Category: Town of Vienna, VA

Post #286: Just poking the bear.

One of the fascinating things about MAC zoning is just how — ah — malleable the arguments in favor of it seem to be.   You will have to have been following this for a while for the next few paragraphs to make sense.

MAC was all about preserving small town Vienna — until some Town Council members positively repudiated that and called for “small town” to be removed from the statute.

The beautiful “Statement of Purpose and Intent” in the law provided the Town Council with absolute control over what was built.  So that made this vastly preferable to “by right” development, where builders have the right to build anything that meets legal requirements.  Until the Town’s lawyer said, near as I can tell, just a month ago — nope.  The “Statement” was unenforceable, and the Town had to approve any building that met the legal requirements.  (I.e., builders have the right to build anything that meets the legal requirements.  Which is kind of like by-right, isn’t it.  And which begs the question of why the Town Council bothers to vote at all.)

MAC limited buildings to four floors — until five floors was OK, as long as the building had the appearance of four floors.  Or five floors were OK all along, people didn’t understand what “mezzanine” meant.  Or the mezzanine rules only apply to residential mezzanines.  Or something.

Oh, and MAC couldn’t possibly work with anything less than four-story buildings,  because builders could not possibly build three-story buildings profitably.  Until one was proposed — presumably profitably — a block away on Church Street.  And then, out of the blue, Town Staff decided that dropping the height limit to three floors was perfectly acceptable change for a tiny portion of Maple Avenue, under a revised MAC statute.

MAC was about revitalizing Maple Avenue retail — until Town Staff had to propose arbitrary requirements for minimum amounts of retail, because, as it turns out, MAC is all about housing, not retail.  And otherwise builders would build as little retail space as possible.

MAC is about a process that ensures quality buildings by requiring review by three bodies (BAR, PC, TC), and demands the highest architectural standards.  Until somebody on the Town Staff pulled a switcheroo for the Marco Polo developer, and quietly substituted some partial sketches of a vastly cheaper minimalist modern building in place of the stone/red-brick/wrought iron “Georgetown” style building approved by the Board of Architectural Review.  And despite the fact that somebody on Town staff did a heck of a favor that will save the builder millions of dollars, the Town refuses to hold any sort of formal investigation of how that happened.  Just trust them.

If you found all that confusing, let me just sum it up for you.  If you step back from the process, to a pretty good approximation, MAC is about justifying whatever it takes to get the next building approved.  Plus whatever whims or fancies Town Council wishes to impose.

I could go on, but I’m just going to point out one more because, as far as I can tell, we have collective amnesia about this one.  Can you recall the absolutely critical “Community workshops” that the Town held on MAC zoning?  As written up in this post.  Does anyone but me recall the clear statements by our Town leadership that discussion on MAC could not proceed without the critical feedback those workshops would provide?

Now, can you recall how those workshops completely changed the direction MAC took?  You probably can’t because … nothing happened.  Those workshops were held at the end of March.  The Town put .pdf images of the hand-written comments on line.  And, near as I can tell … that’s it.  Nothing happened.  And, as importantly, nobody seems to care that nothing happened, or looks like it will happen, as a consequence of those workshops.

So, to all of the above, we can add that this (structured and frankly biased) community feedback exercise was critical to our thinking about MAC.  (Really, go back and listen to the audio in the post cited just above.)  Until it wasn’t.  And nobody cared.  Heck, besides me, I doubt anybody even remembered.

I’ll repeat here what I said in post #262:

I’m not confused because I’m stupid.  I’m confused because I’m paying attention to what they’re saying

And I record it, and write it down, so I can remember it.  About 90% of what I do on this website is that, period.  And if the results make the pro-MAC Town leadership look a bit inconsistent — that’s only because they are.

 

Post #284: CORRECTED: They’re going to do what at Nutley and 66?

In my original posting, I downloaded the draft plans on the Commonwealth of Virginia website explaining the proposed changes to I-66.  A colleague pointed out that these plans are obsolete.  Virginia Department of Transportation substantially altered the plan for the I-66/Nutley interchange, they just they just didn’t replace them on their website.  The corrected plans can be seen in this newspaper article, and a copy in full detail is on the Town of Vienna website (.pdf).  I have yet to determine where they can be found on the VDOT site.

I am going to walk through the new plans in the same orientation as I did in my  original posting.  To get oriented:  I-66 runs top to bottom, DC would be at the bottom.  Nutley runs left to right — Pan Am Shopping center is to the left, Vienna is to the right.

