Category: MAC zoning

Post #876: Town of Vienna, please see the forest through the trees.

This will be of no interest to anyone outside of the Town of Vienna.  Unless you are a student of how “silo thinking” can lead to truly inefficient decisions.

Let me cut to the chase.  The Town of Vienna is using a $16M piece of land to produce (arguably) $20,000 in annual cost savings to the Town.  Probably, less than that.  And using that in such a way that, in practice, prevents any better use of that valuable property for benefit of Town residents in general. Continue reading Post #876: Town of Vienna, please see the forest through the trees.

Post #706: MAC zoning repealed

Above:  The Merrifield Mosaic District, overlain on the Vienna MAC zone, drawn to scale.

The section of last night’s Town Council meeting regarding MAC zoning was fairly contentious.  In the end, the Town Council voted to repeal MAC zoning.  This was no particular surprise, to the point where I’d already recycled my now-obsolete signs.

If I had to pick an item that encapsulated it, it was Councilman Noble’s discussion of the preamble to the MAC statute.  That’s the section that has all the nice language about preserving small-town Vienna, and so on.  That’s where “parks and plazas” comes up.  That’s the section — I might say, the only section — that preserved the spirit of the original, long-ago citizen direction for MAC.  The overriding goal of the citizens, from the original MAC development efforts, was to preserve the small-town nature of Vienna.  And that’s exactly what that preamble to the law said.

As it turns out, they didn’t realize that the preamble was not legally enforceable.  So it sounded nice, but, as I described it a year or so ago, in the end, it served more as camouflage than as anything else.  It made it sound like the law was there to preserve small-town Vienna.  But it had no practical or legal effect.

And, in the end — some five or six years after the law was passed — that was finally formally expressed by the Town’s attorney.  The preamble had no legal status.  And if a building met all the technical requirements in the statute — height, setback, “open space”, draining, and so on … the Town Council could not legally turn it down.  Or, if they did, they’d likely be sued and lose.

The second telling item was again from Councilman Noble, which was the MAC requirement that all of Maple avenue be treated identically.  That was not part of the original plan, and apparently that was not supported by Noble in the original drafting of MAC.  But that’s certainly one aspect of MAC that I’ve harped on quite a bit.  What they ended up with is a nearly-two-mile stretch of road, with nothing even approaching a plan for development.  Apparently this was recognized by some as a significant flaw, even as the law was being passed.  All I did was manage to rediscover something that the MAC forces already knew about.  Hence the picture above, comparing the size of the Mosaic District and the MAC zone.

To be clear, the repeal of the MAC statute is hardly the end of it.  It just shifts this struggle to another arena. 

After they passed MAC in 2014,  the Town re-wrote the Town’s Comprehensive Plan to match MAC.  That rewrite occurred in 2015 (or 2016, depending on whom you ask and/or which date serves Town staff’s purposes in any particular circumstance).  In effect, they embedded MAC-like zoning into the Comprehensive Plan, after they passed MAC.  (Which is, in fact, backwards — you’re not supposed to change the zoning, then change the plan to match.  Not, at least, by the way I read Commonwealth statute in this area.  But it is what it is.  And it is what they did.)

So the game plan now shifts to the complete rewrite of all the zoning in Vienna.  A few meetings ago, soon-to-be-ex Town Council Member Majdi, with support from Council Member Patel, asked that the MAC-like language be removed from the comprehensive plan (see Post #765).  With the idea being that if you’re going to get rid of MAC, then, logically, you should modify the comprehensive plan to match.

The pro-development forces forcefully beat back any such effort.  And they wrote a contract for their chosen consultant that, in several different places, carefully directs the consultant to make sure that the re-written zoning matches up with the master plan.  (Which, by Commonwealth law, it should).

The upshot is that resurrection of MAC-like zoning is baked in.  They have carefully set this up so that their chosen consultant must re-create some form of MAC zoning.  But this time, it will explicitly be by-right zoning.  That is, once passed, developers will have the right to develop to the standards expressed in the zoning.  No messy public hearings.  In fact, no input from our elected representatives at all.  So, Town Council’s hands will be clean.  All power over development on Maple, under this new approach will be ceded to the Town bureaucracy.  And all discretion over what is and isn’t allowed will be solely in the hands of the Director of Planning and Zoning.

