On 5/1/2019, the Board of Architectural Review, and Planning Commission, and Town Council met in a joint work session to discuss potential changes to MAC zoning. You can find the meeting materials on this page.
The first part of this posting is my overall impression of the meeting. I follow that with a few key findings. Then I list a detailed index to my recording at the bottom of the page.
Continue reading Post #261, review of the 5/1/2019 joint work session
The new High-Intensity Activated crossWalK (HAWK) light is now up at James Madison Drive. I’m writing this post based on a bad experience I had with the other HAWK light, just up the street at Maple and Pleasant (Post #225.)
The issue is the timing of the walk signal. I think there needs to be a long lag between when the HAWK light turns red, and when the walk signal comes on. In this post, I will explain why. Continue reading Post #260, James Madison Drive HAWK light
The Town elections are coming up this Tuesday, May 7th. This is a contested race and our polling place may be a little crowded. You probably ought to have a voting plan, that is, a specific time when you are planning to get down to the Community Center and cast your vote. I don’t think that waiting until the last minute will be a good strategy this year.
What follows below-the-line here is something I posted back in February. Things have changed a little since then, but not enough to make me change my vote. The biggest change is that more-or-less everybody is running against the current MAC rules. Now everybody wants to see some changes.
That said, I’m voting for Springsteen and the two Ps: Patel and Potter. If you care to know why, read what I wrote back in February, below the line further down this page.
What do I hope to see change about Town of Vienna government? Mostly, I want to hear a straight story. I don’t want to hear that, somehow, Town staff swapped buildings between review by the BAR and approval by the Town Council (Post #245, Post #253). I don’t want to be told that Vienna has no choice but to complete its rezonings within 100 days, while I can see that nearby towns take up to a year (Post #247). I would like the Town to stop telling us how responsive they are to citizen input, while re-writing the rules mid-stream to favor whatever the developers appear to want (Post #227). I don’t want the Town to sell MAC as preserving small town Vienna, then repudiate that small-town portion of the law. I don’t want them to sell it based on four floors, only to find out that five floors is just fine.
I could go on, but you get the drift. Actual development issues aside, just cutting the crap would be a big improvement.
I’m just going to offer up one more, based on a flyer that landed in my in-box yesterday.
I attend a lot of these meetings, and I cannot count the number of times I have heard Town officials swear that it’s simply not possible to build profitable mixed-use buildings in Vienna with less than four (or is it five?) stories. Simply not economically possible, people who think it can be done are kidding themselves, and so on. All stated as fact.
Then this arrives, below. After all those assurances by various Town officials … the impossible appears to be happening, one block off Maple.
I’m not endorsing this building. I’m not saying I want this building. I’m not saying I like or dislike this building.
But this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. If three-story mixed use development is possible, then let’s acknowledge that and have a reasoned discussion. Rather than shut down discussion by pre-emptively claiming that it’s impossible.
I guess what I’m saying is, I want people who are a little less bought-into the MAC, and a little more bought-into the facts. Fact is, as I hear it, the Town is completely aware of this building, as they were aware of the failed Mill Street garage.
The original posting follows. Not all the details are correct now, but the conclusion is the same.
About 15 people attended last night’s Transportation Safety Commission (TSC) meeting. The bulk of the meeting dealt with petitions and complaints from several neighborhoods regarding cut-through traffic, speeding, and the need for pedestrian crosswalks. Among the streets discussed were Tazewall, Casmar, and John Marshall.
My main interest was in the Town’s replacement for the Citizen’s Guide to Traffic Calming. You can find the current version — in use since 2002 — on this page on the Town’s website. It outlines the process you would have to go through if you wanted your street to have (e.g.) speed bumps, a pedestrian crosswalk, a flashing pedestrian crosswalk sign, or other traffic safety measures. You can find a draft of the proposed replacement on this page on the Town’s website.
An overflow crowd attended the Town Council’s first public hearing on 380 Maple West (39 condos plus retail, corner of Maple and Wade Hampton). A total of 41 people spoke during the public comment period, with (by my count) 8 in favor of the development and 33 against. All told, public comments lasted for nearly two and a half hours.
At the prompting of Councilman Springsteen, the Town “kept the public hearing open”, meaning, they will take public comments again, on this topic, at their next meeting. The rules for that were not made clear. For Planning Commission, you may speak twice as long as you don’t repeat yourself. I don’t know what the rules are for the this next portion of the public hearing.
The Town has already posted its video file. I am having even more trouble than in the past trying to get the Granicus website to play the video. And the option to download the file appears to have been removed. Here is the link to the video of the meeting. Perhaps you will have more luck with it than I have. http://vienna-va.granicus.com/player/clip/345?view_id=1
I went ahead and posted my audio file with Excel index to this Google Drive directory. Look for the .mp3 and .xls files named 2019-04-29 … The times in my index file will match my audio, but the Town video started at a different time.
