Joint RA-RCA-ARCH Letter Updates Community Comments on Draft Reston Plan, Version 10

This letter updates the joint letter sent by RA, RCA, and ARCH concerning proposed amendments to the draft Reston Comprehensive Plan being considered by the Reston Task Force.  It recognizes that some of the earlier recommendations concerning Sustaining Reston and Environmental Stability have been incorporated in the latest draft.  This letter adds new text addressing new language concerning parks and recreation in Version 10 of the draft Plan. 

These changes and changes submitted by other organizations on the task force will be considered at tomorrow's possibly final meeting of the task force.  It will be held at the RA Headquarters Conference Center, 7PM, October 29, 2013. 

   Joint RA-RCA-ARCH Comments on Version 10 of Draft Reston Comp Plan, October 28, 2013

Commentary: Draft Plan Jeopardizes Urban Reston, John Lovaas, Reston Connection, October 23, 2013

An overflow crowd at the Joint Community Forum last Thursday, Oct. 17 at the Reston Association learned the outlines of the draft Reston Master Plan for the Dulles Rail Corridor. The sobering assessment by community representatives on the Master Plan Task Force which began its work four years ago left the audience with many unanswered questions and concerns about the quality of planned growth for 40,000 more people and 60,000 more jobs in the corridor.

Six themes dominated the assessment and dialogue during the evening. . .

Click here for the rest of this commentary.

Recap: Joint Forum on Reston's Future, Colin Mills, RCA President, Reston Patch, October 23, 2013

RCA, RCA and ARCH came together to inform our citizens about how the Comp Plan will affect our community. It was a great event - and a preview of collaborations to come.

When you’re a community leader, you want to feel that you’re doing real good for your community.  I’ve never had that feeling more strongly than last week, when we held a joint forum with Reston Association and ARCH on the draft Comprehensive Plan.  Civic organizations coming together to inform our citizens about a complex issue with big implications for our future… that’s my idea of doing good.  The forum was a triumph for our organizations and for Reston.

I’ve talked many times about my desire to work with other organization to help the community.  Happily, the leadership at RA and ARCH feels the same way, and we’ve had many productive conversations about how we can join forces.  The Master Plan Task Force provided the spark to bring us together; we realized that we shared many of the same concerns, and we decided we would be more effective as a chorus, rather than as solo voices. 

We developed a joint statement of principles that we felt should guide the Comprehensive Plan.  And we decided to hold a community meeting to let our citizens know where the Task Force process stands, the areas where we think the Comp Plan could be made better, and why this all matters.  We also wanted to give our citizens a chance to ask questions and share their concerns. 

We expected the forum would be well attended, but we didn’t realize how popular it would be.  The meeting took place in the RA Conference Center, and it was standing room only.  We set up an overflow room where people could watch on video, and that was standing room only as well.  All told, over 250 folks showed up for.  I haven’t seen a crowd that big at a community meeting since the Rescue Reston rally last September.  It was great to see so many Restonians concerned about the community’s future!

Task Force chair Patty Nicoson started us off by explaining the Task Force’s vision for the Metro station areas.  Next, Richard Lambert of the County Department of Planning and Zoning provided an overview of the Comp Plan as it stands.  Then we turned it over to our panel, consisting of RA’s Andy Sigle, RCA’s Terry Maynard, and ARCH’s Jerry Volloy.  Together, they addressed each of the principles in our joint statement, outlined the strengths and weaknesses of the Plan in those areas, and provided suggestions for improving it.  (Those suggestions became a joint comment our three organizations submitted to the Task Force after the forum.)

After that, we took questions from the audience.  My only regret is that we didn’t have time to answer them all; there were a lot of thoughtful comments.  We did try to address common questions that were asked by a lot of different folks.  Through these common questions, a picture emerged.  Our citizens are concerned about what development will do to our traffic.  They’re eager to see pedestrian and bike connections as well as roads.  They’re worried about the impact to our environment and open spaces.  They’re curious how we’ll find enough recreation space, so that the people who live and work here can also play here.  They’re excited about the Silver Line, but worried about how the changes it brings will affect the Reston they love.

I closed out the forum by explaining why the Comprehensive Plan process matters. The decisions we’re making now will set the ground rules for development in Reston for the next 40 or 50 years.  We’re creating the Reston that our children and grandchildren will live in.  We’re seeking to balance the ability for Reston to grow and remain vital with the timeless values that we’ve always held dear. 

This process brings a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous risk.  If we get this right, we’ll succeed in updating Bob Simon’s vision and maintaining a vibrant community into the future.  If we get it wrong, we risk losing the qualities and the balance that make Reston special.  The Comprehensive Plan has real consequences for our traffic, our open spaces, our environment, our recreational amenities, and our quality of life.

All in all, it was a tremendous event.  If you weren’t able to attend, you can watch the recording provided by RA.
Now it’s your turn.  The best way to ensure that the Comp Plan is right for Reston is for you to speak up and get involved.  The more citizens that the County and the Task Force hear from, the better chance we have.  Fortunately, there are still opportunities for you to make your voice heard.

