From the Virginia Freedom of Information Act:
... F. At least one copy of the proposed agenda and all agenda packets and, unless exempt, all materials furnished to members of a public body for a meeting shall be made available for public inspection at the same time such documents are furnished to the members of the public body. ...
Source: Linked from terminator.fandom.com
I am not yet done posting about all the interesting items that popped up at the 11/7/2019 Town Council work session. This post is about an offhand remark that Councilman Noble made, regarding the “Tysons 527 plan” for Maple Avenue.
I have to admit my ignorance here, because I had no clue what he meant. But it sounded somewhat important. So, after some digging, this turns out to be the long-rumored Fairfax County plan that calls for widening parts of Maple Avenue. If you plan to be in Vienna a decade from now, it will be well worth your time to have a look at that. The time frame for this report is the year 2030.
I cannot over-emphasize that this is all theoretical. This is about dealing with somebody’s guess (projection) of traffic in the year 2030, based on a guess (projection) of additional development at Tysons. As far as I can tell, nobody has any actual plan for doing any of this to Maple Avenue. At least, for now.
So, first caveat: These are not firm plans for anything. Hence the picture at the top of the page. I have no clue as to whether or not anyone could actually require that Route 123 be changed in this fashion. I believe this is merely Fairfax County’s way of showing might be done, to certain Maple Avenue intersections, in response to the additional traffic load that Tysons development might create.
And, second caveat: We may not get all this projected traffic after all. Public discussion about this Chapter 527 filing brought up some opinions that the additional traffic wouldn’t flow down Maple at all. These projections were made more than a decade ago. And, for the last decade, there has been no increase in actual Maple Avenue traffic (Post #398). In fact, if you download the spreadsheet, you can see that average daily traffic on Maple has declined slightly over the last decade or so. So what you are looking at below is based on the opinion, of one set of traffic engineers, as to the impact that Tysons development would have on Maple. Don’t get the impression that this is the only opinion, or that there isn’t a lot of uncertainty about that opinion, or that the projected additional Maple Avenue traffic must materialize. So far, it hasn’t.
That said, as I have been hearing about this terrible report for years, I’m going to summarize what it says. At the least, it shows you what some set of traffic engineers thought it would take to fix a couple of difficult intersections on Maple Avenue. But keep the caveats above in mind. The sections of this post describe:
Continue reading Post #456: Fairfax County’s 527 Plan for Maple Avenue
Page 120, Town of Vienna 2015 Comprehensive Plan. Areas in red have adequate access to parks, per our definition.
Vienna parks map
“If only we had a parks master plan, we could then ask MAC developers to proffer funds for Vienna parks.”
I’ve heard that said, in various forms, by various Town authorities. Most recently, it was said in passing at the last Town Council meeting. I even repeated that in Post #442, about ways to get open space from MAC.
And yet, something about that has always seemed a bit off to me. Given the importance that citizens place on open space, then, well, why don’t we have a master plan for parks? What’s stopping us? Who’s in charge of getting that done? And so on.
For sure, if this is bound up with the required once-every-five-year review of the Town comprehensive plan, we have the option to review and modify the comprehensive plan at any point. We don’t have to wait for that. The law says “at least” every five years, not at most.
So I am struck by the incredible discrepancy between the effort going into rewriting the entire Town of Vienna zoning code — hiring more staff, a quarter-million-dollar contract to a consultant, and so on — versus the (zero? low-key?) effort to get a parks master plan written. It’s almost as if having a parks master plan doesn’t really matter, in terms of getting proffers for park land.
And maybe it doesn’t.
After doing my homework, I believe that opening sentence is incorrect. At least, as things stand now, and as I vaguely understand proffers. Putting economics aside (i.e., can developers afford to pay for that, and bury the power lines, and provide open space on Maple, and so on), I think it’s a false hope.
Briefly (with detail to follow):
The upshot is that I think we need to eliminate that section of the comprehensive plan, first, before we even have a shot at asking for proffers for parks. And I think it’s possible that because we’ve already said what we said in the current comprehensive plan, we may not be able to ask for proffers for parks, period. That’s something the lawyers would have to figure out.
Separately, I found out a few oddities about our Vienna’s current (2015) comprehensive plan. I’ll summarize those at the end. Turns out, the Town is well aware of these issues, as they were pointed out in 2016.
1: We’ve already stated that Maple Avenue has good access to parks, in our comprehensive plan. That’s shown on the map above — the red circles are the parts of the Town of Vienna within a quarter-mile of some park.
