Category: Town of Vienna, VA

Post #536: Last night’s “Community Conversation”, 1: A brief review, and one useful fact about requesting Town services

Source:  Town of Vienna Website.

Last night (3/2/2020) the Town held a “community conversation“.  Admirably, they already have the video posted at this link.

Nominally, the “conversation” was about the two topics chosen by the Town.  These were a proposal to expand the single-family-home lot coverage limit beyond the current (and long-standing) 25%.  And, separately, what priority should be given to (what appears to me to be a subset) of projects recommended in the Town’s multimodal transportation study.

Offhand, I’d say that the room was full and that the number of speakers was in the low dozens.

Continue reading Post #536: Last night’s “Community Conversation”, 1: A brief review, and one useful fact about requesting Town services

Post #534: Sell the Robinson property; use the money to build sidewalks

The title of this post is somewhat more than just a cheap attention-getting trick.  But you’ll have to skip to the end to get to that.  Possibly, this post will explain why I found the discussion of sidewalks at the last Town Council meeting so irritating.

In logical order, then: Continue reading Post #534: Sell the Robinson property; use the money to build sidewalks

#533: How will the Patrick Henry Garage fit into the Maple Avenue cityscape?

This is just a quick calculation to see where the proposed three-floor Patrick Henry Garage would fit on the on the graph above.  And the answer is, until 444 Maple West gets built, the Town’s garage will be the second-largest building on Maple. (Or, given the uncertainties in the measurement, tied with the second-largest building.)

The only building that will be larger — by total enclosed volume — is the Giant Food shopping center.  And while that shopping center is one-story and sits almost 400′ off the road, the garage will be 25′ off the road.

So I’m not exaggerating when I say that we’re in the process of making a parking garage the centerpiece of the new Vienna downtown.  In the context of the current Vienna, A 220′ long three-story garage, sitting 25′ off Maple, is going to be noticeable.  Continue reading #533: How will the Patrick Henry Garage fit into the Maple Avenue cityscape?

#532: Last night’s 2/24/2020 Town Council meeting – CORRECTED

Correction:  I looked at the wrong block(s) of Plum Street.  The one block in question does not, in fact, have a sidewalk now.

The Town has already posted its video recording of last night’s meeting.  You should access that by clicking the relevant “media” link on this page of the Town’s Granicus website.

To cut to the chase:  There was not a peep about the (now) $10M parking garage — see just-prior post.  Or about the $1M increase in cost for a proposed Church Street garage, for that matter.  Not a peep about the revised Capital Plan for $35M in borrowings this year.  Again, see just-prior post.  Those two items took maybe ten minutes in total.  But there was more than an hour discussion of sidewalks, leading to a decision to authorize three stretches of sidewalk (on Plum, Cabin, and Holmes) using funds from the Robinson estate.

Those sidewalks were chosen by … the Trustee of the Maude Robinson estate.  At least a couple of Town Council members understood how irrational that decision process was (Majdi, Noble), though I did not see any progress in arriving at something more rational.  One, by contrast (Colbert), applauded the process as democracy in action, or something. Continue reading #532: Last night’s 2/24/2020 Town Council meeting – CORRECTED

#531: The $9M Patrick Henry parking garage?

When did this become a $9M project?  Beats me.  Last I recall, the only number mentioned was something like $4.7M.  Pretty sure that lower number was what was in the discussion of the capital budget.

I guess I haven’t been paying attention, because that’s the first I’ve seen of that $9M number.  But there it is, in black and white, in the documentation for that portion of tonight’s Town Council meeting, which you may access on this Town of Vienna web page.

Wait, doesn’t $9M for 188 spaces work out to be near $50K per parking place?  Didn’t (at least some) Town Council members balk at paying far less than that, for a parking garage on Mill Street?  Again, I must not have been paying close attention, because that’s sure how I recall it.  Isn’t that vastly more per space than the Town is going to pay at a proposed Church Street garage?  What the heck?