Please come to the next Task Force meeting, on Tuesday, October 29th at 7 PM at RA Headquarters.  Members of the public can speak at the meeting.  The Task Force is used to hearing the same old voices, and it would be great to see and hear from some new faces.

Once the Task Force approves the Comprehensive Plan, it will go before the Planning Commission on November 13, and the Board of Supervisors in December.  We want to see a big turnout of Restonians who care about our community’s future!

In addition to the public speaking opportunities, you can also email your thoughts directly to the Task Force and to Supervisor Hudgins.  Whether you like the Comp Plan or don’t, they need to hear what you have to say. 

I’m grateful to RA and ARCH for standing together with us and keeping the public informed on this issue.  (Thanks especially to Cate Fulkerson and the RA staff for their great work in setting up the forum.)  I’m glad Patty and Richard came to give the Task Force side of the story.  And I’m proud and honored that so many of our citizens showed up to see what we had to say.

The best part?  We’re just getting started.  All three of our organizations have really enjoyed collaborating, and we’re actively seeking other ways that we can work together for the good of the community.  We are the custodians of Reston’s future, and we take that duty seriously.  Stay tuned to see how else we will work to make Reston a better place.

Joint RA, RCA, ARCH Letter to the County Planning Staff on Version 9 of the Draft Reston Comprehensive Plan, October 18, 2013

   Joint RA RCA ARCH Letter on Version 9 Comp Plan Text, October 18, 2013

Video: Joint Reston Community Forum on Draft Revised Reston Master Plan, October 17, 2013

Last night, Reston Association (RA), Reston Citizens Association (RCA), and the Association of Reston Clusters & Homeowners (ARCH) held a joint forum on their key concerns with the current draft Reston Master Plan.  More than 250 people attended, including overflow crowds in both the RA Conference Center and a second large room where the forum was livestreamed. 

RA President Ken Kneuven opened the forum welcoming all the attendees and highlighting the importance of the Reston Master Plan Task Force.  He then introduced Patty Nicoson, the task force chairman, who spoke about the task force and its vision and planning principles for the community (12:10).  After her presentation, Richard Lambert of the County Planning Staff provided an overview of the draft plan (28:20)

The forum was then turned over to the task force representatives--RA's Andy Sigle, RCA's Terry Maynard, and ARCH's Jerry Volloy--to discuss the six topic areas of special interest to the Reston community in assuring the uniqueness and quality of life of Reston.  The six topic areas are:

• Sustaining Reston (Begins at 52:35)
• Open Space, Parks, & Recreation  (1:02:05)
• Flexibility (1:10:50)
• Environmental Sustainability (1:17:10)
• Mobility (1:21:50)
• Implementation (1:28:40)

Ken Kneuven then read questions from the audience for the forum panel to address (1:34:45).  Colin Mills, RCA's President, wrapped up the forum with a call to action by the community (1:58:20).

The full video is provided below.

 

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

Posted by Terry Maynard

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.

Looking into Reston's future, Colin Mills, RCA President, Reston Patch, October 9, 2013

Want to know what sort of changes are in store for Reston? Come to our community meeting, where RCA, RA and ARCH will tell you how the new Comp Plan will affect us - and how it could be better.

Posted by Colin Mills , October 09, 2013 at 01:40 PM

Lately, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to think about how much better it is to do things together than to go it alone.  As I mentioned last week, I recently got married.  From my perspective, married life has a lot to recommend it. 

It’s great on a practical level – you have someone to split the chores with – but also on an emotional level.  Having someone to help celebrate your triumphs and lighten your burdens, a trusted confidante and companion, and someone to start and end each day with… it’s all a blessing.  It’s great to have someone else on your team.

What’s true for individuals is also true for organizations.  I’ve written on many occasions about how crucial it is for our community organizations to work together.  And I’m happy to report that three of Reston’s leading organizations – RCA, RA, and the Association of Reston Clusters and Homeowners (ARCH) – are working together on a key issue for Reston’s future: the draft Comprehensive Plan that’s emerging from the Reston Master Plan Task Force.  Not only that, we’re holding a meeting next week to let our citizens know what the future holds for Reston.  (Keep reading for details!)

RCA has been working very hard on the Task Force, but it has been a long and lonely struggle at times.  As you know if you have followed our comments, we believe the draft Comprehensive Plan less than ideal for Restonians in a lot of ways.  But we’re only one voice on the Task Force; there’s only so much we can accomplish on our own.

Happily, we’ve discovered that we aren’t alone.  In conversations with leaders from RA and ARCH, we’ve found that we have a lot of views in common.  And we agreed that our voices would be amplified if we spoke up together.  So we decided to stand up together on behalf of the citizens of Reston.

Like a good marriage, our collaboration allows us to benefit from each organization’s strength.  We at RCA bring our analytical skills and deep involvement throughout the process to the table.  RA brings its formidable resources to the table.  For instance, they’ve been able to hire a land use attorney as an advisor (something we could never afford), and they have a much larger megaphone to communicate with our citizens.  ARCH contributes its community connections and experience in complex community issues.  When we unite those strengths, it’s a very powerful combination.

