Among the posts that I don’t want to write is a post about the role of the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. Because I don’t want to write this, I’m going to keep it short and to the point. You might even say blunt. Continue reading Post #540: Comprehensive plan
Image Source: Linked from the Dominion Power outdoor lighting website.
This is a brief followup to Post #503.
At the time I wrote that post, roughly one streetlight in seven along Maple was burnt out. My contention was that … well, nobody cared. Nobody noticed, and nobody really had to care about it. Just looked a little sloppy is all.
As I was driving down Maple last night, something seemed different. I’ll have to double-check this, but I believe that a) all the burnt-out bulbs have now been replaced and b) some of the poles themselves seem to be undergoing repairs. I’m pretty sure I saw at least one with wires sticking out where the “acorn” light globe should have been.
Edit: Drove down there by the light of day this afternoon and, sure enough, there are headless light poles scattered along much of the length of Maple. So some sort of maintenance operation appears to be underway.
I’m not sure whether to thank the Town, or VEPCO, no Virginia Power, no Dominion Resources, nope maybe it’s Dominion Power? I have the vague feeling that all the streetlights belong to Dominion?
You can get part of the story on streetlights and streetlight outages on this Town of Vienna web page. Briefly, we pay a streetlight maintenance fee to Fairfax County, which in turn pays that fee to Dominion, which owns and services the streetlights.
That’s why streetlight outages are be reported to Dominion, not to the Town.
Unfortunately, the links to Fairfax and Dominion websites on that TOV web page are broken. The County’s explanation of streetlights is given on this page of the Fairfax County website. The Fairfax County instructions for reporting a streetlight outage are given on this page, which in turn links to an interactive map. (FWIW, the interactive map totally and completely failed to work for me.)
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
