The Virginia Department of Transportation has agreed to consider some improvements but is not moving fast enough, said Sonya Breehey, Northern Virginia advocacy manager for the Coalition for Smarter Growth.
Category: CSG in the News
CSG in the News: Residents, advocacy groups rally for Route 7 safety upgrades
“We are here to win badly needed safety improvements,” Coalition for Smarter Growth Northern Virginia advocacy manager Sonya Breehey said.
CSG in the News: Falls Church community demands safety changes to Route 7 corridor
“We need these safety improvements now,” Breehey said. “We took a look as we walked around this stretch and noted the missing infrastructure.”
CSG in the News: Groups launch Safe Streets campaign
The Coalition for Smarter Growth and the immigrant advocacy group CASA are launching the Safe Streets for Bailey’s Crossroads campaign. The goal is to engage and organize the local community in pushing for improved access for walking, biking, and transit.
Report says Montgomery County has good bus service, but region needs more investment
A report released Thursday by a regional coalition of business and smart growth organizations commends Montgomery County for its Flash bus service and free fares for Ride On service, while urging improvements for bus service across the region.
CSG in the News: MetroNow releases progress report to refocus region’s leaders on urgency of better bus
The MetroNow Coalition—comprised of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, Federal City Council, Greater Washington Board of Trade, Greater Washington Partnership, Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Prince George’s Chamber of Commerce, the 2030 Group and Tysons Partnership—released the MetroNow Bus Transformation Project Progress Report.
CSG in the News: Traffic safety groups implore officials to make upgrades for pedestrians, cyclists after recent deaths
The campaign specifically focuses on the Route 7 corridor around Baileys Crossroads and Seven Corners after 68-year-old Nguyet Ly was hit and killed when walking along a section of Leesburg Pike without a sidewalk on Dec. 13.
CSG in the News: Prince George’s Zoning Rewrite Stalls Over Unique Ethics Rule
UPDATE 4/12/2021: The revised bill, HB 980, passed both the Maryland House of Delegates and the Senate. Thanks to all those who took action! The final bill was amended (changes we supported) to address concerns and ensure broad support. View final bill here.
“First on FOX 5: Prince George’s County has spent millions of dollars over six years on a massive countywide rezoning plan. Leaders say it’s crucial to make the county more competitive and business friendly, but after all that time and money, the process has hit a hurdle.” View FOX 5 story here.
CSG testified in support of the state bill because adjusting the County’s unique ethics rules for the Countywide Zoning Map amendment will be the final step in implementing the years-long update to the zoning code. Adopting the modern, updated zoning regulations is a once in a generation opportunity. Montgomery County and Baltimore City do not have this ethics rule, unique to Prince George’s, and have already adopted their next-generation zoning regulations.
View CSG’s testimony in support of completing the Countywide rezoning here. View our action alert here. The proposed legislation can be viewed here and final bill is here.
Photo Credit: C. Cort
CSG in the News: Tenleytown Group Files Court Appeal Over 86-Unit Church Redevelopment
By Jon Banister | Bisnow, Washington, DC | March 18, 2020
A plan to redevelop a church in upper Northwest D.C. and add senior housing has received opposition from a neighborhood group, and it is now taking the project to court.
The Tenleytown Neighbors Association filed an appeal Friday with the D.C. Court of Appeals contesting the approval of the redevelopment of the Wisconsin Avenue Baptist Church site at 3920 Alton Place NW…
The project was supported by Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3E. In its resolution of support, ANC 3E said the applicant made changes in design and agreed to mitigation efforts around traffic and noise.
It was also supported by groups including Ward 3 Vision and Coalition for Smarter Growth. CSG Policy Director Cheryl Cort submitted written testimony for the November 2018 hearing detailing the project’s benefits.
