City Council Meeting

Jennifer Passypublic commentGood evening, Mayor, Council members, and members of the community and city staff. My name is Jennifer Passy. I reside at 10109 Farmington Drive, Fairfax, and I'm here once again to speak in strong support of the Willard Sherwood Community Center project. I have sat in your seat. I have been on the Planning Commission and I was the Planning Commission rep to the PRAB and we have been which was over 10 years ago So we've been talking about this project for a very long time This project represents far more than a building it represents a commitment to community One that reflects the values of Fairfax City and the real needs of the people who live here a community center at Willard Sherwood would provide a shared space in a premier location for

and continue to get input from community leaders as well as residents and city staff. Supporting the Willard Sherwood Community Center is not just the best option, it is the most responsible one. Let's continue working together with Fairfax County to ensure this land becomes something that truly benefits the city

Tom Rosspublic commentTonight I speak as a citizen of this community who has been involved in civic affairs since my arrival in 1980 and continues to care deeply about decisions that will shape our future for the next 50 years. I speak in support of fully funding the Willard Sherwood Community Center. Beginning in 1993 as a young professional and later as an assistant director with the National Park Service, I chaired the city's Parks, Recreation, and Culture Program subcommittee of the Fairfax 2020 Commission, a roadmap and perspective on our future. Created and supported by City Council, this citizen-led group, chaired by Dale Lastina, involving literally hundreds of citizens of all ages and backgrounds from every part of the city, made a wide range of recommendations in 1994.

Cappy Russellpublic commentAbout more than just me and my narrow self-interest, I come to you tonight hoping that you view your position in city government as more than a bean counter or a pollster. To sit on that dais is to have a privileged vantage point into the future of the city. To see the whole of our interests, present and future, even if we can't see them clearly ourselves, and maybe especially when we can't see them clearly ourselves. So in that light, let me suggest to you that Willard Sherwood is much more than a nice gym for me and those like me. It's also an opportunity for our city to reaffirm our partnership with the county. This partnership in and of itself is something of an ethereal or an invisible thing,

but its effects on us are very real and very tangible, and they're all around us. They're in our schools with our emergency response arrangements, most impressively, to my mind, in our library. enjoy the benefits of projects on which the city and the county work hand in hand and I think Willard Sherwood fits very neatly in that lineage so I hope you will preserve and further that partnership by supporting the Willard Sherwood project funding it not just because I need a gym today but because you can see very clearly that the future of Fairfax City is brighter when we go into it alongside our friends in the county thank you for your time and your consideration

Toby Sorensenpublic commentGood evening, Mayor, City Council, staff. My name is Toby Sorensen. I live at 10137 Spring Lake Terrace. I come here tonight because I am so excited to listen to the presentation about the new Willard Sherwood Health and Community Center. From what I've seen online, it is a beautiful building and will be a wonderful addition to Fairfax City. This project has been a long time coming. When I was on the Green Acres Feasibility Study Committee many long years ago, I would never have imagined the possibility of having a comprehensive community center at the Willard site. The committee knew it was a great location, but the site belonged to the county, and they were actively using it. are on the verge of having this project begin in a practically perfect location near Old Town,

her support so well I firmly believe now is the time to act Fairfax City needs to continue to modernize amenities which in turn will support local businesses real estate market etc as a resident I believe we want to continue to support the Old Town Fairfax term while at the same time providing resources which most communities in Fairfax County offer Fairfax residents as well as county residents need the availability of a local fitness center and community center young families continue to move into city neighborhoods the need for these amenities is great I am in support of the new Willard Sherwood proposal again I'm look really looking forward to tonight's presentation and thank you for listening we

Kelly O'Brienpublic commentGood evening, Mayor and Council. Kelly O'Brien, 10213 Sager Avenue. Here tonight to speak in support of the Willard Sherwood Health and Community Center. I know many residents have real concerns about the size of the project, the cost, and what it means for the city's long-term finances. Those concerns are valid, and they deserve to be taken seriously. Supporting this project does not mean ignoring those questions. It means weighing them carefully against long-term community needs. Facilities like this take years of planning, coordination, design, permitting, and financing. In this case, Willow Sherwood has followed that long and deliberate path. It has been studied, refined, authorized at multiple stages throughout the CIP process.

