Post #514: Sunrise: Public hearing, and lawsuit

Artist’s conception, eye-level view from across the street, Sunrise at Maple and Wade Hampton.  Source:  Rust Orling Architecture, Sunrise assisted living plans dated 12/13/2019, as posted for the 1/27/2020 Vienna Town Council meeting.

Tomorrow night’s (1/27/2020) Town Council meeting will include a public hearing on the Sunrise assisted living facility at 380 Maple West (Maple and Wade Hampton).  This is the MAC project that was originally approved for roughly 40 condos plus first-floor retail, but after approval it morphed into an 85-unit assisted living with a captive cafe as the only first-floor retail space.

It’s a pretty good bet that nothing will stand in the way of approval.  That said, if you wish to speak at this public hearing (for up to three minutes), show up at tomorrow’s (1/27/2019) Town Council meeting, starting at 8 PM.  Meeting materials can be found at this link.

My understanding is that this is almost the last hurdle that Sunrise must face.   After this, the only remaining pubic meeting will occur just before they start construction, where the Board of Architectural Review will have to give one last approval.  Otherwise, this is the last word that the Town will have on this project.


What about that lawsuit?

Source:  Fairfax county court, via Shelley Ebert.

Lurking in the background is Sunrise’s $30M lawsuit against the Town of Vienna.  The lawsuit arose from the Town Council’s denial of Sunrise’s original proposal to build at Maple and Center.  For background, see Post #342, Post #353, Post #405, Post #441.

The gist of the lawsuit is a claim of age discrimination.  And the fact of that lawsuit is one of the reasons I say nothing will stand in the way of approval at the current location.

The that lawsuit appears still to be in process.  As of two days ago, the only change is that one of the lawyers had withdrawn from the case (apparently, to become a judge).  So, for sure, the lawsuit remained live as of 1/3/2010, and no change has been filed since then.  It remains scheduled for a jury trial in June 2020.

One would assume that once Town Council approves this tomorrow, Sunrise will feel comfortable enough that they’ll drop the lawsuit.  But as of right now, it appears that they continue to pursue the lawsuit regarding the prior denial in the center of Vienna, even as they seek approval to build more-or-less the same building near the border of Vienna.

I don’t think I can read anything into that other than sound business strategy.  It will be interesting to see whether anyone breaks the unwritten taboo at tomorrow’s Town Council meeting and actually mentions the lawsuit in public (gasp!).  I’m betting that none dare be so gauche.  But that will at least give me something to look for, in what should otherwise be a snoozer of a pro-forma approval.

 

 

Post #513: Light trespass and protecting housing adjacent to Maple

The Chick-fil-a-car-wash is in the process of getting some exterior modifications to reduce light trespass, that is, excessive and annoying spillover of light onto adjacent properties.  In this case, the spillover is from the interior lighting of that building onto the nearby townhouses.  Councilman Potter championed this change on behalf of the adjacent neighborhood.  Approval for those modifications was supposed to occur at the last meeting of the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), but was postponed.

So, good for them, for being willing to make the changes to reduce their light trespass.  But you have to ask a) why does a brand new building need this retrofit, and b) is this a one-off problem, or a generic problem that needs to be addressed for future buildings as well?

The answers, as far as I can tell are that a) the Town only checks for light spillover on paper, not in the field, and those paper estimates of light spillover have many shortcomings, and b) yeah, there are already indications that this is an underlying problem that should be addressed more broadly and more proactively.

What I’m saying is, don’t think of this as some sort of one-off mistake.  It’s a single example of a generic shortcoming of the zoning process.  It should be addressed as such.  In much the same way that I argued for changing the code to require closing in garages that face residential areas (to control noise pollution), the Town needs to step up its game and provide real checks on light trespass from new commercial development. Continue reading Post #513: Light trespass and protecting housing adjacent to Maple

Post #512: Census nonsense from Town government, and the larger lesson to be learned from that.

I have been told by friends that I need to keep going on this blog.  And so I will grudgingly try to grind out posts on a fairly regular basis.

That said, there seems to be little point to doing the extensive homework required to support the factual and logical accuracy of these posts.  Facts and logic are ineffective tools of rhetoric in the modern era, and my insistence on that approach is more a remnant of old habits than it is an effective means of mass communication.  I’ll go so far as to say that most readers don’t give a rat’s ass about factual accuracy, mine or anyone else’s.  After all, the central two-part concept of social media is that that we are each empowered to have strongly held and firmly expressed opinions, yet none of us is burdened to do even the slightest bit of homework so that we know what we’re talking about.

So it’s high time that I got with the program.  Logically, stridency, rather than accuracy should be my goal.  And so, in the toxic spirit of righteous cluelessness that is so central to internet-based discourse, let me dive right in.  I’ll try to keep this one short, to the point, and fact-free.

At the last Town Council session I attended, the following statement was expressed by the Director of Planning and Zoning, and duly echoed at various points by pro-MAC Town council member(s).

We have to wait to 2021 to revise the Town Comprehensive Plan because 2020 Census data will be available then.

Continue reading Post #512: Census nonsense from Town government, and the larger lesson to be learned from that.

Post #511: Three followups to the last Town Council work session

Source of this image is linked here.

This is about three unrelated points from the Monday Town Council work session that, in hindsight, struck me as possibly worth writing up:  The Town traffic simulation, the treatment of the Town strategic “plan”, and the end game 18 to 24 months from now.


Town traffic simulation.

Part of the Town’s “Multimodal” traffic study estimated the impact on traffic congestion from Maple Avenue development.  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the consultants did to arrive at their numbers.  As of last night’s meeting, I have officially given up on that, because I can’t make head or tail out of it.

But I did take away one thing from trying to puzzle that out:  There’s a lot of uncertainty (wiggle room) in that calculation.  That’s worth noting, I think.  See if you can follow this.

  1. Back in August, the contractor presented results showing 758 additional net new evening rush-hour trips from Maple Avenue redevelopment.  They did not talk about it during that presentation, or during their next presentation.  But it was on a slide that they skipped over (Post #358).
  2. One issue I had with that is their “baseline” traffic, i.e., the number of trips that they assumed occurs right now.  Their graphic clearly showed that they assumed that (e.g.) currently-empty buildings were generating traffic on Maple.
  3. The single worst example of that was the assumption that the Suntrust Bank (east) currently gets 381 trips in the afternoon rush hour.  As previously noted, that’s a ludicrous number — it amounts to one car going into or out of that bank parking lot every 10 seconds.  Councilman Majdi called them out on that, but both the contractor and Town Manager strongly defended that as “science”.  I was so ticked by that misuse of the term “science” that I sat in the bank parking lot and counted cars to demonstrate that the actual traffic to that building was about one-tenth of that (Post #465).
  4. When I want to look at the final report, I couldn’t find those 381 trips.  As it turns out, at yesterday’s work session, it was revealed that the contractor removed those 381 existing trips from the baseline.  Simply zeroed them out.  That’s why they are no longer in the report. And so, presumably, we have no further cause for complaint.
  5. OK, fine, I can do arithmetic.  If they remove 381 from the baseline, that should then add 381 to the net new trips.  (Why?  Because you net out the existing traffic, when calculating the net new traffic.  If you reduce existing traffic by 381, then you should have increased the net new traffic from development by 381.
  6. And yet … in the final report, the net new trips from Maple Avenue actually decreased from 758 to 500.

