Jim Duszynski:  I would like to welcome you to the third meeting in a series of presentations that we have been doing on the Hunt Field.  We have a lighter crowd tonight than we have seen at the other meetings that we have had.  I will hope that is good news, that we have been answering lots of questions in the community.  If there is anybody in the back that can’t see or would like to move up, please feel free.

 

Tonight, we will spend the first part of the evening sort of reviewing the things that we have talked about over the last month at the previous two meetings and wrap them into a presentation of the community impact statement that we submitted last week.  If you came in through the front door and picked up a copy on the table, that is the text portion of the community impact statement that we submitted to the planning commission.  There are a variety of other documents that went to the planning commission with that, but this is, as I said, the text portion of the community impact statement that is required under the ordinance.

 

In addition to that, we submitted a marketing study.  We submitted what we call a ‘design process summary booklet’, which is a large, color book that contains 11x17 versions of most of the boards that you see behind us and many of the slides that you will see tonight.  But what we wanted to do was, in addition to providing text that people could read and sort of wonder, perhaps, in their mind exactly what we meant and what our intentions were, we also wanted to provide visual images of the type of community that we are planning to build.

 

As I said, the CIS was submitted, the Community Impact Statement was submitted, on the 19th of April.  This was part of our agreement with the planning commission.  We originally were supposed to submit it earlier, but we had wanted to delay that in order to have a couple of these public meetings.  We are scheduled for a staff review with the planning and engineering department on May 4th and then we have our public hearing before the planning commission on May 8th.  I would invite everyone here and everyone in the community to come to that meeting and let your comments be heard.

 

After the Community Impact Statement is approved, we will move forward with the first phase of the project, which is approximately 90 lots.  We will actually talk a little bit more about that later this evening and show a slide of what we see as that first phase to give you an idea of where we will be headed early in the project.  That submittal for the first phase, what the county refers to as a preliminary plot, will probably occur sometime in June.  Then, there will be a planning commission hearing sometime in September or maybe early October.  But, we hope that we will have approvals and permits by October so that we can actually start the Hunt Field project and engage in home sales for the spring.

 

With that, I think that I will just turn it over to Lee and let you do your portion of the presentation.

Lee Quill:  Thank you, Jim. It is a little smaller of a crowd tonight, but we thank you for coming in on such a beautiful spring night.  Driving up here, this will make the fourth season that our planning team has been coming up here and it is wonderful to see the changes in the seasons and see the beauty of this place.  That is partly why we are paying so much attention to this particular proposal.

 

How many of you went to the first meeting?  Okay.  How many to the second meeting?  Okay, so most of you have been.  How many is this their first?  Okay, good.  Welcome tonight.  There is a little bit of a summary that I am going to take you through but you will kind of catch up.  Most of the people who have been here before will see what we have been talking about.   At the end of the meeting, a lot of the boards that you will see in front of you tonight talk about the process that we have been going through to evaluate and study the project and we will take you through that. 

 

Tonight we are going to try to take you through, those of you who have been with us before, you know that we spend a lot of time on various issues trying to understand the context we are in, how you should be responsive to that.  How do you deal with an idea of making compact design and reinforcing the special places such as Charles Town and Ranson?  Based on the models of Charles Town and Ranson, Shepherdstown, Harpers Ferry and others, which are urban settlements so that you preserve the rural legacy and character of a particular place rather than put subdivisions throughout the area eating up a lot of land?

 

The CIS, what we are going to do is take the discussions we have been having for the last couple meetings and private conversations, etc., and take you through how we have taken your comments, your input, our analysis, and put that together in a package that is much more informed and much more focused than what you all saw last year.  If there is one thing that I can compliment this developer on is that after last year’s effort, they re-evaluated things and they hired us, which we were very excited about because we have really enjoyed working on this project and will continue to enjoy working with you all on that.  But, they said let’s look and see what we can do to do things better.  They have gone out and really worked to try to do a project that is much more responsive to what this special place is about.  What we have tried to do is take that now and put it into a CIS so that you can see the framework that we are all talking about moving forward with and we will have a dialogue after, a little presentation today to continue that discussion.

 

Now, the CIS, which there are copies of the text in the back and some of the diagrams, basically is outlined to do one thing.  It says here, the purpose of the CIS is to provide sufficient detail of a proposal to permit an examination of the scope of a particular development and proposal and to permit an evaluation of that proposal’s impact on a particular area.

 

Now, how we have structured this and what I am going to take you through is trying to show you the things we have been talking about regarding this project and how they relate to a CIS format so that when you are looking through it, you understand how the two start to come together.

 

The first part of the CIS really deals with basic descriptive information.  The second part deals with community impact, and then the third part is social impacts.  The fourth part is economic impacts.  I am going to kind of go through various elements of this as we go through our presentation. 

 

Why don’t we start with the slides.  We will bring the lights down and start to go through this and I will take you through some of the issues that we have been dealing with that relate to the CIS.

 

The first question on the CIS is:  Where is the project located?  We’ve talked about this.  For those that are new, what we have put together, we talked about the context of the natural and rural beauty of the particular area and how the location of the project is directly adjacent to the town of Charles Town.

 

It also asks you about topography and the site conditions itself.  One of the most important things about this particular site is it’s direct relationship to two very important historical areas.  One, being the city of Charles Town itself and a visual connection to where you can see the Courthouse Tower, and the other is, in this diagram.  We show here it’s direct relationship to Claymont, which is at the center of these spires.  In our response the plan, what we have done is try to make sure that on the high points of this particular piece of property, you are not viewing from Claymont the back of someone’s deck and their Weber.  We are being sensitive to that particular area so that the high points become the public and significant civic spaces of the part of the new neighborhoods of Charles Town.

 

It is a rolling topography, but as you can see in this particular slide right here, right above my finger right here, that is a view from the high mound, right in the center of the site, back to Charles Town.  So, there is always a visual link back to town.  It is very, very close.  So, sensitive to that context, but also we have some lower lands, some wet lands, some wonderful stream beds next to Claymont and down in the other area.  We want to make sure that we are responsive in that particular method of site determination.  Part of our open space has to be active recreation for ball fields, etc.  But, we also have to provide passive, open space where you can have a contemplative type of space, a space where you can go and enjoy the natural environment.  So, we are going to work with that also.