How many parking places does the Town need at this location?  You’d figure, you’d get a clear idea of that first, then proceed, right?  Nope.  Not clear that anybody has any estimate of that, but … but the Town will eventually do some sort of study, at some point, to guess at that.  It’s on the calendar for some time a couple of years from now.

How much time does the Town have to think this over?  One month.  According to Town staff, the agreement has to be signed no later than next month’s Town Council meeting.

Does this have anything to do with a modified Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), for the Town Council to re-approve at this meeting?  See materials on this Town of Vienna website page. Maybe, I haven’t quite had the time to look at it, except to see that, when the Town couldn’t fit the $35M borrowing into its current economic model, it … changed the economic model so that the $35M in proposed 2020 borrowing now fits.

Is the 2020 bond issue still, by far, the largest amount the Town has ever borrowed?  Yep.

Do we still burn through all the reserves in the bond fund, down to the agreed-upon $2M minimum safe level?  Yep, somehow, with the new economic assumptions, the reserves fall to exactly $2M with $35M in borrowings, which is exactly the minimum acceptable level.  (This is from materials for Tonight’s Town Council meeting).

Does that new projection include additional 2022 and later borrowings to cover the increased cost of the parking garage?  Not clear, because not shown.  Last time around, the figured the cost of the garage in as about $4.7M, but free to the Town (paid for by some other entity).  So it’s not clear that an additional $9M in liabilities has been worked into the future borrowing scenario.  Here’s how the Town’s projected borrowings stood as of the last (what I though was the final approved) version of the CIP.  (This is calculated from the prior CIP, not the new CIP to be approved at tonight’s Town Council meeting.)

Today, gold hit $1673 per troy ounce (per Kitco).  Does anybody remember or care what happened to meals tax revenues for 2009, during the last recession?  Nope.  Likely I’m the only person in Town who cares about that.  But just FYI, here’s the historical on that one:

Does it bother anyone but me that the Town is projecting no trouble paying for all this, based on nothing but ultra-strong revenue growth for immediate, mid-term, and far future?  Apparently not.

How long does the Town Council get to think about this new proposed CIP?  Per the presentation, no time at all — they have to approve it tonight.

#530: Our assets become our liabilities #5: Large tracts of land remaining in Vienna

In Post #526, I pointed out the absurdity of using eight acres of prime land in Vienna — in the middle of a residential neighborhood — for the Town’s leaf mulching activities.  Previously, I had written about the likely fate of the Parkwood school (Post #397), and had written up a few other local tracts of land in and around Vienna (in this post).

That got me to thinking:  Just how many significant tracts of land are left in the Town of Vienna?   Let me define that as pieces of land that are:

  • Not in the Maple Avenue or other retail /commercial zones
  • Three or more acres in extent (enough to make a small park, say), and
  • Privately held, with one owner.
  • Excluding Westwood Country Club and Navy Federal Credit Union (and associated buildings).

The point of this is to ask how many opportunities that Town might have to add to its inventory of parks.  Basically, if the Town is bound and determined to add thousands of new residents along Maple, what sort of opportunities might come up for the Town to buy some significant chunks of land for additional parks, to serve those additional residents?

With that rationale, I am ignoring the two largest tracts of privately-owned land in Vienna:  Westwood Country Club (157 acres) and the Navy Federal Credit Unit/FBI/Other industrial area (about 66 acres).  These are a) too large for the Town plausibly to purchase, and b) unlikely to be up for sale at any price the Town could possibly afford.

Another way to say it is, how rare is it for the Town to have the opportunity to buy a significant piece of land?  How nearly unique is an asset such as the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which sits at the end of my street.  How many chances to purchase land can the Town pass on before there are no more opportunities left?

To try to answer this, I did the simplest thing:  I looked at some maps, looking for large pieces of undivided land.  I scanned both Google Maps and the Fairfax County property tax maps. So I may have missed one or two, but I’m reasonably confident of the following answer:

The short answer is:  few.  There are only a handful of large pieces of land left in Vienna, and most of those are unlikely to go up for sale now or in near future decades.  So if one of these does come up for sale, it should be treated like the once-in-a-generation event that it is.