So, without pondering how they justified that, just do the math.  Focus on the simple arithmetic of how they had to have gotten from the prior estimate to the current estimate.  Solve for X:  758 + 381 + X = 500.  Turns out, X = -639.  That is, they managed to extract a further 639 net new trips out of their analysis, to get from the original estimate that (presumably) netted out the Suntrust 381 in the baseline, to the final estimate that did not.  Just as a matter of arithmetic.

This X factor of -639 trips is what economists call a structural uncertainty in the estimate (as opposed to a statistical uncertainty).  It’s the uncertainty that arises from doing the numbers one plausible way versus another (as opposed to a more traditional statistical uncertainty, which arises from purely random factors, so to speak).

So this lower bound for the true stuctural uncertainty of the estimate — how much it changes based on choices made by the analyst — is larger than the estimate itself.

A lot of other things about the methods and results looked counterintuitive to me.  For example, the net new traffic during the AM rush hour, to the extent that it left Vienna, flowed mostly westward (i.e., against the direction of morning rush hour traffic).  About 2.5x as many additional cars exited Vienna at Nutley as at Follin.  But put those issues aside.  The simple arithmetic of getting from the draft to the final — the X above — is what convinced me that I would never have any real understanding of how they arrived at their numbers.

So this is truly a black box, and a black box it shall remain.  There are open-source software packages that allows individuals to model transportation networks (e.g., here, here, or here.)  All of them require considerable amounts of data as input (e.g., traffic light timings, traffic counts).  I’m not going to put in the effort to try to gin up my own estimate.  But my conclusion is that this is the only way to avoid having the results be a total black box.


Addendum:  Traffic counts and the K-Q curve.

Addendum:  I also have no clue what these traffic models do when actual traffic passes the peak of the “K-Q curve”.  (Briefly, as you try to stuff more and more vehicles through a given roadway (increase the density of cars per square foot, traditionally represented by “K”), each individual car may move more slowly, but in aggregate, the total flow of cars (represented by the letter “Q”) increases.  That is, at first, each car may move slower, but you get more total cars moving through the road segment.  But as you continue to add cars, you reach a point where the reverse is true:  You get so crowded that adding more cars actually reduces total traffic flow.  Not only does each car move more slowly, but you actually get fewer total cars to pass through the road segment in a given amount of time.  That point — where jamming more cars onto the road actually begins to reduce not just speed, but total traffic flow — that’s the peak of the K-Q curve, as in this diagram (k = density of cars, q = total flow of cars through the roadway, v = average car speed).

Source:  Wikipedia.

As I understand it, this is the reason you will see (e.g.) metered on-ramps (ramps with traffic lights) at the on-ramps to the inside-the-beltway portion of I-66.  They are trying to avoid passing the peak of the K-Q curve.   Once you pass that peak, you are helping nobody by allowing more cars onto the roadway.  Not only does every individual car move slower, but you actually get fewer total cars to pass down the highway in a given amount of time.  All you do is increase the size of the backup.

It sure seems to me that we hit the peak of the K-Q curve during morning rush hour.  At least sometimes.  At the point where traffic from the Courthouse and Maple light backs up all the way to Nutley, it’s tough for me to imagine what we haven’t hit and passed the maximum possible through-put of the Maple-Courthouse intersection.  Here we are, just before 9 AM, looking east and west on Maple, at the Nutley Street intersection.

But here’s the technical question.  Look at the diagram above and think of the curved line as a hill.  In terms of traffic counts, you get the same traffic count if you are halfway up the upslope of the hill (before the peak of the K-Q curve, where traffic is light and moving well) as you do halfway down the downslope side of the hill (past the peak, where traffic is packed and moving slowly).

I think this explains one oddity of the report, in that the consultants seem to think that we have one long rush hour period from about 8 AM to about noon.  Because they are looking at the traffic counts, and the flow of cars is about the same throughout that period.  Like so:  The flow of traffic (cars/hour) is the same at 9 AM as it is at 11 AM.

Source:  Vienna multimodal transit report, 12/20/2019 draft, page 3-13.

But as anyone who drives that road can tell you, there’s a stark difference in the level of traffic queues or waiting times between 9 AM and 11 AM.  Just before 9, traffic routinely looks like the pictures above.  Whereas around 11 AM, traffic flows far more freely.  But you see no difference on the graph above, because the traffic counts, by themselves, are blind to the fact that Maple hits capacity during the rush hour.  The count you get when you are on the downslope side of the K-Q curve (just before 9 AM, with huge backups as pictured above) is the same as the count you get when you’re still on the upslope of the curve (around 11 AM say, when traffic moves pretty well).

So that’s just an oddity that I noticed.  Traffic counts (cars/hour) do not, by themselves, accurately measure traffic, because of the ambiguity caused by hitting the peak of the K-Q curve.  Very light traffic and very heavy traffic can generate identical traffic counts.  And the graph just above doesn’t show that we have one long rush hour.  It just shows that the total traffic counts don’t change much between the absolute peak of the AM crunch (which I place at about 8:45 AM) and the must less crowded mid-morning period.  I think that, as much as anything, demonstrates that we hit some measure of capacity on Maple during AM rush hour.  Once you hit capacity on Maple — as I infer that we due during the AM rush — additional traffic does not result in additional traffic counts.

I’ll mention one other truly weird possibility.  At this most recent meeting, Coucilman Noble made much out of the new traffic light system that Vienna is getting.  (I have the vague notion that VDOT, not the TOV, is responsible for that, but that doesn’t matter).  If that traffic light system actually increases throughput during the periods when Maple is at capacity (something that I doubt will happen, per discussion of capacity above, but is possible), then, by traffic counts alone, it will make it look as if traffic has gotten worse during rush hour.  That’s just another example of the way in which traffic counts, alone, can provide a misleading indicator of traffic when a road is at capacity.  If there’s a fundamental change in the roadway (in this case, new light timing), traffic (counts) going up can mean that traffic (wait times) is going down.

And as a final, final note on that, if the Town of Vienna wants Vienna citizens to be aware of some profound benefit they are going to get from new traffic signals, I suggest that they actually provide at least some sort of description of what they intend to do.  Near as I can tell, the entirety of what Vienna has to say about this project is a total of 23 words on this page on the Town of Vienna website.  Normally, as you may realize, I will do my homework to understand what the Town is about.  But from the description, I can’t even find the words to Google up what this is.

 


Town Strategic “Plan”

In theory (and by law), anything the Town of Vienna government does needs to comply with the Town’s strategic plan.  But if you look back at when the Town developed MAC zoning, they developed MAC zoning (2014), then rewrote the strategic plan (“mixed use development) to match it (2015-2016).

This more-than-begs the question of what you mean by “plan”, if you rewrite the plan to match what you subsequently decided to do.  I have a vague idea that it isn’t even remotely legal to do that.

That said, based on the last work session, that’s the plan going forward.  When Councilman Majdi brought up the idea of addressing the comprehensive plan first, that was (of course) immediately shot down.  The agreed-upon sequence is now to rewrite the zoning (with apparently no restrictions whatsoever), and then once again rewrite the comprehensive plan to match whatever comes out of the zoning rewrite, if necessary.