“We support this project given the need by Wisconsin Avenue Baptist Church to renew its outmoded facility for religious uses,” Cort wrote in the letter. “We support the project because it is sensitively designed, requiring only modest relief from zoning requirements. We support the project because we believe it is important to provide assisted living and memory care for DC and DC area families.”…
Residents across the city have appealed dozens of projects in recent years, delaying projects that would create thousands of new housing units. The appeals come as Mayor Muriel Bowser is pushing toward a goal of building 36,000 new units in D.C. by 2025, with a focus on adding housing in upper Northwest neighborhoods like Tenleytown.
Read the full story in Bisnow here.
CSG in the News: New transportation dollars will soon flow into Central Virginia. But, what will it be used for?
By Wyatt Gordon | Greater Greater Washington | March 4, 2020
With the unanimous blessing of the Virginia Senate’s Finance Committee, the creation of a new Central Virginia Transportation Authority is all but a done deal. The projected $170 million the tax hikes are expected to raise will transform the region, but will Greater Richmond use the money to fund smart growth or sprawl?
After the passage of a transportation funding deal for the I-81 corridor last year, Central Virginia felt like the hole in a donut with regions to its east, north, and west all raking in dedicated transportation dollars. To ensure the nine localities which make up Plan RVA—also known as Planning District 15 (Hanover, Ashland, Goochland, Powhatan, Richmond, New Kent, Chesterfield, Henrico, and Charles City)—did not get left behind, Delegate Delores McQuinn introduced HB1541 this session right before the filing deadline.
Central Virginia’s new transportation monies will flow in from increases in two taxes. Residents of the nine localities will pay an additional 0.7% on sales and use taxes and an extra 2.% on the wholesale gas tax. Half of those new dollars will remain in the hands of localities to do with as they see fit. Thirty-five percent will be disbursed under the auspices of a newly created Central Virginia Transportation Authority (CVTA) and its 16 member governing board. The smallest portion of the new funding—just 15%—is allocated to transit.
A transit conundrum
Twenty-five million in dedicated dollars is an exciting prospect for a transit system that has for decades been fully reliant on year by year funding decisions from the localities it serves. The changes outlined in HB1541 will mark the first time the Greater Richmond Transit Company will achieve any level of budget autonomy. However, the bill fails to fully free GRTC from the caprices of the localities. In fact, HB1541 creates a surreal loophole that could tank transit funding for what is already America’s worst-funded public transportation system per capita.
In exchange for the CVTA’s two tax increases, the bill mandates all nine localities continue to spend at least half of what they currently alot for transportation expenditures. The benchmark date to determine their 50% “maintenance of effort” is July 1st, 2020.
By signing off on a date in the future, lawmakers established a loophole through which the County of Henrico or the City of Richmond (the only two localities that currently fund GRTC) could scrap their transit funding altogether in this spring’s budgets and lock themselves in with no obligation to continue locally funding transit at all.
The anticipated $25 million GRTC will receive from their 15% allocation in the CVTA bill isn’t even enough to cover even half of their current budget. If that happened, Richmond’s award-winning, trend-bucking transit system could face service cuts this summer.
Spending on sprawl
What is guaranteed to receive funding out of the CVTA bill is sprawl. The original version of HB1541 included language which only allowed the new regional authority to spend its budget on new road construction. Lacking any mandated provisions for bike, pedestrian, or multimodal infrastructure—let alone maintenance of existing roadways—Delegate McQuinn’s bill could potentially result in 85% of the new funding flowing directly into new highways.
That means as much as $145 million annually could go to build out further sprawl. Chesterfield County, the largest locality in Planning District 15, already has a litany of new highway projects it plans to fund with the new tax dollars. A proposal to extend Powhite Parkway out to US Route 360 is projected to cost a half a billion dollars alone.
In an op-ed in the Virginia Mercury, Stewart Schwartz— Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth—warned lawmakers, “We are not confident that Richmond’s suburban jurisdictions are yet committed to transit-oriented land use and the rural land conservation necessary to reduce traffic and preserve the livability of the region. Instead, with a big infusion of tax dollars for road expansion and accompanying auto-dependent growth, the region could repeat the mistakes of traffic-choked Northern Virginia.”
View the full story in Greater Greater Washington here.