Here’s what I come up with, as my inventory.  Unsurprisingly, it consists almost entirely of tax-exempt land, both churches and non-profit corporations such as swim clubs.

I count fewer than a dozen such tracts.  Of these:

  • Seven are churches or church-related properties.
  • Two are swim clubs.
  • Two are schools.

It sure looks like the Town of Vienna remains committed to growth.  The Town government is in the process of redoing all the zoning, with funding from Fairfax County based on how much additional tax revenue the resulting additional development will create.  The Town now recently hired its first Economic Development manager.  And so on.  If there’s nothing we can do to dissuade the Town government from moving in that direction, maybe we can at least ask them to have some sort of plan to preserve some open space by having plans, in hand, for purchasing one or more of these, if they come up for sale.

Post #528: What’s your sign?

Source: https://www.clipart.email

Mine is “No right turn, M-F, 7-9 AM”.

That’ s my sign, pictured below, at the corner of Courthouse and Moorefield Roads, SW.  I used to visit it occasionally, but these days I respect its demands for anonymity (as evidenced by the blurring in the second, more recent photo).

Why is that my sign?  More than two decades ago, I complained to the Town about cut-through traffic on my (then) quiet residential street, Moorefield Road.  At that time, AM rush hour traffic used Moorefield to bypass the light at Courthouse to get to Nutley Street southbound.

The Town changed that intersection in a major way, repainting the lanes, modifying the stoplight, and putting up that sign.  They went to all of that effort just to keep rush hour cut-through traffic off one quiet little residential street.

That occurred as part of a 1997 Town-wide traffic calming effort.  As with so many parts of ancient (pre-internet) Vienna history, the only on-line record of those events is in the Town of Vienna newsletter archive.  That traffic calming effort was the lead story for several months.

I’m not quite sure how Vienna went from that era — going to great lengths to preserve a small, quiet neighborhood — to the current era — where the Town will take no action until you pass a standard threshold of misery (Post #436).  To an era where a sign like the one above is simply off the table, beyond the pale, not even subject to discussion.  Nuh-uh, no way, now how.

But aside from complaining about that change, I’ll note one more thing about the Town’s prior approach to traffic calming.  Each of those newsletter articles emphasizes that Vienna was trying to learn from other local governments.  Each announcement of a meeting says ” … and provide information from other jurisdictions on their traffic calming efforts.”

So that sets me up for a future post.  A colleague sent me the traffic calming guide from Falls Church.  Turns out, they do things somewhat differently there, some of which I like, some of which I don’t.  For one thing, they have an explicit formula for pedestrian accident risk, and they prioritize based on that.  Riskiest situations get priority.  For another, they have a multi-tiered approach, where residents always have the right to petition, but some changes can be dealt with administratively (without having to submit a petition). And some petitions require just 51% of residents to sign, others require two-thirds — but at no point do they require the 75% that the Town of Vienna requires.

Just looking at that one jurisdiction — Falls Church — I’m beginning to see that there maybe value in a systematic review of what all of our neighboring jurisdictions do for traffic calming.  I’ll work on that this week and see what I can come up with.

 

Post #527: W&OD bridge?

Two of the W&OD road crossings in the Town of Vienna will be updated, based on suggestions in the Town’s Maple Avenue Multimodal etc. study.  The W&OD road crossings at Park Street and Church Street will get raised crosswalks, turning them more-or-less into speed humps.  And they’ll get new signs.

It’s tough to say why, of all the things in that study, the Town decided that those two W&OD road crossings were a priority.  For sure, there was no formal cost-benefit or risk analysis done.  I think they just sort of liked the idea, and it was cheap to do.  So they’re going to do that, and that’ll be the tangible outcome of that study, along with filling in a right-turn lane where Mill and Church intersect.