Just in passing, and to underscore how loosey-goosey this is, Town staff have now set it up so that this Town Council is actually providing less guidance to this process than occurred during the original development of MAC zoning.  At least, under MAC, Town Council somehow arrived at a firm limit on building height.  Here … near as I can tell, anything goes.  Town Council has not publicly agreed on even one single thing that they want to see in a revised MAC zoning.  It’s all up to the Department of Planning and Zoning.  That’s no surprise, given that Planning and Zoning appears to be controlling this process.


Looking 18 months down the road.

Fundamentally, the limit on the density of development on Maple Avenue appears to be a political limit.  It’s really about what the median Vienna voter wants.  There’s no technical barrier to filling Maple Avenue with Chick-fil-A-car-washes.  It’s just that the people who live here do not, on average, seem very fond of that idea, and they will vote for people who say they won’t do that.

This is all the more true if you purposefully ignore any other possible limits to growth.  E.g., if you will not discuss development in the context of the capacity of Maple to move traffic, or in the context of impacts on nearby residential neighborhoods.  Barring all that — if you acknowledge no other limits — then the only limit on the density of Maple Avenue development is a political limit.

This is a point that Councilman Majdi brought up at that work session.  And either his fellow Council members didn’t get it, or they just shot it down as sort of knee-jerk reaction.

So I need to point out the following:  Town staff have structured this process so that our elected officials have no say in shaping the new MAC.  They will have no formal input in what happens to MAC zoning until the very end of the process.  The process will be controlled by the Department of Planning and Zoning, with input from the Planning Commission (still largely staffed by holdovers from prior Town Council.)  Only at the very end of the process will Town Council be presented with the finished products.

Councilmember Patel tried to reverse that — to get Town Council to have first say over the shape of the revised MAC zoning — and got quashed by the pro-MAC members of Town Council.

So I’m just pointing out the disconnect here.  The only functional limit on MAC density is a political limit.  And our political body is (formally, at least) completely shut out of the process of shaping the new MAC, until the very end.

The only logical conclusion is that this is likely to end (or, at least, risks ending) in some sort of train wreck.  The people actually structuring the new MAC are not subject to any political constraint — they are not elected.  And the people who are elected are not part of the MAC-rewrite process.  That’s exactly what the response to Councilmember Patel established.  But in the end, the constraint on what can and can’t be done is a political one.   So this is a fundamental mis-alignment of incentives, and poor overlap between scope of authority and scope of responsibility.  Town Council is going to be responsible for what comes out of this process, but they have been stripped of all authority to shape it.  

What guarantees that Town Council will be handed a new MAC that is politically acceptable?  Nothing.  The process is literally and purposefully structured that way.  Any notion that Town Council would offer overall guidance (by having first crack at proposals) was firmly snuffed out at this past Town Council work session.

And that’s the scenario that I reckon as a train wreck.  Suppose the very-pro-development Department of Planning and Zoning, working in a political vacuum, comes up with a zoning proposal that appears unacceptable to the median Vienna voter.  Then what happens?

I believe that Town staff are actually counting on that possibility of train wreck.  That is, they are counting on being able to cram this down Town Council’s throats, at the end of the process, one way or the other.  They think that those who oppose larger buildings and higher-density development will blink, in order to avoid that train wreck.  (E.g., to avoid vetoing a proposal that too two years and a quarter-million-dollar contract to develop, and that includes a bunch of purely technical and non-controverial fixes to Town Code in addition to a rewritten MAC.)  By refusing to separate out the non-controversial “clean up” portion of this work, from the more controversial changes to Town zoning, they can given Town Council a one-vote take-it-or-leave it choice (as I have already noted, per Post #483 and others).

Or, possibly, they are hoping that this next election will lead to a change in the fortunes of the pro-MAC portion of Town Council.  So that by the time this comes to a vote, they’ll have the votes for a higher-density MAC zoning.  That’s certainly possible.  From what I can tell, the anti-MAC forces seem totally disorganized at this point.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Post #510: Last night’s Town Council work session

The materials for this meeting are on this Town of Vienna web page.

I had intended to record this meeting, but I goofed, and so I have no audio recording.   This writeup is based entirely on about a dozen pages of sketchy notes.

For a brief shining moment, last year, I used to be able to say, no problem, the Town will post its recording of the meeting.  But they’ve just quietly stopped doing that.  In hindsight, looks like that started at the end of November, per the graphics above.  I noticed it in early December, (see Post #501, Hebrews 13:8), and tried to make light of it.

But ultimately, it’s not funny.  Well, it’s kind of funny, in a hypocritical way, for a Town Council that blathers about how deeply and sincerely they want “transparency” in Town government.  In any case, with regard to timely access to the content of these meetings, we’re right back where we were a year ago.  If one of the the peasantry citizens wants to know what the Town government is up to, he or she must attend these meetings in person.  Or have somebody record it for them.  As I intended, but failed, to do in this case.

And so, as we start the new year, we’re back to where we were a year or two ago, with respect to public access to the Town’s recordings of these meetings.

And, despite an election, and turnover of some Town Council seats, in a nutshell, that’s pretty much my take on this entire work session.  Nothing has changed.

Some detail follows.


Town actions from the Multimodal study.

The first part of the meeting dealt with action items from the Town’s Maple Avenue Multimodal study.  At one point, one member of Town Council described these items as “window dressing”.  I think that was in the context of Maple Avenue traffic congestion.  And that comment pretty much summarizes it for me.

So, they’re going to make the W&OD road crossings uniform, and muck about with the intersection of Church and Mill, and so on.  If you want to know the details, look at the meeting materials here.

It appeared that there was no apparent effort to do any type of cost-effectiveness analysis.  So this appeared to be a some collection of targets of opportunity and pet projects.

Not that anybody is listening, but I’ll give an example.  If you search the contractor’s appendix, looking for accidents with pedestrians, you’ll find none at the corner of Church and Mill.  If you search the Commonwealth’s TREDS, for the past five years, ditto.   By my recollection, it’s rare even to see a pedestrian there when the road is busy.  Near as I can tell, the Town does not even have a count of pedestrian volume for that intersection (as it does for others, as part of its 2015 traffic light timing study).  They don’t know if, in a typical rush hour, one person crosses that on foot or 100 people do.

And so … closing off the right-turn-lane, and reconfiguring the intersection of Church and Mill is a Town of Vienna pedestrian safety priority.  Perhaps there’s some long-standing history of accidents there that does not appear in any current set of accident reports?  Otherwise, it beats me why that’s somehow a priority, from the standpoint of pedestrian safety.

Don’t know that there’s much else to talk about.

The Town is thinking of spending $400K/year (hopefully, of somebody else’s money) on a trolley for Maple and Church.  I’m not even going to bother to try to grasp the cost-benefit analysis there, but I will take a minute to correct errors of fact in that discussion.  Fairfax County took over almost all local bus transit from  Metrobus, starting in 1985.  (So the lack of a Metrobus route down Maple should not be a surprise to anyone.)   The Fairfax Connector 463 (Maple Avenue) service is not rush-hour only, but in fact runs every half hour M-F from about 5 AM to about midnight.