 

Under the new plan, the exits from Nutley to I-66 will be more-or-less as they are now.  But the exits from I-66 to Nutley will be quite different.  There will be a single exit ramp from each side of I-66 to serve both Nutley northbound and southbound.  The ramps will split — one side will feed directly onto Nutley in one direction, and the the other will terminate in a partial roundabout that will allow you to (in effect) to make the left turn onto Nutley in the other direction.  In addition, the westbound I-66 Lexus lanes will have an exit onto Nutley.  Again, using the partial roundabout, you can access Nutley north-bound or south-bound.

The proposed plan makes a hash of the existing pedestrian paths through the interchange.  Right now, there are sidewalks on either side of the road, you can walk from Vienna to Pan Am on either side, and on either side, you have to cross a total of four single-lane entrance and exit ramps.

Under the new plan, if you opt for the sidewalk (dark green) you must start on the east side of Nutley in Vienna, end up on the west side of Nutley at Pan Am, and cross the full width of Nutley (without a light!) at the left-hand roundabout in the picture above.  This is in addition to crossing four entrance/exit ramps.

Alternatively, there is a multi-use path (orange) that appears designed for bicycles.  If you take that option, you avoid the at-grade crossings of the road entirely, but take a much longer path and end up on the east side of Nutley at Pan Am.  By my measurement, the distance from Marshall Road to Lee Highway is currently about 4000 feet by sidewalk.  It will be over 6000 feet with the new multi-use path.  Trivial for a bicyclist, but burdensome for a pedestrian.  That said, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone walking that route.  If there are any pedestrians crossing that bridge, they are few and far between now.

They will also take out the collector-distributor lanes at this interchange. Presumably they needed the room; plausibly I-66 will now fill the entire available area under that bridge, so the “through” part of the collector-distributor lane was no longer feasible.  At any rate, instead of passing under Nutley to access one of the directions on Nutley from I-66, the exit ramp splits and leads directly to each direction.  That’s now feasible because the partial roundabouts allow you to, in effect, make a left turn across Nutley, if need be.

 

Post #281: Campaign finances and the Providence District Democratic primary candidates

As I discussed in this post, the W&OD railroad made Maple Avenue the choke point for a lot of Tyson’s traffic.  The black line below shows the nearly 5 mile stretch where the only road of any consequence that crosses the old W&OD roadbed is Maple Avenue.  This acts like a fence between Tyson’s and areas to the west.   If you live west of Vienna, and want to get to Tyson’s without using I-66, chances are that you will take Route 123 through Vienna.

What happens in Tyson’s doesn’t stay in Tyson’s — it drives through Vienna first.  Tyson’s is in the Providence District.  And so, while we can’t vote for Board of Supervisor candidates in that District, we have more than a spectator’s interest in that race.

In this post, I’m going to take a look at the campaign finances of the Board of Supervisors candidates from the Providence District.  Refer back to my just-prior post to see a similar analysis for our own Hunter Mill District candidates.  The data shown below are all taken from the Virginia Public Access Project, and are based on reports that candidate PACs must file with the Commonwealth under the CFDA.  Everything I summarize below, you can see by clicking the link above and then clicking the links on that page.  All figures are as of the last reporting data required by the Virginia Campaign Finance Disclosure Act (CDFA), March 31 2019.  Continue reading Post #281: Campaign finances and the Providence District Democratic primary candidates

Post #280: Campaign finances and the Hunter Mill candidates

In Post #272 I described the Virginia Campaign Finance Disclosure Act (CFDA).  In that posting, I noted that no campaign finance laws apply to elections in the Town of Vienna.  But this posting isn’t about Vienna.  In this posting, I’m going to show you what the CFDA can do for you, in terms of making you an informed citizen with respect to Fairfax County elections.

Disclosure:  I contributed to the campaign of Parker Messick.  You can see my posting about my talk with Candidate Messick on this page.

Continue reading Post #280: Campaign finances and the Hunter Mill candidates

Post #277: Board of Supervisors Candidate Debate

Last night (5/15/2019), ViennaVotes sponsored an “informal debate” for the five Democratic candidates for Board of Supervisors for the Hunter Mill District.  The event was sparsely attended but the questions and answers — all focused on Vienna — were well worth the time.

Whether you have an interest in the lack of public baseball/softball fields in this area, or your Fairfax County property taxes, or Vienna schools, there was something said that may interest you.  If you want to hear what was said, you should take some time next week to visit the ViennaVotes website.  At that point a recording of the candidate debate should be posted.

