The Fairfax County government should resist requests by a developer to significantly reduce parking for multi-family residential units at a proposed mixed-use project next to the West Falls Church Metrorail station, the McLean Citizens Association (MCA) board of directors reiterated June 7.
MCA originally sent a letter to county officials March 1 challenging the findings of a parking-reduction study for FCGP-Metro Development LLC’s proposed project.
The applicant later submitted a revised parking study that also supported the reductions, said Robert Perito, who chairs MCA’s Planning and Zoning Committee.
The MCA board of directors on June 7 approved a letter from association president Linda Walsh to William Hicks, the county’s director of Land Development Services, which disputed the study’s findings and urged county officials to deny the applicant’s request for a “drastic” reduction in parking spaces, he said.
“The letter states the study does not offer sufficient empirical evidence to justify a reduction in parking spaces for multi-family residential buildings from 40 to 42 percent below county zoning-ordinance requirements,” Perito said.
Such reductions also might result in overflow parking in surrounding neighborhoods, he said.
It would be “really unfair” for a developer to create such a situation and expect to counter it with increased parking restrictions and law enforcement, Perito said.
While the applicant is seeking to provide 0.75 parking spaces per studio or one-bedroom unit and 0.9 spaces per two-bedroom unit, the county’s parking-utilization surveys for residential building near public transit do not recommend offering less than one space per unit, Perito said.
The applicant does not have a contractual agreement with Metrorail to allow people living in those units to park in an existing five-story parking garage at the site, which is operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and would remain with the redevelopment, the letter read.
The county’s staff report does not expect WMATA to offer the garage for residential parking and states the applicant should provide parking instead, MCA’s letter read.
Studies of comparable transit-oriented areas show that residents still need to own cars and most have one or two, the letter stated.
The MCA board rejected a member’s suggestion to seek no parking reductions at all at the development.
The applicant also is trying to reduce parking for the development’s townhouses and retail space, and MCA’s Transportation Committee did not object to those proposals, said Bruce Jones, MCA’s recording secretary.
“Our concern has been limited to the multi-family” units, he said. “It would not be reasonable to request the multi-family [parking] coefficients that are applied at a place which is remote from mass transit be applied at a place that is so close to a transit station.”
The Fairfax County Planning Commission on June 7 recommended again that the Board of Supervisors approve FCGP-Metro Development LLC’s application. The commission originally recommended approval March 15, but took up the matter again following a March 23 Virginia Supreme Court decision that invalidated Fairfax County’s Modernized Zoning Ordinance (zMOD).
(County supervisors approved zMOD at an electronic meeting during the pandemic in March 2021 and the court ruled that this violated open-meeting rules of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. Supervisors on May 9 this year reauthorized zMOD.)
The proposed mixed-use rezoning would build 810 multi-family dwelling units, 85 townhouses, 110,000 square feet of office space, 10,000 square feet of retail, six park areas, road improvements, and pedestrian and bicycle amenities. The development would be built in four phases, with infrastructure being built first.
“This is about as by-the-book an application as you can get,” said Andrew Painter, the applicant’s attorney, at the June 7 Planning Commission meeting.
The Board of Supervisors is slated to take up the application June 27.