 

How does the project relate to the context that we are in?  One of the questions that the CIS asks:  How does it relate to the comprehensive plan and how does it relate to the proximity of other projects?  Hunt Field’s property is this area right here, which is right on the edge of an urban growth boundary that has been established in your master plan.   This is a good thing.  This is a good thing because the model for this is this example, a national model, in Portland.  Those of you who study these types of things, this marked growth, know that there are boundaries that were set up that say, “These are the areas where growth should occur.  Outside of that area, we want to preserve that pasture land.” 

 

Believe it or not, Jefferson County, by establishing this urban growth area is really very progressive in trying to address the issues of how sprawl works.  The problem here in Charles Town, and it is the same in Portland, what type of development happens within that particular area and making sure that it happens in that particular area.

 

As I said, this particular property and how it relates to downtown, it is a project compatible to downtown or to an adjacent piece of property.  We have a number of things that we have to relate to.  One is the historic property, Claymont.  The other is the residential neighborhoods to the north and of course, Charles Town, just the northeast.  We also have, as I said, if you remember the boundary comes down through here, we have other developments, which will in fill into hat area over 20 years.  But, what we are trying to show is that future development that also comes around this particular project needs to go to the same standard and high quality of development and understanding of the context here so that it is more informed and more like Charles Town.

 

Again, historic resources, they ask how you relate to these.  We have related to it from the understanding of how the tow projects visually connect.  Also, if you come up here and look at some of our boards on the historic context over here and how we are working with the plan, what we are working with area areas of identifying historic resources and making sure that these are not going to be areas that are just kind of wiped over and forgotten.  We are going to be continuing to look at how special places, such as Prospect Hill, Washington’s original house right here, how views from Claymont back into the site look.  There is also Braddock’s House, which is back over in here, another potential historic site in this area.  We are continuing to do more extensive research on the sites so that these special places become part of our open space and part of our natural and historical resources so that the history of these it is not left behind or forgotten.  This is a very important area. 

 

As I mentioned once before, I am from Alexandria, Virginia.  The Washington Family is big in our area.  He went to my church.  We want to make sure that we give the respect to these historic references here so that they become part of the natural space, or sometimes part of a neighborhood, part of a regional open space system that people will be able to enjoy in the future.

 

The model for our development is really the historic fabric and wonderful special places in this region.  If you were with us in our earlier meetings you know that we spent a lot of time talking about Shepherdstown, especially Charles Town.  But, what we have done in our analysis early on and in some of the boards here, is we have studied the block and street structure and development plat plans in Charles Town, in Shepherdstown, the streets, and the development pattern there, as well as Bolivar and Harper’s Ferry, and we have really looked at the urban settlements.  These are much more compact.  It puts people together in a little different pattern than your typical subdivision, but these are the special places that we all travel to up here and we love to go to them. 

 

What we are saying is that in this new development, as it is evolving over the next 20 years, the pattern of this development should be based on patterns of development in this region that have worked for over 200 years.  We are not looking for patterns of development that have worked for the last 40 years which gobble up the land and don’t become responsive to the wonderful places.  Eventually, if this place is developed right and everything within the growth boundary is developed in a pattern that is sensitive to the historic pattern of town-making that we all love, whether it is here or in other areas, eventually this just becomes a little bit bigger.  You know, this town was not always that large.  It started smaller, it grew.  But, they stayed with the same pattern.  What we are saying is that we need to be true to the patterns that have worked and eventually, within that growth boundary, if we do that, the pattern will be more dense, it will preserve more open space, it will be of a character where eventually it will be a new neighborhood, but it will have the richness of some of the older ones.

 

These are our guiding principles that we have been using throughout much of our work, but also into his particular area.  Some of them deal with smart growth, the opportunities of mixed use, creating housing opportunities, fostering distinct, attractive communities with a sense of place.  That is why this is so strong in Charles Town, Shepherdstown, and Ranson, etc.  Providing a variety of transportation choices, making sure that we preserve open space and concentrate the developments so that you preserve farmland.  Again, that is within that boundary, not outside.

 

In urban design, it is okay to concentrate things, but you have to do it right, within the boundary.  Part of it, the wonderful nature of neighborhoods is that they are walkable.  You run into your neighbor, you see people, you experience people.  You walk to places because they are close. 

 

What we want to do with this development is set up a series of neighborhoods, we have talked about this in some of our earlier meetings, six neighborhoods essentially.  They will have a five-minute walk from the center.  They have an open space, a civic component as its center.  That also incorporates major open space, both passive and active.  So, within a five-minute walk, you are in a park.  If you have kids and you want to go walk to a park, great.  If you are grandparents and you have your kids coming over for that, great.  If you have no kids and you like parks, you can go walk to it.  We are also talking bout making a series of connections back into town as another series of kind of the multi-modal capability here, of getting on bikes, etc., so that we can get people out of their cars, walking, biking, and using the facilities of the neighborhood.

 

One of the basic questions that comes up under the first part of CIS is:  What is the plan?  How does it evolve?  What is it like?  What are the lots like, etc.?  So, I am going to run you quickly through what we have done, as you recall.

 

Again, the site, we have set up these six neighborhoods.  AT the center of these neighborhoods are civic spaces or open spaces.  Many of them are set up along the model of trying to take these high places and putting civic buildings in those high places so they become points of reference.  That is what our clock towers and church spires, and in this particular community the spires a block and a half over here of the courthouse, they become physical references and markers.  They become places that orient one to the development and to the community.  This one is in Nantucket, but it is very prominent as you come in.   This is what we want to do.  We want to use these as markers in the high spaces as well as open spaces.

 

At the center of each neighborhood will be a park.  You can see that we have started to do some diagramming in the left early on this year when we talked bout that and this is the kind of nature of some of the arks that could happen.

 

We looked at a couple models of what happens in the east and what happens in the west.  There is more residential-oriented in the west and in the east there is a little more mix of some commercial as far as around the square or a circle.  The other important thing to keep in mind with this development is that if we are going to get people into a different mode of transportation and a different way of thinking, we have to have centers of the neighborhood hat people can walk to so that they can have a convenient way to get on some kind of a shuttle or some kind of a vehicle such as a fast tram here or pan-tram bus that can then take you to downtown.  It is the intention of this development that where there may be some small neighborhood retail, like the dry cleaners or small corner grocery or something that you find in many communities, that it is not to erode downtown.  Downtown Charles Town has tremendous potential if it starts to bring the community together.  Shepherdstown is pretty rich.  It has everything from dot com groups down there to engineers that do engineering projects in other states, to restaurants, to bakeries, to coffee shops, to bookstores, etc.  That richness can come to Charles Town.  We want to reinforce the downtown and get people either bike-riding or going by shuttle so that they are not all driving. 

