FCPS to seek rezoning and parking waiver for Justice HS
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| An illustration of the Justice High School addition. |
Fairfax County Public Schools has a new plan to construct a badly needed addition for Justice High School without using Justice Park for parking.
Instead, FCPS would go through a rezoning process and would seek a waiver of Fairfax County’s parking requirement, said John McGranahan Jr., an attorney representing the school system.
The size of the planned addition would not be changed, McGranahan said at a virtual community meeting Oct. 12.
About 100 members of the public attended the meeting, where they were invited to submit questions on the chat function. Some questions were answered on the spot. For others, FCPS officials promised to provide detailed answers online on Friday, Oct. 15, along with a transcript of the meeting.
A new timeline
The rezoning process would delay construction by about a year. But if FCPS had applied for a rezoning at the outset instead of using the less-transparent 2232 process, the project would have been much farther along at this point.
Related story: FCPS will not use Justice Park for a parking lot
Under the revised timeline for the addition, the bid process would begin in fall 2022. Construction would start in winter 2022-23, and the addition would be completed in fall 2024.
A parking waiver
The new parking plan would result in a net increase of 20 spaces.
The number of parking spaces in Justice High’s rear lot parking lot would be reduced from 81 to 18. The main lot would be increased from 248 to 302 spaces.
By adding striping to the 29 existing parallel parking spaces on Peace Valley Lane, those spaces would count toward the county’s parking requirement. They don’t count now because they have to be striped to conform to a specific measurement.
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| A car caravan last spring on Peace Valley Lane celebrates the Justice High School Class of 2021. |
Because the number of parking spaces in the plan is below the requirement in the county’s zoning ordinance, FCPS would need to file a waiver with the Fairfax County government.
Among other parking alternatives, FCPS determined a structured parking facility is too expensive, and there isn’t enough room on Peace Valley Lane for perpendicular or angled parking or allowing parking on both sides of the street.
Justice Park
Before the Park Authority backed away from allowing school parking at Justice Park, FCPS had notified the public that in exchange for losing parkland, several improvements would be made in the park, including an outdoor classroom and a trail.
Those improvements are now off the table, and Justice Park would be left as is.
The addition
The Justice High School addition is needed to relieve overcrowding. The school’s current capacity is 1,991 students and is projected to increase to 2,500.
The project includes a three-story addition with core classrooms, science labs, modeling and technology labs, and special education spaces. The cafeteria would also be expanded. Because of limited land, the addition would take up part of the existing parking lot.
Rezoning
According to McGranahan, without the use of Justice Park, FCPS will have to file a rezoning application to have the school property rezoned from R-3 (three dwellings per acre) to R-8.
R-3 allows a floor-to-area ratio (FAR) – a measure of density – of 0.3 percent of the site. Because the addition would increase density on the site to a FAR of .373, the property would have to be rezoned to R-8.
The rezoning would only affect the school property; it would have no impact on the surrounding neighborhood.
Related story: Justice Park advocates blamed for potential delay of Justice High School addition
Rezoning requires more community meetings, said Mason Supervisor Penny Gross. The Mason District Land Use Committee will have two public meetings – one to gather information about the project and one to make a nonbinding recommendation to the Planning Commission.
Both the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors will then hold public hearings.
To speed the process along, Gross said the rezoning application and site plan review could take place concurrently. Rezoning normally takes about a year, she said, but “we can possibly make it seven months.”
FCPS hasn’t submitted any paperwork yet, because “we wanted to have this meeting before filing anything with the county,” McGranahan said. “Our intent is to collect feedback and do everything we can to accelerate this.”
Outreach
School board member Ricardy Anderson (Mason) called on FCPS to provide more community engagement on the project.
“It’s one thing to have outreach, it’s another thing to have ‘in-reach.’ We should have done more to pull people into the conversation,” she said.
It’s important that everyone have a chance to provide feedback “about the prior proposal,” as well as the revised plan, Anderson said.
She also plans to get information from the Park Authority Board on how they made the decision to reject a parking lot in Justice Park.
McGranahan agreed that FCPS should have sought more community input. “Hindsight is 2020,” he said.
Noting that county land use officials told FCPS the 2232 process was appropriate to move the project forward, McGranahan acknowledged that “we should have done things differently.”
FCPS didn’t know last fall that the Park Authority would reject the parking lot in the park, he said. “If we knew, we would have been at this point a year ago.”
A lot of time was spent trying to explain the rezoning process, but here's the thing- the current Justice FAR already exceeds the R-3 zoning limitations! There is no way to decrease the FAR with the addition, so the rezoning would have been necessitated unless FCPA land was conveyed to the school, thereby decreasing its ratio of FAR:land. However whether this land was used in part as a parking lot, is immaterial to this rezoning process.
It was clear that they could use bureaucratic work-arounds (officially designating Peace Valley lane parking spaces as "school use" while not creating any actual new parking in this area because students and faculty are already parking on these spots) in order to reach the parking requirements.
I was dismayed that participants were only allowed to see the questions in the chat box that were officially answered by panelists. This gave the panelists the opportunity to skew the discussion to publicize only the questions and comments they wanted to address at that time. There were almost 100 questions asked, but only 28 were given responses, and if there were questions in Spanish, none were addressed despite there being an interpreter on the call. All of the unanswered questions will have responses posted by Friday, which while I look forward to that, it made the public meeting disingenuous because again, the control of what questions were even seen by the public was in the hands of the panelists.
There was a good deal of public-blaming by certain officials; and repeated suggestions by Ricardy that the view to not put a parking lot on the park was not representative of the wider Justice community and public. Perhaps this is the case, but we have no way of knowing until FCPS gets its act together to create a more robust and transparent public engagement process. This is riding against a history of a large contingent of the public not trusting the FCPS public engagement decision-making process (e.g. the name change process), and one would have hoped it would have improved by now.
What is this 2232 process I keep hearing about? McGranahan seems to the lay the responsibility of this mess on the "land use" officials (who are they?) who claimed this was appropriate.
More information here: https://bit.ly/2U9ih48
Thank you, Fairfax County Park Authority, for preserving and protecting this public park.