Whoever said politics makes strange bedfellows might have had Marleen Durfee in mind. Government moves slowly; Durfee continually pushes for solutions. Chesterfield County government has a history of embracing rapid residential development and of resisting public transportation; Durfee has advocated controlling growth and expanding public transit, particularly high-speed rail, her current focus.

As one of four new county supervisors who ran on platforms of change, 50-year-old Durfee wants to be known as a servant-leader who makes decisions based on data rather than politics.

A Chesterfield resident for 23 years, Durfee didn’t become active in local government until 2002, after talking with her twin brother, Alex Tatanish, about the county’s growth surge. “Something doesn’t feel right about the way growth is happening here in Chesterfield,” she recalls telling him. During 2002, its population rose by 7,000 to 271,000, increasingly overloading the Upper Swift Creek area where Durfee resides. Tatanish, an urban planner in Pennsylvania, suggested she look up the county’s comprehensive plan, which guides future development.

Durfee took her brother’s advice. She was shocked by what she learned. The countywide thoroughfare plan in use was from 1989 and the comprehensive plan was from 1991. By 2002, the number of potential housing units approved by the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors stood at 27,950 — more than Hanover, Goochland, Powhatan and Henrico combined. Today, the number tops 50,000.

About 60 percent of the growth was occurring in the Upper Swift Creek area, which represents 13 percent of the county’s land. Yet the area lacked a police station, library or fire station. Schools were overcrowded, roads were clogged, land prices were rising and water quality in the Upper Swift Creek Reservoir’s watershed was threatened by phosphorus runoff.

“I knew it could be done smarter,” Dur-fee says.

An Early Activist
Durfee’s family moved to Chesterfield from Louisiana in 1986 when her husband, Jim Durfee, took a job with MeadWestvaco. Marleen Durfee previously worked for the Pennsylvania DUI Association, training law-enforcement officers, advocating for tougher drunken-driving legislation, evaluating offenders and making recommendations for treatment. She decided to halt her career to raise their daughters: Lindsey, now a junior at Virginia Tech, and Lauren, a Cosby High School junior who recently was crowned Miss Virginia in the junior teen pageant. Still, Durfee kept her hand in highway-safety work. She worked with Jerry Kilgore, then Virginia’s secretary of public safety, and later served as an ad-hoc member of then-Gov. Mark R. Warner’s highway-safety task force.

Although she’s relatively new in her role as supervisor, Durfee is no novice when it comes to activism. In Gulich, a close-knit township in central Pennsylvania, Marleen Tatanish grew up watching her father, Alex, landscape the cemetery grounds free of charge and build a local grocery store. Marleen’s grandfather, who emigrated from the Carpathian Mountains of what is now the Ukraine, built the local church to serve Gulich’s population of less than 1,000 — including her 19 aunts and uncles and 21 cousins.

Her mother, Martha, volunteered for a variety of causes, which prompted 10-year-old Marleen to knock on doors to raise money for the American Heart Association. She was a natural. The next month, her mother had her collect for the March of Dimes, then the American Lung Association.

“I became the poster child for veterans and every other cause,” she says with a laugh.

In high school, Marleen played on the girls’ softball team. She was already a seasoned player; she and her siblings built what became the neighborhood baseball field in their backyard, using slabs of Pennsylvania slate for the bases. “I thought about joining the boys’ baseball team because I threw the ball too hard,” she says. “I kept accidentally breaking the thumbs of my teammates.” When she took up basketball, she consistently scored more than 20 points at every game. She recalls the crowd chanting, “Go, Pocahontas!” — a nickname earned for her dark, braided hair and endurance on the court.

She received her bachelor’s degree in health-community education at Pennsylvania State University in 1981. There, she met Jim Durfee, a member of the fraternity where Marleen was a little sister. He remembers when she played center field for the Penn State softball team: “We were both athletes, but she was a much better athlete than me. She possessed an amazing amount of energy.”

Pushing for a Plan
Marleen Durfee’s first issue before the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors as a county resident was a push for compliance with a state requirement to revise the comprehensive plan every five years.

“There were some infrequent amendments made but no [full-scale] revisions,” she says. The comprehensive plan needed to address growth issues, particularly in the rapidly developing Upper Swift Creek area, she says. Under the philosophy that growth pays for itself, former board members green-lighted development at a rate unsupported by county infrastructure.