 

Again, the center of each neighborhood will have an open space.  Some of those will have churches where they are markers, such as this, with the development blocks around them.

 

Again, this was the eastern way of looking at it.  This was modeled off of a small village idea of buildings with 2 ½ levels, similar to a Nantucket condition right here, where you have a few areas of retail on the ground floors which has the opportunity for live/work above.

 

We have also looked at other opportunities on a site.  We have a rail line that cuts right through the site.  Part of thinking out of the box a little bit, we are exploring, and we have hired a consultant whom I will introduce in a few minutes, some of you have met him already.  We are looking at the opportunity of bringing either an extension of the MARC train or a shuttle to the MARC train station right to the center of the site so that the opportunity can exist for getting people that are commuting into Washington to come right to this particular station. 

 

Now, if we can get this to work it would be wonderful.  If not, we still want to make sure that we have established a center in the center of the project which becomes the heart and also becomes a hub for transportation which then can be a shuttle back through neighborhoods to take people back to the MARC station. But, we are very encouraged.  There are some opportunities that are there.  Al will speak to kind of a general, big picture of things that might happen and we are going to continue to explore this and we will be talking with you as we evolve this idea.

 

Again, in this particular one, the center would have a civic space, a train station and some other civic buildings.  This is a space in Leesburg, for those of you who have been to Leesburg which most of you probably have, you know that having that open space in the center of the town really helps center one as far as where the center of the whole town is as it grows out into the neighborhoods.

 

We did an extensive analysis of the block structures of Charles Town, being the downtown blocks, the neighborhood blocks, judicial blocks, and then how the zoning works in Jefferson County.  We have an 80 foot frontage requirement and a 6,000 square foot lot requirement.  How can that work backing into the models of blocks such as what we find in Charles Town.

 

In the next slide, what we have started to develop then is an understanding of how the individual lots work.  There are different lot sizes in Charles Town that run from anywhere from 40 foot wide to 50, 60, 70, 80, 110, those allow for a variety of housing types.  What we have done is studies of how those might work with block structures here and also how those houses may work in different sizes.  Part of what you will see in the boards over here, when you see an analysis of Crosswinds and building typologies here, the purpose of those boards are to tell you that we have studied not only the historic buildings, which are wonderful, here in Charles Town and Ranson, but also what is being built and how does that fit on a particular lot.  How can you make that better and fine tune it slightly to get the car orientation taken care of a little bit so you get a better street, a better house.  We are working with traditional typologies while trying to make them a little bit better.

 

These are two streets, one being in Charles Town, the housing and here in Alexandria.  In a plan like this, we have been talking big and everyone is saying, Oh my God! This is a huge plan.  It is big.  But it is also a 20-year plan.  You aren’t looking at little incremental things that are going to gobble you up.  You are looking at trying to plan and set up a framework for what will happen on a very important piece of property for the next 20 years.  The advantage of this is that you know what is coming.  You are seeing it right here.  You are helping to shape it and you will continue to help shape it.  You won’t have to go out there and fight the battle every couple months or whatever worrying about what is going to happen to this area, this area, this area, this area.  Trying to control some sprawl.  But, the thing is also, we are going to be looking as I said, at the houses anted getting down to that quality level.  When we walked the streets of those places that I talked about of Charles Town, Ranson, Shepherdstown, Bolivar, and Harper’s Ferry, it is the buildings and the way that the streets work that really are the key elements of the plan.  We have to pay attention to everything, down to how buildings relate to the street, what they are, all the way up to how the big area is planned.  So, it is always a change of scale and getting down to the details in order to get this.

 

If you take a look at these two houses, this is a house in one of your subdivisions, and this is a house in Charles Town.  I want you to look at it very closely because this is the level of detail that we are talking about.  This has a center hall, this has a center hall with a peak.  This has two windows above two windows.  Two windows on this side.  This house has the same.  This has an appendage right here, this has an appendage right here.  What is the difference?  It is a garage door.  Now, which one do y our want to live in?  Well, some will pick either one.  But, which one makes a better street?  I think this one does.  What we are trying to do is look at houses and say how do you de-emphasize this black top, that big garage door, things like this, so that the car becomes a little less intrusive in your community so you create a better street.  But, that house, with a little fine-tuning over there, takes on the character of this. So, we aren’t that far apart.  It is not that all of the houses being built we can’t work with, it is just that we have to be sensitive to our historic context.

 

Again, here we started looking at blocks, and working with blocks of about 220x600 which is basically a little tighter than a block in Charles Town.  The Charles Town block is about 330x600 or 400 and 500.  We are dealing with an 80-foot frontage by 100 foot deep lot.  We will have time for questions in just a few minutes.  What we are developing is a series of blocks that will work with the typologies of an 80 foot frontage and then if we want to change it some day in the future we can play with that too.

 

The next part of the CIS gets into, really an area which is called the social impact.  It gets into things such as traffic, demographics, emergency facilities, fire, police, housing supply, recreation, etc.  We are going to talk about a few of those issues now too because those are impacts of what we are doing with a project like this and we have spent a lot of f time thinking about that as I have talked about.

 

Once again, we have talked about the historic resources and the importance of it’s location on this particular piece of property.

 

These are the two drawings, this guy here and this guy here, these are the two project drawings that are going in with the CIS to give the general concept right now.  This is the first stage of a series of drawings that go in.  It is not the final plan because the steps are that you have the CIS, which sets an overall framework, it gives you an understanding of where things are going.  There is then, a preliminary plat, which is really the first portion of what you are going to do.  Then, there is a final plat.  The final plat comes before the planning commission.  We don’t just disappear once this would go through.  There is an ongoing, important dialogue and relationship with this community of making sure that the plan reaches where it needs to go.  By taking these initial neighborhoods that we are studying with, we go forward and help to develop those into the models you have seen and can see around you.  There is public dialogue that we will have with you in future meetings as well as public hearings so that there is a chance for dialogue.  I just want to let you know that it is very much a public process and one that we are very excited about and engaged in and really enjoy.  It is a two-way dialogue that enriches plans such as this.