That said, I was probably the only person in the room who has ever ridden that bus (Post #225).  I guess the lack of understanding about the existing Maple Avenue bus service is understandable, because I don’t think anybody there actually gave a crap one way or the other, whether or not the description of current bus service was accurate.  If the Town wants a Trolley, then the Town wants a Trolley.  Besides, Vienna is too bougie for a bus (Post #416).

As a coda, I should note that Connector service is a lifeline for people with disabilities, who (in my limited experience) are significantly over-represented among ridership.  Pretty sure the Town isn’t even thinking about ADA access issues for the proposed Town Trolley.

And I guess I need to say that the Town is going to fund a study of the need for parking — in 2023, after they’ve funded two additional parking garages.  So, we’re back to that ready, fire, aim approach that appears to be a tradition in Town of Vienna planning.

Read the meeting materials if you want to know more.


Scope of work for rewriting the entire Vienna zoning code

Bottom line here is that I really don’t have the heart to write this up.  Suffice it to say that the Town Council spent spent a couple of hours, mostly wordsmithing the minutiae of the Staff-written Scope of Work document.

Town Council’s comments on that document were developed in private, via a Noah’s Ark (Post #480) meeting.  And, oddly, while it’s illegal for the Town to vote on anything in private — and so, clearly illegal to vote on anything in a Noah’s Ark meeting — nevertheless the discussion clearly separated out the comments that had four or more positive votes from Town Council members, from those that had three or fewer.

So that was a learning experience.  They can’t vote in private, by law.  But … approving comments with four or more in agreement was not the same as voting.  Got it.

So they spent their time buried in the details like good little boys and girls, doing exactly and only what Town Staff directed them to do.  Anyone who was naughty, and tried to raise bigger issues (Majdi), was firmly quashed.  Any notion that (e.g.) you might moderate the pace of development if it might increase traffic congestion was firmly excluded.  Any notion that Town Council would get to see the issues early on, and so direct the course of this from the outset, was firmly put down.  Any notion that you might separate out the non-controversial “clean up” portion of the task from the controversial policy changes, and so have separate votes on those pieces, was absolutely rejected.  The idea that we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the MAC zoning development was immediately swept aside.  And any notion that Town Council should lead this process, by expressing a clear description of what they desire for the Town of Vienna, faded as fast as a fart on a windy day.

So, God bless Councilman Majdi for giving it a try.  But he was the lone voice of dissent on … yeah, pretty much all of that.

Bottom line, as far as I can tell, is that Town Staff — meaning the Department of Planning — will now proceed to lead Town Council by the nose through this process.  They’ll present Town Council with finished pieces of the new zoning  (“modules”), and … I don’t know, maybe allow them to do some more wordsmithing.  Then … just guessing here … force them to vote on the whole thing, up or down.

So, for me, this meeting just validated what I believed to be true in Post #487 and Post #495.

And if you don’t believe my description, listen to it for yourself.  Oh, sorry, I guess you can’t.  The Town has a recording of the meeting, to aid Town staff in constructing the minutes for the meeting.  But you’re not going to get to hear that.

Post #509: Public meetings this week relevant to MAC zoning.

There are two meetings this week with some relevance to MAC zoning.

Monday, 1/13/2020, at 7:30 PM in Town Hall, the Town Council work session will include discussion of projects to undertake from the Maple Avenue Multimodal transportation study, and discussion of the scope of work for the contract to rewrite all the zoning rules in Vienna, including MAC zoning.

The relevant materials can be found here:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=746846&GUID=1854A3F9-B0DC-4553-9492-7A352244EE40&Options=info&Search=

Thursday, 1/16/2020, at 7:30 PM in Town Hall, the last item for the Board of Architectural Review meeting is a request to add screening to the Flagship Car Wash to prevent interior lighting from that building from disturbing the neighbors.

The relevant materials can be found here.
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4301148&GUID=29032CE5-B558-470B-84FE-BBF90083669E&Options=&Search=

Commentary:  Of these, the public discussion of the scope of work (ground rules) for rewriting Vienna zoning comes as a surprise.   This item was only added to the agenda as of last Friday, and the last I had heard, that discussion was supposed to take place in private via a “Noah’s Ark” meeting.  I’m not sure what, if anything, has changed about .

Post #507: Last night’s Town Council meeting

The 1/6/2019 meeting was largely uneventful.  In this post I summarize a handful of items from that meeting in not-quite-chronological order.

You can find the meeting materials on this page.  You can find my audio recording of the meeting (taken from the Town’s streaming of the meeting) at this Google Drive link.  My .xls “index file” to show you where to find items on the tape can be found at this Google Drive link.

For your reference, here’s the agenda:

2020 01 06 Town Council meeting agenda

 


A pig flew past the window, chasing after a lead balloon.

About two and a half minutes into the meeting, my wife got up and asked Town Council voluntarily to comply with both the Virginia Campaign Finance Disclosure Act (CFDA) and the Stand by Your Ad act.

The reception to this request was less than enthusiastic.

You can see my CFDA discussion in Post #340.  Currently, no campaign finance laws apply in Town of Vienna elections.  Anyone can give any amount of money to any Town of Vienna candidate.  There is no requirement that any such contribution be publicly reported.  And anyone may post ads trying to influence the outcome of the election without revealing who they are.

My wife is asking the Town to change this situation by voluntarily placing town  elections under the CFDA, as the Town of Herndon did earlier this decade.  They aren’t going to do that.  Not much I can do except to say, please remember this (and the Noah’s Ark meeting) the next time Town Council starts blathering about how much they favor transparency in government. 


Candidates for Mayor

Council members Colbert and Springsteen announced that they would be running for Mayor.  Colbert stressed her strong association with (and blessing from?) the current Mayor.  Springsteen emphasized both his long-standing service and his understanding of Vienna citizens’ desire to maintain “small town” Vienna.  You can hear their speeches starting around 1:01:00 (just over one hour) into my tape of the meeting.

Apparently it is Vienna tradition that anyone on Council who intends to run for Mayor should makes that announcement at the first meeting of the new year.  (I wasn’t aware of this but others assure me that’s the case.)  The inference — but clearly not a hard-and-fast rule — is that nobody else on Council is running for Mayor.

If that’s the full list of candidates, then from my myopic lens of reducing the size and extent of redevelopment, that gives me an obvious choice of Springsteen over Colbert.  This, notwithstanding the recent vote to commingle the MAC rewrite with the rewrite of all the zoning in Vienna, and to develop the ground rules for doing that in secret (Post #495).


Level of service standards for Maple

This one turned out to be a huge disappointment for me.

You can read my just-prior post for the background, but, briefly, the issue is whether to adopt some goal for reasonable traffic flow down Maple as part of the Town’s comprehensive plan. That goal would be expressed as a “level of service” on Maple, graded from A (free flow of traffic) to F (gridlock).  Fairfax County has a county-wide standard of no less than a “D” level of service, but accepts level “E” in some congested areas.  Currently, Maple Avenue as a whole appears to score as level “D”.

Why was I disappointed?  First, this appears to have been initiated by Town staff, not Town Council.  (Councilmen Noble, asked, in effect, “did we ask for this”?).  Second, apparently Town staff intend to use this in the narrowest possible way, by looking at the additional traffic from one development project at a time, and if that traffic pushes Maple Avenue below the acceptable level of service, requiring that project to adopt “mitigation measures” to maintain the level of service.  Third, Councilman Majdi brought up the issue of integrating such a standard into an overall redevelopment plan for Vienna, he got (what I heard) as a bunch of evasion and double-speak.  To me, at least, it was not at all clear how this fits into the overall rewrite of all the zoning in the Town of Vienna, if at all.

