Kathleen Seefeldt was first elected to the
Prince William Board of County Supervisors in 1975, and served as the
Occoquan District Supervisor from 1976 to 1991. In 1991, she was elected the first at-large Chairman of the Board. Previously, the Chairman had been elected by the Board from among its membership. When Seefeldt took office as Chairman in 1992, she assumed the Board's eighth seat, the first time the Board had grown since it was enlarged to seven Supervisors in 1967. During her tenure on the Board, she was a fairly strong advocate for greater growth and development in the County, which was still very rural when she first entered office in 1976. She was instrumental in the construction of the
Prince William Parkway, a stretch of which bears her name. The Parkway, begun in 1990, provided a major arterial thoroughfare connecting the county's eastern and western ends, beginning at
Interstate 95 near
Woodbridge and continuing on through
Dale City to
Manassas. Later additions to the Parkway included an eastern extension providing a link-up with
US Route 1 and a western extension that connected with
Interstate 66 and those parts of the county west of Manassas. In 1988, Seefeldt became involved in a battle between the
National Park Service and real estate development company Hazel/Peterson over the proposed construction of a large, regional shopping mall near the
Manassas National Battlefield Park. Seefeldt expressed concerns over the environmental and traffic impact of the proposed development, but supported the mall as a strong economic development tool, one that might compete with the large, popular, and profitable
Tysons Corner Center in neighboring
Fairfax County. Relations between Seefeldt and the Park Service soon deteriorated over longstanding county government concerns regarding the Park Service's stewardship of the Manassas Battlefield and the Park Service's opposition to the new mall. Ultimately, the mall was never built. Mrs. Seefeldt lost reelection to a third term in 1999 to
Republican Sean Connaughton who successfully targeted her as the architect of the County's burgeoning growth. Development that was once welcome had brought greater traffic and placed a strain on county services, fueling voter disenchantment in a historic election; the Democrats lost control of the
Virginia General Assembly for the first time in a century. In Prince William County, once the Democrats' bastion in
Northern Virginia, the
County Sheriff,
Commonwealth's Attorney, and two members of the Board of Supervisors were the only Democrats left in County Government. Seefeldt was the last Democrat to chair Prince William County's government, despite the county's gradual and increasing return to the Democratic fold in presidential and gubernatorial elections until Ann Wheeler twenty years later won in the
2019 Virginia elections a Democratic Party majority of 5-3 on the County Board—the first time since Seefeldt's departure that Democrats held a majority on the governing board of Virginia's third largest local government. ==Prince William Parkway==