This seems to have stirred up some interest in a W&OD bridge for the Mape Avenue/W&OD crossing in the Town of Vienna.  To be clear, we’re not getting a bridge there, and nobody is talking about paying for a bridge.  And in this post, I’m briefly going to explain why that is — why this was ignored in the Town’s Multimodal study, and will it will likely remain a low-priority issue.  My conclusion is that the stoplight we have now for the W&OD Maple Avenue crossing is probably good enough, given the size and cost of a bridge.

 

But other crossings have bridges …

Sure, but those crossings tended to be ones with significant problems and traffic, often where a new traffic light would not work, or where there are problems, despite a light, due to heavy traffic.

The closest large dedicated bridge on the W&OD is the Citizens’ Bridge in the People’s Republic of Falls Church.  This is where the W&OD trail crosses Route 7/Broad Street.  This bridge dates to 1992 or so.  Falls Church citizens agitated for a bridge because bicyclists and pedestrians were crossing Broad Street there, rather than walk/bike to the stoplight-controlled intersection at West Street.

That bridge is an object lesson in the nature of bicycle and pedestrian traffic.  At the time, the bridge was lauded as an example of effective small-town government.  But one could just as easily say it’s there because various bicyclist and pedestrian scofflaws routinely jaywalked rather than walk an extra 200 feet to cross with the light (while getting their exercise along the W&OD trail.)

More recently, the influx of new tax and toll monies means that all kinds of marginal and low-value projects are now being funded, as long as they plausibly help people get around without a car.  This includes a spate of new bridges for the W&OD.  These tend to be for intersections where the road crossings were an annoyance to bicyclists and/or motor vehicles, though not particularly dangerous (at least in my opinion).

There’s a bridge going up for the Route 29 crossing just east of Falls Church, and a bridge is planned for where the W&OD crosses Wiehle Avenue in Reston.  Neither of these is a particularly difficult crossing now, although Weihle is awkward because it’s so close to a stoplight with no place to stop in the median.  Both of these crossings, though, apparently have fairly high automobile accident rates, as cars stopping for bicyclists get rear-ended with some frequency.

Above:  Route 29 W&OD crossing just east of Falls Church, and Weihle Road crossing in Reston.

In essence, right now, these are just crosswalks used by a lot of bikes.  Not unlike the W&OD crossings in Vienna.  But soon those simple crosswalks will be replaced by some fairly large and obtrusive bridge structures.  Here’s a “before and after” view of Weihle Avenue where it crosses the W&OD trail.

Above:  Wiehle Road crossing now, and Wiehle Road showing artist’s conception of bridge.  (Orient by trees in background).  Source for Weihle bridge:  FCDOT via restonnow.com

So why not Maple Avenue in Vienna?

It boils down to need, cost, and size.  And all of these argue against a similar structure at the W&OD crossing on Maple Avenue.
First, the existing light-controlled crossing works well.  We have the occasional bicycle scofflaw crossing against the light.  But in my experience, those are few and far between.   And that’s because that current path is in fact the shortest distance.  So we do not have the problem that Falls Church had, with a constant stream of jaywalkers who were unwilling to walk to the nearest light-controlled intersection.
Second, a bridge there would necessarily be fairly large.  And it’s not that you need a massive structure to move the bicycles.  It’s that VDOT requires a minimum 17.5′ clearance (I just looked that up), and bike paths are never supposed to have more than a 5% slope if that can be avoided.  When you combine those two (17.5′ tall, 5′ slope) you realize the bridge would have to span Maple Avenue and 350′ on either side of Maple.
The upshot is that the entire bridge structure (including earthworks at either end) would have to span about 750′ (350′ + 350′ plus the width of Maple).  No coincidence, this is roughly the length of the Citizens’ Bridge in Falls Church.  So, if you look at that (above), that’s more-or-less the minimum size of structure that you can get away with.  Not due to the load of the bicycles, but due to the combination of clearance and slope limits on the structure.
So the very smallest it could be, built to those standards, would be a span from almost Church Street at one end, to almost the end of the Whole Foods market at the other.   This would cut Maple Street off from the trail and make trail access difficult.  (In fact, some of the opposition to the Falls Church Citizens’ Bridge came from local merchants who saw the bridge as discouraging bicyclists from stopping (and spending money) in Falls Church.  See the newspaper article cited above.)
It will also cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $6M to $12M.  Or so.
 
