Maple Avenue development is in the spotlight for Tuesday’s (May 7) Vienna Town Council election, with two incumbents facing off against four challengers for three council seats.

The Vienna Voice, the official town newsletter, recently profiled the Vienna Town Council candidates. Several of those profiled said they are concerned about the scale of new developments planned for Maple Avenue and are running to preserve Vienna’s “small town feel.”

The following candidates are listed as their names will appear on the ballot:

• Howard Springsteen — An incumbent who was a leading voice in opposition to new larger Maple Avenue developments. Springsteen said managed growth with low-density residential zoning and modest, appropriate developments for the commercial zones are critical for the town.
• Julie Hays — Pedestrian and bicycle safety and protecting residential neighborhoods are centerpieces of Hays’ campaign. Hays is a former member of the Transportation Safety Commission and chair of the Pedestrian Advisory Committee.
• Steve Potter — Potter is a founding member of the Vienna Citizens for Responsible Development, a group that has pushed for developments that preserve the “small-town character” on Maple Avenue.
• Nisha Patel — Patel is a local small business owner who has expressed concerns about the impact of high-density mixed-use developments on traffic and schools. Patel, Potter and Springsteen are all endorsed by the Vienna Citizens for Responsible Development.
• Tim Strike – Strike is a vice president of a local technology service company who has expressed opposition to the medium-high density developments while fast-tracking local businesses through the process. Strike has also said increasing public parking, reducing vacancies and improving traffic need to be town priorities.
• Tara Bloch — Bloch is an incumbent Vienna Town Council member and preschool teacher. Bloch has said pushing for a pedestrian-friendly business corridor is a priority of her campaign and touted the increased number of sidewalks and bike routes, as well as new commercial redevelopments, as part of her accomplishments.

Local residents who are registered can vote at the Vienna Community Center (120 Cherry Street SE.) from 6 a.m.-7 p.m.

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The Vienna Town Council now has a new strategic plan.

“This plan builds on the town’s previous 2013-2015 strategic plan,” Lynne Coan, the communications and marketing manager for town, said at the Town Council’s meeting Monday night. “Goals, strategies and action steps are outlined in the plan to provide a roadmap for the town’s ongoing services and priorities over the next five years.”

The Town Council adopted the plan at its April 29 meeting. The plan focuses on a variety of areas, including safety, mobility, fiscal responsibility and environmental sustainability.

Some of the goals targetted for this year include:

• Incorporate wider sidewalks in areas of high pedestrian use
• Identify locations for bicycle parking and bike-sharing stations
• Issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) for consultant to lead zoning code update
• Implement quarterly budget reporting

Town staff started discussing the plan with the assistance of Craig Gerhart, a faculty member at the Virginia Institute of Government and former Prince William County Executive, in 2017. Councilmembers have worked on the plan since January last year, Coan said.

Funding for two positions to help alleviate two very different crises in Vienna was salvaged by last-minute savings.

Digging around the proverbial sofa to find extra funds for previously unfunded priorities is a time-honored local budget tradition. In Vienna, that took the form of $400,000 recovered from transferring repaving to a cheaper system and changes in the town’s health insurance structure.

In response, Town Manager Mercury Payton proposed $383,000 worth of items that were not funded in the budget that could be financed by the found-funds in the final budget.

The largest item among the unfunded priorities was $144,600 for an economic development manager — a long-discussed idea in Vienna.

Despite more businesses opening than closing in the town, Vienna is still struggling with rampant closures from small businesses. The manager would help assess problems facing local business and develop strategies to help keep businesses in town. Vienna is currently the only locality in Northern Virginia without a person working specifically in an economic development role.

The list of unfunded priorities also includes $50,000 for an economic development and market study.

The other crisis addressed in the list of priorities is handling the town’s massive wave of tree deaths. Over the last few years, every ash tree in Vienna has been killed by the Emerald Ash Borer, an invasive parasite that’s devastated North America’s ash tree population.

