City Council Meeting

Bryan Fosterstaffbut the way we're able to do that is because of how we plan for our projects that they're you know they're derived from our approved plans whether it's the comp plan small area plans transportation plans etc that's how they get started we work through this process and even though it takes longer but by doing that we're able to leverage these outside funding which is important to be able to do the magnitude of the projects and things that we're doing, whether it's transportation, parks, or otherwise. And so, again, I just wanted to point that out, that where this money comes from is not all from the city of Fairfax for these capital projects. And so you see the CIP highlights, again, some of the projects that are going to be

Chloe Ritterstaffat the roughly 60% design phase, which is where we are with this project. but we do typically do a public hearing with all of our projects regardless of whether they're federally funded or not. So that is the purpose of this public hearing tonight. So the project location is this line in the middle of the map in red and this project came out of the small area plans for the Old Town Fairfax small area plan and the Northfax small area plan which envisioned a multimodal spine connecting the two activity centers George Mason University campus which is almost to the south which is shown here on the right so it would connect north south with all of these dense activity centers and it's also surrounded by several other projects that have been in

project roadmap at this stage we've already gone through the cons the feasibility the concept design and we are now refining some of the details such as roadway and drainage design details the striping plans and the environmental review for the federally funded project this is a timeline of the where how the where the project has been so far as I mentioned this was part of the Old Town and North Fax small area plans. It was also included in the bicycle master plan adopted in 2021. From those plans, we then brought this to the city council for the two-year transportation program, and then we conducted a feasibility study and developed the funding application and determined that it was feasible, and we were able to fund it with transportation

alternatives funding. Then we started design last year, and we had a work session and an open house last fall, about a year ago. And now we've been working through changes based on that, and we are here at the Design Public Hearing tonight. So just to recap, the project objectives are really to implement the vision for the University Drive multimodal spine, as envisioned in those small area plans. And to do that, we want to improve pedestrian bicycle safety and comfort while maintaining access for all other types of travelers, vehicular capacity and transit operations. So now I'm going to hand it over to Ms. Waring to go through the design details.

engagement that we've done we've done some engagement both in the planning phases through the two-year transportation program the bicycle plan small area plans all had substantial engagement as part of the overall planning processes. And then we had engagement at the funding application stage as we were developing the concept and conducting the feasibility study. And then again, as I mentioned, we did have an open house and engagement last winter. And the engage page has been open throughout the project. And as of January, we had approximately 300 visitors look at the page. We had had five visitors comment on the concept. But more recently we've had a few more comments come in since we posted the public hearing

Molly Novotnyapplicantput on the small area plan as all the small area plans are done in the city to give some idea of massing and scale and how buildings could lay out what we've done is the image on the right and that overlays our building our new mixed-use building on the left and then it retains that Safeway with the white roof and the retail to the right of the Safeway being retained. What you can see on the image of the left are those two blue lines. Those are the retail oriented streets that your small area plan calls for. So one of the special exceptions that we have requested is to allow more residential on our ground floor than the ordinance would specifically allow. But I want to be clear, your small area plan only identifies retail along those two facades of our building and we are

Catherine ReadOkay. So the small area plans are a concept, not a blueprint. That's where we start, in my opinion. has wanted to change at this plaza for decades. I've been here since I was a student in 1981 walking to this plaza from the campus so I've seen how much it has not changed. So we have a property owner who wants to improve the property and we are demanding that they give us the whole picture even though they've made it clear that the long-term lease at Safeway has locked them into parameters that make that difficult. That's the first thing. The second thing is the development all around the shopping center could dramatically change how future councils see the possibilities of that space. That includes the building of the Willard Sherwood Center. We built the