 

In the CIS document, the basic plan that they call for is basically a concept plan.  It asks for something that is relatively fluid to kind of set the framework of what it is that we are trying to do.  Essentially with this plan, which is the one that is right here, the green spaces that you see on this are generally the open spaces in the neighborhoods.  You will see end numbers which talk about essentially six neighborhoods, the green spaces of recreation around the lake, the school sites, the passive areas, the forests, down in the wet lands.  This is all set up as well as our connector road which we will talk about which is also meant to be a boulevard instead of a freeway.  We have a certain number of single family, townhouses, multi-family, essentially in the first neighborhood we are looking at an initial total acreage of 83.  I think this chart is into the back.  If you look at Table 2 in the handout that we have, in the back you can follow along.  This will give you more depth, but essentially we have broken the plan out.  It is 83 acres, open space of that is 15 acres, percent open space is 18%.  Single family, we are looking at about 236 dwelling units in the first phase of this plan.   We then go to 34 townhouses in that.  So total unit would be about 270 and probably about 50,000 of commercial which is a neighborhood-serving community retail that we talked about in our earlier plan.

 

As you go through the schedule you will look at this diagram and you will see that we have broken it down so that you can follow the open space, the number of units and see that it is going to be a series of incremental changes.  This is not one big swipe where all of a sudden in four years you have this whole site developed.  It is over a period of 15-20 years that this area will be developed. The good thing, again, is hat you know what is coming.  You can see the framework, you can understand that, we can all deal with that, it brings in the positive aspects of how we deal with the facilities, how we deal with the open space, etc.

 

The core, again, of every neighborhood is a neighborhood park.  This is a proposal on the right in Potomac Yard, a project of ours in Alexandria.  This is a neighborhood park in Richmond.  This particular park is an amazing structure.  It is a little triangular piece of land, but in this particular idea of putting in a neighborhood park, people really come together.  This particular one, you can see a couple sitting right here, not necessarily focused on the kids very much, maybe focused more on themselves, and of course, these guys, focused not their kids.  It is an idea of bringing community together and it is very important to the richness of our fabric of urban places and it is what we experienced when walking the streets in a particular place such as Charles Town.

 

Other open spaces that we talk about, whether it is large open spaces around the lake or large greens are part of the plan, part of the foundation that again will give you that open richness.

 

This is what we are not talking about doing.  There is open space in many subdivisions today which is open space and you can go out and throw the football.  It is also your BMP pond.  It is kind of that space that looks like, “Well, I gotta put it in there.”  What we are talking about is dealing with BMP issues, but also designing the open space so that it can be actively used as recreational space or a passive collection of filtering environmental areas through wetlands, etc.  All we are saying is that we are going to design the open space.  It is not something like, “Oh my gosh!  I have got to put it in.”  It is going to be the foundation of our plan and it is going to part of a connected open space system that can be tied back to Charles Town.

 

The civic component, what is the richness of Charles Town, Ranson, Shepherdstown, Bolivar, Harper’s Ferry?  It is the mix of buildings within a context.  If you walk out of this building right here and turn around, you are sitting in a school.  It is right next to some residences.  If you go over a block, you will see a church.  If you go back another block you will see another church and a graveyard.  There is a rich fabric of multi-structures of different civic uses.  If you go around the corner another block from here you see the city or town hall.  The courthouse is across from it. What we are talking bout doing is taking our civic buildings, whether they are churches or synagogues, whether they are fire stations, or whether they are schools and making them part of these civic spaces that we are talking about and making them part of the fabric of our neighborhoods so that they are not isolated somewhere else in the county.  We have needs that will be having to be addressed here.  There will be needs for additional fire facilities.  We will be providing a site for fire station public safety on site.  Even though we are very close to two, right here, it will be on site so that it can serve the community.  The idea of coming in with a potential library which was brought up at the last meeting.  There is probably a way that we can work that into a civic building, a small branch library.  We are going to explore that further with the members that we talked to last week.

 

Jim will sit here and talk for a moment if you would like to about the schools because the schools have been a really hot issue.  We know, we have been talking with the schools extensively about what should happen there so that it is not overburdened.  The problem is here now, we aren’t going to add to it. What we are going to try to do is solve part of that problem and definitely address ours, and Jim is going to talk a little bit about the success that we have been having with that effort.

 

Jim Duszynski:  Maybe I will go back just a little bit to a couple of the things that Lee has talked on a bit first.   That is the long-term nature of this project.  Last year, and even through particularly the first meeting that we had here, but not as much anymore because I think that people are starting to accept and understand a little bit better what we are talking about here.  But what we constantly heard was, “It is so big.  It is just too big.  Three thousand homes, oh my God!  We can’t have that here.”  The same thing when it came to schoolchildren.  The school board calculates school children at .5 children per single family home.  So, .5 times 3,300 at that time, 3,200 today, is 1650 kids.  We are going to need three new schools and we are going to need them now.  If it is traffic, it is 24,000 vehicle trips a day.  Oh my goodness, there are going to be 24,000 new cars on the road.  We can’t do that. 

 

But, again, what we have tried to talk to people about and what Lee has done, I think, a good job of talking to you tonight about, is the fact that this is a long term project.  The advantages that we see as developers of master planned communities is that once that plan, that framework is set, everyone in the community knows pretty well what to expect.  AS Lee said, you don’t have a new battle to fight every month.  “What are they doing over there?  What is happening on the farm down there?  What is happening between Shepherdstown and Charles Town?”  Or the kinds of things that I know that you are dealing with on a regular basis.  Again, Hunt Field is big, but it is long term.

 

Table 1  which is just behind page 16 for those of you who have a copy of the CIS.  Table 1 gives the project schedule, basically by year, by the types of houses that we anticipate to sell on an annual basis.  It is an anticipation or an estimate on our part, but one that we think is based in some current trends of population growth, of the number of building permits that Jefferson County is issuing on an annual basis.  AS we look at the census data, which has just been released for the state and particularly for this area and we talk to the economic development authority here in Jefferson County, to the school board here in Jefferson County, in the ten years between 1990 and the year 2000, the county grew by about 17%.  When I talked to the economic development authority, they use an annual growth rate of 1.5% per year.  When I talked to the school board, they look at the school population growing by 2% per year. 

