Minutes: Reston 2020 Committee Public Meeting, January 7, 2010

The RCA 2020 Committee, chaired by Dick Stillson, met on Thursday, January 7, 2010 at RCC Lake Anne. In attendance were Dick Stillson, Chair, Cindy Smethers, D.D. Rogers, Dan McGuire, Dave Edwards, Diane Blust, Guy Rando, John Lovaas, Kathy Kaplan, Marion Stillson, Rob Whitfield, Tammy Petrine, Terry Maynard, Mike Corrigan, Paul Thomas, Jerry Volloy, Terri Phillips, Herb Basik, and C.J. Basik.

The first order of business was a discussion of the committee’s proposal for Community Advisory Groups to be put before the Reston Master Plan Special Study Task Force (RMPSSTF). The county and task force preferred the term “working group” rather than “advisory group” and the name was changed in the proposal. Paul Thomas confirmed that the RA Board of Directors had tasked the various RA Advisory Committees to generate recommendations to the Task Force in the topics of the individual committees. The committee reviewed the draft document on working groups and decided to reduce the original eight groups to five: 1) transportation, 2) infrastructure and implementation, 3) environment, 4) parks, recreation and public facilities, and 5) urban design. All agreed that the pertinent RA advisory groups and the Land Use College participants would be logical organizations from which to begin to draw members and/or leaders for the working groups. After a wide ranging discussion on the /working groups, a subcommittee was formed consisting of Dick Stillson, Mike Corrigan, Dave Edwards and Terry Maynard to draft a paper on proposed working groups for presentation to the RMPSSTF at the January 12, 2010 meeting.

Secondly, the committee discussed the planning principles to be drafted and presented to the RMPSSTF. There was general agreement that the principles to be proposed by the committee would be based on Bob Simon’s original principles for Reston, but that they would need to be updated for the 21st century and spelled out in a bit more detail. Committee members were reminded that several documents with suggested principles language had been circulated to the membership: papers from John Lovaas, Dick Rogers and Terry Maynard, along with the ARCH statement of principles circulated by Jerry Volloy. John Lovaas, Dick Rogers and Herb Basik agreed to form a subcommittee to draft the new principles document.

Terry Maynard handed out copies of the draft Reston 2020 Blog and asked for comments, corrections and input. After a brief discussion of other methods of group communication/opinion gathering, the committee agreed the proposed blog would best fit our needs. There was general agreement we wanted the blog to be open to all members of the community and that we wanted individuals to be able to post comments to the blog. Committee members should communicate directly with Terry regarding input for the blog.

Terri Phillips raised the use of Twitter as a mechanism to spread the word about the work of Reston 2020 and the RMPSSTF. She will investigate this issue and report back to the committee.

The date and time of the next meeting will be announced via email, the committee blog, and the county website.