Here’s what the Town of Vienna says it needs to do for parks, in the current comprehensive plan (.pdf, page 119):
Several “service gaps” exist in Town. Service gaps are defined as areas where residents do not have access to Town parks within a 5-10 minute walk from their homes. The map on Page 120 shows these gaps. Salsbury Spring was not included in this analysis due to its use as a passive park. The Town should consider ways to expand parks and recreational options in areas not located within close walking distance of existing parks.
If you look on the map above, most of Maple Avenue is (mostly) not in a “service gap”. Most of Maple is within a quarter-mile of some park. It’s mostly the areas in the south of town, well away from Maple, where there are large “service gaps”.
2: We’ve defined our parks problem as one of access, not parks acreage per capita. The comprehensive plan map above shows roughly quarter-mile rings around each park. That quarter-mile figure is commonly used by urban planners the distance that most individuals would routinely walk.
There’s nothing said about the size of the park, relative to the size of the population its supposed to serve. Given that the Town chose to identify park adequacy this way, adding more people (on Maple) literally can’t create a problem with access to parks. Our measure isn’t based on park acres per capita, it’s based solely on whether or not you can plausibly way to some park.
3: Further, by calculation, Vienna as a whole is not short of park space per capita relative to other local jurisdictions.
Falls Church did that analysis in its Parks for People document (.pdf). Vienna is middle-of-the-road in terms of locally-run park acres per capita, and this does not even count (e.g.) the W&OD park and other parks not under Vienna’s sole control. We rank ahead of Falls Church, but behind the City of Fairfax.
3B: An aside on Vienna parks.
The Vienna number in the table above is close to, but not identical to, what I get when I do that calculation. And that’s in part because it’s not clear what should and should not be counted as a park. And much of Vienna’s park land is not owned outright by the Town of Vienna.
Town of Vienna parks, were, at least originally, almost totally unplanned. Some parks, such as Meadow Lane, were built on land donated by developers (.pdf). But Southside and Northside parks are there because they were once the location of the Town’s main sewage treatment plants (.pdf). They became parks after the Town connected to regional sewage treatment facilities. In effect, they are located for maximum inconvenience. They were put as far away from the bulk of the (then) Vienna population as possible. It is unsurprising, then, that the Town’s comprehensive plan notes the uneven distribution of park area throughout the Town.
Oddly, the second-largest park in Vienna, by acreage, is the W&OD trail. The right-of-way is about 100′ wide, and the Vienna portion is two miles long, resulting in 24 acres of park. (My calculation there exactly matches what is shown on the Fairfax County tax map.)
If you count all the more-or-less public park areas within the Town of Vienna, it looks like this. Note that the inclusion of park areas not directly or solely controlled by Vienna boosts the 6.7 acres per 1000 (above) to 8.3 acres.
4: So we can’t ask Maple Avenue developers to proffer funds for more parks. We can only ask for a proffer if we can prove that their development is directly causing a problem. But, per our current comprehensive plan, there isn’t (and can’t be) a park access problem caused by development on Maple.
Here’s a short summary, though I’m not sure it’s the best summary, of the law. You have to prove that development is placing some burden on some public facility above its existing capacity; you have to prove that the developer benefits from this public facility; and you can only charge in proportion to the developer’s actual impact on that facility, among all users.
My point is, we don’t even have a concept of what “capacity” means for Town of Vienna parks. Our sole measure of park adequacy, in our comprehensive plan, is based on distance to the nearest park. And, on the whole, we are not “over capacity” in our parks, at least in terms of how we stack up against other local jurisdictions in terms of park acres per capita.
Given that everything in Vienna is supposed to conform to the comprehensive plan, I think this makes it an uphill battle to ask for proffers for the parks. To the contrary, the language of the current comprehensive plan seems to make that absolutely impossible.
First, I’m not a lawyer, so take this all with a grain of salt. Maybe there’s some way to dodge around what appears to me to be the plain reading of the comprehensive plan and Virginia’s proffer law.
Second, if there were some newly-defined zone, solely for Maple Avenue, that defined some need for open public space along Maple, then maybe you could get the proffers that way. Put the need for public plazas along Maple into the comprehensive plan, defined a target for such plaza space per Maple Avenue acre in the comprehensive plan, and ask that new development target the provision of that much open space. Maybe that would be legal. But that’s not a parks master plan, that’s specific to Maple Avenue.