 

So, what we looked at, when we developed our business plan and when we first looked at Hunt Field and looked at what made sense, would the project be a viable one financially?  Not one that we would come up and do a lot of presentations, start it, and then not be able to finish it, but how to make it viable.  We took a long hard look at these kinds of data to make sure that we weren’t creating some sort of pie-in-the sky dream that developers are sometimes known for.  But clearly, when you look at the schedule and you look at the number of building permits or the number of houses that we are talking about occupying annually, it fits within the overall growth rate for the county.  Whether we are talking about households that annually come into the county or whether we are talking bout school children that annually come into the school system, or traffic on the roads, or whatever it might be.  The proposed community fits within the anticipated growth for Jefferson County for next year and for the next 20 years.

 

Just for an example, I think the current trend is for the county to issue roughly 400 building permits per year.  What we saw at the beginning of the year, there was a little clip in the Hagerstown Herald that showed that the average number of days on the market for a new home in Jefferson County had literally dropped by half.  I want to say it was about 160 days last year in January, to about 70 or 80 days this year.  I see a couple realtors in the room, but I won’t make them speak to me on this subject.  But, we see that in fact, houses are going a little bit faster, but again, the historic trend is for about 400 building permit’s a year to be issued.  You see here that in our first year we are talking about 90.

 

The high years that you see here which are significant in terms of looking at a number of 400, which again, remember, is probably going to increase on an average of 1.5-2% every year.  The high years are years that we have plugged in the multi-family and the community.  Currently there isn’t really any multi-family development in the county so I am going to look at those and sort of present those to you as anomalies.  They are really not a trend where suddenly there is going to be a large spike in the amount of housing that comes on the market every year, but it will just be a year in which we anticipate that we would bring on, and I think that we anticipate about 150 units in each of those years.  But, you can see, except for those years, 100-150.  Then, as the project goes on 10, 11, 12 years from now when you will start to see more in the range of 450-460 building permit’s a year, again based on current trends of growth in the county.  Hunt Field consistently stays in probably the 25-30% range of the growth that is anticipated within the county.

 

If you go to Table 3, we looked at Table 2, it is a table that I have put together with he school board.  David Markoe, the former school superintendent, and Nancy Johnson, the school treasurer, and I have looked at these tables and I have had a number of meetings with the school board and Mr. Markoe over the last year to talk about how many students are in the school system, what their anticipated growth is, what their issues are.  Certainly one of the major issues that we have heard about and we continue to hear about, we understand it is a significant issue within the county, is schools and school capacity and the level of education in Jefferson County.  There is no doubt in our minds that it could use some improvement.  We will talk a little bit about that in a minute.

 

This table reflects, if you look at the first column it is basically Year 1 of the project.  You can assume that is the 2002-2003 school year.  But it is Year 1 of the project.  In the second column, you have elementary school, middle school, and high school.  Then, the third column is single families.  The fourth column is townhouses.  The fifth column is multi-family.  Then, the total number of school children in the right hand column that is generated in each year of the project at each grade level.  So, for elementary school, if you go back to Table 1, the project schedule, which indicates that 90 single families and 30 townhouses would be developed in Year 1, that generates, from that number of townhouse sales, 16.2 children.  We will round up to 17, and 3.3 or 4 more children from town homes for a total of about 20 or 21 schoolchildren at the elementary school level for the first year of this project.

 

In middle school, you see under single families, 7.2, townhouses 1.2, 8.49 children  in the middle school in the first year.

 

Then in the high school, 6.6 and 6.9, and again, there are no multi-families in that year because we didn’t anticipate developing any.  But, you see, then again, looking just at the right hand column, we are talking in the first year of this project at about 20 elementary school students, 9 middle school students, 8 high school students.  We aren’t talking about 1600 kids here.  These are the school board’s numbers.  They are numbers that I have worked on over the last year with them that give you the annual enrollment rate for the project and how it will impact the school system.

 

Now, what needs to be looked at and what I am in the middle of discussions with the school board about is what is the cumulative effect, because, clearly, the schoolchildren come in during Year 1, but they go someplace in Year 2.  They either stay in the school system or they graduate from a school.  It could be elementary school to middle school, middle school to high school, or if they were in high school, they graduate out of high school.  But where do they go?  How long are they in the elementary schools system which right now is K-5.  How long are they in the middle school system, which is 6-8?  In the school year 2002-2003, the ninth grade center will be open.  Kids coming out of middle school will go to the ninth grade center and kids in the ninth grade center will go to the high school level and so on.  Where we are in the process is trying to understand if this is how many students we expect to generate annually?  What can we anticipate in terms of how long those students are in the school system and then we can really start to talk seriously about the real impact, monetary, financial, fiscal impact of the students that are generated by this project.  We have committed since the beginning, and at each of these public meetings and again tonight, that we want to do what we can do to mitigate the financial impact of the students that are generated by this project.  We haven’t really been able to get anybody at the school board or at the county level to say to us, this is exactly what the impact is, we have already calculated it, we know what it is, and this is how we got there.  Nobody seems to be there yet. 

 

I know that there is a lot of discussion in the community about impact fees and about the local powers act and all of these.  There is a lot of work that needs to be done so that the county can get to the point where they can logically, reasonably, legally, and defensively calculate impact fees.  I hope that they get there sooner rather than later because right now we are the only developer committing to pay impact fees.  But, we are committed to that and we would like to see everybody doing it so that we aren’t at a disadvantage in the marketplace.  But again, we included this table which is supplementary to the CIS.  It is not required by the county, but we wanted to show the planning commission and the community that we have given this some thought.  Again, as I tell you tonight, we are in discussions trying to further refine it and better understand it, but I can tell you from what I have seen so far is that obviously, if you look at it so far, is at the elementary school level. 

 

So, for the first five or six years of the project, it would appear, and again, not understanding and not getting the data that tells me how long an elementary school student is in the elementary school system in this county. That is really the crux of the issue right now.  But when you look at it, clearly, you can see that the major impacts are on elementary schools.  But in the 6th, 7th, 8th year of this project, the elementary school that is impacted greatest by this project will graduate more students on an annual basis than will come into that school.  So, suddenly you will see a shift, a very significant shift based on the spreadsheets I have worked on so far, from elementary school population into middle school population.  And you will see that sort of rolling population.  And then it recycles about 10 or 11 years into the project.  But again, you have a significant amount of children that graduate from the school in the 6th or 7th year and you are still only graduating 15 or 20 students a year.  So, all of a sudden those impacts shift and they move away from the elementary school level.  But, we are clearly focused on the elementary school and knowing that is really where we need to focus in the early part of the project and then we can look at the other grade levels as the project goes on.  I think that is all I will talk about right now, thank you.