Our collaboration is starting to pay off.  We’ve agreed on a joint statement expressing our guiding principles for the Phase I Comprehensive Plan.  We’re working on a joint comment for the Task Force expressing our common views on how the plan can be improved.  And we’re holding a community forum to let Restonians know what’s in the plan, how it will affect Reston’s future, and our ideas for making it better.

The forum will be on Thursday, October 17th from 7 to 9 PM at RA headquarters.  Task Force chair Patty Nicoson will be there to talk about the work that’s been done so far.  Heidi Merkel of the County’s Department of Planning and Zoning will talk about the plan from a County Perspective.  And then representatives from RA, RCA, and ARCH will share our thoughts about the plan and how it will affect Reston’s future.

We’re having this meeting because we want to make sure our citizens know what’s in store for our community.  But we also want to hear from you, and find out what matters most to you, so that we can better represent the community’s interests and concerns.  So we won’t just be there to speak to you; we’ll also make sure you have the opportunity to make your voice heard.

This is a really crucial meeting to attend if you’re a Restonian and you care about our community’s future.  The new Comprehensive Plan, and the new development that will be built around the Silver Line, will change the face of Reston for decades to come.  It will impact our traffic, our vitality, our environmental quality, our parks and recreation facilities, and our future direction. 

If you’ve been following the process closely, now is the time to speak out and make yourself heard.  If you haven’t been following it, now is the time to get informed and involved. 

I’m really glad that our three organizations are coming together on behalf of our citizens.  We’re much more powerful and effective when we speak as a united voice.  And it’s particularly important for us to join forces on the Task Force.  The developer representatives, while they don’t agree on everything, have shown themselves as a fairly united force throughout the process.  They know how the game is played, they know what they want, and they know how to get it. 

The citizen representatives need to have the same unity of purpose and resolve.  Together, we can push for a plan that builds on Bob Simon’s vision and creates a community that’s ready for the future while maintaining the values and amenities that we all love about the Reston of today.

I hope to see you at the meeting next week.  And I look forward to working with RA, ARCH, and other civic organizations to ensure that Reston’s future lives up to its past.  Just like my marriage, I hope that our organizational partnership lasts a long time, and that we’re able to enjoy a lot of success together.

Joint Community Forum: RCA and RA Approve Joint Summary Statement of Concern about Draft Reston Master Plan, Plan Joint Forum

At their respective Board of Directors meetings on September 23, 2013, the Reston Citizens Association (RCA) and Reston Association (RA) approved a joint summary statement of concerns about key  concerns in the draft Reston Master Plan.  The summary is a top level description of a series of six key areas of concern the two organizations and the Alliance for Reston Clusters and Homeowners (ARCH) have shared with the County.

Here is the text of the joint summary statement:

GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR THE PHASE ONE COMPREHENSIVE PLAN FOR

THE RESTON TRANSIT STATION AREAS (TSAS)

1.  Reston Sustainability:  We believe that Reston encompasses all of the land within the Transit Station corridor area.  All new development in this area should be incorporated into either RA or RTCA, according to their agreed upon membership boundaries.

2.  Environmental Sustainability:   Consistent with Reston’s history of forward thinking on environmental stewardship and sustainability, we believe that future development in Reston should meet the highest feasible environmental standards, ranging from the protection or restoration of natural amenities, to the use of the best environmental practices in development design and materials.

3.  Flexibility:  We appreciate the need for moderate flexibility in planning over a two-decade timeframe, but we do not support Plan language that would allow significant variation or increase from the density/intensity and land use mix objectives laid out in the Preferred Development Scenario (Scenario G). 

4.  Open Spaces, Parks, and Recreation:  In order to sustain Reston’s existing character and reputation as a model planned community, we believe the new Comprehensive Plan must assure the provision of adequate high-quality, publicly accessible open space, parks,  natural areas, and recreational facilities within the Phase 1 area, to accommodate Reston’s residents and employees.

5.  Mobility:  We believe the people of Reston must have reasonable cross-community driving, biking and walking conditions, especially during peak periods, both within and near the Phase 1 area.  The following are crucial to maintain a balance between land use and transportation:  (1) road, bicycle, pedestrian and transit improvements;  (2) transportation demand management (TDM) measures; and (3) adherence to the Preferred Development Scenario mix of uses and maximum level  of development.

6.  Implementation:  We believe the people of Reston must have strong guarantees that the infrastructure needed to support the increased level of development and continuation of Reston’s high quality of life  will be completed concurrently with development, and paid for, on a fair, pro rata basis,  by those who will profit from the development.

The joint effort by RCA, RA, and ARCH is a first in the half-century history of Reston.  It reflects the importance that all three organizations attach to the development of a new Reston Comprehensive Plan that protects and advances the quality of life in Reston in areas critical to the community.

Representatives of the the community organizations will present a panel discussion and Q&A opportunity in a joint community forum at the Reston Association headquarters at 7PM on Thursday, October 17, 2013.  Everyone is invited to attend, learn, inquire, and act.  Please join us.