Third, it would be a lot simpler if the Town would just buy open space if it wants it. Maybe the upshot is that, as far as open space from MAC development is concerned, the Town is going to have to do it the hard way: Pay for it.
Fourth, I think this also makes the idea of using the Patrick Henry library site as a way to buy some sheltered public green space along Maple even more critical (Post #369, Post #371 The alternative is to believe that, despite evidence so far to the contrary, we can write a law that will require developers to provide pleasant, open public space.
Finally, a close look at the comprehensive plan reveals some oddities.
First, Commonwealth statute says that every locality must review its comprehensive plan at least every five years. Nothing prevents the Town from updating it more frequently than that.
Second, for the last revision, the Town took two years to do an extensive revision of the plan. They started in 2013, ended substantive work in 2015, and Town Council adopted the document in 2016. Clearly, they are not planning to do much this time around, or certainly nothing like that effort.
Third, the comprehensive plan in effect when MAC was passed (2014) was the 2010 plan, which says nothing about mixed-use development on Maple. So the Town passed MAC, then appears to have modeled that portion of the (2015) comprehensive plan after the MAC statute. I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way. But, this being Town of Vienna, I guess that doesn’t matter.
I am not the first one to note this, as a citizen made this exact point at the March 23, 2016 Planning Commission meeting.
Fourth, I can’t tell when the next plan review is due, as the the Town mentions many different dates.
So, the 2010 comprehensive plan is referred to as the March 15, 2010 plan, and states clearly and unambiguously:
Approved as amended by the Planning Commission: January 27, 2010 Adopted by the Mayor and Town Council: March 15, 2010
But the 2015 comprehensive plan? Well, you tell me. The only clear statement is:
Adopted by Town Council on May 23, 2016
Assuming that’s true, then the Town of Vienna did not comply with Commonwealth statute. More than five years elapsed between the prior review and the current one. Again, I am not the first person to have noted that. In the April 13, 2016 Planning Commission meeting, a citizen brought up this exact point, and the Town asserted that because it began its review of the comprehensive plan before the five years were up, then it had not violated the spirit of the law. Or some such. Basically, typical Town of Vienna.
The current document does not say when the Planning Commission approved the “2015” comprehensive plan, but it appears that there was one joint hearing in which the PC and TC did their thing, and the plan was adopted. In 2016. So it looks like there is only one date for the current comprehensive plan.
Trying to read between the lines, it looked like something chaotic was going on at that point. This is the 2015 plan. But it was passed in 2016. There appears to have been no formal approval by the Planning Commission prior to literally the public hearing where the Town Council passed it. All of that seems quite unusual compared to prior comprehensive plans. But I have no idea why.
I think the upshot of all that is that the Town won’t have to (begin to) review the Comprehensive Plan again until 2021. I have to wonder what other towns do, and if they have adopted the same interpretation of the law as the Town of Vienna. In any case, Vienna could choose to do that review and change the comprehensive plan prior to that date.
As long as I’m on the topic of noise …
John Pott (of Vienna Citizens for Responsible Development) talked to the people who live next to one of the Falls Church mixed use developments. Universally, they said that the construction made their lives hellish. Mostly, it was the unrelenting high noise levels from the construction equipment.
So it’s a pretty good bet that construction noise will make life tough for the neighborhoods as these MAC projects go up.
And, as with noise abatement in the MAC streetscape, there are simple things that the Town could do that could make a big difference. Mainly, the Town could require temporary construction noise barriers instead of standard chain-link fence.
It’s not like this is something exotic. Google “construction noise barrier” to see that in many areas, this is standard operating procedure. Most use mass-loaded vinyl or some similar substance. (Again, Google it, it’s a standard approach to noise control).
The issue of keeping the sidewalks open during construction has already come up. I don’t think that one has been formally addressed. So this is now the second thing that the Town could write into the code to help mitigate the problems caused by construction. And this one matters greatly to those most strongly affected by these new MAC buildings.
How about it, Town of Vienna? Do something tangible for the MAC-adjacent neighborhoods. Write in construction noise barriers as a standard in the MAC and other commercial code. And ask that Sunrise proffer that if they get to build their assisted living facility at 380 Maple West.
Addendum: Since I wrote this, I’ve been informed that buildings four floors and taller likely will have to have construction wind screens. These are an insurance (safety) measure for workers at that height, but also serve to limit the dust from construction at that level.
The minus one still cracks me up. See Post #364.