 

Lee Quill:  I think that the importance of this is also, as Jim has been working with the school board continually so that we can understand the impact, part of the reason for understanding this is because this developer has worked with school boards and said, okay, there is going to be 75 acres set aside for school sites.  Now, should that be one big site or two?  We think right now that it probably ought to be two.  What we have been looking at is one potentially in this particular area down here,  We are only talking about this being a third of the development that will be coming in over the next 20 years.  What we are trying to do is to see what is our part and how can we help?

 

By making the school sites part of the community, we want to establish them, as you can see in how we have set them up, as major elements within the community just like (inaudible).  They front on the streets.  They aren't hidden away someplace.  Paige Jackson, I am sure, is a wonderful school, but how many people can find it easily by coming in on old 340?  Our model is more like the building, we are in right now where the building is front and center, the play fields are behind or on the side.  And it is really part of the hub of the community that you can walk to, and really, it is a wonderful building.  again, that is part of the rich fabric of a really wonderful neighborhood.  So, a lot of this data will continue to inform when this should come on and what type of school it should be.

 

Part of the major building blocks of good neighborhoods and good communities are our streets.  When we walk the streets of Shepherdstown, on this side, or Charles Town, there is a special place and characteristic feel to each one of these, a special feel to each place.  Shepherdstown has a unique situation where they don't have so many curb and gutters, but they still have magnificent trees in many of their neighborhoods.  They have the sidewalks and then the trees, and then the road.  It is just missing the gutter.  But it has an amazing series of old trees that really provide character to the street.

 

In certain streets in Charles Town you have the trees inboard.  But again, you have that long row of trees.  Now, these trees were planted, they were designed and put there to help contribute to the neighborhoods over a long period of time.  That is what we are talking about doing.  But, it is a conscious decision.

 

There is a big difference between creating a street such as this, which is the Kentlands, and creating a street like this, which is a typical subdivision of what you see a lot of around the country.  What we are saying is that we think we can do a little better than that.  We can learn from the models that you saw before and do more of that to try to make the street a little richer. 

 

One of the major streets that we have going through the project we are talking about is a major collector piece, it connects to neighborhoods.  We want to make this a boulevard.  It is modeled after two boulevards in the region.  One is Monument Avenue in Richmond.  I don't know if you have been there but it is wonderful.  This is the street on this side; it is a tree-lined boulevard with a 40 foot median.  It has parking, wonderful houses.  But, guess what, how many of you all know where this is?  Ranson.

 

Believe it or not, when I first came up here and looked at this plan I kept looking at this plan and there was a circle in this long boulevard.  I said, "What is this?"  Finally, when I got back up here, because I had been to Charles Town, but as a young kid I didn't really focus on the urban issues as much.  I was going camping as a Boy Scout, etc.  All of a sudden, coming up as an architect and a planner I said, "My God!  Look at this wonderful street!"

 

It is really defined, instead of having so many gas stations and things, if we put a few more buildings around it and a few more trees that could be a little better.  But it is a wonderful street.  What we are saying is that we want to pick up from the patterns here and in other places to create wonderful streets like this that become major thoroughfares, but are not based on a by-pass.  They are not based on a high-speed road.  They are based on being building blocks of a community where people can cross the street and they have people living not the street so that the traffic goes slowly, but it contributes.

 

This is what Monument Avenue looked like when it first got started.  Everybody says, "Well, how are we going to do that?"  This is what Monument Avenue looked like before all of the trees were planted.  This is Commonwealth Avenue in Alexandria.  This used to be a trolley line at the turn of the century in the early part of the 20th century and then they came in and put the trees in when the trolleys were taken out.  So, all it is, is making a conscious decision to make good streets that contribute to your neighborhood.

 

Streets, the hierarchy of streets, whether they are neighborhood streets or whether they are collector streets is all based on kind of creating a character of a place.  But you are going to say, "Well, what about the capacity, what about these things?" 

 

One of our consultants, Mike Workosky, from Wells & Associates, is going to take a few moments right now to talk about what is it that generates traffic, how does it generate traffic, and what are the issues that we are looking at from the traffic and transportation components that are going to start to influence these things.  Again, the components of character versus what do you do with the streets to control it.

 

Mike Workosky:  Thanks, Lee.  Good evening, my name is Mike Workosky.  I am a Principal and a Traffic Engineer at the firm of Wells & Associates.  We are a Traffic Engineering/Planning Firm.  We conduct traffic studies and parking studies for projects, primarily in the Washington, D.C. area, but also around the country.  We are based in the Northern Virginia area, but we have other offices in Suburban Maryland.  We have been asked by Greenvest to take a look at this project from the traffic impact side and also review some of the previous studies that have been done on this project and have been submitted to the county.

 

We also have worked with Jim at Greenvest and Lee on other projects in the area so there is some cohesiveness between our teams as we come together building these plans.

 

The first thing that I wanted to touch on is the plan itself.  Lee has eloquently led you through how the plan is being designed, how the streets are being laid out.  These are very, very important concepts to a plan because we are invoking smart growth principles.  How we are doing that is having integrated uses.  From a traffic engineer's standpoint, we want integrated uses.  We want people to be able to combine their trips.  We want people to be able to walk to different places.  We don't want every person to have to get in their car and drive to the grocery store and then drive back home.  That, from just a conceptual level, helps to decrease the amount of peak hour traffic that a project will generate and that lowers its impact on a road network itself.

 

Also, you can see from these slides and some of the previous ones, the boulevard concept and streets with parking on them.  Again, these are very basic, very good internal designs for a project of this nature.  What this does, parking on a street of that nature creates some side friction.  It helps to slow traffic down.  We try to strike a balance on these projects and it is the most difficult part.  We want to serve pedestrians, we want to serve transit uses.  We also need to serve vehicles and we need to do that safely and we need to do that efficiently.  That is why there is a trade-off in these designs.  Through our experience on other projects that are similar in nature to this one, we have found that those types of designs are very important.  From a pedestrian standpoint, we look for connections.  We look for connections throughout the project.  We make sure that different ends of the project are connected through a central path.  We would like to plan for other facilities such as bike lanes, those sorts of things.  Those are what make, what we would term, “a walkable community”.

