Notes on the Town Center Committee Meeting, August 17, 2010, Dick Rogers

The 17 August meeting of the Town Center (TC) Committee was mostly devoted to citizen comments. All committee members were present except Peter Otteni, co-chair.

Process: Robert said the TC sub com will meet next Tuesday to discuss open space and other issues and on August 31st to finalize draft.

He did comment that further analysis of county guidelines on urban parks suggest that 30 acres of park will be needed in the four TC sub-areas. (Comment: This will be a major challenge for the TC group to meet.)

John Lovaas and Dick Rogers presented a brief summary of the 12-page Reston 2020 Committee comments that John, Tammi Petrine, and others worked so hard on. Marion Stillson made some excellent succinct points in support.

Richard Stillson talked about the need for focus on implementation issues. There was some discussion about how far the Vision committee will go on this issue and Robert Goudie (co-chair) raised the utility of an implementation committee, which he said he had raised earlier but was ignored. Mark Looney voiced his strong support for using the existing Small Tax District #5 in this context.

Loren Bruce raised the RA-RTCA governance issue (Lovaas and Rogers had called for a fairer discussion of this issue earlier). Loren also urged the committee to take more urgent action on the suburban police station issue but got nowhere.

Katherine Driscoll McKee spoke to say that insinuations that RA was attempting a "land grab" for properties now covered by the RTCA was untrue. RA was interested only in new residences. This led to a brisk exchange with Goudie defending the committee's endorsement of RTCA membership for North Town Center.

Joe Leighton urged getting the perspective of Arlington on bus issues since they have a system that works. He also urged ball fields as part of urban parks.

Mary Ellen Craig from Paramount condos again voiced support for more parks and less density around her. She cautioned about shelters for homeless, etc, saying the impact on neighborhoods needs to be kept in mind.

The owner of the "Windward" property spoke about the utility of looser standards on residential density to encourage residential construction. This led to a general discussion of the PRC and current restrictions. There was strong sentiment for exempting the TC from the PRC and possibly Reston as a whole. Committee members thought the PRC restrictions would forestall the type of approach to 1:1 residential-commercial balance they are calling for.