On that last one, I’ve seen that sort of purposeful ambiguity enough times to realize what that means.   Town staff aren’t going to do that, but they aren’t going to say that they aren’t going to do that.  So if there is any overall concept of “please do not develop Maple to the point where traffic cannot move”, that’s going to have to come from Town Council, and will likely be opposed in the usual manner by Town staff.

So that’s the crux of my disappointment.  I thought that Town Council would use this to act like real planners, and use it to shape the overall scope of allowable Maple Avenue redevelopment.  As in, if we forbid any expansion of Maple Avenue itself to handle more cars (which is unspoken but appears to be true), then let’s estimate how much additional development we can afford on Maple before we drive the level-of-service below level “D” (or “E”, or whatever they adopt as the standard).  And then structure the new zoning regulations to give us no more than that limit.

I.e., I thought they intended to do some actual forward-looking planning, acknowledging the key role that traffic congestion plays in qualify-of-life in Vienna.  But if they did that, it would probably limit the overall extent of development on Maple.  So that sort of proposal certainly isn’t going to come out of our strongly pro-development Town staff.  Any such thinking would have to come out of Town Council.  And I’m not hearing any such thinking, yet.

The other disappointment is that, if used as proposed by staff, this is a traffic-control placebo.  Staff can point to it and say that they’ve addressed the impact of development on traffic, when they have done no such thing.

Why?  Traffic congestion is the cumulative effect of a lot of little decisions.  Traffic congestion can rarely be attributed to any one point source or any one development.   In all likelihood, any “level of service” goal will never be binding on one individual development.  (With the possible exception of the redevelopment of Giant Food, which could pour on-order-of a thousand cars onto Maple each morning, at that one location (Post #479).)

It’s all about the difference between “development” and “a development”.  If you’re serious about not screwing up Maple Avenue traffic any further, what we need is some overall limit on (the totality of) redevelopment on Maple.  (If such a limit is warranted by objective analysis.)  Absent action by Town Council, what we are going to get from Town staff is a rule that addresses “a development”, meaning one individual project along Maple Avenue.

Not only is that not going to address the issue, it’ll let people dodge around the fact that the true issue hasn’t been addressed.  It’s the traffic analog of the completely ineffective open-space requirement.  Look, MAC is designed to give you parks and plazas!  It says so right in the law.  Now take a close look at the size and quality of the open space MAC has brought thus far.  That’s how much traffic congestion control via a one-development-at-a-time approach to level-of-service will likely bring.


Vacating alleyways

Again, read my last post for details.  This ended up being deferred.

My takeaways from this are the following.  First, I don’t really understand the law here.

Second, virtually nobody else other than the Town attorney understands the law here.  Not the people asking for the Town to vacate the alleyway right-of-way, not Town Council, and so on.  Based on what the Town Attorney said, in most cases, the Town can’t sell the right to the alleyway, it has to revert to one or the other of the adjacent property owners, depending on how the alley was created in the first place.  And that requires researching the original title to the land.)

Third, the Town has no systematic plan for addressing these requests.  I think Councilman Noble emphasized that.

Fourth, there doesn’t seem to be any systematic plan for addressing a lot of issues with the Town right-of-way.  This is what Councilman Majdi had tried to get a handle on at the last meeting, but got shot down in favor of having the Town Manager do an “after action” (followup) report on the Wawa tree cutting, and how the Town could prevent such mishaps in the future.

On that last point, I thought the Town Council was mixing apples and oranges, but maybe not.  Today they were addressing the narrow issue of disposing of Town alleyway rights-of-way that serve no public purpose.  Majdi’s point, from last time, was far broader, and included things like oversight of treatment of Town right-of-way during redevelopment.

Councilman Springsteen was disinclined to consider any requests for vacating alleyway rights-of-way at the moment, in light of what happened with Wawa.  His position is that we needed to keep these a buffers between business and residential areas.

When all was said and done, this issue was tabled until the Town Manager comes back with his “after action” report on the Wawa incident.

 

Post #495: We’ve lost, really. I’m not kidding.

People don’t seem to have taken my Post #487 seriously.  Based on the reactions I’ve gotten, some people think I’m wrong, others think it was hyperbole.  I think it’s just accurate.

So without belaboring this, let me do three more things.  First, I’ll summarize three additional bits of detail that I think I now know, about this new-new plan to redo MAC zoning. Then I’ll explain how I believe this proposed MAC rewrite is going to work.   Then I’m hanging it up for the rest of the year.  I need a break.


If you want the background, read Post #487.  Briefly, the Town Council has decided to have Planning and Zoning redo all the zoning in Town, including MAC, as one big project.  And they’re giving Planning and Zoning a quarter-million dollars to hire the consultant of their choice to help them do that.  And then, as I understand it, just as with the original MAC vote, Town Council will be have a take-it-or-leave it up-or-down vote on the entire package.

My new information comes from Councilman Potter, who took the time to email me earlier this week.

First, he explained that he was the one who set this up, meeting separately with Town staff and various Town Council members.  So this new development was the outcome of his intense effort to get collaboration among all the parties involved.

The second new bit of information, again from Councilman Potter, is that there is no actual scope of work.  Instead, the scope of work, for what the Town Council voted to approve last Monday, is “in the initial stages of development”.

Third, the actual scope of work will be developed by having the Town Manager and Planning and Zoning director meet with each Councilmember.  In a spirit of cooperation.

So, for one thing, this explains why I somehow could not get the correct scope of work for this task.  First I said I could not find a public copy of the scope of work for this new task, because the Town didn’t post one with this agenda item.  Then Councilman Noble said I was wrong, and directed me to a scope of work from a meeting roughly two months ago.  So I wrote that one up, with a lengthy “caveat” section about not being sure about the scope of work.  Subsequently, I have been told that this effort was labeled incorrect as well, on social media, because I still did not have the correct scope of work.

And now I realize my fundamental problem.  The Town Council voted for this, last Monday, without knowing what “this” is.  They literally agreed on this new plan for dealing with MAC without knowing what the plan actually is.  The actual plan is still literally “to be determined”.

My basic confusion is that I never even considered that the Town Council would take an issue as important as this, and just wing it.  It never even occurred to me that as the Town Council was deciding to revamp the basic fabric of the Town, they’d do it off-the-cuff.  That this has gone from “the most divisive issue in Vienna for decades” to something you’d decide now, with details to be determine later.

The fact that all the details were tbd certainly didn’t come out in the “peace and love” discussion on Monday night.  But that appears to be exactly what they did.  They voted to approve something, and they’ll find out what they actually approved, some months from now.

Worse, it looks to me like that whole process of deciding exactly what they are going to do is going to be done in private, out of the public view, using the Noah’s Ark meeting (Post #480).  That scope of work is going to be hashed out by having the Town Manager and Planning and Zoning director meet with each Councilmember.  Thus they dodge around Virginia Freedom of Information Act requirements that all public meetings be open, by never having more than two Town Council members in the room at once.

Just keep that in mind the next time Town Council members start spouting off about “transparency” in government.