 

When I evaluate a project myself, I think about a person with children.  I have some children and I take them out, I put them in a stroller, and I do all of the things that a mom would do, or a parent would do, or a disabled person would have to do to get around that project.  It gets down to very detailed designs of where ramps are located and crosswalks are located and pavement treatments and those sorts of things.  Those can really help make a project a community itself.

 

Some of the other features that this design affords are features such as a circle.  Those become focal points in a project.  Those become things that people enjoy and they find that they can identify with those sorts of things.  Also, remember that we are looking at a 20-year plan.  This is a plan that is going to evolve some over time.  There are opportunities for transit.  There are opportunities for TDM or transportation demand management measures.  These are things I know that it is difficult to conceptualize them now, but as planners and engineers, these are that things that we have to think about because we are going so far into the future.  There are several design principles that I just sort of touched on and now I would like to just give you the brief discussion about the traffic study itself, some of the things that have been done and some particulars about the site.

 

Whenever we conduct a traffic analysis, similar to the one that has been submitted on this project, we start off with the basic conditions.  We look at the existing counts of traffic.  How are things working today?  How do people drive?  What is the capacity of the road system today?  We do that by collecting background traffic counts and primarily during the peak hours.  Those hours are essentially the morning peak hour when people go to work and the evening peak hour when people return.  We identify those hours as a function of the traffic counts that we take.  Then, we look the growth in traffic that will occur over time without the project.  That is, other planned projects in the area, other road connections that may affect the roads surrounding the project.  Historical growth rate information. 

 

All of these things we put in the background of a project.  Then we estimate the amount of traffic that the site will generate itself.  We have heard the comments about 24-25,000 vehicles a day.  From a sheer traffic standpoint, a project that is integrated and has uses that are integrated with each other, it will generate lower trips together than a project that would be calculated separately.  You’d have no interaction between these uses.  You do capture trips within your project and not on the external road system.  In general, this project would generate about 24-25,000 vehicle trips per day.  That is on a 24-hour basis.  Half of those trips come into the project, and half of those trips leave the project.  Those trips are not there at the same time.  Generally, the peak hour, peak demand, peak direction, is normally about 10% of the average daily traffic volume.  In this case, that would translate to about 1300 to 1400 peak hour, peak direction trips.  What I mean by that is people who are leaving in the morning and coming in in the afternoon, or in the evening. 

 

Once, we have determined the amount of trips that a project is generating, based on the land use densities and where they are located within the site, then we apply those trips to the road network.  And we do that by looking at population and employment densities and where these things are located in relationship to the site itself so that we can forecast where people will work and where people will live.  People who will work on site and people who will be coming to the site to work, hopefully.

Then, we prepare capacity analyses at the intersections and the roadways that surround the site.  Those analyses lead you to a set of roadway improvements that can accommodate site-generated traffic as well as the traffic generated by background developments and the traffic that is on the roads today.  So, generally this is an incremental process.  Right now, like I said, there has been a study that has been submitted to the county.  It outlines a number of roadway improvements that can adequately accommodate the traffic that this project will generate over three different stages.  I believe that the study has three different conditions in it.  That is really a prudent way to analyze it.  Our firm has been looking at this study that has been prepared.  We have been doing our own evaluation of the improvements and the ability for these improvements to handle the traffic of this site.  We will be in the coming months working with the West Virginia Highway Department as we go through the permitting stage and we get beyond the zoning stage.

 

I think that is the extent of my comments and, Lee, I will just turn it back to you.

 

Lee Quill:  Thank you, Mike.  Mike will be available for more detailed discussion.  Again, he is part of the team that will be with us during the duration of this project as we try to make refinements and understandings of how this project will have it’s impacts, to make sure that we get more people off of the road.

 

One of that things that I did want to point out again, is part of what we are doing with the measure of open space and recreation is, not all of the trips are just going to work.  A lot of them are you come home, but it is the quick trips of running to the store, or if you have kids, it is running the kids to a soccer game or baseball game or something like that.  What we are working on very consciously is putting major recreational, regional recreational facilities on the site so that if you are living here and your kid is in one of these leagues, he or she can either walk to it if it is close enough, ride their bike,  Or if you have to do a short haul, you can take a trip within the site, never impacting out.

 

What we are trying to do is again deal with the mix of uses, the mix of what we deal with in our lives everyday and enriching this community so that we can keep people in the different modes of transportation, walking, biking, transit connections that we talked about, maybe short trips in the car.  But we are trying to get them out of their car as much as we can.  There is not getting out onto the road network and having to drive to some other facility.  Another component as you may recall that I mentioned early on was looking at the center of the site and in this particular drawing right here, exploring what can happen with transit and what can happen with on the site transit as well as off site. 

 

I just want to introduce Al Eisenberg who is a consultant that has been brought on and I will just give a little background quickly on what he is doing.  Al is heading up the effort to look at transit opportunities for this site and what we might be able to bring to Charles Town and this site.

 

Al Eisenberg:  A number of you have met me before, I think, at one of the other sessions and I am glad to be here tonight and reacquaint myself both again and anew for the group that is here tonight.  It is a great privilege for me to be a part of this team.  By way of background, I was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation.  I served for 15 years as Chairman and Member of the Arlington Virginia County Board of Supervisors.  We are a community known for urban planning and smart growth.  A lot bigger scale than this one, but with the same goal in mind which is to keep the friendly neighborhood scale in every way and every place that we can.  A good project connects transportation and land use.  It is the essence of smart growth.  If the two don’t work together, then you have the kind of sprawl, which this project is trying to avoid.  In fact, as they have developed and planned it, it will avoid. 

 

If I didn’t believe that this was and will be a smart growth project, I would not have signed on to this task. I am excited about it and I think that there is something that is very important here that we can take advantage of.  Because you have two major rail lines, a Norfolk Southern line, and a MARC line, there are some opportunities, over time, to take advantage, we think, of those two lines as potential means of reducing the amount of travel, particularly by car, for those who would be traveling out of the county to get to and from work.  We want to explore these opportunities and we think that there are a number of them.  There are a large number of federal programs that are formula allocated as well as allocated by competitive grant to the states and to localities for a very wide variety of transportation uses. 

