News-Press Editorial

The 2,000 word comprehensive review in last week's News-Press of where the City of Falls Church has come and where it is headed on economic development was breathtaking. Taken as a whole, the City of Falls Church has accomplished an enormous amount in the last three years and the process only accelerated in the last year. And what's on the horizon is of a whole different magnitude.

Everyone who's been a part deserves credit, and we take great satisfaction in our role over the last 13 and a half years (next week's will mark the 700th consecutive weekly edition of the News-Press). Since Day One in March 1991, we've crusaded in this editorial space for just the kind of robust economic development that we're now seeing. There's been a constant drum beat from this quarter, but it fell on deaf or frustrated ears for many years in a community with a well-deserved reputation for being stubbornly adverse to such things. Finally, a serious momentum for change began to come together in the late 1990s.

Now, four major mixed use developments have been closely scrutinized and approved by the City Council, and each one has been better than the last. The result has been increasingly impressive projects with stronger prospects of net benefits, including proffers and annual tax yields, to the overall community.

But hold onto your hats. The biggest, by far, is yet to come. Starting in mid-September, the City will learn what its next decade has in store when the first results of negotiations for the development of a four-block area of downtown for a new City Center is unveiled.

With that big moment will come the first look at the future of Falls Church. A lot of vetting in public hearings and reviews by local boards and commissions will precede final decisions, but the parameters of the downtown overhaul will be set. The good news is that the City government is a big player in the project, meaning it will reflect the public will and be carefully monitored and developed in a manner designed to optimize the net benefit to the community.

There is no doubt this will mark an historic opportunity for the City of Falls Church to shape its image and sense of community more profoundly than at any other point in its history, whether that history is run back 305 years to the founding of the Big Chimneys Inn or back 50+ years to the incorporation of the City in its present jurisdictional form.

Today's citizens will be present at the remaking of Falls Church, and while this will be an amazingly exciting time, it will also be a seriously challenging one. We'll have to live with major traffic and other disruptions for an extended period. Still, if we maintain a sense of humor and with a focus on the overwhelming benefits that we'll all gain from the outcome, it could be an incomparable experience of community solidarity.