Next I’m going to bring up one little irony, and it’s about the use of a consultant to help straighten out MAC.  I don’t normally talk about myself, but I think this is worth saying.

When I first learned about MAC zoning, I was so aghast that I wrote to Town Council and offered them $50,000 to contract with an independent consultant to look the situation over and offer advice.  Not my expert, not the Town’s expert, but a true independent look at what the Town had done.  For free — I was volunteering to pay for it.  (And, to be clear, that was and is a lot of money, to me.)  My only restriction is that I would not control the consultant, and neither would they.  Truly independent look at the law.  For free.

The Town turned me down flat.  The answer was that the MAC law was fine as-is, they’d had lots of expert input, it didn’t require any changes, it was for the good of the Town, it was all about preserving small-town Vienna, and so on.  Basically,  take a hike.

Fast-forward about a year and a half, and … the Town is in the process of hiring a consulting firm to help sort out the problems with MAC zoning.  Only the key difference is, it’s not an independent consultant.  It’s going to be a consultant under the control of the Department of Planning and Zoning.

I worked as an economic consultant for more than 20 years.  You can definitely find some consultants who view it as their job to give you the answer you want.  And you always find consultants who see it as their job to take direction from the client.  Because that’s part of the job, and if you don’t do that, you don’t get the work.

So the difference between what I proposed almost two years ago, and now, is not just in the overall scope of work.  It’s in the independence of the consultant.

Just look back at the original MAC process to see what I mean.  The consultants originally wanted to divide Maple Avenue into three distinct zones, each of which was (in hindsight) roughly as large as the Mosaic District.  But by the end of the day, they’d had that nonsense beaten out of them in favor of a single zone, not because that was in the best interest of the Town, but because the Maple Avenue land owners who were running that process all wanted an equal slice of the pie.  And so somewhere along the line, some consultant ended up giving the Town what the Town’s steering committee asked for.

If you think this new MAC process is going to happen any differently, then you’re living in a dream world.  Or, as likely, you’ve never done consulting for a living.

Under this new plan, not only are you going to get a revised MAC, it will come wrapped in the sanctimony of the consultant’s blessing.  Town staff may now direct the consultant as to the general outcome that they want.  Then pretend that the results reflect the independent wisdom of their expert consultant.

I’m telling you that from experience.  Along with firing people, avoiding having to be held responsible for a decision is one of the main reasons that Fortune 500’s hire consultants.  You get done what you need or want to get done.  But you get to keep your hands clean.  A year and a half from now, everyone in Town government will be showing us their clean hands, and pointing at the consultant.


I guess I’ll end this with an anecdote about “spirit of cooperation” and Town staff.  At a recent Town Council work session, Councilman Majdi got everyone to agree that the Town should use “hard” traffic counts (meaning, actual traffic counts) in its estimates of MAC impact.  In fact, the Town’s traffic engineer helpfully volunteered that the Town had the equipment to do that.  But that, depending on the scope of the work, they might need to hire somebody to do that for them.

Fast forward to last night’s Planning Commission meeting, and there were two Town staffers, telling the PC that under no circumstances were they going to use actual traffic counts for any estimates of MAC building impacts.  Sometime between that work session, and yesterday, somebody decided they didn’t want us to know the actual traffic counts.  So that isn’t going to get done.

Mind you, it’s not merely that they aren’t going to use the actual traffic counts.  Nothing wrong with doing the traffic counts, then deciding whether to use actual data or look up some national average in a manual and use that instead.  It’s that they’re going to prevent us from knowing the actual traffic counts.  So, e.g., at at the Suntrust Bank, we’ll have no choice but to assume that a car enters or exits that lot every ten seconds, right now.  No matter how ludicrous that assumption is (see Post $465).

I believe that’s indicative of the cooperation you’ll get from Town staff on this new project.  They’ll cooperate … as long as it’s what they want to do.  But if not, I think its wishful thinking to expect them to operate with a true spirit of cooperation.  Or, at least, as far as MAC goes, I sure haven’t seen that so far.


Summary

The holidays are upon us.  So I’m going to stop blogging, at least until after the new year.  It’s just too damned depressing.  And given how the game is now rigged, it’s increasingly hard for me to see the point of it.

To recap, I believe this is now the straight story:

On Monday, Town Council voted to approve a plan that rolls a rewrite of MAC zoning into an overall rewrite of every aspect of Town of Vienna zoning.  But, as of now, there’s no actual detailed plan for how they are going to go about that.  All the things that favor our pro-development Planning and Zoning department have already been granted — ever aspect of zoning is up for grabs, and there’s a quarter-million dollars to hire the consultant of choice.  But all the things that might put in some “checks and balances” are still in the process of development.  And that development will be done in private, using meetings structured to avoid triggering Virginia open meeting requirements.  And I think that, a year and a half to two years from now, Town Council will be take a yes-or-no vote on whatever package of changes Planning and Zoning develops.

If you think this is going to come out well, for those of us who wanted to moderate the size and density of MAC buildings, you are welcome to think that.  But I don’t.  I think we’ve lost.

See you next year, I guess.  This is my last blog post for 2019.  I may reshuffle and reorganize some content on this site in the coming weeks.  Repost some older stuff.  But there will be no more new content this year.

 

Post #494: A little more focus on streetlights

Carlyle acorn

Which picture does not belong?  Source of images:  Dominion Energy website.


In my last post, I stumbled across the fact that the Town is going to put four of its “acorn” olde-tyme lamp posts along Wade Hampton, directly adjacent to the Sunrise assisted living facility.  Those aren’t shown in the architectural renderings (or at least, I didn’t see them).  You can only see them on the light plan (photometric plan).  And now that I look closely at the light plan, while the fixtures are shown, it sure doesn’t look like the estimated light levels on the ground include the output of those lights.  (At least, there no indication of any increase in light level around those light posts, which I’m fairly sure ought to occur.)

The upshot of all of that is that the existing photometric plan shows virtually no “light trespass” onto neighboring properties.  But … I’m not so sure that’s right.  And for sure, those Town-mandated lights are going to be annoyingly bright for whoever lives in the Sunrise rooms directly adjacent to those lights.

In any case, I had to learn to read light plans years ago, for a project I did at the church I then attended.  So I thought I’d look up the specs on those lamps, look at the light plan, and just generally take a closer look.  The light plan is the last page of this document (.pdf).

Continue reading Post #494: A little more focus on streetlights

Post #493: 12/11/2019 Planning Commission meeting

Carlyle acorn

Which picture does not belong?  Source of images:  Dominion Energy website.


Background

Last night’s Planning Commission meeting was about the proposed Sunrise assisted living facility at 380 Maple West (Maple and Wade Hampton).  The MAC building at that location was approved with the understanding that it was going to be 40-ish condos plus first floor retail.  But plans changed after approval, and it’s now slated to be an assisted living facility.  This meeting was one of several legally-required hearings to bless that change.

The important upshot is that the Planning Commission unanimously approved everything they had to approve.  I don’t think that came as a surprise. 

You can find the meeting materials, including the most current building plans, on this web page.  If you just want to look at pictures of the building, download this document (.pdf).  If you want the full technical detail, download this document (.pdf).