Continue reading Post #257: Brief report on the 4/29/2019 Town Council meeting
On Monday, 4/29/2019, at 8:00 PM in Town Hall, the Town Council will hold a public hearing on 380 Maple West (39 condos plus retail, corner of Maple and Wade Hampton).
Citizens are invited to speak. Please limit your remarks to three minutes per topic.
Meeting materials can be found on this page:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3929063&GUID=B36EEB43-5C4F-46D4-98BE-337EC9FDA106&Options=&Search=
On Wednesday, 5/1/2019, at 7:30 PM in Town Hall, all three governing bodies (Town Council, Planning Commission, and Board of Architectural Review) will meet in a joint work session to discuss amendments to MAC zoning.
No public comment is permitted at this session. There are no publicly-available meeting materials at this time.
Separately, not directly related to MAC zoning, on Tuesday 4/30/2019, at 8:00 PM in Town Hall, the Transportation Safety Commission will receive a briefing on the draft Street Safety Guide. The Town is changing the procedures by which citizens may petition for traffic calming, pedestrian crossings, sidewalks, and other traffic safety measures in their neighborhoods. This new process and manual will replace the “Citizen’s Guide to Traffic Calming” that has been used in Vienna for the past 17 years. The new procedures and rules differ significantly from the old ones.
The existing traffic calming guide (.pdf) can be found at this link: https://www.viennava.gov/DocumentView.aspx?DID=712
This week’s Sun Gazette has three articles that directly address development on Maple Avenue. Plus a profile of the opening of a new bike trail here in Vienna.
And it would be great if the citizens of Vienna would read those articles. Except that, as far as I can tell, the paper wasn’t delivered to a large part of Vienna. That happens from time to time.
And that’s a pity, give how important these issues are to Vienna. And how on-topic this particular issue of the Sun-Gazette is.
You can access the .pdf version of this week’s Sun-Gazette at this link on their website (.pdf). Of particular interest are these articles, all by Brian Trompeter. I’m not even going to reference my amateur discussions of these various issues. Please read what a professional journalist has reported about these topics.
Page 1: ‘MAC’ Is Hot Topic as Vienna Campaign Intensifies. This is a summary of the recent National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE)-sponsored debate held at the Vienna Community Center.
Access the article directly at this link.
Page 8: New Trail Connecting Tysons, Vienna Dedicated. This profiles the opening of a dedicated bike trail between the northern tip of Vienna and the Spring Hill metro station on the Silver Line.
Access the article directly at this link.
Page 10: Critics Raise Red Flags on Vienna Development. This is a discussion of the issue raised by the Vienna Board of Architectural Review (BAR), which had never seen the (greatly) revised plans for the Marco Polo/Vienna Market development.
Access the article directly at this link.
Page 11: Town Attorney: Vienna Can’t Delay Land Use Cases After May Election. Fairfax County (usually) bars its Board of Supervisors from making rezoning decisions around the time of an election. Town of Vienna has no such rule, and so our Town Attorney said that the various MAC rezoning projects must continue apace.
Access the article directly at this link.
The Sunrise Assisted Living proposed for Maple and Center is an oddity in a lot of ways. Step-by-step, the Town and the developer have arrived a compromise of a building. It’s a building designed by a committee, in effect. And if you work through how we got here, to this particular design, maybe you’d come to the conclusion that there might be a smarter way to do this. Maybe a true four-floor building, with no ground floor retail, might make more sense than what we ended up with. But the Town would have to give up its fixation on ground-floor retail space to make that happen. Continue reading Post #254: Sunrise: Skip the retail, skip the 5th floor, have a better building, set a better precedent
In Post #245, I described the surprise that occurred at the most recent Board of Architectural Review (BAR) meeting. Read that if you need the background. Briefly: The building that the BAR passed was not the same as the building that the Town Council approved.
I described what happened, I did not talk about how that happened. And because of that omission, some people got the wrong impression. Case in point: A reader asked me how the Director of Planning and Zoning could have allowed a mistake like that to occur.
This made me realize that I should just lay out the situation, as I see it, as clearly as possible. Even if it seems a little rude to some people. Because that wasn’t a mistake. Continue reading Post #253: Clarification for Post 245, the BAR meeting
See just-prior post for background. For this meeting, I stayed home and watched it via streaming. My “pirated” copy of the Town’s video is available in this Google Docs directory. (I recorded it as I streamed it. The file is about 1.5 gbytes, “2019-04-24 Planning Commission …”)
I’m going to note some times at which various events take place in that recording, in lieu of my usual “index” file for the video recording.
The motion is for extending the MAC moratorium to November 15th. I had incorrectly said October in my prior posting.
The motion for extending the MAC moratorium passed with little discussion. For the Sunrise Assisted Living facility, the Planning Commission voted to keep the public hearing open, so that members of the public will have a chance to speak on this topic again at the May 8 2019 meeting of the Planning Commission. Presumably, the Planning Commission will vote on the Sunrise facility at that time.
Detail follows.
Continue reading Post #252: 4/24/2019 Planning Commission meeting
