Strategic plan group talks transportation improvements, house rules

Virginia Railway Express trains that travel both north and south all day, more bike lanes, and more commuter parking are just some of the transportation wishes for the group tasked determining what Prince William County will need as its population grows.

Nowhere on the big list was an extension of Metro rail to the county, something advocates have long called for despite the Washington, D.C. subway system’s funding issues and crumbling infrastructure.

Members of the Prince William County Strategic Plan Committee made this of desires at its sixth scheduled meeting on May 25. The group is made up of representatives appointed by members on the County Board of Supervisors and four county staff members. It will spend the rest of year discussing what type of education, public safety, human services, and transportation improvements the county needs.

The committee held its first meeting at the county’s government center in February, and has 14 more meetings scheduled before the end of the year. The meetings are held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. and are open to the public, which is invited to come and speak with committee members to give input how they want to see Prince William improve in the coming years.

Meetings of the Strategic Planning Committee are called every four years. The committee produces a list of desires — what it calls outcomes. Those outcomes then are turned over to county staff members which are supposed to come up with a plan of action to achieve the outcomes, said group facilitator Pat Thomas, an analyst in the county budget office.

This is the first time the County Board of Supervisors did not give the group a goal statement. So, using two of what Thomas calls the county’s guiding documents, the “future 2030 report” and the existing comprehensive plan that this committee will update, it is up to the committee to tell the county what its citizens want from its government.

The committee set its goal for transportation at its last meeting:

“The community will have an accessible, comprehensive, multi-modal network of transportation and technology infrastructure that supports local and regional mobility.”

Members of the group then wrote down their outcomes (more commuter parking, more VRE trains) and then posted them on a wall. The results were then grouped together by topic, and the Committee at its June 2 meeting will vote on what outcomes to leave in and what to leave out.

The group spent a majority of the meeting talking about its house rules and not transportation. In the event the group cannot reach a consensus and must vote on a matter, some members of the group successfully argued to change the voting set up from a super majority — where two-thirds of the votes win the day to a simple majority where the majority of the “yes” votes wins.

There was fear among some committee members that the appointed county staff members in the group  would vote for existing county policies and would not be open to new ideas.

The last meeting of the strategic plan committee was held in 2013.