A internet search shows the cost of steel pedestrian bridges runs about $2000/linear foot for a prefab steel footbridge such as the Falls Church one. Of the 700′ length, the Falls Church Citizen’s Bridge is roughly 400′ of steel bridge, and the rest earthworks.  At that price, the steel bridge alone would cost about $8M.   So call it $10M or so, based on that.  
A second data point comes from the bridge slated for Weihle Avenue in Reston, which has a preliminary cost estimate of $11.4M, per the newspaper article cited above. 
 
A third data point is a reported cost of about $6M for what looks like a roughly-similarly-sized intersection (W&OD crossing four lanes of traffic).
Caveat:  The reported cost of the Falls Church Citizens’ Bridge, just under $1M, is vastly less than $10M after accounting for inflation.  Adjusting that circa-1992 cost for the Consumer Price Index change to 2020 yields about $2M in today’s money.  On the other hand, that initial cost estimate may have been in error, as the $11.4M Weihle Avenue bridge was originally supposed to cost under $3M.
So, maybe not exactly $10M, but somewhere in that ballpark seems likely.
In summary:  The current Maple Avenue W&OD crossing appears safe, appears to have relatively few bicyclist scofflaws, and in general provides easy on/off access to the W&OD in the heart of Vienna.  Any bridge there would necessarily be large and fairly expensive.  It’s easy enough to see why other intersections have gotten bridges before anyone would think of funding a bridge for the Maple Avenue W&OD crossing.

Post #526: Our assets become our liabilities, part 4: Beulah Road Park Industrial Zone

File this one under “aren’t you glad you don’t live there”.  Or maybe under “don’t get in the way of the Town bureaucracy.”  But certainly under “nobody else does this, and hey, I bet there’s a reason for that.”

First, walk a mile in their shoes.

Suppose you’d lived in a home in Vienna since the 1960s.  Or bought one of our many ’60’s-era houses.  Like the one pictured above.  It’s in a nice, quiet neighborhood with mature shade trees.  And all the land for half-a-mile in every direction is zone RS-12.5, for single-family houses on modest lots.

But there’s a problem.  There’s a large piece of vacant property abutting your back yard.  Historically, some Town of Vienna documents marked that tract as park land.  So you may have been foolish enough to consider that vacant land a real asset in your neighborhood.

Then, surprise:  An industrial waste processing facility moves in and takes over that lot.  This facility runs noisy machinery for hours a day.  At various time of the year, streams of diesel dump trucks move onto and off of the property, unloading and loading the materials to be recycled.  In years past, the property was littered with construction debris, until you complained to the Town about it.  And the recycling operation generates large mounds of pungent rotting organic matter.

Well, complain to the Town, you might say.  Nobody has the right to operate an industrial facility in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Nice thought.  Except that it’s the Town’s industrial facility.  Welcome to what the Town of Vienna refers to as the Beulah Road Mulch Yard.

While it’s (almost) inconceivable that the Town would grant someone else the right to use property in that location that way, the Town granted itself a conditional use permit for that mulching operation back in 2004.  You can read some of the contemporary press coverage in this link, or this link, and by following the links at the bottom of those stories.

Member of the Northeast Vienna Citizens’ Association (NEVCA) did their research on this when the issue first came up in 2003.  That’s the year the Town bought a large (and loud) tub grinder for grinding up leaves, and roughly the time the Town moved mulching operations to the current site.  Here’s their timeline for how that property was classified and used by the Town of Vienna, from the November 2003 NEVCA Notes:

Source:  NEVCA Notes, November 2003.

Why bring this up now?

OK, so that neighborhood took a beating in 2004, and has been taking that beating ever since.  Why bring that old news up now?