But the town is also dealing with the still-unsolved mystery of what is killing the town’s Norway maples. The death tally reached 30 earlier this year, and Town Arborist Gary Lawrence said the killings were so similar to the Emerald Ash Borer deaths that at first the deaths were mistaken for that infestation.

The list of unfunded priorities includes $69,364 for an assistant arborist and $20,000 to help handle tree maintenance.

A public hearing on the tax rate is planned for April 29 and adoption of the budget is scheduled for May 13.

File photo

A moratorium on new development applications for Maple Avenue was scheduled to expire in June but could be pushed back to October, marking over a full year of no new applications.

On the agenda for tonight’s (Monday) Vienna Town Council meeting is a request to schedule a public hearing for May 13 to discuss extending the suspension of the Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) Zone from June 27 to Oct. 31.

Last year, the town was roiled in controversy as citizens and Council members argued back and forth over whether a new mixed-use development replacing the Vienna Wolf Trap Hotel was too large for Maple Avenue.

“If we’re going to have a project there, this one is not ready for primetime,” said Councilmember Howard Springsteen at the August meeting. “I think the developer has done a horrible [public relations] job and has created a firestorm of concerns around town. This is probably one of the most divisive things that has come to this town in 20 years.”

In September 17, the Town Council voted to suspend the MAC Zoning while town staff redesigned the town’s guidelines.  The redesign process has been conducted throughout the winter and into spring. Two community workshops to solicit public feedback were held on March 29 and 30.

But the agenda item notes that staff needs more time to work on putting the suggestions from the public and Vienna officials into new guidelines:

Staff recommends extending the suspension of the MAC Zoning regulations to enable completion of proposed new design guidelines and incorporate potential recommendations from the multimodal transportation study into the amendments to the MAC Zone regulations.

The agenda item notes that a joint meeting of the Town Council, Planning Commission and Board of Architectural Review was held on March 20 but the meeting was continued to May 1.

Additionally, the Town of Vienna also recently commissioned a Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study whose results are expected to be received this summer and could be incorporated into the design guidelines.

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Fairfax County and the Town of Vienna are working together on a plan to potentially replace the Patrick Henry Community Library (101 Maple Ave E).

The rebuilding is part of a $91 million bond referendum planned for this fall to upgrade the County’s aging libraries. The Patrick Henry Community Library was originally built in 1971.

In September, the Town Council unanimously agreed to finance part of a feasibility study with Fairfax County to look at adding a new parking structure to the building in addition to potential renovations to the library itself, according to InsideNova.

According to the FY 2020 Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), the Town of Vienna will be working in a joint partnership with Fairfax County to determine whether to renovate or completely replace the building.

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(Updated April 8) Despite a host of other compromises, the Sunrise Senior Living Facility and Vienna Town Council are still at odds over the project exceeding the town’s height requirements.

Both parties agreed at a work session on Monday (April 1) that there’s been compromise from Sunrise. There were modifications made to spaces on the ground floor and mezzanine and the number of proposed units was taken down from 85 to 83.

But a mezzanine that cuts just under the town’s 50-percent coverage limit for what can be considered a floor is still a sticking point for Town Council members who say the project is out of line with the town’s five-story height limit.

Jerry Liang, senior vice president of development for Sunrise, argued that Vienna should reframe its limits rather than force the building to come in under a certain height.

“There’s different ways to think about density, [like] units and square footage,” Liang said. “By setting your limits on floor and height, you’ve created the maximum box. We believe the building we designed is visually pleasing.”

Planning Commissioner Mary McCullough said there were concerns from nearby residents that the back half of the building still had a “five-story look.”

The next public hearing for the project is tentatively scheduled for April 24, when the Planning Commission will discuss the development.

“Part of our goal is to satisfy a lot of particular needs for a lot of stakeholders,” Liang said. “We’re trying to find the right balance between providing critically needed service with the cost-benefit balance to really solve that Rubik’s cube.”