Town Council met last night to have their third briefing from Kimley-Horn on the Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study. I’m using this post just to get my audio recording up, in case anyone wants to listen to it, at this Google Drive link. There’s no accompanying “index” file for the recording. Continue reading Post #450: Audio recording, the 11/7/2019 Town Council work session on the traffic study
Last year and current year Town of Vienna water and sewer rates:
Sec._1_13.___Schedule_of_public_works_fees_red lined-2The Town of Vienna quietly raised the water and sewer rates in July. Nobody paid attention at the time, but now it seems that a lot of people are figuring this out and a few seem upset about it.
And so, there seems to be a lot of nonsense going around about this, e.g., that our rates are twice as high as Fairfax County. To be fair, water and sewer bills are not straightforward. So I’ve seen a lot of mistakes like (e.g.) not factoring in the sewer rates.
But the key fact that many seem to overlook is that this is just the second year of a five-year plan to raise water and sewer rates in the Town of Vienna. I don’t think that’s widely recognized.
So I thought I’d do my best to get the facts down in black and white. The increase was done at the suggestion of a consultant. The additional money will, in theory, fund additional (and apparently much-needed) maintenance on the Town’s water and sewer pipes and other infrastructure. Taking that at face value, we have relatively little choice in the matter but to ensure adequate money to maintain the pipes.
The bottom line is that, right now, our water/sewer bills are about the same as everybody else in the area. In particular, for a typical family, you’d pay about the same here as you would pay for water and sewer in Fairfax County. That was the Town’s goal.
But looking forward, our bills are going to continue to rise, at about 10%/year, for the next three years. The upshot is that the FY 2023 (starting summer 2022) bills will be about 50% higher than the FY 2018 (starting summer 2017) bills were. Continue reading Post #448: Water/sewer bills, waiting for the other three shoes to drop.
The title is the most polite thing I can say about the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA), and paying for Vienna’s parking garages. But I think it tells us something about Town of Vienna government as well. Continue reading Post #447: NVTA, fix your cost-benefit calculation
What is wrong with this picture (Page 30, Town of Vienna Capital Improvement Plan (.pdf) as of October 21, 2019).
This is a tough post to write, so let me get to the point, with a set of simple declarative statements below. I’m going to provide just enough detail to show you what’s wrong with the picture above.
Continue reading Post 446: Patrick Henry commuter garage, reductio ad absurdum
This is just a brief pointer back to Post #404 . Posts are soon forgotten, and this one has become timely again.
Councilman Majdi has been asking the Town to consider using a consent agenda approach to speed up Town Council meetings. (That is, all the non-controversial routine business would be packaged into a single agenda item and voted on just once, rather than having a vote on each individual item.)
At the 10/22/2019 Town Council meeting, Town Council directed staff to look into this consent agenda approach. (Although, weirdly, that item is not on the agenda posted on the Town website. You had to have been at that meeting to know that was on the final agenda.)
This analysis will including finding out which local governments use it.
To cut to the chase, the answer is that more-or-less all local governments in this area use a consent agenda approach, except Vienna. That was the point of Post #404 ).
Here’s hoping that the Town adopts this, and many more such measures, to speed up Town Council meetings.
The Town Council — specifically Councilman Noble — asked the Transportation Safety Commission to undertake a study of the neighborhood bounded by Nutley, Maple, and Courthouse. Outlined in red above.
That was, in fact, discussed at the last Transportation Safety Commission (TSC) meeting, documented in this post.
Apparently, there’s going to be some discussion of that at tonight’s TSC meeting. In fact, they’re going to lay out the entire workplan for this item. But I only know this because a) my neighbor emailed them, and then b) emailed me when he got a response.
So, Where’s Waldo? Here’s a copy of the TSC agenda for tonight. Find the discussion of the MAC-adjacent neighborhood study. If you can intuit where that is, you’re a better person than I.
AGENDA-60The final kicker here, in addition to no public notice of this, is that there’s a different meeting, tonight, for residents of Wade Hampton and adjacent streets to meet the people who (are? may be?) buying the rights to develop at 380 Maple West (see Post #432). So, don’t expect anyone from my neighborhood to be there. Not only did we not know this was on the agenda, all the civic-minded among us will be at the other meeting scheduled for tonight.
If my neighbor hadn’t emailed Town staff about this, I never would have bothered to go to the Town website, pull up the audio recording, and listen through it — on the off chance that this traffic study would be mentioned. Let alone go and seek clarification (see next post). As hard as I try to keep up with these things, I really shouldn’t have to find stuff like this out purely by happenstance.