You may or may not recall that the Town bought a house on Beulah Road, back in 2018.  The house was directly adjacent to the Town’s Beulah Road property.  And, at the time, the official line of the Town government was that they bought it with no purpose in mind.  Even at the time, that was pretty clearly a prevarication.  That was almost surely bought with the construction of the new police station in mind, as I documented in this post, with a link to a news article by Brian Trompeter.

The Town just recently moved to reclassify that small parcel of land on which that house sites as land for “government use”, in the Town’s Comprehensive Plan.  That zoning — for government use — is not something you can see on the Town’s zoning map.  (We don’t have a zone for that.)  It’s only something that exists as a land use category in the Town’s strategic plan.

But apparently that doesn’t quite tell the whole story.  Exactly what the whole story is, it’s kind of hard to tell.  But that building and the Beulah Road property will now be used as part of the building of the new police station.  As I understand it, the Town needs somewhere to park the fleet of 20-some police vehicles, and apparently that unimproved Beulah Road property is the place they’ve chosen to do that?  Tough to say, as all I am running on at this point is rumors.

The point is, this has opened up an old wound for residents of this neighborhood.  It’s not enough to have the Town’s leaf mulching facility in their back yards.  Now, in addition, that’s going to become parking for the police fleet? which I would guess entails some use of sirens at some point?  And so, graveling or paving enough of that lot to allow for such parking?  And, maybe, as in the past, storage of the odd bit of construction debris and such, as the Town apparently did when it redid the sidewalks along Maple?

Who knows?  And that’s pretty much the point.  At one point, the Town apparently considered that to be a neighborhood park.  But over the  years, they have slowly peeled back part of the tree cover as they turned it to various other uses.  The Town turned a deaf ear to the residents of that neighborhood when it decided to use as more-or-less an industrial site, mulching all of Vienna’s fall leaf litter there.  And now, in addition, it’s to become a police vehicle parking lot, and it’s not clear what else.

If I lived there, given the history, I’d be a little worried too.  Makes my problem with cut-through traffic from 444 Maple West seem like small potatoes.

Does anyone else do this?

This, being, get their fall leaf litter converted to mulch or otherwise disposed of?  This turns out to be a fairly difficult question to answer.  But near as I can tell, nobody in this area runs an industrial-scale leaf mulching operation in the middle of a residential area.  Except the Town of Vienna.

City of Alexandria.  They maintain a leaf mulch site at 4215 Eisenhower Avenue.  This is in an industrial area, adjacent to (e.g.) self-storage facilities, ball fields, and similar.

Fairfax County:  From the look of it, my guess is that Fairfax does its mulching (for this part of the county) at the Ox Road solid waste transfer facility.  That’s in the heart of a large industrial/governmental use area.  But I could not find documentation to prove that.

Town of Herndon.  Some earlier work by NEVCA suggests that Herndon does not perform these operations within its Town limits, but I could not verify that (on-line) using current information.  (Historically, they filled roll-off containers with leaves, then trucked those out for composting.)  Herndon also does not appear to offer free mulch to residents (as Vienna does).  Presumably, Herndon residents would have to rely on Fairfax County free mulch.

City of Fairfax:  Fairfax City directs residents to the County’s free mulch, which suggests (but does not prove) that Fairfax City doesn’t do its own mulching.

City of Falls Church.  They offer residents free locally-produced leaf mulch, but provide no clue on their website as to where they produce that mulch.

 

Is this a good use of scarce land?

Fairfax County currently values that 8-acre tract at about $2.5M, but it’s not clear what, exactly, that valuation reflects.  Certainly not the value of the land for use as housing.  But that’s roughly the same value that Fairfax puts on the 11-acre Glyndon Street park.

Putting aside the impact on the neighbors, it seems to me like running a mulch pile is a fairly low-valued use of a scarce resource such as Town of Vienna land.  You have to wonder if this practice started back in the days before Fairfax County itself became so invested in recycling.  I can’t help but wonder what it would cost the Town to turn that tract of land into another useful Town park, instead of using it for what amounts to refuse collection (and, going forward, vehicle parking).