Post #272: A followup to the Town election

On these items, I don’t really know whether to laugh or cry about them.  But I think I’ll get them down, in black and white, before the memory of the election fades.   And I’ll preface this by saying how much I hate social media.

The Virginia Campaign Finance Disclosure Act (CFDA).

There are no laws governing campaign finance in Town of Vienna elections.  None whatsoever.  Anyone can give any amount of money to any candidate — and it doesn’t have to be reported anywhere. 

And I, for one, think that’s a problem. Particularly given (what I estimate to be) hundreds of millions of dollars of land use decisions that are going to made under MAC zoning.  And so I did a little something about that.  But most of you are going to need a little background information first, so you can understand what I did, and why.

Now:

  1.  Nobody ever believes me, the first time I tell them that no campaign finance laws apply here.  So if you just went “nah, that can’t be right”, when you read the intro to this section — well, you have plenty of company.
  2. I only found this out after considerable digging.  You won’t find this out easily, because if you ask the Town government, as I did, you’ll be told that the Town complies with all applicable sections of Virginia law governing elections.
  3. Here’s what you have to dig to find out:  The law doesn’t apply to Towns of under 25,000 population.  Virginia law (the Campaign Finance Disclosure Act of 2006) specifically exempts them.  Here’s a quote from the first part of the CFDA:
The provisions of this chapter shall apply to all elections held in Virginia, ... except nominations and elections for ... (iii) town office in a town with a population of less than 25,000, ....

There’s an interesting provision in the law, though.  A Town can voluntarily agree to be subject to the CFDA.  That provision is the following, from the same section of the law cited above:

The governing body of any town with a population of less than 25,000 may provide, by ordinance, that the provisions of this chapter shall be applicable to elections for town offices in the town.

This is exactly what the Town of Herndon, did, in 2011.  You can see that briefly mentioned at the next-to-last question on their election FAQ page.  And this .pdf of the actual ordinance shows how little it actually took for them to do that.

Herndon’s situation is different from the Town of Vienna, in that they were close to the 25,000 person threshold in the 2010 Census.  There was some sense that they would inevitably be subject to it after the 2020 Census.

You can read the Herndon Town Council’s discussion of the pros and cons of the e CFDA requirements around page 149 of this on-line document.  The reason I point to this is that you can be sure the exact same arguments will come up if this is ever debated in the Town of Vienna.

The main advantage is the law is transparency:  Everybody knows what’s spent, and where the money came from.  The main disadvantage is that it’s a pain to comply with it, because … you have to report what’s spent, and where the money came from.  And there are additional legal issues in that you have to acknowledge, in any campaign literature, where the money came from.

Which leads to my next section.

Political Action Committees (PACs)

PACs!  PACs, here in Vienna.  OMG, we’ve never seen PACs in Vienna before.  OMG, WE  HAVE PAC MONEY INFLUENCING OUR ELECTION!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, this is sarcasm.  Or very nearly.  Although, one of our elected officials did circulate this, as part of her get-out-the-vote effort:

"There are a few other websites, Facebook Pages, and blogs publicly available for this election, know that some are funded by a PAC that has also funded some of the candidates, so I would be a bit suspect on how balanced their information is. "

Here’s the joke:  I am the aforementioned PAC. As anyone who did even the slightest bit of homework on it would know.  Why would they know?  Because everything about every Virginia PAC is public information.

So, I am president, treasurer, chief cook and bottle washer for my own little PAC.   Now defunct.  Which is the PAC in question.  Total funding for that PAC was the whopping sum of $1000, which is the least it could be, and still be required to report as a PAC, under the Virginia CFDA.

So, in some sense, that sentence from the get-out-the-vote email is fair.  In the sense that I’ve certainly pointed out the bias in the Town’s information enough times.  So turnabout is fair play.  But the PAC scare tactics are just ill-informed or ill-intentioned or both.

Why did I bring the scourge of PACs to the Town of Vienna? Let me start by pointing to some of our neighboring Towns.

Take Leesburg, for example.  Nice little town.  Presumably they have an honest government.  But — look up the Mayor of Leesburg, and you will find — OMG, SHE HAS PAC!!!!!

But, take Herndon — surely our sister city to the west is free of that type of nonsense.  Let’s check out their mayor.  OMG, SHE HAS A PAC TOO!!!!!

Yes, that’s more sarcasm.  The fact is, PACs are how Virginia tracks campaign finances.  If you want to run for office, and you are subject to the CFDA, you have to form a PAC.  And you have to report where every donation (in excess of $200) comes from, and report every expense..  And even if you are not running for office, but want to spend money by directly trying to influence an election (as opposed to just giving a candidate money), then you, too, must form a PAC to do so.  And you must report every donation over $200, and every expense.

