I made an audio recording of the 2/11/2019 Town Council work session. You can download this recording of the meeting from Google Drive, at this link. There are three MP3 files for the three parts of the meeting, plus copies of the Town’s documents for the meeting. These were recorded at very high volume, so turn the volume down on your device before you play them.
This work session dealt with the new “visual guidelines” for MAC zoning (and to some degree, with changes in the MAC rules). There was also a section on proffers (voluntary offers by developers to make their developments more attractive to the Town). And there was a section on the Town’s guide to traffic calming.
I have “bookmarked” the section of the meeting with the discussion of MAC visual guidelines. I uploaded the audio file to YouTube, and give links to specific places in the file below.
Click here to go to the YouTube page with the Town Council’s discussion of MAC zoning changes. The list below links to specific places in the audio file.
- 0:00, first three minutes are a description of the Town’s Visual Preference survey.
- 3:30, Town Council members begin asking questions.
- 5:15, some tough questions on methodology from Councilman Noble: How do you know what features a given picture represents, and weren’t you supposed to provide a summary of all those written comments from Vienna citizens?
- 7:40, Councilmen Majdi, Springsteen would like to see more on the survey results. The gist of this is, how did you get from the raw survey data to the conclusions presented in the MAC visual guidelines.
- 11:30, Town staff description of next steps — Planning Commission and Board of Architectural Review.
- 12:50, Council members begin to question the amount of time this will take, and others jump in to say, no, full speed ahead. This is the start of questioning the rapid schedule for this.
- 18:10, Councilman Majdi: “This is an ambitious schedule”.
- 20:10, Councilman Majdi: We need to allow Council members to express their own ideas, not just pass judgment on what’s handed to them.
- 20:50, Councilman Noble, the schedule is unrealistic.
- 22:20, Councilman Noble, the MAC discussion needs to have the results of the Maple Avenue transportation study.
- 23:30, Council member: Was this schedule set by working backwards from the end of the MAC moratorium?
- 25:40, Planning and Zoning Director, if the community doesn’t like the proposed changes, that they need to start all over. Followed by discussion of extending the MAC moratorium to allow more time for this process.
- 29:30, Councilman Springsteen, I’m getting a lot of pushback about MAC from the public, particular due to the size of the Chick-fil-A building.
- 30:45, Councilman Majdi, when do Town Council members get to present ideas, instead of just reacting to what they are given?
- 32:30, Town Manager, Councilmembers can make recommendations about building height, density, or anything that they want.
- 40:50:, Further discussion of the importance of the Maple avenue transportation study.
- 42:50, Councilman Noble, and the concept of not pushing Maple Avenue past capacity and degrading the level of service (traffic holdups) on Maple.
- 50:00, at this point, Town Council turned to looking at the details of the draft Visual Guidelines.
There are interesting points raised after this point, but they were mostly focused on the details, other than an un-focused discussion of the need for more parks around 1:18:00 into the meeting. More green space is something that Vienna residents clearly would like to get out of this, based on the results of my random-sample survey of Vienna residents.
