Fairfax chairman’s work is family enterprise

Fairfax County (Map, News) - Gerry Connolly has the distinction, rare among his colleagues, of being able to open up any number of newspapers in Northern Virginia on just about any given day and see his own name.

Entering his fourth year as chairman of Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors, the blustery, Irish Catholic Democrat drives headlines in ways others local politicians can only dream of. Of the 10 members on the board, his face is the most ubiquitous, his voice the loudest, his words the most quoted. If any one man represents metropolitan Northern Virginia to the rest of the predominately conservative, rural state, it’s Gerry Connolly.

Even inside of his Mantua home, he doesn’t completely cast off the identity of an elected official. As the conversation turns to policy and politics, he slips easily back into the impassioned, assertive manner that marks his public persona. But the 56-year-old chairman is also equal parts husband and father, a Boston-raised former seminarian who married a former nun from rural Pennsylvania. Her name is Cathy. He, affectionately, calls her Smitty.

Both had crossed into the Old Dominion by the time they met.

“Cathy had already left the convent, and I had left the seminary,” he remembers. “And we met here while we were both working for a nonprofit organization back in 1972, right after Nixon was re-elected.”

Their daughter, 15-year-old Caitlin Rose, is a public high school sophomore involved in chorus, ice skating and — along with her father and mother — theater. She seems untroubled by her surname filling the headlines so often, though she does, at times, hear about it at school.

“People usually don’t bring it up,” Caitlin Rose said. “But sometimes, people will say, ‘Hey, isn’t your dad the governor?’ ”

It’s not a far stretch politically; Connolly diverges from Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s policy decisions only rarely. But the silver-haired chairman, bespectacled and mustachioed, bears little to no resemblance to his ally Kaine.

Nor does he reside in a mansion; his blue two-story home sits on a quiet residential road not far east of Fairfax City. The structure is backed by a stretch of the winding cross-county trail, a 40-mile walking trail that runs to the northern and southern ends of the county.

The interior is adorned with artwork from far-off locales, appropriate for a man who once traveled the world as a senior policy adviser for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 10 years working on Capitol Hill, he’s traveled to 76 countries.

During the holidays, their living room was anchored by an expansive and well-adorned Christmas tree. The mantle was guarded by a phalanx of nutcrackers. The three share the house with two cats, a dog and a parrot named John Adams that might be only the living thing more outspoken than the chairman himself.

Outside, there is little to indicate that the house is occupied by one of Northern Virginia’s most powerful men, other than the Connolly campaign bumper sticker on the back of a parked van.

Connolly, by any standard, is a monumentally busy man. Being the prime elected leader in a county with a population that exceeds that of seven states is not a full-time job; he spends about 30 hours a week as director of community relations for tech firm SAIC, one of the largest employers in the county.

He said he spends about twice that time each week on the affairs of county government. Cathy is marketing director for the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra.

His wife and daughter join him on the road for community events on weekends, which Cathy said nets them quality time together in the car. Unlike his nine counterparts, the chairman is elected at-large, which means his district encompasses all 395 square miles of Fairfax County. And spread throughout that suburban land mass are the 500 community events he estimates he attends each year.

That equation adds up to a lot of driving, with no county-issued car.

“Another reason we try to spend time doing that with Gerry [is] we get involved, to know what he has to go through on a daily basis, to make it part of our lives,” Cathy said

The chairman added: “It is a family enterprise, and I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t, frankly, if Cathy and Caitlin weren’t supportive.”

Both double as campaign boosters, too. Connolly plans to run again for chairman this year and is widely rumored to have larger political aspirations.

It’s been a long road thus far. Connolly took his first step into elected politics in the Mantua Citizens Association, heading the group when a nearby tank farm began leaking fuel fumes into the neighborhood.

He then leapt to president of the Fairfax County Federation of Citizens Associations.

His opening on the Board of Supervisors came in 1995, when he ran to fill the Providence District spot being vacated by Kate Hanley, who ascended to the chairmanship. At the time, Caitlin Rose was very young.

“For her, it was an interesting experience,” recalls Cathy. “Caitlin at the time was not quite 4 years old. She didn’t quite get the fact that it was a competition, that daddy would run but he might not win. She was distressed to discover he had an opponent.”

To put his daughter at ease, he took her to meet his first (and second) challenger: Jeannemarie Devolites. She is now state Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites-Davis, married to U.S. Rep. Tom Davis. In 1999, he ran unopposed.

When Hanley, now secretary of the commonwealth, decided not to run again in 2003, Connolly again stepped into her footprint. Since then, his profile has grown enormously.

“For me, it doesn’t mean an awful lot, except that I tend to accumulate newspapers,” his wife said of his local fame. “It’s a nice connection for people to be able to speak to you personally about someone who might otherwise be distant.”

And as he prepares for another high-profile battle for the right to lead Virginia’s largest county government, the chairman and his wife are tending to a far more serious matter: teaching their daughter to drive — a stick shift. “So few kids these days,” he laments.

He and Cathy just celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary. Both remain connected to their religion, though no longer as a career choice.

“The values, I think, the Catholic values we were imbued with stay with us,” he said.

“There is not a day I don’t get up and think about those values. There is a lot of religious motivation, I don’t mean in terms of proselytizing. ... There is a pastoral aspect that is very important to me.”

Before he was chairman ...

» Gerry Connolly joined the staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee after receiving his master’s in public administration from Harvard University in 1979. While on the committee, he traveled to 76 countries and specialized in the Middle East and foreign assistance, he said.

» Ten years later, he joined SRI International as vice president of the firm’s Washington office, where he directed relations with top federal officials. He became SAIC’s director for community relations in 2002.

About the county

» Fairfax County has a population that tops 1 million residents, making it the most populous jurisdiction in the D.C. Metro region. By 2020, population is expected to reach almost 1.2 million residents. The county contains about 400,000 housing units.

» The county boasts the second-highest median household income in the country at $94,600, behind its neighbor Loudoun. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2004 American Community Survey, more than half the county’s residents work within its borders.

wflook@dcexaminer.com

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