 

There is one program that you can apply directly to the state for which can actually help build bike trails, for example.  Now, that is not the mass transit that we are talking about with the two rail lines, but it is an example of the kind of thing that is out there.  There are, at least nationwide, hundreds of millions of dollars just for that program alone.  There are a whole variety of transit programs and related programs and we want to explore these to see about the extent to which over time, as this project unfolds, that these different kinds of transit options and choices can come into play.  The issue is choice and options so that people will have different ways of getting to and from where they want to go and not be tied to just one particular choice.

 

Rather than drag this on any farther, let me just say, my job is to explore this.  I will certainly be extremely interested in the views that you all have about opportunities, about things that you think will work.  What are the kinds of things that you believe are necessary in regard to this project?  I would certainly want to hear them and crank them right into the project that I am engaged in.

 

Let me make one other point that is very important with respect to the long-term transit options.  Under the law, all federal transportation programs have to go through a planning process and by law, that planning process has got to be open, every stage of the way, to very substantial public participation.  So, whatever it is that is proposed, all along the way, there is this public participation.  Because of the size of this community, you relate to a state plan and again, the state has got to consult you in terms of everything that would be done.  It is a wide-open process just like this one.  Again, I am very pleased to be part of it.

 

Lee Quill:  So, as we wrap up here and get into comment and question period, I think that what we have tried to convey as we look at this CIS as opposed to what you all have seen before, this planning effort and the open meetings and our two-way dialogue that we have been having and will continue to have.  This is not the end.  This is the beginning of a dialogue and working together to create a very special series of new neighborhoods for Charles Town that reflect and relate to Charles Town and historic patterns, so that we can learn from this wonderful place in Shepherdstown, places like this Alexandria neighborhood, and respond to a context again, over a period of time.  Here is your growth area.  Again, a wonderful model, based on the Portland model of an urban growth boundary.  But, if you notice, you will see a 20 year, need report.  Again, if there is anything that I want to stress with regards to phasing and time so that you can put this in the context of what you are dealing with. 

 

Right now you are dealing with incremental 150-200 plots of development right now.  But you don’t know what is coming down next year.  You don’t know where it is going to be or where it is coming from or what you are going to have to fight.  What we are trying to say right now is let’s plan for that portion right down in here and make it really good and raise the bar so that the other people coming in that are trying to do development in this area start to say, “Well, why isn’t it focused in a certain area and where is the quality level?”  What kind of environment do we want to create?

 

Sprawl, management of growth, happens in two different ways.  You either help shape it by determining where you want it to go and how you want it to be shaped and what quality.  Because Portland is struggling right now with the quality of its infill.  It is actually getting some cul-de-sacs and things like this within the growth boundary.  So, it is a little bit better, but we are talking at the next level, of quality.  What is it that we are talking about on the ground.  So, we either get ahead of it and try to help shape it, or it will shape us.

 

So, this plan talks about a phasing of twenty years.  This is the plan of a series of neighborhoods that we are talking about here.

 

This is probably the first neighborhood or a general idea of it.  There is major open space down here working with the new lake.  Recreation area is here and the first neighborhood going on, again, all connected, part of a short road.  This is probably what you will expect to be seeing shortly.  Within the next couple of months we will be coming back and talking to you about that.

 

It is going to be based on these models.  This wonderful mix, even the garage looks good in Charles Town because it is designed well and it fits with it.  This is a street in Kentlands.  It is not a bad place to live.

 

This is what we are trying to avoid.  That was not controlled and that was not shaped.  That happened.  There is a discussion out there about whether we are too early, too big.  Let me just put this thought out there.  If you know Leesburg, which I do, I have been working with Leesburg and the planning people in Loudoun for a long time about trying to protect the nature of its town and protect it with a boundary.  The eastern end of Leesburg did not deal with that and I dare you to please tell me where the boundary of Leesburg is coming in from Route 7 from Tyson’s Corner.  If you can find it, because of the little village, you win the prize.  But, I have seen it eroded because of this kind of stuff.  It just keeps growing and growing and now they have a large mall. 

 

What we are trying to do is be part of a problem-solving team to help focus the dialogue in the community, but also bring about a quality of discussion and a project that will avoid this from happening on the west end and in other areas so that you start to raise the bar.  To bring the community together and say, “Look, we don’t want this to continue.  We want it to be focused and we want to reinforce our downtown.  We want a quality development.”  It will either shape you or we can shape it together.  We will bring our tools, our experience, our resources from around various people and around the country to help solve problems here and that is why we are excited about the project just like Al.  That is why we are lucky and we feel lucky to have this opportunity with this developer because he has gone the next step.

 

These are our guiding principles that we have talked about before.  They are on the board over here.  Come over and look at them.

 

Again, this is the place that we are trying to protect that we want to reinforce and use as our model for the new development.

 

We are now going to open it up to questions and comments.  We thank you for coming to this third meeting.  AS you know, we have a CIS hearing on May 8^th.  If you can think about whether you can find some element of this plan or a bunch of elements in this plan that you think are good, please come and speak to them.  If you can swallow parts or the whole thing; come and speak to those things that you think are good.  If you don’t think it is good, come and speak to that too.  But we think that we have gone in this analysis and this study a long way to try to help shape some wonderful opportunities here of taking a  big project and instead of turning it into one big sprawl project, we are creating some wonderful new opportunities and we look forward to starting with this new project in the CIS approval and moving on to the next stages of neighborhood one and continuing the dialogue in more meetings which we will get into.

 

Jim Duszynski:  We have one person in each aisle with a hand mike so if you have a question just raise your hand and they will bring the mike down to you.  When you have the mike and the person in front of you has stopped talking, just feel free to stand up and ask your question.  So, is there anyone who has a question or would like to ask anything?

 

Lee Quill:  For the new people, what we are doing, is we do a transcript.  The reasons that we have these things on is that we do a transcript which is available to the public so that everything that we have been talking about tonight and the question and answer, if you would identify yourself, it is available.  There are also two transcripts from the other two meetings so you can go back through that.  If you like heavy reading at night, it is pretty thick, but you can go through it, look at these boards and follow along the discussions so that there is a more informed dialogue.  We learn a lot from the comments that come back also.  We try to share some information and get it back.  So, comments, questions, concerns, anybody?  No?  Okay, thank you.  (laughter)  Yes.

 

Robin Huyett Doherty:  As you just stated, if this project goes through just the beginning of a 20 year relationship with the city of Charles Town and with Jefferson County.  In my industry when we enter into business-client relationships we always look for references and past records.  How would you describe your relationship with Loudoun County?  And, or if I went to Loudoun County Planning Commission what