And if that doesn’t make you uneasy, you haven’t been paying attention.  Marco Polo Gate?  Four floors really means five floors?  Mezzanine rules only apply to residential mezzanines.  We need buildings taller than MAC allows, not shorter.  Those of you who have tracked this for a while know what I’m referencing above.  Those of you who haven’t, you can search this website for those key phrases.

So, we’ll see what comes out of this, a year or so from now.

Separately, if I had to put out the single thing that is most screwed up about this new approach, it’s the following:

  1. Under MAC, the binding constraint on building size along Maple was a political constraint.  It was all about what the citizens would accept, and how much negative externalities (in terms of traffic, noise, and so on) Town Council could successfully impose on surrounding neighborhoods.  Purely based on economics, builder probably would have built even larger buildings than were allowed under MAC.
  2. The current process for rewriting all the zoning in Vienna specifically excludes any formal input from Town Council.  That is, specifically ignores political constraints.  As I understand it, Town Council doesn’t get to direct this at all.  There will be some consultation with the Planning Commission (only).  And then, in the end, Town Council will get to vote yes/no on the entire package of redrafted zoning laws.

This is what I have referred to as the cram-down strategy (Post #483, 12/9/2019).  (Yeah, I’ve been complaining about this for that long.)  Town Staff are going to direct the rewrite of the law, probably to be as favorable to development as possible.  Then they’re going to cram it down Town Council’s throat.  All one piece, no separate votes on separate items.  So Town Council’s only option will be to toss out a quarter-million dollars’ worth of consulting, and a year of staff work, and so on.  Or pass whatever it is that Town Staff decides to cram down their throats.

If you wonder why I have come to loathe the Old Guard here in Vienna, it’s for stuff exactly like that.  No self-respecting legislative body should ever willingly let itself be put in that position.  But, it’s a way for them to win, even if the majority of the citizens don’t want it.  So, I’m betting that they’ll win.  And I guess that’s all that matters.  So that’s the plan.

Post #705: Meanwhile, back in the Town of Vienna, plus ça change?

 

This post is about tonight’s Vienna Town Council meeting.  With the key question being, will there be any fundamental change in the Town’s plans for redeveloping Maple Avenue, once the new Town Council is seated?  Or, really, will there be any fundamental change in how it goes about meandering through various decisions?

In any case, tonight’s proximate issue is MAC zoning.  Meeting materials are here, and you can find instructions for watching it live here.  (For me, streaming only works with Chrome, FWIW).

The options on the table are to extend the current moratorium, or to kill MAC zoning entirely.  Best guess, based on what went on at the corresponding Planning Commission meeting, they’ll vote to kill it.  (It was almost-but-not-quite funny to look at the tape of the Planning Commission meeting, and see that the pro-MAC members there really would not pick up on the very strong hints that killing MAC is the what the Powers that Be want now.  Clear the decks, so that they can rewrite the commercial zoning to allow MAC-like buildings by right.  Even I understand the game plan, and I’m not exactly privy to their thinking.)  We can only trust and hope that they will do that in a fashion that doesn’t allow a few developers to slip in proposals after the June 30 end of the current moratorium.  (You’d think I wouldn’t have to say that but … somehow two proposals made it under the wire the last time.)

But the longer-term issue is whether or not things will change with the seating of the new Town Council in July.  As I see it — and predicted it — the pro-development Mayor-Elect won because candidates Majdi and Springsteen split the moderate-development vote.  (My January 2020 prediction was off by a bit, but not much (Post #697).  With the Mayor-Elect as the last remaining member of the original solidly pro-MAC faction that once controlled Town Council, what’s going to happen next?  Are they actually going to moderate plans for development along Maple?  Or do they figure they’re just one election away from regaining control?

