Falls Church Mayor Letty Hardi weighed in on the controversy over plans included in the coming six-year Capital Improvement Program to invest $30 million in a new property yard facility at the yard’s current five-acre site on Gordons Road in the Little City.
While she did not offer concrete suggestions, she repeatedly said plans for the site presented as part of City Manager Wyatt Shields’ proposed budget in this Monday’s City Council work session “should be more creative” than the current one that calls for an expensive new facility.
Following controversy over the matter that was aired at last week’s Planning Commission meeting, the News-Press has learned that at its next meeting this month, the City’s Economic Development Authority will tackle the issue, and could emerge with a recommendation for an alternative use.
The Property Yard sits on land in the City’s West End that is simply too valuable from a commercial development potential perspective to continue in its current non-revenue generating capacity, those who want a change suggest.
If the City’s five acres there were combined with the six acres (six, this number being corrected from the News-Press’ previous erroneous report of 20 acres) owned by Beyer Automotive, it would add up to almost a dozen acres of prime real estate sitting in the shadow of the 9.78 acres currently being aggressively developed by the Hoffman Group in its so-called West End project site where the old local high school once sat.
In other words, the two properties in question – Beyer Automotive and the City-owned current Property Yard – combined would actually be larger than the space where the City’s portion of the Hoffman West End plan is located now.
From a revenue generating potential standpoint, and with the proximity to the Hoffman project adding considerable value in itself, the economic benefit to the City and its taxpayers could be huge, and could vastly outweigh whatever land the City might have to acquire elsewhere, even if somewhere outside the City, to relocate its Property Yard.
In an interview with the News-Press this week, Mike Beyer, the principal of Beyer Automotive, said he’s not been focused on his years-long work of amassing the property around his business because his car business is booming and taking up all his time. He added that there still remain two small pieces of the land he wants to piece together before it will form one large parcel, even though one of the difficult acquisitions was recently achieved. He said that the fact part of his land assembly spills over into Fairfax County can also open a “can of worms.”
Falls Church’s current plan to build a large $30 million structure on its land there has been based in part on a past history of difficulty finding an alternate Property Yard site when a search was undertaken years back. However, that effort did not take into account the prospect of connecting the land in question now to the Beyer’s and the enormous added value such a merger would provide. That potential could render the search for an alternative site both more urgent and more lucrative.
In a presentation last month made to the influential NAIOP regional developer organization, in the context of City plans to play host to that organization’s annual bus tour showing off potentials for new development in the region slated for May, Chief Falls Church Planner Paul Stoddard included the so-called “Gordons Road Triangle” in a chapter entitled, “Expanded West End Development.” It sites the potentials for development of the Hoffman Group’s 9.78 acre West End, of Virginia Tech and Hitt’s 7.52 acres, Federal Realty’s 10.7 acres, WMATA’s 24 acres that it has assigned the EYA company to develop, and the “Gordon’s Triangle’s” 20 acres that subsumes both the Beyer and City Property Yard properties. Throw into that mix for good measure the City Schools’ 26 acre campus home to its Henderson Middle School and Meridian High School.
At whatever point all of those properties could be fully developed, it could be the match of almost anything else in the region, if not potentially closing in on rivaling even Tysons Corner.
All this being said, the fate of the $30 million now included in Falls Church’s proposed CIP for committing the its current Property Yard land for its current non-revenue generating use in perpetuity could become one of the biggest issues in the upcoming budget cycle.