Because that’s how it works in Virginia. Under the CFDA, anyone can give anyone any amount of money as a campaign contribution, for a state or local (i.e., non-Federal) election.  There are absolutely no limits.  The only hitch is, it must all be rigorously tracked and reported, subject to severe penalties for mis-reporting.  And for those who independently seek to influence elections (“interest groups”), anything they publish has to note the name of the PAC of the interest group.  Once again, so that everybody knows where the money is coming from.

The reason we don’t have PACs in Vienna is that we’re not subject to the CFDA.  See the first part of this post.  And because of that — because  we’re not subject to it, and PACs are not required — nobody has the faintest real clue about sources and uses of campaign funds in Town elections.

I hope you get the drift here.  Anybody can give any amount to any state or local candidate in any Virginia election.  The only difference between Town of Vienna and other elections is that in the Town of Vienna, there’s no requirement to report any of that.

So, why did I form a PAC? The only real drawback of putting ourselves under the CFDA for Town elections, that I have seen mentioned, is that the requirement to form a PAC is burdensome.  I needed to know how burdensome it was, before I could make any sort of informed judgment. 

And my answer is, any fool can form a Virginia PAC.  And I’m proof of that.  It’s not burdensome.  The Commonwealth goes out of its way not to make it burdensome.  You don’t need a lawyer, you don’t need consultants.  All you have to do is go to the Virginia Department of Elections website and follow the directions.  Beyond a doubt, the hardest part of it was getting used to the logic of the Commonwealth’s COMET reporting system.

But I needed to know that, before I could write this post.  I needed to understand the burden issue before I could say, hey, I think we ought to put the Town under the Virginia CFDA.  Just for safety.  And now I know that PAC reporting burden is no big deal.  In fact, it’s easy enough that if the Town ever decides to put itself under the CFDA, I’ll volunteer to lead candidates through the process of forming a PAC.  It’s just not that hard.

All it takes is doing a little homework.

Post #268: HAWK light timing issue, fixed

In two earlier posts (Post #260, Post #225) I raised an issue about the timing of the new High-Intensity Activated crossWalK (HAWK) lights in Vienna.  These are the new lights located on Maple at Pleasant Street and at James Madison Drive.  Their purpose is to allow pedestrians to cross Maple safely at those locations.

The issue is the timing of the “walk” signal.  I thought there needed to be a longer delay between the red light, and the walk signal.  See the posts cited above if you want the full story.

This is not an issue.  I used the Pleasant Street HAWK light earlier this week, and there is a roughly 2.5 second delay between the red light and the walk signal.  So either I hallucinated the problem, or the Vienna Department of Public Works (DPW) already fixed it.  For purposes of this post, I’ll assume that I am sane and that DPW did, in fact, change it that fast.

A little more about HAWK lights follows — because I literally had to look it up to understand how you are supposed to deal with them.  The key point is that you should treat the flashing red lights like a stop sign.

Continue reading Post #268: HAWK light timing issue, fixed

Post #266: Election turnout and results

Click here to see the election results.

Last night’s election had the largest turnout in recent Vienna history — by a slim margin. Below is a graph of voter turnout since 2000, using data as posted by Fairfax County at this location.  (The official 2019 turnout number has not yet been published, so I extrapolated based on total votes cast, and the median ratio of voters to votes from all prior contested elections in this period.) Continue reading Post #266: Election turnout and results

Post #262, just a series of questions

This post is my further reaction to the 5/1/2019 joint work session (Post #261).   It is the first of three posts I plan to write on this topic.  This one will just state a few questions, all motivated by what I heard from that meeting.  You may want to read my just-prior post to make sense of some of the questions.

There’s no particular order here.  And there’s no guarantee that these are the right questions.  It’s just a set of issues that I woke up today shaking my head over, trying to figure out what the Town thinks it’s doing.  I’ll probably add more questions later today as I think of them.

In hindsight, I think I get confused because I listen to every word that is said, at every meeting. And — key point — I write it down.  I tape the meeting, and create a detailed index of who said what, when.  This forces me to pay attention to everything that everyone in a position of authority says.

Trust me on this, if you did that, you’d be as confused as I am.  I don’t think anyone else in Vienna does this, except possibly the Town staffer who drafts up the meeting minutes.

What I mean is, I’m not confused because I’m stupid.  I’m confused because I’m paying attention to what they’re saying.

Questions follow:

Continue reading Post #262, just a series of questions