EditorialA New Way of Thinking
We have to hand it to the leadership of the City of Falls Church. In a wide range or arenas, it has exhibited a willingness to learn and improve its capacity for both innovation and effective negotiation.
In F.C.’s pursuit of economic development since F.C. Chamber of Commerce president Margaret Handley worked to initiate a “Private-Public Partnership” in 1991, it took some seminal turning points to overcome a reputation cultivated over decades of being hostile to economic growth. One was the revolutionary move by the Chamber of Commerce in April 1995 to go on record in favor of full funding for the Falls Church City Schools in the City’s annual budget fight. That profoundly changed the perception, each to the other, of the City's business and residential communities. Another was the impact of the legendary “Holmes Report” in the fall of 1997. Development consultant David Holmes, in marked contrast to a stream of predecessors, ignited widespread optimism for the capacity of the City to be a “destination location” for attractive large scale retail, commercial and mixed use development. Holmes demonstrated how the City could exercise design control and attract dense projects which could yield enormous financial benefits to pay for education and other vital services. He won over important City fathers like Lou Olom.
This provided the basis for the City's tentative deal on its first Class A office project which morphed into The Spectrum, about ready for groundbreaking this fall. The Broadway, The Byron, 500 S. Maple and the City Center redevelopment negotiations quickly followed.
Meanwhile, the City has honed its negotiating skills, going from dishing out $1.5 million to make the first project happen to routinely wringing multiple millions in developer proffers from each new project. Now, in the proposed “workforce housing” Trammel House project reported two week’s ago, the developer has anticipated the City's wishes in advance to offer, rather than wait to be asked for, an innovative new kind of proffer.
It’s just not the same City of Falls Church that virtually gave away prime real estate to the Northern Virginia University Center in 1992, or that permitted all residential development on the 6.5-acre Whittier School site in mid-1997. We have to believe, gratefully, that nothing like those kinds of naive and costly decisions, that we editorialized so strong against to no avail back then, would be made today.
Similarly, while the F.C. school board delayed for months in 1998 before accepting a modest offer from the News-Press to donate an electronic scoreboard for the high school baseball field, it is now happily granting athletic field naming rights and other rewards in exchange for major contributions from local businesses. It's this new way of thinking in Falls Church, and not any particular developer or deal, that will assure a bright and lasting future |