You can find the Town’s recording of the meeting this at this link:  https://vienna-va.granicus.com/player/clip/476?view_id=1   For me, that only plays in Chrome, but YMMV.  Times for starts of major sections:

  • Staff presentation: 0:04
  • Discussion of traffic counts 0:20
  • Sunrise’s presentation 0:27
  • Comments from the public start around 0:59.
  • Closure of public comment, and start of Commissioner comment, 1:20
  • Final vote, 2:18
  • End of meeting, 2:38

My ten-second take on it?  In general, my conclusion is that, to a very large degree, Sunrise listened to and acted on the neighborhood’s concerns. 

Unlike what you may have seen for other MAC projects, public comment started off with a  next-door-neighbor a) praising the developer for listening and responding, and b) offering support for the project.  Followed by several others in the neighborhood echoing that sentiment.  And the first speaker set the tone for much of the rest of the discussion:  Our main remaining concern is traffic.  It’s not just this one building, it’s going to be the cumulative effect of all the traffic generated by all the MAC buildings.  We want the Town to protect us, proactively, from the cut-through traffic that all this new development on Maple is likely to generate.

Many of my neighbors and I really would like to close Wade Hampton at Glen Avenue.  Our feeling  — between 444 Maple West, and this building, and all the rest that are likely to follow — is that if the Town is bound and determined to do this, fine.  Just keep the resulting cut-through traffic out of our neighborhood.  We’ve already been told that Public Works will not consider even as much as putting up a no-through-traffic-during-rush-hour sign.  So, we’d just like to sever the connection to Maple entirely, despite the obvious inconvenience to ourselves.

Separately, I found another issue that I would raise, given below in the section on lighting.  Sunrise appears to have been diligent about minimizing light, noise, and traffic spillovers onto the neighborhood.  But the Town of Vienna, less so.  The issue is installing four of the Town’s “Carlyle” acorn-style olde-tyme streetlights on that short stretch of Wade Hampton, a few feet from what will be bedroom windows in the Sunrise building, and a few tens of yards from residences across the street.  (N.B. Those lights are NOT shown on the architectural renderings, only on the lighting diagram.)  I think that’s the single most intrusive aspect of this proposal that could be easily remedied.

What’s the problem?  From the standpoint of lighting impact, those acorn lights are only slightly better than having high-wattage naked bulbs sitting atop poles.  Fine for an industrial/commercial area (the existing Maple).  But I’ll leave it to the reader to figure how how appropriate it is to locate those a few feet from somebody’s bedroom window.  Let alone in an existing residential neighborhood.  I believe the Town needs to rethink the use of those, period, if it continues with its plan to convert Maple Avenue into a housing district (plus retail).

 


The meeting.

The public hearing on this issue starts about 4 minutes into the recording.  Town Staff presentation went on for about ten minutes.  Here are just a handful of things I’d like to review, as they affect the neighborhood.

Just as an aside, I don’t think there’s any doubt that this assisted living facility will be approved.  It’s just a question of doing the legally-required steps.  For one thing, there’s the $30M lawsuit that Sunrise filed for being turned down, still hanging over this.  For another, given that the Town has approved a big building there, this is likely to be the least-intrusive use from the neighbor’s perspective.  For a third thing, at this point pretty much everyone has given on up on the idea that MAC was supposed to generate significant public benefits and “open space” — what was described as “parks and plazas” in the MAC statute.  This building expands the Maple Avenue sidewalk from the current 11′ to 20′, and (I think) puts a short stretch of power lines underground.  But at this point (post-Chick-fil-A-car-wash), people have come to expect no more than than that, and have come to view lot-covering buildings as the new norm.

Traffic and parking.   

In general, the conclusion is that we’re going to get more traffic than the current building generates.  Particularly more weekend traffic.  But that we’ll get less additional traffic from the assisted living facility than we would have gotten out of the condos plus retail.

FWIW, the traffic study suggests that average weekday traffic into and out of that building will be about twice what we have now (419 trips versus 230 trips).  Weekend traffic will be much higher than currently, because offices are largely closed on the weekend, but an assisted living facility is 24/7/365). But the traffic report only shows Saturday peak hour trips.

As always, you have to take these traffic projections with a grain of salt.  Among other things, the estimate of increased traffic assumed that the existing office building is a fully rented, economically vibrant building, and matches the average of some sample-of-convenience data used by the traffic engineers.  But because that’s not true, the traffic impact study overstates the amount of traffic we have there now, as we have seen in other recent studies (Post #465).  This is a systematic problem of failure to correct for “selection bias”, as I described in Post #364.

This overstatement of existing traffic was among the issues raised by Commissioner Patariu around 20 minutes into the recording.  He made the plea for actually counting the existing traffic into and out of these properties.  He got gavelled down, and Town staff didn’t back off an inch, so don’t expect them to change what they do any time soon.  This was not helped by Commissioner Couchman, who both completely misunderstood the technical issue and strongly supported staff’s decision not to count actual current traffic.  This tells me I need to do yet another post to try to explain this issue once again.  In any case, it could be worse.  The projections are that the assisted living facility will generate about twice the current weekday traffic, but only about half the weekday traffic that the condos-plus-retail would have.

For what it’s worth, the builder appears to make a good-faith effort to keep traffic from this building out of the adjacent neighborhood.  The outlet of the parking garage on Wade Hampton is marked (“no left turn”) to prevent people from traveling back into the adjacent neighborhood, and a “pork chop” island will provide a physical reminder not to turn left (though it’s not hard to drive around such a barrier).

In general, the treatment of the Wade Hampton roadway is a lot better in this iteration than with the building full of condos.  For one thing, the developers actually provided a realistic truck-turn diagram.  Second, most of the truck maneuvering can be accomplished by driving through the building, rather than backing-and-filling on Wade Hampton itself, because they retained access to the building on Maple Avenue.  For a third, they’ve given up on striping Wade Hampton for three lanes, likely due to the expected reduced traffic flow.  Which is good, because trucks weren’t going to be able to make the turn onto Wade Hampton if a car were sitting in a center-turn lane anyway.

And instead of destroying street parking, they actually added one space.  Just as an example of how things go in the Town of Vienna, when the building was presented as condos, at one point Town staff claimed the condo building would result in no loss of street parking.  Now that it’s assisted living, Town staff claim that the assisted living is better, because the condo building would have resulted in loss of street parking.  Go figure.

The only new information I got out of that is that you can’t park within 30′ of a stop-sign-controlled intersection, per Town code.  I had missed that in my prior parking analysis, and instead read a separate section about staying 20′ back from an intersection.  That said, people actually park on Wade Hampton as I had said (Post #391).

Open space and green space — not discussed but still important.

The “open space” calculation for this building provides yet another example of the totally ineffective open space requirements of the law On the detailed plans (physical page 8), you can see that the legally-required setbacks from the street, plus the narrow alleyway between the building and the adjacent lot, sum to about 6400 square feet, substantially more than the required “open space” for this lot.  As occurred with 444 Maple West, in this case the open space “requirement” doesn’t actually require any additional open space, above what is already legally required for setbacks and/or separation from the lot next door.  In addition, a good chunk of the “open space” here is a narrow strip sandwiched between the building and a fence at the lot line (i.e., not even visible open space, unless you are standing right at the end of the fence).  So, as near as I can tell, that part of the law is simply window dressing.  It’s a great selling point when touting the benefits of MAC zoning, but it doesn’t actually require anything that is not already legally required.