Katie Johnsonpublic commentKatie Johnson, Spring Lake Terrace. Affordability cannot just be a buzzword. The Willard-Sherwood cannot be viewed in a vacuum. It must be viewed with a broad, clear lens. It must be viewed alongside the school bond, property yard, the firehouse, the vehicle fleet that will be needing to be replaced, IP projects as well as the debt services that we have to pay. Together, their economic impact must be fully understood and clearly communicated to the people. We must fully understand how the additional $4 million to our annual operating budget will be paid for, and those are 2025 numbers. How high are you willing to raise our taxes? What services will be sacrificed? The Willard Sherwood sounds like a great project,

Christina Susserypublic commentGood evening, Mayor and Councilmembers. My name is Christina Sussery. I will provide the address to the clerk, but I live in the Mosey Woods developments. long time, Fairfax City resident of nearly 14 years, and while I also serve on the school board, I want to be clear that I'm here in a personal capacity as a taxpayer who deeply cares about this wonderful community we live in. I strongly support moving forward with the Willard Sherwood Center. Like many others before me, I will emphasize that this project is not a luxury, but essential community infrastructure that serves residents across generations, children, families, working adults and seniors all in a single accessible location. It creates a multi-generational hub that combines county health services, childcare,

The Willard Sherwood Center is the right project, in the right place, at the right time. It honors years of planning, meets the needs of our community now, and will serve residents well into the future. I urge the council to move forward with the project. Thank you for considering the future of our city.

Mike Fabiopublic commentGood evening, Mayor and City Council of Mike Fabio, 3920 Chambridge Road. I, too, support the Willard Sherwood development. The important role of a community center cannot be overstated. It provides a safe, inclusive space for civic management and promotes economic development. This is not about a gym membership, which we can get anywhere. This is about meeting our neighbors and getting to know one another. a people place where you want to spend time. It might be like Cheers where everyone knows your name. Get a meeting room for your favorite hobby and form a group. Attend a concert. Get the idea? That's what this is all about. The present Sherwood Center is well known. The proximity to Old Town will be synergistic with the Old Town small area plan.

Jim FeatherAnd the third large project we want to prioritize is the Willard Sherwood Community Center. It's like a timely that it's our presentation is the same night as your discussion. So you've had a lot of public input from the Planning Commission standpoint. As I said, we unanimously endorsed this resolution, which included this as a priority for us. You have heard all the public comments on various needs, why it's an important project, bringing the facilities up to contemporary standards, putting it in a place where it's most accessible, the adjacencies to Old Town, Van Dyke Park, what could be developing in along the Blenheim corridor and the partnership with the county, all very important priorities.

Stacy HallThank you. I've long thought about this cross-functional interdepartmental planning, and I think it's probably unfortunate that we weren't having these same thoughts a few years ago because I do think there have been some potential opportunities for these programs, these plans, as we're now discussing the Willard Sherwood facility and we're discussing the fire station and we're discussing the property yard. only continuing to grow. And in conjunction with the school bond, I mean, I was just, you know, rattling off numbers here as everything was going. And I know I'm a numbers person, and that's, you know, first and foremost where I go with it. But it's crazy. I mean, the property yard initially, I think, was $58 million, $63 million, and now we're at $155

number two that it means that we still need to fund it somehow overwhelmingly everyone else who lives in the city who answered this thinks that when we say a project has been appropriated or committed that means we've already paid for it. And I bring this up because with Willard Sherwood specifically, we are being asked to fund $50 million. With these other projects, we're being asked to fund well over $150 million. So education for our taxpayers, for our residents is key. And I will say that again, these projects have not been paid for. We have not been putting money aside. We don't have the money. We have a plan to borrow the money, and that is critical. It doesn't mean I'm saying no to any

Speaker 31site. So there has to be a plan B and probably a plan C and a plan D for if we parse out everything that's at the property yard, where does it go? And I would venture to guess that if you went through those different options, many of them, if not all of them, would be less than $155 million. So yes and no. Like there's understanding that these things are expensive. They have long tails and that's just the construction tail and the operations and maintenance, but also spending some money up front to plan, and sometimes it's 10 years of planning, as we've seen with Willard Sherwood, ideally gets you to the right answer. Now, 10 years is a long time. A lot of things happen. We've seen seismic shifts in the city with COVID

Stacy HallAnd that is very true. I saw with the Willard Sherwood, I think it was $29 million or $31 million in fiscal year 2021 and 2022. Then it jumped to $40 million. Then it jumped to $50 million. Then it jumped to $56 million. And now it's looking like $54.3 million. So I understand that happens. But I think having the ability to share that and explain it goes a long way. So thank you.

