Post 247: The hundred-day rule

This is a re-posting of material that I posted earlier this year, with just a little additional information.  The gist of this is, maybe now is a good time to review the 100-day rule that the Town adheres to in rezoning matters.

Nearly every other government entity in the Commonwealth of Virginia gives the governing body (.e.g., Town Council, City Council, County Board of Supervisors) one year to make rezoning decisions, once the Planning Commission has reached a decision.  But in the Town of Vienna, we say that the Town has just 100 days to make such decisions, including both the decision by the Planning Commission and the decision by the Town Council.

And when you figure out how long it takes the Planning Commission to come to its decision, then factor in the need for a public hearing by the Town Council, this means is that you get some very rushed decision-making by the Town Council.  Continue reading Post 247: The hundred-day rule

Post #246: 4/18/2019 BAR meeting, audio file

I’ve decided to put all these files audio recordings of meetings into a single Google Drive directory, accessible at this link.  For this meeting, there is no “index” file because, for me, there were only two items of interest.

Discussion of the Wawa property line fence starts at 15 minutes 45 seconds and ends at around 21 minutes into the recording.

Discussion of Vienna Market/Marco Polo starts at 39 minutes 30 seconds into the recording, and ends around 1 hour 36 minutes.

There are some unintelligible bits due to poor microphone use.  Presumably the Town will post its own audio within a few days, and as always, their audio is better than mine.  You can find the link to the Town’s audio on their website (fifth item down the list, it includes the word “video”, click that, then follow the links.)

 

Post #245: The 4/18/2019 Board of Architectural Review meeting

Let me boil down last night’s Board of Architectural Review (BAR) meeting regarding the Marco Polo development to two words/two pictures and one question:

Bait: What they told the BAR they were building. This is what the BAR approved.  Georgetown-like red-brick/ironwork turn-of-the-last-century architecture.

Switch:  What they are actually proposing to build.  Chicago alleyway, complete with bricked-in windows.  (Who in their right mind includes bricked-in windows as a design feature in a new building?)

Looking on the bright side, at least the cars were the same.  Even if the building was not.

(In the drawing above, ignore the portion of the building fading off into the distance.  All of the new “switch” building matches what you see facing you.  The parts fading off into the distance are parts of the old “bait” building that they either didn’t bother to, or intentionally failed to, erase.)

This was, apparently, the first time the BAR had been asked to look at the revised plans. They were not pleased.

Church Street, in particular, is more-or-less treated as an alleyway.  Here I have crudely removed the buildings in the background, so you can see the face of this development, as it sits on Church.

It’s no exaggeration to say that if you added a couple of rusty fire escapes and a dumpster, you would not be able to tell it from any alleyway in a large Midwestern city.  My wife’s observation is that “it looks just like the subsidized housing in the City of Alexandria.”

I believe that was not lost on the BAR.   And this is on Church Street — you know, the one where the Town mostly got the redevelopment right.  Until now.

So here’s the question:  Who in our Town government is going to be held responsible for this?  Is anyone going to be held responsible for this?  And what’s to stop this from happening again? 

OK, that’s three questions.  But my bet is, they all have more-or-less the same answer:  Nobody, no, and nothing.

Interestingly, the original developer — the person who managed to achieve the passage of this — just recently sold it to a new developer.  In one of those strange coincidences, yesterday morning was the public announcement that the Marco Polo project had been sold to new owners.  Before this, the sale had merely been a rumor.  You certainly have to applaud his sense of timing.

The new owners clearly did not expect the reaction they got from the BAR. The new owners walked in with samples of bricks and other materials, for the BAR’s approval, so that they could start construction.  But the BAR more-or-less cancelled that.  The BAR deferred approval of anything until this could be straightened out.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I’ll just end by noting who was there, and who was not, to see this through.  For this item, the citizen audience consisted of a half-dozen people.  It was Vienna Citizens for Responsible Development (VCRD) and a handful of their friends.  They were there because they had done their homework.  John Pott — a founding member of VCRD — got up and asked for an investigation — why was this wholesale change only being brought to light now?  Chuck Anderson had spent the last two days compiling the complete history of how this occurred, along with clear “before-and-after” pictures.  On net, the BAR seemed appreciative of the information and clear presentation.