(And will they please, please, please let Ed Somers run the meetings.  In case you missed it, he was the other person on the Colbert/Somers non-slate.  The one who got the exact same number of votes as Mayoral candidate Colbert.  But it wasn’t a slate.  Nuh-uh, no way, only evil carpetbaggers need to run as a slate.  Anyway, based on what I saw at the Transportation Safety Commission, he really knows how to run a meeting, and that’s a talent that Town Council ought to make use of.)

Anyway, beats me whether we’ll see change or not.  I’ve just been asked to write one more blog entry about Town of Vienna government and the path ahead.  So here it is.  Think of this as my contractual obligation posting for the week.

But if I had to guess, my guess would be, as the French put it, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.  Which I translate loosely as “you can put new butts in those chairs, but chances are they’ll generate the same crap.”  I make some predictions about the Patrick Henry Parking Garage, below, to illustrate what I think I’m talking about.

Things have changed a bit recently.

To be clear, given the ongoing global pandemic …

Source:  That’s my best guess.  The only hard fact is that, as of today, just under 1% of the Fairfax County population has been diagnosed with COVID-19 (per the Virginia Department of Health website).  The actual fraction who have been infected is not known, but can be guessed at based on various studies using various biased samples-of-convenience of various populations showing antibodies to COVID-19 using various tests with different false-positive rates.  If you don’t understand what can go wrong there — particularly the bias in using samples of convenience (e.g., grocery shoppers), and in particular if you don’t understand why even a small false-positive rate for an antibody test skews the results of such a test for this purpose, then you probably shouldn’t opine on what the “true” infection rate is.  (E.g., if nobody was infected, but the false positive rate for a test is 1.7%, then the test is going to show 1.7% infected.  If you think that’s just an academic exercise, search “Literally every single one could be a false positive” in this article to see why this matters so much, when you are trying to identify a disease with a relatively low prevalence in the population.  The upshot is that  most of what you’ve read in the popular press (and a fortiori on right-wing blogs trying to convince you that some huge fraction of the population has already been infected) is wrong.  If forced to guess, I’d guess that at most 5 percent of the Fairfax County population has been infected with COVID-19, based mainly on studies of California cities, on a study of consensus of opinion among a random sample of US physicians, and on a high-quality study of Spain showing that, despite a severe epidemic, only 5% of the Spanish population has antibodies for COVID-19.  I would be surprised if our true prevalence were higher than that of Spain.  For what it’s worth, the CDC is gearing up to do a systematic study of this issue.   Maybe a year from now they’ll be able to give us a really accurate estimate of what the true prevalence was.  Finally, if you don’t know what “case fatality rate” means, as opposed to “infection mortality rate”, then you also should not opine about how the mortality rate of COVID-19 compares to the mortality rate of influenza, because the flu data are case fatality rate data,   As with COVID-19, if you got the flu, but not badly enough to see a physician and be diagnosed, you weren’t counted in the denominator of the widely-cited case fatality rate statistics for flu.  The apples-to-apples comparison of COVID-19 and (e.g.) swine flu is COVID-19 deaths divided by diagnosed individuals (either via PCR test, or based on symptoms as presented to a health care provider.)

The potential for a global economic recession or depression …

Reduction in demand that hits the mix of small business on Maple Avenue particularly hard, with its heavy reliance on restaurants and personal services  …

Source:  See Post #201 for details on methods and underlying data.

With a retail vacancy rate that was average, but may or may not stay that way.

Source:  See this post for details.

But will Town Council change how it does business?  My litmus test.

I don’t  mean the current Town Council.  They’ve been set on full-speed-ahead, almost without exception.  Nothing would deter them from continuing as they have started.

And, near as I can tell, their answer to any question regarding buildings is “the biggest one that will fit on the lot”.  Example:  What is the optimal size for the new police station?  What is the best choice for a Maple Avenue parking garage.  And repeat.

No, to me the question is whether the new Town Council, seated in July, will do business any differently.  In particular, if there’s going to be any rethinking of schedule and purpose given this backdrop of some fairly large uncertainties.

