WATCH Proposes Its Own Town Center Committee to the Reston Task Force

Below is the text of an e-mail from WATCH Chair Robert Goudie to the Reston task force proposing a Town Center Committee under the auspices of the Reston task force. The attachment he refers to in this e-mail is WATCH's proposed planning priorities earlier posted here.

Attached for the Task Force’s consideration concerning Town Center’s future development is input from WATCH, the Working Alliance of Town Center Homeowners. WATCH is an informal organization comprised of Town Center’s HOAs and residents that I nominally chair (as one of the residential reps on the Town Center Board). The attached synthesizes what I received – after soliciting written comment and holding two open community fora on the subject. The document cannot pretend to speak for every resident or HOA, but I have forwarded it among the WATCH mail list asking that HOA Boards and residents consider contacting the Task Force to “me-too” this document or offer their own views on these important subjects (whether in writing or at the April community forum on Town Center).

I want to address briefly the procedural recommendation that the Task Force immediately create a Town Center Committee:

1. I know some in our group are reluctant to have any committees. I respect that view, and I’m open to persuasion on the subject. But my instinct is that there are a number of issues pertaining to Town Center that will not easily lend themselves to the large forum format and, equally important, the compressed time frame we have to consider this (I understand we hope to be done with Phase I by June).
2. My thought is to borrow the committee mechanism from the Tyson’s effort and innumerable other task forces to maximize our time. WATCH proposes that the committee would be appointed by the Task Force and be comprised of Task Force members, report to the Task Force, be accountable under County FOIA and regular Task Force order, and, importantly, be guided by Staff. Non-voting expertise could be sought if the Task Force deemed that appropriate, but this would be a wholly accountable arm of the Task Force.
3. The committee would have a narrow focus: do some of the initial heavy lifting in terms of research, getting additional community input that could address specific pieces, and doing some real nitty gritty on grids, sorting out north-south connector options, pedestrian crossings, open space, development options for the North County lot, considering density issues, and other key items. It would then make recommendations or present options to the Task Force, which the Task Force would be free to accept, reject, or modify. My concern is that any one of several of these issues could alone consume an entire Task Force meeting. Enlisting a committee from among our number I think gives us the best chance to thoughtfully hit our deadline.

I defer to the wisdom of the Chair and Staff to decide when it is appropriate to consider this issue of a Town Center committee, though my personal hope is that this be sooner rather than later.

Supervisor Hudgins, I’ve included you on this because this document is a good-faith effort to coalesce diverse resident inputs into some kind of consolidated view of Town Center’s future, so it may have some value for you beyond the Task Force.

On behalf of WATCH I thank you for your consideration of these issues.

Regards,

Robert Goudie

One has to wonder if ALL Reston's neighborhoods shouldn't have their own committees to protect their equally important interests the way WATCH proposes protecting town center residents.

Terry Maynard
Reston 2020