But in the end, it was the BAR itself that caught this.  They knew that what they were seeing was not the building they approved.  And, unsaid but pretty clear from the comments, had this “Chicago back alley” been the building they were shown, it would not have been approved.

At this point, I’m just going to clean up my audio recording and post it, so that you can hear the discussion for yourself, if you choose to do so.  I’ll have the link to that in a separate post.

But the long and short of it is that the building that the BAR passed had almost nothing to do with the building that the Town Council may-or-may-not-have passed.  The BAR was shown plans for a building that evoked turn-of-the-century Georgetown — red brick, ironwork, rounded facades, detailed windows, stone lintels.  It respected the adjacent streets by presenting a house-like facade.  And it would have been expensive as all get-out to build.

But what the Town Council appears to have passed — it’s not clear right now exactly what they were looking at — can best be described as Chicago back alley.  But as they were looking at that, they were also shown pictures of the original, Georgetown-like building.

Apparently both sets of plans — Georgetown turn-of-the-century and Chicago back alley — were presented, in pieces, simultaneously.  This is something I find hard to believe, because when the Planning Commission (PC) was explicitly faced with two sets of plans this year, for 380 Maple West, they literally didn’t know how to deal with it (Post #213).  They had not, within living memory, dealt with two different proposals simultaneously.

The Chair of the BAR rightly rejected any part of the discussion that dealt with how this came to pass, or what other parts of the Town of Vienna government did.  The BAR is not an investigative body.  He focused on what the BAR’s mission is, which is to review the architecture of buildings proposed for the Town of Vienna.

The bottom line is that the BAR deferred any decision on the Marco Polo/Vienna Market development.  They will have a work session to sort out how best to deal with the new plans that have been handed to them.  But it is not their job to ask how this mess came about.


Completely separately, and not to be forgotten, the BAR accepted Wawa’s gracious offer to build a solid vinyl fence at the back of their property.  If you want the back-story, read, in chronological order:  This post, then this post, then Post 241.   As one BAR member put it, Wawa met them more than halfway.

 

 

Post #244: Shocking behavior

I just want people to see, with their own eyes, the shockingly rude harassment faced by citizens who speak out in public meetings in favor of MAC zoning.   See for yourself.  FOR SHAME, YOU POISONOUS ANTI-MAC RABBLE!  YOU DON’T DESERVE TO BE CITIZENS OF VIENNA.

OK, yes, that’s sarcasm. These meetings are about as exciting as watching bread rise. The meeting was packed with people who don’t want this building.  The clip above shows the two pro-MAC speakers, spliced together.   The citizens got up, spoke their piece, and sat down.  Just like everybody else who spoke.  Continue reading Post #244: Shocking behavior

Post #242: Chick-fil-A, you ain’t seeing nothing happening

My guess is that the pace of construction will pick up sometime around mid-May.

This is one of a series of posts that is usually titled “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”  (You can use the category search here to find them.)  Normally, the point is that, a) the building is still getting bigger, and b) even as big as it is, it’s tiny compared to 444 Maple West/Tequila Grande or to Vienna Market/Marco Polo.

But as I drove past that yesterday, thinking of the next installment in that series of posts, I noticed that … not much had changed since I last photographed it on 2/10/2019.  Even though there is more to be built, the structure isn’t markedly bigger than it was back then.  Things have just kind of … stopped.  As far as the size of the building goes. Continue reading Post #242: Chick-fil-A, you ain’t seeing nothing happening

Post #241: Wawa comes through.

I know what convenience store I’m going to use, henceforth, in the Town of Vienna.  I’m a Wawa convert. 

Read the back story in this post, and this one.

Briefly, thanks to an odd 1974 ruling by the Town of Vienna, there’s no masonry wall at the back of the Coldwell Banker property (corner of Maple and Nutley), where it adjoins the residential neighborhood.  This is now a problem for the family living behind that property, because the sleepy little Coldwell Banker training facility is going to be replaced by what may well be a very busy Wawa convenience store.

And, although they were under no legal obligation, Wawa has now proposed to put up a 6′ vinyl privacy fence, at the back of the lot.  Just to be a good neighbor.  And they’ll put it up in such as way as to spare the large silver maples currently on or near the lot line. Continue reading Post #241: Wawa comes through.