Image via Town of Vienna

A new study of the Maple Avenue corridor shows Vienna’s most dangerous intersections and details extensive gaps in the town’s sidewalk network.

At an April 1 work session, the Vienna Town Council is scheduled to discuss the initial results of study by planning consulting firm Kimley-Horn.

The report also showed three major traffic crash hotspots calculated over three years: where Maple Avenue intersects with Nutley Street, Courthouse Road, and Park Street.

The study shows that while Maple Avenue has extensive sidewalk coverage, streets one block away like Windover Avenue and Glen Avenue on the west end or East Street and Mashie Drive at the east end of town are completely without sidewalks.

Church Street, another major street through the town, only has sidewalks on one side of the street between Park Street and Beulah Road.

In a finding that will surprise few Vienna residents, Maple Avenue is overcrowded. The report said daily traffic on the street topped 30,000 vehicles per day, on the high end of the study’s scale.

The street’s traffic density was worst between Nutley Street and Follin Lane, the main stretch through town.

Maple Avenue also sees high levels of bicycle traffic. It os ranked by the report at “level of traffic stress 4,” the highest category available, meaning that it is exceedingly uncomfortable and stressful for cyclists to use.

Nearly every major road feeding into the street, like Nutley Street and Park Street, as well as the aforementioned Church Street also saw high levels of car traffic and cyclist stress.

The redevelopment of 380 Maple Avenue is set for a Vienna Planning Commission review tomorrow, but whether the project will get the extra story it’s requesting remains to be determined.

The project faced pushback from members of the Vienna Town Council earlier this year when it and another Maple Avenue development seemed to be pushing the limits on what was acceptable under the town’s height limits.

The Maple Avenue Commercial zoning rules dictate that the height of buildings on Maple Avenue is limited to four stories. According to the staff report, the applicants — Red Investment LLC and MJW Maple LLC — are requesting a modification with an additional story of above-ground parking.

The application also includes a modification request for a nine-foot awning, which encroaches three feet into the front yard setback.

“Staff finds that the application meets the requirements of… the Town Code, with the exception of the requested modifications of requirements,” staff said in the report.

During work sessions with the Planning Commission and Town Council, options with the extra story and without the extra story were both presented. According to the applicants, the new parking deck would significantly increase the number of available parking spaces for retail tenants.

Photo via Town of Vienna Department of Planning and Zoning

After a moratorium on new applications and a long series of discussions, the Town of Vienna is ready for the public debut of the new Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) zoning changes at two workshops next week.

The community workshops will be held from 6-8 p.m. on Friday, March 29, and from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturday, March 30 at the Vienna Community Center (120 Cherry Street SE).

The workshops will demonstrate how the community feedback has been translated into changes in the design guidelines, according to the Town of Vienna newsletter.

Some of the first changes proposed addressed the scaling of buildings, one of the biggest topics of controversy in last year’s MAC debates. Further changes have been added over the last month of workshops between the Town Council, Planning Commission and Board of Architectural Review.

The workshops are scheduled to be “open house” style, meaning residents can drop in and leave at any point. No formal presentations are planned.

Image via Town of Vienna

It was fitting that the announcement of Maud Robinson’s death yesterday (Monday) was made public at that night’s Vienna Town Council meeting, a place she and her husband, Charles, had spent decades.

Robinson died at 96 in Inova Fairfax Hospital, one month shy of her 97th birthday.

Robinson had served on the Vienna Town Council from 2000 to 2009. Robinson was also one of the founding members of the town’s board.

At the Town Council meeting, members praised Robinson as a leader in the town and a mentor for many members of the city’s leadership.

“She was a shining example of a lifetime of service,” said Mayor Laurie DiRocco. “She’s been involved in every aspect of life. Her commitment to the town of Vienna unparalleled… I can’t think Maude enough for all she’s done. Her passing is the end of an era.”

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