Town of Vienna, VA – Page 18

Post #517: Last night’s Town Council meeting

The main topic of discussion at last night’s (1/27/2020) Town Council meeting was the proposed Sunrise assisted living facility. Spoiler: it passed. The only other item of interest to me was the Town’s application for funding for a Maple Avenue parking garage. That also passed. The meeting materials are on this Town of Vienna web page.

There were a handful of surprises at that meeting. The first surprise is that the Town has already posted its video at the link above. That’s extremely helpful for citizens who want to see what went on while these topics are still hot. I won’t bother to post my audio file, but I will post my Excel “index” file at this Google Drive link. That Excel file is a running summary of what was said when, during the meeting. My times will only approximately match the times in the Town video.

Continue reading Post #517: Last night’s Town Council meeting

Post #515: Fraud (noun): Intentional use of deceit for financial gain.

The last item on tonight’s (1/27/2020) agenda ticks all the boxes for me. This is the item whereby the Town Council asks yet a different taxpayer-funded organization to pay for the new commuter garage in Vienna.

Wait, you didn’t know there was going to be a commuter garage in Vienna? That’s no surprise, because there isn’t going to be one.

I mean, why on earth would anyone drive through this …

… in order to get to the middle of Vienna, park in the new commuter parking garage, then take the (once-per-half-hour) bus back down Maple Avenue, in order to get back to the Vienna Metro?

Nobody’s going to do that. But our Town government is happy to lie about that, if that fraud means somebody else will pay for the proposed shopper/diner parking garage at the Patrick Henry Library.

On top of committing fraud against the taxpayer by lying about commuter use of this garage, this item has several other features worth noting. All of which I’ve touched on before. It’s more-or-less a microcosm of … well, pretty much how I view Town government.

Keep Town Council/Public in the dark. There’s no copy of the staff presentation in the Town Council meeting materials. This is now standard operating procedure by the Department of Planning and Zoning, and serves to keep both Town Council and (particularly) the public in the dark as long as possible. Consistent with SOP, if anyone on own Council dares to slap their wrist over this (yet again), DPZ will offer to send them a copy after-the fact. And the public? Anything sent out with the meeting packet itself has to be public information, by law. But if they don’t send it out? Well, you peasants can FOIA it if you want to have a copy of it. You can see my writeup of this tactic, as the new norm, in the middle of Post #480, which discusses FOIA issues in general.
Ask for a rubber-stamp approval. Heck, they didn’t even bother to provide a copy of the two items that the Town is backing with this resolution. I.e., the story here seems to be “just say yes, you don’t need to bother your little heads about the details of what you’re endorsing”. If that’s not the definition of rubber-stamping something, I don’t know what is. (And note that the story about the garage continues to change, see below).
We’re already overspent the capital budget. The Town is already so over-spent on its capital budget that it needs this free shopper-diner garage, or it’ll have to scramble to find the money. So Town Council has no choice but to endorse the fraud. (See, e.g., Post #504, Post #488, Post #485.)
The story keeps changing. The number of “commuter” parking places in this proposal is less than the number in the prior funding proposal the Town Council approved for the NVTA. (Versus this new funding proposal, to the NVTC — see last item). Arguably, that’s because the last proposal, for money from a different local government agency, was totally absurd. So our story about these fictional commuter parking places continues to morph, even as we apply to additional entities to pay for them. (See, e.g., Post #447, Post #446).
The only option on the table is just plain ugly, but nobody will object. The only viable parking garage plans result in a new library that squats under a parking garage. See illustration, and see, e.g., Post #367, Post #369, Post #371, Post #372.
Ready-fire-aim. The Town will, eventually, get some consultant in to tell it how many parking places it actually needs. But only after it has already funded both a Church Street “commuter” garage and this Patrick Henry “commuter” garage. Call me cynical, but I bet the consultant ends up telling the Town that it somehow, though sheer guesswork, funded exactly the right number of spaces, whatever that number turns out to be. (See, e.g., this post or Post #481 for discussion of other ready-fire-aim studies, or Post #510 for the parking study, or this post from a year ago about the economic development plan that will justify MAC zoning after-the-fact. The point is, ready-fire-aim is the Town’s normal mode of operation in this arena.)
Ludicrous cost. The current lie (to NVTC, as opposed to the previous lie, to NTVA) is now stated as a request for $5.5M to buy 84 “commuter” parking places, or $65,000 per putative commuter parking place. That’s exceptionally expensive, and doesn’t even factor in a reasonable utilization rate (i.e., doesn’t even account for the fact that commuters aren’t going to park there). See e.g. Post #447 for how the “commuter” garage cost-benefit analysis ought to be done.
We have two local government agencies handing out cash? Where do I stand in line? Yes, the first application was to the NVTA. That’s the organization we suckered into paying for ~~half the Mill Street Garage~~ 59% of the Church Street Garage, or whatever-the-heck portion of whatever-the-heck actually gets built, if anything. (See Post #491 for explanation.) I mean, it’s the taxpayers’ money, so it’s not like anybody needs to care about it, or anything. So, whatever. Noted above, we’ve already put in an application to NVTA, promising that all the parking places in this new garage will be for commuters (Post #446). But this new application, for funding the same garage, is to NVTC, and I don’t think we’re promising every space is a commuter space. (But how can I tell, since there’s no copy of the actual proposal posted.) In any case, we haven’t scammed them yet. In short: Two different taxpayer-financed tax spigots, two different applications. The names are so alike that staff stumbled over the acronyms at the last Town Council session on this.

