As if shot from a sling, Corey Stewart ascended this year to Prince William County’s top elected office on a rapid and seemingly inexorable trajectory.
The 38-year-old attorney, an anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage conservative who says he wants to trim the county’s budget and lower tax bills, took the chairmanship in November with a comfortable lead over his Democratic challenger. He had spent only three years in county politics prior to the victory.
To paint his success simply as a local referendum on social and fiscal issues, however, would be inaccurate. Stewart owes much to a different constituency, one that knows no party but whose members have traditionally been associated with the political left. During his campaign, he billed himself as the man to control growth, and his promises to reign in development resonated in Northern Virginia’s southernmost county. Stewart won with 53.25 percent of the vote, defeating Democrat Sharon Pandak.
Though, in the infancy of his chairmanship, it is probably too soon to tell, Stewart could be a new model of the local Republican in Virginia. At the very least, his influence is felt among the Prince William board. The race last month to fill his previous position — Occoquan District supervisor — was between two candidates fighting to be seen as the real controlled-growth candidate.
“I think you’re seeing a change, you’re definitely seeing it here,” said Stewart in a recent interview at his Woodbridge home. “Actually, I think there is a generational change going on, and I think you’re going to see this nationwide: younger candidates who are both conservative Republicans on the social issues, on the fiscal issues in particular, and also conservationists.”
It’s not all government and politics in the life of Stewart, though. He’s a father of two boys — Isaac, 7, and Luke, 5 — and husband to Maria, a native of Sweden, whom he met in Japan and married in Duluth.
His sons are rambunctious even by the energized standards of young children, dashing to and fro across the living room and kitchen, and returning defiantly minutes after a parent-mandated exile. One recent day, they battled with plastic swords and helmets.
Maria Stewart, with a friend, runs a catering company specializing in Swedish food that serves clients including the Swedish embassy, and looks after the children — cooking dinner and reading to them each night. The family attends a Catholic church visible out the back window of their home. The boys take lessons in Swedish.
Stewart’s new duties as chairman, coupled with his job as an international trade attorney at Foley & Lardner LLP in Washington, eat up the bulk of the week. Stewart says he comes home on a typical day around 10 p.m.
It’s not an unusual state of affairs for chairmen of Virginia’s county boards; the positions generally don’t pay enough to qualify as fulltime jobs. Nevertheless, they require enormous commitments of time beyond that of a county supervisor. In the commonwealth, the board chairman is the closest thing a county has to a mayor.
Maria and Corey met 1992 in Yokohama, a city outside of Tokyo. He, a recent Georgetown University graduate, was teaching English there. They stayed in the same Gaijin house, essentially a boarding house for young foreigners.
“I was there just traveling,” said Maria. “I sold jewelry in the street.”
They went on to travel in North Africa and Europe, and then to Sweden, returning to the U.S. so Stewart could attend law school in Minnesota. After marrying in 1994, they moved to their current home in 2001 from Baileys Crossroads, he said, because they needed more space and a yard for the boys.
“It didn’t take me long to figure out that the biggest problem Prince William faced is the commute to D.C.,” he said.
Traffic, like nearly every local issue, is tied intensely with development. The issue is especially important in a county that serves as a buffer between car-clogged Fairfax and rural Stafford. At stake in the coming years is to what degree Prince William will come to resemble its neighbor to the north.
In 2003, Stewart ran for the Board of Supervisors to replace outgoing Republican Ruth Griggs, winning the Occoquan spot with a massive lead over his two opponents. Last year, when the Bush administration tapped Chairman Sean Connaughton to head the U.S. Maritime Administration, Stewart was elected in his place. He has less than a year before he must run again.
He has big plans before then, however. His first major act as chairman was to successfully aid a push for a yearlong moratorium on rezonings, in which the County Board will wield its legal ability to defer proposals by developers to allow higher building density. He admits it’s not a long-term solution.
“To some extent, [the rezoning freeze] really hasn’t done all that much because were seeing the slowdown anyway,” he said. “There are not a lot of new applications in the pipeline. Its impact can be overstated very easily.”
He said he wants to double the monetary contribution the county charges developers for new homes — which would go to upgrading roads, schools and other services.
At the same time, Stewart says he’ll push for a true tax decrease — a reduction in the real estate tax rate that would outpace any growth in assessments. He says his philosophy on the scope of taxation and spending was forged during a study abroad program in communist Poland in 1990.
“I became very conservative,” he said. “After seeing a communist government in action and what it did to ruin an economy, and really make life miserable for people, I became very fiscally conservative.”
Outside of the county, he’s faced with Northern Virginia’s typically tenuous relationship with Richmond. Like supervisors in neighboring counties, he decries what he sees as an unfair formula of transportation funding with the rest of the state, considering Northern Virginia’s hefty contribution to state coffers.
“The southern part of the state is unified,” he said. “Democrats and Republicans are unified down there in making sure they continue to receive 83 percent of the state’s transportation allocation. And until we begin to see ourselves as a very powerful bloc, whichwe can, it’s going to be difficult to change that.”