Brooke HardinstaffGood evening, Mayor and Council. Again, Brooke Hardin. I'm serving as the city's point of contact for the Willard Sherwood Health and Community Center project. Pleased to be with you all this evening. with me tonight are a number of individuals. Here as part of the presentation team is James Patterson, who's the city's project management consultant with Blue Heron Leadership Group, Stacey Summerfield, the city's director of parks and recreation, and JC Martinez, the city's chief financial officer. There are a number of folks as well in the audience this evening, including Fairfax County's project management team, also from the design and construction team, representatives from Grimm and Parker Architects, Urban Engineers,

Stacey SummerfieldstaffAll right. So the development of a cost recovery model to offset the operating cost is clearly vital to the project. So for the proposed Willard Sherwood Center, we identified 50 peak hours that are the most desirable for private rentals. This includes the 4 to 9 p.m. time slot Monday through Friday, as well as full day Saturdays and Sundays. We then, using market rates of comparable recreation centers and spaces in the Northern Virginia region, we developed a potential rental rate, private rental rate, for each of the rentable spaces in the building. And we only utilized the spaces that are truly rentable. So we didn't include the preschool classroom, the walking track, the fitness center, things like that.

Speaker 11One of the exercises we were asked to do is kind of look at a cost comparison of what would some of the alternatives be so we look at three. One is the Willard What I want to emphasize on the column that has the Willard Sherwood Health and Community Center figures, those are real numbers. The 54.3 is actually based on bids that came from all the subcontractors when the Crispin Company went out. They're very hard numbers. The Green Acres New and the Green Acres Renovation, those are order of magnitude estimates that were made. We didn't do a deep study in terms of doing concept drawings and doing detailed cost estimates. the willard sherwood you know we were talking about obviously the partnership with fairfax

The green acres new build. What we built into that one is looking at a completely new standalone building. So we would scrape the existing green acres building. We'd go in with basically the same program we're building at Willard Sherwood, with new above ground parking, because it's going to take about 200 parking spaces, figuring you're not going to want to remove those fields. not underground parking but above ground parking for the new build and then green acres renovation is basically taking care of the deferred maintenance so using the mosley study of the facility condition assessment that was done as a starting point and then also to look at the gym replacing the gyms are doing selective demolition on the existing gym and going in with the new gym

We just looked at the first five years. So not including the capital reserve. And this comparison, uh, we did the operating costs. Um, the operating costs are both Willard Sherwood and the new build are the, basically the same figuring they're both brand new buildings. The staff costs are a little bit less at green acres because of some of the challenges with the multiple entrances at green acres that you would not have building so we reduced that for both the new build and the green acres reno the building operating costs a little bit higher on the green acres reno because you're talking about a 65 year old building with old bones so those costs are higher and then we looked at the cost recovery and we use the break-even

numbers that Stacy just went through for both the Willard and the green acres news they're the exact same numbers because both of them be new buildings the green acres renovation, we won't have a new fitness center that you'll be able to rent. We won't have the ability to really sponsor fitness classes. We won't have that fitness classroom that we have in the new building and the rental opportunities are less. So those numbers run a lot lower. So we have the total cost recovery. And then we came down to, you know, total cumulative annual cost without the capital renewal funds, 3.8 for the Willard Sherwood, 3.5 for the new build at Green Acres, and 5.2 for the Green Acres Reno. And then the numbers below that are the equivalent pennies on the real estate tax,

Let me just double check with JC and kind of walk through that with you one more time. So the Willard Sherwood at the break even would actually result in 4.33 because if you go through this slide here, we included operating costs and we took into consideration cost recovery. So the total cumulative of all the operating and recovery is 4.33. That's