E.g., if this has permanently damaged the local restaurant industry, then the face of Maple Avenue retail moving foward might look quite different from the past.  You’d then think that your planning would change accordingly.  And you might think that, maybe, you’d slow down your decisionmaking until you could get more of a sense of how this will all shake out.

But put the issue of the commercial zoning rewrite aside for now.  There’s a simpler, more straightforward test that doesn’t depend on what the Town’s consult tells the Town it needs, for new commercial zoning.

There’s a much simpler way to take the measure of the new Town Council.  Let’s see what (if anything) they do with the Patrick Henry Parking Garage (and library). 

That’s the illustration at the top of this post.  And the question is, will the new Town Council rethink any of what had gotten us that design, at this point?

Let me start off by listing a few of the many things I hate about the proposed design for the Patrick Henry Parking Garage (and library).

First, we’re trying to con somebody else into paying for it, based on the outright lie that this new garage will be a commuter garage.  (We’re not dumb enough to say that in the Town’s own documents.  There, we refer to it for what it is — shopper/diner parking to serve the nearby Maple Avenue merchants.  It’s only in trying to sell it to the local traffic-relief authority that we make up a story about commuters driving into the heart of Vienna, in rush hour, so that they can park in this garage and take the once-per-half-hour bus to Vienna Metro.)

We should call that — obtaining money under false pretenses — exactly what it is — fraud.  (See Post #515, with a better explanation in Post #446).

Everybody on the current Town Council understands just how ludicrous this story is.  Commuters, in large numbers, are not going to drive into Vienna, park, and take the occasional bus to the Vienna metro.  Yet every one of them was willing to support the use of that story in order to con the funding out of a local transportation congestion-relief funding authority.

Will the new Town Council be any different?  Will even one new Town Council member object to obtaining tax funding based on the lie that our shopper/diner parking is actually a commuter parking garage?  Will anyone object to our describing it for what it is, in Town of Vienna documents (shopper/diner parking), then trying to sell it to funders based on a completely different and totally fictional description?  That will be interesting to see, but my guess is, no. 

Second, how big a garage does Vienna need there?  BRRRT.  Wrong question.  The answer is “”the biggest one that will fit on the lot”.  So, as I understand it, the Town will do some sort of parking demand study — long after they’ve made the commitment to go for the garage as planned.  So, the extent of “thoughtful” planning is to go for the biggest garage that will fit on the lot.  Full stop.  Then justify that after-the-fact.

At some point, I’d have argued for getting the order of operations reversed there.  Figure out what you need, then build, instead of vice-versa.  But after seeing the Town’s last traffic study, I’m not convinced that any consultant study overseen by Town staff can produce an unbiased estimate of anything.  It’s more akin to commercial research (support the product line) than it is to academic research (determine what’s true).  So now my feeling is, given that any such study is just a fig leaf for whatever decision has already been made, let’s just skip it and save the money.  The idea of making the commitment to the building, then funding the analysis of how much parking is needed, is just stupid and wasteful.  If they are going to do it in that order, at least have the good sense to kill the after-the-fact parking study.

Even absent a formal parking study, won’t anybody question the “small town” feel of making a big parking garage literally the centerpiece of the town? Because I sure haven’t heard that from anyone in power so far.  I guess, with all the open parking lots, this will fit right in?

Does anybody even care that this locks Maple in to the current (circa 1961) configuration, pretty much for eternity?  We’ve seen what it would take to get traffic flowing on Maple, and per Fairfax County, it would take more lanes.  Will that ever even get on the table as a topic of discussion, or has it Already Been Decided, and no discussion is allowed?

Won’t anybody even question the legitimacy of having taxpayer pay for the parking, so that Town Staff can reduce the amount of zoning-required parking in any new construction in that area?  Is this really little more than taxpayer subsidy to local businesses?

So, will the next Town Council be able to step back and ask, how big does it really need to be?  That would be nice to see, but my guess is, no.  It’s going to be the biggest building they can squeeze onto the lot.

Third, can we at least change the design so that the library isn’t underneath the parking garage?  I think that’s a really horrendous mistake, if you are looking for a library that is a pleasant center for community-based activity.  And, for sure, I looked, and you cannot find a single suburban library in the DC area that’s built into the first floor of a parking garage.  The fact that nobody else builds a library like this really ought to be a red flag, if anyone is paying attention.