Post #239: Advance announcement of traffic experiment – RESCINDED

The Town has made much about the benefits of closing curb cuts along Maple.  For example, under current MAC statute, closing off one Maple Avenue driveway satisfies the “column A” requirements for a 15 percent reduction in the parking requirement for the building.  (In what universe that makes sense, I don’t know, because closing a driveway seems to have nothing to do with the need for parking.  But that’s the law.) Continue reading Post #239: Advance announcement of traffic experiment – RESCINDED

Post #238: Wade Hampton Parking, revisited (error fixed 5/22/2019).

Corrected 5/22/2019 for my mixing up Park Street and Center Street in Google Maps satellite view.

My earlier contention (Post #232) is that 11 people can park legally on Wade Hampton now, and that, looking at the diagram of the future Wade Hampton, with the majority of it striped to accommodate three lanes at the end, almost all of that parking would be eliminated.

The Town, as reported by the developer, says otherwise.  In particular, the report was that no parking would be eliminated on the side of the street across from 380 Maple West.

What’s the correct explanation?  Somebody has to be wrong here.  At this point, the easiest way to resolve those two views is to suggest that the diagram of the street, as offered by the builder, is incorrect.  As long as you take away almost all the lane striping that is shown, and make the street more of a free-for-all, then you can plausibly claim more-or-less no loss of parking on the west side of Wade Hampton.

To be clear, you have to assume that the lane striping on the 32′-wide Wade Hampton will be nothing like the striping on the 32′-wide Park Center Street, as it meets Maple. Even though the setup (one lane incoming, two lanes outgoing) and width (32′) are the same.  And even though the striping on Park Center Street is almost identical to the builder’s diagram.  But if the Town stripes Wade Hampton as it did Park Center, all streetside parking would be eliminated.

So, I could be dead wrong.  But I had some help getting there.  To get to the Town’s reported position: you have to ignore the Builder’s drawing of Wade Hampton, you have to ignore the real-world example of Park Center Street at Maple, and you have to ignore one legal space on Wade Hampton that nobody uses anyway.  And if you do that, and leave most of Wade Hampton as a free-for-all, so that we can drive down the middle of the road as we see fit — then you can see that the Town’s reported claim of no parking loss is credible.

Detail follows:

Continue reading Post #238: Wade Hampton Parking, revisited (error fixed 5/22/2019).

Post #237 Replacement yard sign stakes

I have reports that the stakes holding up my green savemaple.org yard signs are breaking.  I would like to keep these signs up through the May 7 2019 Town election.

I have bought replacement stakes and have left them at the end of my driveway at 226 Glen Ave SW.  If the metal stake for your sign has broken, please drop off the broken one and pick up a new (but somewhat smaller) one from the end of my driveway. Continue reading Post #237 Replacement yard sign stakes

Post #236: The tear-down boom actually has zero impact, or, by-right jumps the shark

After sitting through Wednesday’s Planning Commission (PC) meeting I had a revelation.  I’ve been looking at the tear-down boom (Post #217) all wrong. Now that I have revised my thinking, and modeled it after the logic used by some members of the planning commission, I now realize that the tear-down boom has absolutely no impact on anything in the Town of Vienna.

Here’s the key:  Every owner of a small home in Vienna has the right to tear down their home and build a vastly larger home on the lot.  And so, because they have the right to do that, the only logical way to assess actual tear-downs is against this by-right baseline. This was the key bit of logic that had escaped me before.

And so, the following are inescapable conclusions of that logic:

  1. These new, much larger homes have zero impact on the schools.
  2. There is no impact on the Town of Vienna tax base.
  3. The tear-down boom leaves the look of our residential streets unchanged.
  4. Conversion of the entire housing stock to very large homes has no impact on the perception of Vienna as “small town”.

If you think this looks a bit off, I’ll just remind you of the logic used to get there.  The right way to assess a change that actually will occur (an actual tear-down), is against a baseline of what could possibly have been done, by right.  No matter how improbable.  And so, logically, because all homeowners have the right to tear down and rebuild, the actual tear-down boom has zero impact.

This is exactly the logic used by some, at Wednesday’s PC meeting, to justify, in part, the size of 380 Maple West.  This is the logic of the by-right analysis as it is currently being done. Continue reading Post #236: The tear-down boom actually has zero impact, or, by-right jumps the shark