The story for green space (which I will sloppily equate to “pervious area” here) is pretty much the same.  Existing lot has 10.8% pervious area, all of it in the form of turf, almost all of it visible as you pass by.  The new plan has 13.4% pervious area, of which about a third is the area sandwiched between the building and the fence on the lot line (i.e., not visible unless you stand at the end of the fence).  So this new proposal has more green space, but less visible green space, than the lot as it currently stands.  And, in particular, the green space visible from an arbitrary point on Maple Avenue appears greatly reduced.  Separately, as with the previous plan, the builder plans to use a storm water planter to control runoff from the lot.

Visual and audible spillovers into the neighborhood.

In general, Sunrise appears to have tried to address neighbors’ concerns about the back of the building.  The top floor is stepped back about 20′ more than legally required.  They reduced the window area of the back facade.  They made the storm-water planter less of a box by adding curved surfaces to it.  The electrical transformer at the back of the lot will sit in an enclosure.

They also appeared to be sensitive to noise and light issues.  In addition to reducing the window area, their lighting plan shows low stray light levels at the rear property line (with a caveat to be noted below).  And they decided against having a garage door, because they thought that the noise of opening and closing a garage door would exceed the reduction in noise from closing in the garage with a garage door.

In fact, likely the single most obnoxious source of stray light in the entire proposal is not going to be from Sunrise per se.  It’s going to be from the Town’s insistence on lining Wade Hampton with those “olde-tyme” acorn-style lights.  These lights are not shown on the architectural renderings, so you don’t see them in any of the visuals for the site.  But they are shown (Letter A) on the last page of the technical drawings, the lighting plan.

Where regular streetlights are way over your head, and largely shine down, and can be replaced (eventually) with dark-sky-compliant lights (as Fairfax County is doing, slowly, through out this area, .pdf), those acorn lights sit about 14′ off the ground, and shine in every direction, and basically illuminate the sky as much as the ground.  Functionally, they are only modestly better than having naked high-wattage light bulbs sitting atop the poles.

Assuming I’m reading that right, there are going to be four (!) of those inefficient but cute lights on that short stretch of Wade Hampton.  Shining in every direction.  Located within a few yards of residences.  I’m certainly glad I won’t be living across the street from that.  And it’s clearly a mistake to locate these right outside somebody’s bedroom window, which is what you are doing by placing them adjacent to the Sunrise building.

I think this is a mistake, pure and simple, and the Town needs to rethink the use of these lights on the MAC Maple streetscape.  The Town adopted those lights when Maple was, as it now is, a purely commercial district with no buildings directly adjacent to the road.  The fact that they shine out in every direction was mostly harmless, albeit hugely wasteful and completely at odds with modern dark-sky lighting requirements.  But now, those are a poor choice if located directly adjacent to somebody’s bedroom.  Or even in a neighborhood, because you’ll have line-of-sight view of those brightly lit acrylic “acorn” globes.  I think the Town needs to take a hard look at that, and change its requirement that those lights must be installed in those locations.

Finally, Sunrise is to be commended for providing true ground-level (pedestrians’-eye) views of the building, as requested.  These are far more helpful than other approaches for judging exactly how this will look to the neighbors than other approaches (see to see how other approaches can distort perceptions about a building).  So here, as opposed to the renderings provided for the Chick-fil-a-car-wash (Post #420), the modestly broader sidewalk (14′ paved, 20′ total distance to the curb) in front of the building looks like exactly that — a modestly broader sidewalk.

Source:  Snapshot from Town of Vienna recording of the 12/11/2019 Planning Commission meeting.

(Separately, note that the picture clearly shows what I described about the green space earlier.  The green space visible from Maple, on the new building, is substantially smaller than it is now.  Compare to poor Google Street view snapshot below.)

It’s also worth noting (at around 51:00 into the tape) that they are aware of issues for those with mobility problems.  So, while they show a brick sidewalk, they plan to do that as brick over a concrete slab, to keep the brick surface as level as possible.  Otherwise, all entrances to the building are “at grade” and don’t require steps.  Given their resident population, I think Sunrise tends to be sensitive to issues like this, and the design appears to reflect that.

 Public comment started around 0:59

Unlike what you may have seen for other MAC projects, public comment started off with a  next-door-neighbor a) praising the developer for listening and responding, and b) offering support for the project.  Followed by several others in the neighborhood echoing that sentiment.  And the first speaker set the tone for much of the rest of the discussion:  Our main remaining concern is traffic.  It’s not just this one building, it’s going to be the cumulative effect of all the traffic generated by all the MAC buildings.  We want the Town to protect us, proactively, from the cut-through traffic that all this new development on Maple is likely to generate.

Of the speakers, Mike Ahrens in particular has taken the lead in showing the Town what could be done with that area.  He specifically asked that the Town bundle the closing of Wade Hampton at Glen as part of this overall project.  Basically, we’re at Ground Zero of Maple Avenue redevelopment, and from our perspective, it makes sense to block arterial traffic from running down our narrow neighborhood streets.

Many other speakers mentioned traffic, and some brought in traffic-calming measures less radical than outright road closure.  But it was clear that cut-through traffic from MAC development was our number one concern.

Subsequently, the Planning Commissioner’s commented, and, to summarize my take on it, it’s not their problem.  They punted the traffic issue to the Transportation Safety Commission (TSC). 

Well, it it’s up to TSC, we’ve already lost the battle.  Near as I can tell, the special accommodation that Public Works/TSC are willing to make, in this case, is … basically none.  Instead of using actual existing traffic counts, they’ll add in projected traffic from approved MAC buildings.  Beyond that, we can stand in line with everybody else in Vienna.  I have already summarized this in Post #436 and other posts done around that time.  The upshot is that they absolutely refuse to consider keeping a pleasant neighborhood pleasant, and only when we hit the appropriate threshold of traffic misery will they act, and then only if we jump through all the appropriate hoops.

If nothing else, I hope that other neighborhoods adjacent to Maple are taking note of this.  If your neighborhood currently does not have a big traffic problem, but you think MAC-generated development in your neighborhood will create such a problem, well … you’re stuck with it.  The Town does not see its job as preserving the peace and quiet of a neighborhood.  The Town only sees its job as acting once a neighborhood has already been made less livable by traffic.

In any case, DPW jumps in about 1:30 into the recording, and it’s pretty clear that they aren’t going to close the road.  It’s not clear they’d consider doing anything, to tell the truth.

In fact, I guess I would characterize more-or-less all the ensuing discussion, save the stray comment here or there, as a summary of the reasons why the Planning Commission was not/should not/cannot do anything with respect to the citizens’ request.

There were exceptions, most notably when Chairman Gelb (1:48 or so into the discussion) said that citizens in this situation shouldn’t have to go through the entire petition process to get something done.  Basically, that when the Town causes issues like this, it’s incumbent on the Town to try to solve those issues.  Maybe they should work out some sort of solution as part of the planning process.  I’m not sure that got any traction with the majority of PC members.

After the final vote for approval

Weirdly, the vote for the final approval motion took place at 2:18 into the meeting.  But there was another 20 minutes’ discussion on other matters.  Discussion ranged from what the Town Council passed at the last meeting, to safety at the Chick-fil-A-car-wash (though not the safety issue I brought up on this website).  I’m not going to review that portion here.