Weirdly, will anybody on Town Council even realize that the design looks the way it looks because it had to fit in with MAC zoning?  Yeah, the same MAC zoning that they are about to get rid of.  That’s why it looks like a 15′ glass-fronted shopping mall on the bottom floor.  Because that’s what MAC zoning mandated.  So the look of the proposed library is a remnant of the zoning that they are in the process of killing.

My own suggestion to all of this (Post #371 and earlier) was to put the parking underground, pay extra for doing that, and use the free space at ground level for a one-third acre park, adjacent to the new, airy, spacious library.  In effect, you get to buy park land, along Maple, for at or below the current market-clearing rate of about $6M/acre.

More generally, is there any chance that the new Town Council will, I don’t know, maybe ask current library users what they think of the basement-of-the-parking-garage design?  Maybe crowd-source a design by having a contest for local citizens?  Or reconsider the current library-as-afterthought design in any significant way?

Otherwise, I think the current course for the Patrick Henry Parking Garage pretty much sums up what I disliked about decision-making by current and prior Town Councils.  The funding is based on a lie.  And everybody just winks at that.  The design was done that way for a reason that no longer matters (i.e., to match MAC zoning).  Yet the design appears locked in.  The true public purpose here, a library to serve as a center for the community, is subservient what the local commercial interests want to see that land used for (more parking to feed their businesses, and then to allow relaxed on-site parking requirements moving forward).  To the point where the proposed design — library-under-parking-garage — is something that nobody else in the DC area has chosen to build.  For good reason.

Oh, and we’ll do the study to see how much parking we need, after we’ve decided how much we’ll build.  I don’t know about you, but something tells  me that study is going to tell Town Council that they made the exact right decision.  And that’s exactly the wrong way to go about getting good decisions made.

 

My signs? Come and get them starting 4/24/2020

I gathered these signs in after last year’s Town elections.  At that point, they had been up so long that they were blending in with the landscape.  Worse, metal fatigue was setting in.  A lot of them were hanging on by a thread, as the metal “legs” gave out.

My plan was to rehab those, and then replace them myself.  I carefully noted the address of every place where I took a sign.  I bought new metal “legs”.  And I now have a stack of about 100 signs, ready to go.

But times change.  For one, the election is under two weeks away.  For another, it’s not like I can ring your doorbell and ask if you want your sign back.  For a third, I really don’t have the energy to go running all over the Town of Vienna.  And finally, it’s not even clear that the Town is going to keep MAC zoning on the books.  Which would make the signs themselves fundamentally obsolete.

So, I’m not going to deliver them out. Starting tomorrow (4/24/2020), I’m going to put a stack of these at the end of my driveway (226 Glen Ave SW).  If you want your sign back, please come pick one up, starting tomorrow.  I’ll keep the stack filled until all the signs that I have are gone.

At that point, I’m not going to gather them back in again.  Once you’re done with it, please dispose of it as you see fit.  And thank you for displaying these, last year, and again this year.

I apologize, but the world is a different place now.  No way I could have anticipated that when I gathered them all in.

Post #546: Last night’s Town Council meeting

Cedar Lane I-66 bridge will (probably) close for six months, starting before this summer.

There wasn’t much to last night’s (3/10/2020) Town Council meeting.  The Town has already posted a link to its recording on the Town’s website (but no link to the recording is posted yet on the Granicus site). The meeting materials can he found at this link. Continue reading Post #546: Last night’s Town Council meeting

Post #542: Needless risk

Source:  Town of Vienna.  This is the agenda for tonight’s Town Council meeting.

Dear Town Council and Planning Commission:  Please extend the MAC moratorium, right now.   Please don’t wait until the last minute, because that’s looking like an increasingly risky strategy.

If you agree with that, you don’t need to read the rest of this.

Edit:  I needed to make two corrections to the original post.  One is for the Vice-Mayor, which I misstate.  A more substantive correction is that, in this case, the Planning Commission’s role is purely advisory.  They would make a recommendation to the Town Council, but Town Council could chose to ignore such a recommendation.

