There are several public meetings this week with some relevance to MAC zoning.
Monday, 11/4/2019, at 8:00 PM in Town Hall, Town Council will hold a meeting that includes several MAC-related items.
1) They will hold a public hearing on extending the MAC moratorium through June 30 2020. Citizens are invited to speak. Three minute time limit.
2) They will consider a resolution to request grant funding for a three-story parking garage/library to replace the current Patrick Henry library.
3) They will examine (and likely approve) the modified rear facades of the Marco Polo/Vienna Market MAC project.
The relevant materials can be found here:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=716363&GUID=DC46C9A8-009B-49C0-93BE-A2BB7BFFB61B&Options=info&Search=
Thursday, 11/7/2019, at 7:30 PM in Town Hall, Town Council will hold a work session to obtain their final briefing on the Kimley-Horn “Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study”.
The relevant materials can be found here:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4213345&GUID=7038D400-8A10-4B9D-AE3D-8F5E05930CAB&Options=&Search=
Friday, 11/8/2019 at 8:00 AM (AM), the Board of Architectural Review will hold a work session on the new building proposed for 380 Maple West, a Sunrise assisted living facility.
The relevant materials can be found here:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=735324&GUID=CEE00DFC-1728-44FD-B567-C1B14E4BA0D5&Options=info&Search=
The Town reserves the right to change or cancel meetings on short notice, so check the Town’s general calendar before you go, at this URL:
https://www.viennava.gov/Calendar.aspx?NID=1&FID=220
Commentary:
On the Monday Town Council meeting, I would have expected the extension of the MAC moratorium to be cut-and-dried. Would have, except that it was anything but that at the preceding Planning Commission meeting. The actual discussion was in fact for more convoluted than I said in my brief writeup (Post #440), and included some legal arguments to block any consideration of an extension of the moratorium
Also, the Town Council is being asked to approve a grant request for funding the largest parking structure option that the Town’s consultant offered them. I had not realized that the Town had made the affirmative decision to go with that option. If that’s a done deal, I certainly wish they would reconsider (e.g., Post #367, Post #369, Post #371).
Separately, the Town is also going to ask for about $240K in grant funding for Capital Bikeshare bike racks. I’ve already expressed the sentiment that this is almost sure a near-total waste of money, given the lack of use of these rental bikes in Tysons and other remote suburban near-Metro locations (Post #387).
On the Thursday Town Council work session, to me the big question is how they’ll deal with the estimated traffic impact of MAC development. The rest of the items — the proposed projects for the Town to undertake — seemed fairly weak to me. You can see can see my analysis in Post #358 and subsequent posts to Post #364. It is worth bearing in mind that the traffic impact analysis does NOT use current traffic as baseline, which is why (e.g.) redevelopment of the currently empty BB&T site was estimated to reduce traffic on Maple in that study.
The Friday BAR session is a bit of a puzzler to me, as it is not clear to citizens that (e.g.) Sunrise has actually signed a contract with the current owner of 380 Maple West, and so on. This is due, in part, I think, to the fact that this isn’t a MAC application. Formally, it’s a request for changes to the existing, approved MAC building. (I.e., new building, new owner, new purpose, new conditional use permit and so on, and yet all done within the context of the land already having been rezoned to MAC instead of standard commercial development.)