Except for that last point, I’ve documented all of this before, so I don’t see the need to write this up again. Read the prior posts if you want the details.

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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 #508: Revisiting #3: Don’t split the vote

In the 2019 election I made a plea not to split the anti-MAC vote (Post #259). That is, don’t field more candidates than there are open seats. This is the 2020 version of that post. Continue reading Post #508: Revisiting #3: Don’t split the vote

Post #506: Tonight’s Town Council meeting

There are at least three interesting agenda items for tonight’s Town Council meeting. You can find the meeting materials on this page. One has to do with “vacating” town alleyways (i.e., selling the land to an abutting land owner). A second has to do with the Town setting a goal for the “level of service” on Maple Avenue, that is, a goal for the most congestion it will tolerate before trying to do something about it. Third, the Town is finalizing plans to hire a contractor to tell them how much it will cost to put the utility lines underground along Maple. Continue reading Post #506: Tonight’s Town Council meeting

Post #505: Revisiting #2: Let’s move the Noah’s Ark meeting into the 21st century.

Read Post #480 for the definition, and Post #495 for how this applies to Town’s decision to establish the rules for rewriting all the zoning in Vienna in private, out of the public view.

In a nutshell:

Under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), any time three* or more members of a public body gather to discuss public business, that’s a public meeting.
All public meetings have to be open to the public, unless there’s some well-defined reason for having a closed meeting. The statute identifies a specific list of such reasons (e.g., personnel actions).
A meeting of two members of a public body is not a public meeting. It has to be three or more.

* Or, if a quorum is fewer than three. So if there’s a two-person subcommittee, if those two people meet to discuss public business, that’s a public meeting.

OK, now think like a bureaucrat. How do you dodge the clear intent of the Virginia FOIA, and manage to hold a meeting of (e.g.) seven members of the Town Council, but bar the public?

Simple: You break your meeting up into little pieces, where each piece only has two Town Council members present. Let me term each such piece of the overall meeting a “meetinglet”.

A single meetinglet, by itself, is more-or-less useless. But now, instead of one meeting with all seven present, you hold a coordinated series of meetinglets, one after the other, with Town Staff providing information on what has been said in all prior discussions. For legal purposes, instead of that being treated as one meeting of seven people that has been broken up into meetinglets, the law treats each meetinglet separately.

Hence, “Noah’s Ark” meeting, because you bring in the Town Council two-by-two. You break the seven-person meeting into a series of two-person meetinglets, and presto, it’s legal.

Continue reading Post #505: Revisiting #2: Let’s move the Noah’s Ark meeting into the 21st century.

Post #504: Revisiting old business #1, the mystery of the additional $7,000,000 2020 loan

I don’t quite have the heart to write a post summing up where we stand on MAC zoning. Which is how I should start the new year.

So, in the meantime, I’m revisiting a few old issues, mostly those that I find puzzling or annoying. Today’s issue is both. Today’s post is about the Town’s forthcoming $28M — or-is-it-$35M? –2020 bond issue.

Mostly, I’m revisiting this because, upon reflection, what the Town said about the $35M borrowing authorization simply reeks of baloney.* They said that the last $7M of borrowings was added with no purpose in mind, and it would be used to add to the reserves in the capital fund.

* I realize baloney does not reek, but my wife made me change this from the original wording.

The sole point of this post is to point that out, as clearly as possible, that this is nonsense. And then to take a pure guess as to what’s actually going on. The Powers That Be in Vienna will or will not inform the peasantry of the true reason for the additional loan (i.e., the spending of the peasantry’s tax dollars), at some point, as they deign. Or not. All I can do is point out that what they said in that meeting about the additional $7M in borrowings isn’t plausible. Continue reading Post #504: Revisiting old business #1, the mystery of the additional $7,000,000 2020 loan

Post #503: 21/150

Image Source: Linked from the Dominion Power outdoor lighting website.

Maybe it’s because I’m so burnt out, writing about the Town of Vienna. Maybe it was an exchange I had with somebody where I said that if you actually look at the “olde-tyme” streetlights along Maple, they look like hell. Maybe it’s the fact that the Town is going to place four of those lights along Wade Hampton. Maybe it’s just my knee-jerk reaction to quantify the data wherever that can be done cheaply and quickly.

In any case, the title of this post is the count of olde-tyme “acorn” streetlights that are burnt out (21), out of the total of such lights (150) along Maple. In round numbers, one out of seven street lights along the “nice” section of Maple (Courthouse to East Street) is burnt out.

Just FYI, it took me about 5 minutes to count them, by taking a drive along Maple. So this is the count, as I was driving by. It might be off by one or two. But it’s materially correct.

Continue reading Post #503: 21/150