Continue reading Post #542: Needless risk

Post #539: MAC moratorium schedule revisited – CORRECTED

 

Calendar GIF from Calendar GIFs

Source: Tenor.com

Edit:  The main point of this post may be moot.  Town Council member Noble has reminded me that he has already asked that Town Council rescind MAC zoning entirely.  (Technically, Town Council would refer a motion to the Planning Commission to rescind all of MAC.)  That motion would be made at a Town Council meeting in late April or early May, at the same time the Town Council approves the consulting contract for rewriting the Town’s zoning.

At that point, if successful, MAC would be rescinded, and zoning on Maple would be by-right zoning under some variation of the commercial zoning that we have now.  Any MAC-like elements would have to be embodied in changes in the commercial code, not in revision of a separate MAC zoning.

I’m not clear on the details, but my guess is that this still entails a very tight schedule.  My understanding is that this change in the zoning rules requires two public hearings.  If so, the schedule here would have to be replaced by an equally strict schedule for rescinding MAC prior to the end of the MAC moratorium. 

So there’s still a fast track that has to be adhered to.  It’s just that the content of those hearings would be for rescinding MAC, not for extending the moratorium.

Just a reminder about unfinished business.  Briefly, the Town now needs to undertake a multi-step process to extend the MAC zoning moratorium.  May not seem like it, but the time available to do that is fairly short.  Let me walk through it.

On 11/4/2019, the Town Council extended the moratorium on new MAC zoning applications through June 30, 2020 (reference).

On 12/9/2019, they passed a motion to fold review of MAC zoning into the complete rewrite of all the Town’s zoning (reference).

On 12/9/2019, they didn’t extend the MAC moratorium.  That’s still left to do.  Instead, the minutes from that meeting read, in part, that our new zoning czar (Post #487) should provide ” … determination of a realistic moratorium period for the MAC zone based upon the scope of work identified.”

In other words, we are now waiting for Planning and Zoning staff to tell us how long the MAC moratorium must be extended.  Then Town Council has to go through the lengthy legal process to create that extension.

And that all must happen in the next four months.  And my point is, deadlines are approaching for getting that done.  In particular, Town staff have just about two months left to tell Town Council what that “realistic moratorium period” must be.  And then all the legally required steps for extending the moratorium have to go off like clockwork, from that point forward.

Detail follows. Continue reading Post #539: MAC moratorium schedule revisited – CORRECTED

Post #537: A thank you to DPW

I live on one of the many “save the swales” streets in Vienna.   It has sloped grass-filled ditches (swales) instead of sidewalks.  I believe this was a fairly common cost-saving move back in the 1950s, which is why you find this layout in some of the older neighborhoods in Vienna.

This is not only picturesque as all get-out (compared to concrete sidewalks), but is also modestly more environmentally friendly than standard curb and gutters.  The swales and culverts slow down the rainwater runoff.

This also makes it a pain to walk anywhere.  Basically, you have to walk in the road, particularly on the spots where there is literally no ground or no level ground to walk on.  And if that’s not bad enough, one portion of the pavement has been in terrible shape for years.

The oddball thing about it was that, as road surfaces go, it wasn’t in bad shape to drive over.  There were no deep potholes, just a whole bunch of small shallow holes.  Just enough to twist an ankle on.

But as a sidewalk, it really stank.  And if weren’t for the fact that we have to use the road surface as our sidewalk, the condition of the pavement would hardly be worth mentioning.  But, as it stands, I’ve taken a couple of falls in the past few months by stepping into those potholes while walking at night.

Which brings me to the point of this post.   A few days ago the Town of Vienna Department of Public Works filled and smoothed over the key section of broken asphalt.  I finally walked past that this morning on my way to Madison High School.  This little bit of pothole filling is a vast improvement for pedestrians trying to get from my neighborhood to Maple Avenue.

I certainly complained about it enough when it was in poor shape.  I figured it was only fair to say “thanks” now that it has been fixed.