MANASSAS -- Manassas has finished the initial stages for its Comprehensive Plan for 2040 and is now headed into technical studies by the Planning Commission's Comprehensive Plan Committee over the next few months.

Eventually, the plan will go before the City Council for direction and ultimately adoption.

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QUANTICO MARINE CORPS BASE — Quantico’s CDC (Child Development Center) North has reopened for business after a sewage backup.

The center was closed for over a week, displacing 230 children, after sewage flooded several rooms in the facility, said Quantico Marine Corps Base spokesman Maj. Ken Kunze.

Sewage flooded the center Tuesday, January 29, prompting an early dismissal. The closure was prolonged due to the sewage backup reoccurring the next day after they had initially repaired it, and then a construction crew working on a high school next door ruptured a water line – “so they had no water to complete the sanitation cleanup,” Kunze explained.

The ruptured water line added about two days to the closure.

They hired an “outside plumbing company to come in and put the camera down and get everything out.”

Foreign objects that were found in the sewer system were dislodged. Kunze couldn’t describe them.

The base also hired a professional cleaning company to sanitize the building – everything down to the toys was cleaned. There was no structural damage to the center, said Kunze.

The Child Development Center is a daycare center for school-age children. Due to the center being more affordable than off-base child care, Kunze explained that the center operates at capacity, filled the brim with children.

Marine parents who use the center had to leave work and pick up their children when the sewage backed up. The CDC will credit the parents for the days that their children missed care and will be reimbursed financially.

CDC South, a second child care center on the base, is a newer facility in a separate location and was not affected.

MANASSAS -- Manassas leaders Monday night passed a resolution in support of ratification by the Commonwealth of Virginia of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.

A similar last fall in Prince William County failed despite heavy lobbying from Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly.

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PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY -- Jackie Gaston is throwing her hat in the ring for Coles District School Board.

She’s a special education teacher in Fairfax County as well as a mother of three boys whose experience with PTO’s, meetings in the schools, and school improvement planning teams for her own children in who attend Prince William County Public Schools led her to want to serve.

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PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Paul O’Meara is running as a Republican for Coles District Supervisor.

He previously ran in 2015 for the same office and lost in the primary to Marty Nohe, who today is not seeking election to the Coles seat but rather the Prince William County Board of Supervisors Chairman, At-large seat.

O’Meara’s goals for running are to fix Route 28, to “find some practical solutions” to fix overcrowding in the schools, and “to correct a broken housing policy that has planted the seeds for the explosion in our budget and our current infrastructure deficit.”

“My number one priority is to fix [Route] 28.” O’Meara said. “I think that we need to build the Godwin Drive extension.”

Last month, Governor Ralph Northam left it up to Northern Virginia leaders to fund a fix for Route 28, dubbed the most-congested road in the region. The governor said he wouldn’t allocate state funding to fix the road.

With a price tag of $220 million, the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (of which Nohe is the Chairman) will fund a portion of the fix.

No matter who pays, O’Meara says it needs to be completed. “I think that it’s within Prince William County government’s authority to build this road and fix [Route] 28.”

When it comes to schools, O’Meara said that even if the county pays hundreds of millions of dollars to build more schools, the private industry could not build schools fast enough to keep up with the need. O’Meara instead believes that redrawing school boundaries may be a better use of taxpayer money.

The Board of Supervisors and School Board members are discussing a $143 million plan to upgrade school facilities that would nearly eliminate all portable trailer classrooms in the county.

Regarding the Board of County Supervisors’ relationship with the School Board, “I think we need to take a hard look at the revenue sharing agreement,” he said. That agreement has the Board of Supervisors automatically handing over 57 percent of the entire county budget to the school division to spend as it sees fit.

O’Meara is also focused on development in the county.

“I think that our housing policy is broken. I think that we have an unhealthy mix of commercial and residential development,” he said.

While working on the Strategic Plan team, O’Meara helped get the Board of Supervisors to approve a “moonshot” goal of increasing the county’s commercial tax base 35 percent, up from about 16 percent. While he thinks that’s an excellent first step, he says there’s a lot more work to do.

O’Meara says commercial development is good for the county “because it generates tax revenue, but it doesn’t create the same liabilities of student generation factors that residential development would do.”

At 35 percent, there would be fewer unmet needs in the county, he adds.

O’Meara is a third-generation Prince William resident. He has a degree in Government International Politics from George Mason University and has managed small businesses his entire career.

His family founded two small businesses in 1960 and 1971 and he assumed business operations from them in 2008 and took over complete control when his father died. He then started working in commercial property management in 2014.

He and his wife Melissa have two children, ages 5 and 2.

O’Meara served on the Prince William County School’s Infrastructure Task Force and helped draft the current Strategic Plan, and is currently a Director of the Industrial Development Authority of Prince William County.

“I’m looking to serve. I have a lot of knowledge of county government.” O’Meara said.

O’Meara is one of many candidates announcing his bid for office this year. A Primary Election will be held June 11.

MANASSAS PARK -- A growing number of drivers are parking their vehicles in Manassas Park neighborhoods. And, it's becoming an issue city leaders must address.

"There's only so much space," said  Donald Shuemaker, a councilman on the Manassas Park Governing Body. "Our population is growing.”

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PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Prince William County is well into its second phase of a pilot archery deer management program that began last year.

If it goes well, the program could become permanent. The pilot stage last year only operated at three sites for six weeks. This year the number of sites has increased to 10 locations and the time for the hunt has lengthened from October 6 to November 16 and then again from December 2 to February 28.

Purvis Dawson, who served as Prince William’s former Chief Park Ranger before he left the post in November, explained that 2017’s main goal was to prove that the county can safely facilitate hunting on county land – and they did.