Finally, I should make it clear that a) as a homeowner, you don’t have to participate in the Town’s leaf mulching operation and b) current environmental thinking actually discourages you from doing that.  The point being that the heat generated by mulching on an industrial scale kills off eggs of beneficial insects that might otherwise overwinter on your leaf mulch, such as various species of butterflies.  If you have the room and the inclination, mulching your own leaves probably makes more environmental sense than having the Town mulch them for you.

Post #524: Some topics at public meetings this week

Things change.  For more than a year now, I’ve sent a weekly email (to individuals who signed up for it) noting any Town of Vienna public meetings dealing with MAC zoning issues.  I typically cc’d the content here (e.g., Post #516 and many prior posts).

It’s starting to look like there probably won’t be any more such meetings devoted to MAC zoning topics.  The last project under the existing MAC zoning has been approved (Sunrise at 380 Maple West).  The Town has subsumed any further discussion of MAC into its two-year-long rewrite of all the zoning in Vienna.  Possibly, Vienna is going to do away with MAC zoning entirely, probably in favor of allowing MAC-like construction “by right” in parts of the existing commercial zone.

So here are a few non-MAC items that the Town will consider this week, along with some brief commentary.

  • Redoing the process for citizens to request traffic calming measures.
  • Dealing with the Wawa tree cutting and other Town right-of-way issues.
  • The new $15M police station.

Citizens’ Guide to Traffic Calming (Tonight 2/10/2020, 7:30 PM Town Council work session).  This guide defines the process by which citizens petition the town for traffic calming and safety measures on their streets (e.g., speed humps, signs, marked pedestrian crossings, and similar).  ‘

The Town government is in the process of changing that procedure.   And, in the Town government’s usual citizen-friendly fashion, if you want to see some simple summary of what is being changed … you’re out of luck.  The only way to get any type of side-by-side comparison is to read both documents, get a clear grasp of the old and new methods, and then write that up yourself.  You can see the current guide here (.pdf).  You can find the new “Street Safety Guide” with the meeting materials for this work session.

A few things that caught my eye, as I compared the old and the new, are the following:

  • You would no longer be able to petition directly to your fellow citizens on the Transportation Safety Commission.  Instead, the process for starting a request for traffic calming or safety measures would be controlled by the Town bureaucracy (Department of Public Works).  If they didn’t think your request had merit, then it would stop right there, and the request would never been seen in public.
  • Right now, you can sign a petition in favor of some change (e.g., a speed hump on your street).   Under the proposed change, if you sign, you are agreeing to have that traffic calming measure (e.g., as speed hump) directly in front of your house.  Under the new proposal, you can’t sign the petition unless you agree to that.
  • Some measures — such as street closure — appear to have been removed from the document.

Is this an exhaustive list of changes?  Heck if I know.  Probably not.  Because the only way to know what’s been changed is to happen to notice it, as you read through and study both documents.

Fallout from the Wawa tree cutting and other issues with the Town right-of-way (Tonight 2/10/2020, 7:30 PM Town Council work session).  This is, I think, the “after action” report that the Town Manager was to bring to Town Council, and I think it’s also the Town government’s response to Councilman Majdi’s request to have all these right-of-way issues (e.g., Wawa, plus the loss of 4′ of right-of-way from Wade Hampton, and others) into a single effort.

You can find the meeting materials on this page.  I’m not seeing any action item for the Town Council to decide, nor am I seeing any sort of comprehensive strategy.  But you will at least get the final official Town of Vienna word on what actually happened at Wawa, on Wade Hampton, and how the Chick-fil-a-car-wash transformers ended up located right next to the sidewalk.

The new police station will be discussed in a Planning Commission work session (Wednesday 2/12/2020, 6:30 PM).  I have now been briefed in this, and there appear to be a lot of fairly tricky zoning issues that the Town has to get past.  Among those are the setbacks from the adjacent residential property.  In any case, this is all part of an ongoing effort to get certain pieces of land in Vienna rezoned so that the Town can legally construct the new $15M police station.