Reston Spring

Reston Spring
Reston Spring

Monday, October 14, 2013

Thursday’s Joint Reston Community Forum: The Preview…, Reston Patch, October 14, 2013

This Thursday evening, October 17, at 7:00 PM, Reston Association (RA), Reston Citizens Association (RCA), and the Alliance for Reston Clusters and Homeowners (ARCH) will hold Reston’s first-ever joint community forum at RA headquarters.  The forum will focus on key areas of concern about the current draft Reston Comprehensive Plan held by all three organizations as we plan to add 60,000 jobs and 40,000 people to the Dulles Corridor and Town Center areas over the next quarter century. 
Introduced by host RA President Ken Kneuven, Reston Task Force Chairman Patty Nicoson and County Planning Staff Lead Heidi Merkel will start with a brief overview of the plan’s vision and planning principles as well as a broad brush overview of the new plan.  Then representatives of each of the three partner Reston community organizations will discuss six issue areas they believe need further attention in the latest draft Comprehensive Plan for Reston. 
Here’s a quick rundown on the six issue themes:
Sustaining Reston.  The draft plan does not establish a way to guide the massive development proposed in the draft plan in a manner consistent with Reston’s values and history.  The discussion will focus on the importance of Reston’s two leading homeowner associations—RA and the Reston Town Center Association—continuing their community oversight and how that might be accomplished.
Environmental Sustainability.   Among Reston’s most important core values is its commitment to sustaining—even improving—our environment from new green buildings to protecting natural areas in the face of the coming development.  This discussion will look at what more needs to be done to make sure Restonians may be assured that its tradition of environmental excellence itself is sustained.
Flexibility.  Flexibility in a plan can be both good and bad.  We don’t want a plan that is so rigid that it is unrealistic.  On the other hand, we don’t want a plan that is so flexible that we are unlikely to achieve the development and other goals laid out in the plan.  This discussion will look at some areas of the plan where flexibility may be overdone and needs some constraint.
Open Spaces, Parks, & Recreation.   Like environmental sustainability—even part of it—is Reston’s commitment to meeting the parks, recreation, and open space needs of the community as a critical element of Restonians’ quality of life.  This is the least developed topic area in the draft plan and the panel will discuss what needs to be done to help assure Restonians that they will continue to be a community of abundant parks, recreation, and open space.
Mobility.  Restonians are all too familiar with the difficulty of transiting the Dulles Corridor by car during peak traffic periods.  The huge planned jobs and housing developed proposed for the area will badly aggravate the situation unless aggressive measures are made to mitigate the problem.  The panel will discuss the community’s interest in improving road, transit, biking, and walking infrastructure to meet that problem along with transportation demand management (TDM) policy measures to prevent a further deterioration in community mobility.
Implementation.  Like most development planning, this draft plan provides an extensive description of what the community would like to achieve in its transit station areas, but it is wanting in matters of how that might be accomplished.   Implementation questions include how to achieve the plan’s density and balance goals, how to assure that needed infrastructure is created concurrently with development (phasing), how to pay for all this (financing), and how those many important decisions will be made (governance). 
Everyone who attends will have an opportunity to ask questions about all these topics at the end of this discussion.  When those questions are answered, RCA President Colin Mills will wrap up the meeting and offer the community ideas on how it can help Reston’s community organizations achieve a better Reston for the next generation.

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