Author: Rick Horner

The Manassas Park Governing Body has approved a resolution to allow flags representing special causes to fly on city-owned flagpoles.

The Stafford County Board of Supervisors approved the purchase of new vehicles for the county's fire and rescue department.

The county will purchase is first fireboat which will be used to assist emergency services that are operating in or near water. According to documents provided by the county, the boat will be a Metal Shark 32 Defiant series boat which is commonly used with law enforcement and rescue departments.

The boat will be operated by career fire personnel, have a length of 32 feet and will be outfitted with a Mercury Verado 350 HP Twin Outboard engine capable of traveling within the range of 40 to 45 knots. That speed would be equivalent to going 46 to 51 miles per hour on land.

Funding in the amount of $591,000 will be used from the Fiscal Year 2021 Capital Improvement Plan to purchase the boat. Multiple volunteer fire stations in the county including Brooke, Falmouth, and Widewater, and White Oak volunteer fire departments also operate boats.

The county has also relied on fire boats from neighboring Prince William and Fairfax counties, and Charles County, Md. when boaters on the Aquia Creek or Potomac River issue a distress call. 

The county will also purchase a medical van which will be used to help with preventative care and provide health education for the community.

The vehicle itself will be a Ford Transit 350 2021 model which will be outfitted for the rescue department, the van will be provided by the Delaware-based Bayshore Ford Truck Sales Inc.

The county will use $200,000 from the balance of the previous year's budget to fund the purchase.

Manassas City Hall will undergo its first-ever renovation starting in April 2022.

[Updated 6:20 p.m.] The Manassas Park Governing Body is rewriting a new ordinance that allows special flags to fly only on a handful of city-owned flag poles.

If passed, the new rule would prevent U.S. flags specialty flags representing specific causes, such as breast cancer awareness month from hanging on the city's 35 utility poles used to hang banners in years past. Instead, those flags would be hung only on 10 flagpoles owned by the Manassas Park City Government.

The body was set to make a decision on the new flag ordinance at its October 5 meeting. Initially, the officials were going to allow specialty flags to hang on utility poles underneath U.S. flags. 

However, a 30-minute conversation during a recent meeting of the city's Governing Body morphed the intent of the ordinance, and instead restricted them to a handful of city-owned owned-flagpoles.

The reasons behind this change had to do with a lack of funding in the city's budget. The new flag operation would have necessitated hiring new seasonal or part-time public works employees to hang the flags, officials said.

The conversation soon turned to put the flags on city-owned flag poles, which would only place the flags on the 10 poles that the city owns and would not rely on new hires by the city. This option appealed to many in the governing body, which led to the decision to delay the new ordinance until it could be rewritten to reflect the changes.

The ordinance would also rely on the flags for those causes being donated or bought by the advocacy groups that represent those causes because of concerns of lack of funding.

The Governing Body plans to revisit the flag ordinance at its upcoming meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday, October 19, 2021, after it has been rewritten to reflect said changes. The meeting will be held at city hall, at One Park Center Court and is open to the public.

Manassas Park typically flies the U.S. flag annually on Independence Day and did so again this year on the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The city also uses utility poles to hang holiday decorations each December.

Earlier this year, neighboring Manassas City killed a plan to allow residents to band together to pay the city to hang flags on utility poles in their respective neighborhoods. Under the current rules, the U.S. flag may only be flown on utility poles in that city's downtown neighborhood.

Correction: The original version of the this story incorrectly reported the city was considering allowing U.S. flags to be hung on only 10 flag poles in the city.