemic. “I felt that I was meant to be there at that time,” Garvey said, “It was not an easy time, and I had many years of experience that helped me. That’s a satisfying feeling, to pull together everything you’ve been doing in your life to help more people.”

Garvey provides institutional/corporate memory for Arlington’s elected officials, though, she said, “Some are more interested in talking to me than others.”

“We are entering a very different era and the way we’ve been doing things is often not going to work anymore. During the pandemic there was a period when we were kind of on our own—the federal government provided little support for getting important supplies like personal protective equipment, or providing help to set up public health systems to distribute vaccines and supplies,” Garvey said, “In fact, with the PPE, there was an order that arrived at Dulles and the federal government intercepted it and took it away.”

Looking at the current destruction of the federal government Garvey sees cooperation among local governments as critical. She said, “local government is the only functioning government we are going to have,” so it will be essential for local jurisdictions to work together. She described the federal government as “absent or actively malign and threatening to us” and the state government as “not doing great, so we’re on our own.”

Garvey raised the possibility of a widespread outbreak of bird flu in humans: “Is the federal government going to do vaccines? Probably not. If we want vaccines for our people, we may need to go as a region to the people who make vaccines and order them ourselves, as if we were another country or state. The region is well-resourced enough, and big enough, and smart enough that we probably could do that if we were to work together.”

Garvey spoke of the potential impacts on the region of the Trump Administration’s workforce reductions. She said that Arlington County “has a good sense” of how many people depend on the federal government for employment. “That’s been a worry since November,” Garvey said.

Some years ago, Garvey ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia State Senate. Her life had been complicated by breast cancer and her husband’s untimely death.

“I’m actually happy I lost that election. I said to people then that I know I’m meant to run for this seat, but I’m not sure if I’m meant to win or not,” Garvey said, “One of my favorite sayings is, ‘God writes straight, but with crooked lines.’ ”

Garvey believes there is still an “Arlington Way,” the extended discussion of civic issues in generally respectful terms. “It’s a sense of good government and wanting everybody to be involved—but it used to be much more limited in who was ‘everybody’ and involved,” Garvey said, “People today get upset if you’re not being transparent and clear and including everybody.”

Garvey described the demographic that ran Arlington County for years as, “Mostly older and white, owning their own homes, largely in North Arlington,” but said this is changing as the number of renters has increased in the county.

Garvey does not excuse the progressive left. She said, “Part of the reason Trump got elected was liberals from coast to coast deciding that, ‘Not in my back yard’ and ‘We all value this, but not here; when it comes to providing housing for people. Progressivism has good points, but it has also gummed up the works, especially on building housing. So, nationally we in a big hole on the amount of housing we need and we’ve done little to address it”

Garvey cited her former colleague, Mary Hynes, on the differences between Arlington and Alexandria. “It’s like they are siblings and it’s like Alexandria is the older, more established sister and we’re kind of the young start-up teenager still.” She described Alexandria as, “a little more loathe to change, hence you’ve got that Braddock Metro station with no high rises near it, which is nuts.”

“And, you’ve got your City Council being paid an absolute pittance and that I think harms you a lot. It’s ridiculous how little it is,” Garvey said. Serving on the County Board is, “a full-time job if you do it properly, and so is the City Council.”

Garvey said, “The point is, people expect to hear from you. If they send an email they expect to hear from you in an hour or two. If it’s two days, they are furious. And, they expect you to come to their events. They expect you to ‘go toe to toe’ with big companies like Monumental Sports or Amazon. And, they somehow think a community can pay a pittance for that amount of work and quality. There are excellent public servants willing to do this work for almost nothing, but I believe fewer and fewer are willing to make those sacrifices and over time it is not healthy.…sometimes you get what you pay for.”

Garvey is not a fan of Delegate Patrick Hope’s bill in the General Assembly to expand the Arlington County Board, implement a ward system, and have the Board Chair selected by the voters. “We told Patrick we don’t want it, at least not now when there is so much going on, but he goes ahead and does it anyway,” she said.

“It’s like you are on the Titanic, you hit an iceberg and you’re taking on water, and somebody decides it’s time to paint the life boats, not even rearranging the deck chairs…I’m ok with considering changing the number of people on the Board,” said Garvey, “but I don’t think it would get you much. And, I wouldn’t go to districts [for elections] at all in such a very small jurisdiction .”

Garvey added, “And, at this time, to distract everyone from what we need to do to survive the Trump administration is, IMHO, irresponsible.”

Garvey attributes Alexandria’s uncontested 2024 School Board election to the fact that, “You don’t pay enough and the jobs are miserable. Many people treat their elected officials really badly these days. But, right now again, local government is all we’ve got. I think it’s crucial that we all support local government better than we have.”

On or about March 1, Garvey plans to launch Libby’s Local List, a website that will provide information to support good local governance and contain tips for thriving as a community in turbulent times.

“I just like to learn stuff—on the County Board I learned something every day and I was able to make our community a better place for its residents,” Garvey said, “It doesn’t get better than that. It really has been an honor and a privilege to serve my community as I have.”

“lt [elected office] is a public service to me, a calling,” Garvey said, “So, while I didn’t earn a whole lot of money, I earned as much as I’ve needed and I could contribute my abilities and make my part of the world a better place. I’ve just had a marvelous life.”

Thanks for reading About Alexandria!

Subscribe for free to receive new posts.