Now in phase two, the program is more widespread throughout the county for a longer period of time. At the end of phase two, the Board of County Supervisors will decide whether or not they want to institutionalize the program and fund it.

Right now, the program has been administered by the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department.

Because of the widely differing amount of locations and time periods compared to last year’s program, it’s hard to compare the two years because it’s “apples and oranges,” Dawson explained.

So far this year, 49 deer have been harvested, up from 19 last year. Only groups vetted by the county that have certified, trained, and insured archers are allowed to hunt.

“Anytime they have a hunt they complete a form that tells us when they entered the property, when they exited the property, whether or not they harvested a deer, how many arrows they walked into the property with, how many arrows they left the property with, if they harvested a deer what was the tag number for the DPOP (Deer Population Reduction Program) tag for the deer, things of this nature…,” said Prince William County Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Department spokesman Brent Heavner.

High visibility signs are erected on trees throughout the parks to let people know about the hunt.

“The hunters follow strict guidelines of when they can hunt – they must arrive a half hour before sunrise and then leave a half hour after sunset,” Dawson explained.

The program also utilizes “buffer zones” between populated areas like residential neighborhoods and the parks so arrows do not fly into nearby homes. Hunters are required to shoot from tree stands so the arrow has a downward trajectory “so the ground becomes the backstop in that scenario,” adds Dawson.
Hunters must account for every arrow.

“They have to account for every arrow. If they walk in with eight arrows, and they walk out with seven arrows, there’s another form they have to fill out that explains the disposition of that missing arrow.” Heavner said.

Dawson said that if you’re walking through Dove’s Landing and hear an arrow whiz by you, that’s not a legitimate hunter. That’s a poacher. Dawson also said that because the vetted hunters only use archery, if you hear a firearm in a county park, call the police. That’s not one of their hunters.

“Our hunters have a rulebook,” Dawson said.

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY -- Willie Deutsch will seek re-election to the Prince William County School Board as its Coles District member. Though School Board races are non-partisan, the incumbent is the first Republican to announce their candidacy for the seat.

All the seats for the school board are up for reelection on November 5, 2019. Deutsch was elected to the school board in 2015, his first time elected to public office.

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If Montclair has a 100-year storm, the spillway will be able to accommodate it.

Lake Montclair was lowered to just 20 feet this past summer, leaving residents who are used to summer swimming and boating on high and dry.

The lake’s spillway, an area designed for lake water to spill over the top of a dam in the event of a heavy rainstorm- needed to be fixed. The spillway needed to be widened and deepened and a cutback protection wall was installed underground  – as Lake Montclair also underwent changes to meet the state standards for dam safety regulations.

The repairs come after the state recently changed the “maximum probable precipitation” standards, an estimate to how much rain could fall during a massive storm such as a hurricane.

The values from the 1970’s were 28, 33, and 37 inches of rainfall in 6, 12, and 24 hour time brackets. A study was done by the state and the numbers were updated in 2016 to 26.3 and 30.1 inches for 6, 12, and 24 hour periods based on historical data. Lake Montclair did not meet the new standards.

The updated standards help to ensure the dam doesn’t burst during periods of heavy rain.

The Montclair Property Owners Association also had to widen and deepen the lake and also installed a cutback protection wall – a big concrete wall designed to stop erosion so the lake doesn’t drain into the spillway, said Justin Field, with MPOA.

With the repairs complete, it took about three weeks for the water levels to return to normal.

Maintaining the spillway is a big deal for the surrounding area, Field explained. Lake Montclair is part of the Powell’s Creek watershed, which, according to the Prince William Conservation Alliance, “begins near Independent Hill and flows past the Prince William landfill on Route 234, then on to  Montclair, where it meets the dam that forms Lake Montclair.”

If the dam were to break, that would spell disaster for nearby neighborhoods.  

“There are almost 400 occupied structures that would be damaged, flooded – Route 1 would be affected, I-95 would be affected, all the way out into the Potomac River. So that’s the importance of good upkeep on our dam which we do, and then making sure our spillway met all the requirements that it needed to meet.”

Richard Arvin, Chairman of the Montclair Lake Management Committee, is one of a group of volunteers who manage the maintenance and ecology of the lake. Arvin has lived near the lake for about 15 years.

Many residents complained while the lake was dry. One of the fears from residents was that fish would be killed.

That didn’t happen.

“We did not have a fish kill. We didn’t kill anything off.” Arvin said. Arvin explained that they had discussed the impact to wildlife with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and they weren’t concerned.

With the low lake level, he also said it was an opportunity to get some projects done that they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.  The association repaired swim platforms, added new fish, held a lake clean up, and a lot of residents repaired their docks. “So there [were] some advantages,” Arvin said.

They also found a sunken pontoon boat at the bottom of the lake.

Despite the inconvenience for those who wanted to enjoy the lake, Field said summer was the best time to close the lake. The warm weather was a benefit because of the backfill material that needed to dry out.

He also explained they didn’t want to risk running into delays during colder weather that would cause the project to go into the next summer. This way, they figured they could just affect one season of recreation rather than several.

“We bit the bullet, understanding it was going to be an inconvenience but the summertime was the best time for us to do it, get it done, so we that could enjoy [one] compliance with the new state regulations, and then just have our lake back next summer for a full recreation season.” Field said.

This should be the last time the lake will be lowered to this extent. Other than the annual lowering of around three feet that happens near Thanksgiving, Field said they don’t foresee the lake to be lowered to anything near the level it was lowered during this project.

The 108-acre lake sinks 54 feet at its deepest point.