Charrette Gets a Green Light
From the Times Community Newspapers
By Lise Hausrath Simmons
May 10, 2005

Now that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has given the funding go-ahead, a community charrette on ways to revitalize the Lake Anne Village Center will be getting under way in June.

The board gave its approval at a meeting May 9 for a $30,000 “Investing in Communities Program” grant to fund the charrette, which is a planning session where development ideas, projects and strategies are identified and discussed by the public.

The grant money comes from the Community Development Block Grant program, the county said.

Before the charrette, however, there will be a series of seven “focus groups” to “identify why people are attracted to Lake Anne, what would draw others to the Village Center, what may be missing and what would improve the quality of life in Lake Anne Village and Reston,” Hunter Mill District Supervisor Cathy Hudgins (D) said.

The seven focus groups will be convened as smaller meetings among residents, merchants, developers, county agencies, community groups and faith-based organizations between May 17 and May 23, she said, explaining that their purpose is to make sure input is received from key stakeholders before the actual charrette process begins.

After the small meetings are held, there will be a public informational meeting open to everyone on May 24 in Reston.

Kurt Pronske, president of the nonprofit Reston Community Reinvestment Corp. (RCRC), said the findings from the focus groups will probably be reflected in a report that “will serve as a database for the wide-open, all-public charrette.”

The grant money, which will technically be allocated to the RCRC, will be used to hire a consultant to oversee the charrette, which is aimed at gaining some sort of consensus from the local community on a revitalization approach.

Pronske explained, however, that the RCRC has no staff and that the county will actually be in charge of finding someone to run the charrette.

According to Hudgins, after the public meeting May 24, there will be a three-day “community design charrette” that will convene sometime in June.

After a detailed revitalization strategy is defined for Lake Anne, it would be brought back to Reston residents for approval, the county said.

The RCRC was created in 1997 to facilitate joint public and private efforts to improve the Washington Plaza area at Lake Anne. It has 14 members who own property there.

Fairfax County has been looking at giving an economic and redevelopment boost to the Lake Anne Village Center since 1998, when the board named it a revitalization area.

After many years of behind-the-scenes work, the county last year agreed to fund a study by an outside economic consultant on different ways that the village could be revitalized.

The consultant, Basile, Baumann Prost & Associates, issued its report this past March. Hudgins held a public meeting in Reston to review the report on March 16.

The village center, Reston's first at about 40 years old, is showing signs of age, and the businesses there get little traffic in the colder months.

The consultant's report, which represented Phase I of the revitalization project, recommends a range of actions that can be taken to revitalize the area, starting with increased marketing and leading up to major redevelopment of the center and surrounding property.

“Given the existing marketability of opportune sites within Lake Anne Village Center, the initiation of the charrette process needs to be completed as quickly as possible,” the county said.

©Times Community Newspapers 2005