Opinion: In approving Rays Regarde, Supervisors did the right thing

Good for the Ray family.

After watching more than three hours of public testimony at Tuesday’s Prince William County Board of Supervisors meeting, it was clear the family wanted the one thing any property owner wants when they go to sell — a fair market price.

A divided Board of Supervisors approved a rezoning that clears the way for 325 new houses to be built on the 56-acre property soon-to-be known as Ray’s Regarde. They did the right thing.

When I was a child, my mother drove a Prince William County School bus for a living. She ferried high-school students from Marumsco Hills to and from Woodbridge Senior High School in Lake Ridge, each day passing by the Ray property.

This, of course, was in the early 1990s, the days before the Prince William Parkway, when the way to get across Interstate 95 was Horner Road. Since the parkway opened in the early 90s, portions of Horner Road were abandoned, and the Ray property might as well have been, too.

Members of the Ray family told county supervisors their unsightly stories of walking up on people having sex in cars on their property, people who ditched cars in their driveway because they no longer wanted the jalopies, forcing the property owner to pay out-of-pocket to have it towed. There are trash heaps due to illegal dumping, and a blighted, burned-out home that also sits on the property.

It’s no wonder why the Ray family wanted out.

When it comes to Supervisors approving any land-use case in Prince William County, there’s always the traffic argument — this new development is going to produce too many new cars that will use already overwhelmed roads.

Add to that the familiar, “all of our schools are already overcrowded.” It amounts to saying we all moved here, but, for some reason, we can’t hold any more people, and can’t figure out how to fix the schools problem, so, landowners shouldn’t sell to the free market and developers can’t build.

Traffic is a nightmare in Woodbridge. I know this because I’ve not only watched it worsen over the years, I’ve built a successful business here at Potomac Local writing about it.

But this new home project abuts the highway and sits across from Virginia’s largest commuter parking lot, the Horner Road lot. Those who move into these homes, to be priced between $300,000 and $400,000 will undoubtedly be commuters who are forced to find work further north.

All that talk from project developer Gary Garczynski about how these homes being for millennials just entering the workforce is utter nonsense, as few jobs in the county provide an appropriate salary to afford the cost of these planned homes.

And for those soon-to-be commuters who will live in Rays Regarde, things are changing. Have you read about OmniRide developing an Uber-like ridesharing service designed to pick up passengers at their front doors and take them to a commuter lot to catch a bus or to slug?

The same thing could be developed in Woodbridge, and that would mean those cars would never have to leave the driveway during the work week.

And, sure, Prince William County Schools are overcrowded. But new schools are on the way, with John D. Jenkins Elementary soon to open, and new middle and high schools soon to follow.

What about the old construction debris landfill that used to operate at the site where the homes will be built? Sure, it’s nobody’s first choice to live on top of a capped landfill. But the developer has agreed to work with the state to remove poor soils, replace them with something more suitable to build on, and open it up for testing before the first home is built.

With the coal ash problem at Possum Point near Dumfries, we’ve been talking about landfills and slurry ponds since President Obama ordered them closed. However, Prince William County Solid Waste Division Chief Tom Smith told Supervisors that situation at Ray’s Regarde is a far cry from Possum Point.

“This landfill has been capped for 30 years,” he said.

Those toxic coal ash ponds near Dumfries, however, remain wide open.

Let’s not forget this is the east side of the county — the place where the dense development is supposed to occur, alongside the busy interstate corridor complete with commuter lots, slug lines, express toll lanes, commuter rail, and a potential new commuter ferry on the Potomac River.

For years, we’ve heard many of the same speakers who opposed Ray’s Regarde urging the Board of Supervisors to support a Metro rail extension from Springfield to Woodbridge. Well, Metro craves density.

And, as Supervisor Ruth Anderson put it Tuesday, if it dense developments don’t go here, where will they go?

For years, I’ve talked with Charlie Grymes, of the Prince William Conservation Alliance, who is a huge advocate of protecting open space on Prince William County’s western Rural Crescent. To do that, the development that will inevitably come to Prince William needs to be concentrated in the county’s dense, eastern neighborhoods.

“The future is adding to density to north Woodbridge, at Innovation Park [near Manassas], building the live, work, and play neighborhoods, where you don’t need a car,” said Grymes in November, at a Prince William Committee of 100 meeting. “That’s how we’re going to get jobs in Prince William County. That’s how we’re going to get a commercial tax base.”

Since the early part of this decade, county planners and residents have been talking about a transfer of development rights program where property owners in the rural area could transfer their property development rights to developers in the denser eastern section, and be paid fair market value.

“To have a strong rural area, we have to have a strong receiving area,” Grymes said.

To date, that program is just a pipe dream.

But the reality is already on paper, and it has been for more than 20 years. The county’s Comprehensive Plan — the document outlines zoning and what type of development should be built and where — has called for about 16 homes per acre on the Rays Regarde site, more than double what will be built.

“We’ve reached a point where we’ve had this in the [comprehensive] plan for 25 plus years. It would be unfair for this Board to now say we are going to do something different with this land, and the right thing to do is to let the Ray family move forward,” Coles District Supervisor Marty Nohe said on Tuesday.

I couldn’t agree with him more.

And, like most documents, the county’s comprehensive plan is a living, changing document. The county’s planning office has been successful over the past two years attracting residents to town hall meetings they call charettes to go over small area plans, and asking residents about what kind of development they want in their neighborhoods.

Then they — and this is the important part — work together to modify the plan.

In fact, an overhaul of the comprehensive plan has been underway for the past two years. The whole time, county government employees have been asking for and getting feedback from residents.

Recently, I covered a town hall meeting in Haymarket where residents live on land settled after the Civil War by freed blacks demanded the comprehensive plan be changed because they don’t want the wider, four-lane roads the plan calls for.

And, once a year, planners bring requests to the Board of Supervisors from landowners asking for changes in the comprehensive plan. And, in some cases, they change the plan. I know this because I wrote about one such change last week.