The news reported on the front page of the News-Press last week about the rapid progress on aggressive plans to develop the Merrifield district of Fairfax County just west of the City of Falls Church should serve as a wake up call to everyone Falls Church. The plans call for just the kind of “town center” that Falls Church has been haggling about for more than a decade and, as yet, still unable to pull off. Some remember, and still have the yellowed news clips, that this concept was hotly debated in Falls Church as far back as the early 1970s. But to be kind, we’ll limit the age of the latest push to around the time somewhere in the late 1990s when it was figured out to bring the consulting firm, Street Works, into the picture for a full blown public vetting process on what a town center should involve.
