Category: Town of Vienna, VA

The Town elections are coming up this Tuesday, May 7th.  This is a contested race and our polling place may be a little crowded.  You probably ought to have a voting plan, that is, a specific time when you are planning to get down to the Community Center and cast your vote.  I don’t think that waiting until the last minute will be a good strategy this year.

What follows below-the-line here is something I posted back in February.  Things have changed a little since then, but not enough to make me change my vote.  The biggest change is that more-or-less everybody is running against the current MAC rules.  Now everybody wants to see some changes.

That said, I’m voting for Springsteen and the two Ps:  Patel and Potter.  If you care to know why, read what I wrote back in February, below the line further down this page.

What do I hope to see change about Town of Vienna government?   Mostly, I want to hear a straight story. I don’t want to hear that, somehow, Town staff swapped buildings between review by the BAR and approval by the Town Council (Post #245, Post #253).  I don’t want to be told that Vienna has no choice but to complete its rezonings within 100 days, while I can see that nearby towns take up to a year  (Post #247).  I would like the Town to stop telling us how responsive they are to citizen input, while re-writing the rules mid-stream to favor whatever the developers appear to want (Post #227). I don’t want the Town to sell MAC as preserving small town Vienna, then repudiate that small-town portion of the law.  I don’t want them to sell it based on four floors, only to find out that five floors is just fine.

I could go on, but you get the drift. Actual development issues aside, just cutting the crap would be a big improvement.

I’m just going to offer up one more, based on a flyer that landed in my in-box yesterday.

I attend a lot of these meetings, and I cannot count the number of times I have heard Town officials swear that it’s simply not possible to build profitable mixed-use buildings in Vienna with less than four (or is it five?) stories.  Simply not economically possible, people who think it can be done are kidding themselves, and so on.  All stated as fact.

Then this arrives, below.  After all those assurances by various Town officials … the impossible appears to be happening, one block off Maple.

I’m not endorsing this building.  I’m not saying I want this building.  I’m not saying I like or dislike this building.

But this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.  If three-story mixed use development is possible, then let’s acknowledge that and have a reasoned discussion.  Rather than shut down discussion by pre-emptively claiming that it’s impossible.

I guess what I’m saying is, I want people who are a little less bought-into the MAC, and a little more bought-into the facts.  Fact is, as I hear it, the Town is completely aware of this building, as they were aware of the failed Mill Street garage.

The original posting follows.  Not all the details are correct now, but the conclusion is the same.

Continue reading Post #259 — a repost of “My endorsements for Town Council and the problem of splitting the vote, 2-7-2019”

About 15 people attended last night’s Transportation Safety Commission (TSC) meeting.  The bulk of the meeting dealt with petitions and complaints from several neighborhoods regarding cut-through traffic, speeding, and the need for pedestrian crosswalks.   Among the streets discussed were Tazewall, Casmar, and John Marshall.

My main interest was in the Town’s replacement for the Citizen’s Guide to Traffic Calming.  You can find the current version — in use since 2002 — on this page on the Town’s website.  It outlines the process you would have to go through if you wanted your street to have (e.g.) speed bumps, a pedestrian crosswalk, a flashing pedestrian crosswalk sign, or other traffic safety measures.  You can find a draft of the proposed replacement on this page on the Town’s website.

Continue reading Post #258: 4/30/2019 Transportation Safety Commission meeting and a few oddities from recent Town public meetings

InsideNova reported on Maro Polo yesterday. And while they got the details right, I really think that they are missing the big picture.  Among the responses I have seen is a sentiment of “good for the Board of Architectural Review”.  And that sentiment — while nice –is definitely missing the forest for the trees in this case.

In some sense, valuing the role of the BAR here is like valuing the services of a trauma surgeon after you’ve had a car wreck.  It would be a much smarter policy to avoid the car wreck in the first place.

In this post, I’m going to try to point out just one big-picture issue.  The Town did not review one building.  The Town reviewed two very different buildings, at different times.  And despite that, the claim is that this meets the letter of the law.

To be clear, the original design — and the only design seen by the BAR — was for an ornate, turn-of-the-century Georgetown-style stone/red brick/wrought iron building.  But the final design appears to be a plain-vanilla brown-brick building with more-or-less blank walls facing both Maple and (particularly) Church.

Let me explain why that’s crazy, from the standpoint of logic.  For a building to be approved under MAC, it has to pass review by:

1.  The Board of Architectural Review (BAR), primarily focused on how the building looks, and whether it will fit in with the Town
2. Planning Commission (PC), which asks whether the building fits into the Town’s master plan and appears to conform to all the zoning rules.
3. Town Council (TC), which … does what it does.  Near as I can tell, the Town Council can approve or disapprove things without a whole lot of justification.

Here’s the crazy part:  Up to now, we had been assuming that the same building had to pass all three stages.  But now — if this flies — that no longer appears to be true.  You can present materially different buildings, to different parts of Town government, and still claim to have satisfied the letter of the law. The BAR only saw the Georgetown-style building.  They saw nothing of the building that the developer is getting ready to build.  The Planning Commission saw only the Georgetown building at their first meeting, and then were given a mix of renderings of the old (Georgetown) and new (Chicago alley) buildings at their second meeting.  Town Council was given renderings of both buildings, but seemed fully aware that the new (Chicago alley) building is what was going to be built.  Only in passing was it mentioned that the BAR reviewed the Georgetown building.  It was never made explicit that the BAR had never even seen the building that the Town Council was getting ready to approve.

But the Town Council approved it, with a fairly cavalier acknowledgement that this would have to be re-reviewed by the BAR before it was built.

And now, here we are.  This building — that the BAR has never before seen — gets tossed to it for “re”-review.

The upshot is that instead of asking the BAR to guide the architecture, we’re asking them to clean up end results.   For example, Town Council repeatedly pointed out the blank end walls facing Maple, on the revised version of the building.  And noted that something needed to be done about them.

These are ugly blank walls that didn’t exist in the version the BAR approved.  They are part of a building that the BAR had never seen before.  And yet, it’s now the BAR’s problem to deal with them.  If they can.  Almost a year after the Town Council approved the building on 5/7/2018.

But here’s the kicker:  The BAR may not have the final say-so in how the building will look.  As I read MAC statute, the Director of Planning and Zoning is the sole arbiter of whether a variation of a building is “in substantial conformity” with the proposed plans.  The BAR can do anything they want to, and Planning and Zoning can overrule that at any time, just by declaring there to be “substantial conformity” with the original (October 2, 2017) submitted plans.

Just in case you haven’t gotten it by now, I’ll say it plainly.  This is NOT how this system is supposed to work.

 

I’ve decided to put all these files audio recordings of meetings into a single Google Drive directory, accessible at this link.  For this meeting, there is no “index” file because, for me, there were only two items of interest.

Discussion of the Wawa property line fence starts at 15 minutes 45 seconds and ends at around 21 minutes into the recording.

Discussion of Vienna Market/Marco Polo starts at 39 minutes 30 seconds into the recording, and ends around 1 hour 36 minutes.

There are some unintelligible bits due to poor microphone use.  Presumably the Town will post its own audio within a few days, and as always, their audio is better than mine.  You can find the link to the Town’s audio on their website (fifth item down the list, it includes the word “video”, click that, then follow the links.)