Living in LoCo
More Lenah Run Questions Answered
Erica Garman at 8:59 a.m., August 25, 2008 (8 comments)
Erica Garman is on a much-deserved vacation this week. But she didn't want to keep her readers hanging, so you'll see some posts this week that she wrote before she left as well as some from our Living in LoCo correspondents. Erica will return to the helm on Sept. 2.
As promised in an earlier item on the Lenah school site purchase, I am using today’s post to answer readers’ questions on the controversial issue.
For answers, I referred to the public online school documents and the sales contract between the Loudoun County School Board and the seller, land developer Greenvest. I also spoke with Sam Adamo, director of planning and legislative services for the Loudoun County Public Schools.
Most of the questions involved the road and utility infrastructure and who is responsible for what.
Greenvest, the seller, is responsible for building Lenah Loop Road, which is sometimes referred to as the Lenah Connector Road or Lenah Village Drive (as it is listed on the map below). This road will connect Braddock Road south of the site to a reconfigured Lenah Road (Rt. 600), which runs adjacent to the property.
The first segment of this road will be completed before the proposed middle school opens in fall 2010. Segment A, as it is referred to in the contract, will run from Braddock Road to the southeast entrance of the school site.
The second segment of Lenah Loop Road, segment B, will connect segment A at the south entrance of the school and continue to a reconfigured Lenah Road. The sales contract requires Greenvest to fund and build this section of the road “promptly” after the 350th home is sold in the neighborhood.
In this slow housing market, no one can accurately predict when that will take place.
If the county’s Office of Transportation Services feels that a road is needed before that happens, the construction costs to build segment B will be split, according to the contract, between Greenvest and LCPS. Adamo estimated that this project would cost about $3 million ($1.5 million split).
LCPS has offered to build and pay for a westbound turn lane and signal at the Lenah Road/Rt. 50 intersection. Adamo said this addition will “provide a regional road improvement that’s already needed,” and it will also serve as a break in traffic and increase safety for buses, residents and other drivers leaving Rt. 50. Adamo estimated that the cost would be $650,000.
The school also plans to make improvements to Lenah Road, which fronts the school site. School frontage roads, according to Adamo, are always included in LCPS construction costs.
As far as utilities go, Greenvest is responsible for bringing sewer and water service to the site, according to the contract.
Living in LoCo reader Loudoun_Resident asked if the school district has approached the Nicholas/Crerar owners separately about purchasing land for the schools. Combined, the owners wanted $45 million for the land. School officials said that is too much.
Rumor is that John Duncan Crerar of Aldie is shopping his property to Board of Supervisor members at a reduced price. Maybe that is why some supervisors are questioning the Lenah purchase.
Adamo said that because of the configuration of the Crerar property and the lack of infrastructure on it - road access, water, utilities - the cost to make improvements would be roughly $10 million. Those costs would be on top of the cost for the land.
Another reader, schools, asked about the 3,638 residential lots around the Lenah site. Out of the 17 planned subdivisions near Lenah, 1,956 residential units have been approved and 1,682 are pending.
LIL Reader Stinger asked about using trailers for student overflow in South Riding, so the school system can buy time to explore other school site options.
“Trailers exist everywhere else,” the reader wrote. “So why are Mercer/Freedom exempt from this option?”
Funds for school trailers come out of the district’s operational, not capital, budget, Adamo said. So essentially, when trailers are purchased and installed at a school, those funds compete with money for instruction. Between purchase and installation, each trailer costs about $200,000 - money that school officials say would be best used toward building a new school.
The Loudoun County Planning Commission is poised to hear public comment on Sept. 10 about the school board’s pending purchase and plans to construct a middle school and high school on a 99-acre site near the Lenah Run subdivision in Dulles South. The meeting is at 6 p.m. at the County Government Center.
An artist's rendering of the Lenah Run school site (Courtesy of Loudoun County Public Schools):
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Thank you Erica. Have a great vacation!
Here's another question that deserves an answer before the public hearing:
How much time (read tax dollars) is the LoCo government going to waste vetting the sorry-but-I-have-to-say-it PROFOUNDLY STUPID list of "vacant" properties submitted by the newly renamed old group of the same few?
The supposedly vacant properties include occupied parcels in land use, vested rezonings bisected by significant road segments and carrying the attendant proffers to build them, THE DULLES SOUTH MULTIPURPOSE CENTER, and A WORKING QUARRY.
If this is the "information" used to back up the demands of citizen involvement in the process, no wonder nothing gets done.
But of course, for some, that IS the point.
Posted by BarbaraMunsey (anonymous) on August 25, 2008 at 11:48 a.m. (Suggest removal)
"The sales contract requires Greenvest to fund and build this section of the road “promptly” after the 350th home is sold in the neighborhood."
The language reads to me that 'promptly' means 14 months after Greenvest transfers the 350th lot to a builder (i.e. Toll Bros.), not to a resident. Is there any recent history on how long that process takes? I assume that Greenvest wants to sell sections quickly...
The long-term (2020) traffic projections for Rt. 50 are unpleasant... I thought the traffic calming thing was a little more long-term than that.
Posted by daggar (anonymous) on August 25, 2008 at 10:32 p.m. (Suggest removal)
daggar, developers usually transfer blocks of building lots, not one at a time. By all means, raise the point, but I would venture from the wording that it means after the 350th home is contracted to a homeowner--remember, the vast majority of the new growth in Loudoun is from individuals developing their OWN homes on formerly "pristine" land.
The long term projections ARE unpleasant--and that is with "traffic calming". That pork project began as a legitimate remedy for the three towns and villages for whom rte 50 is a main street, in conjunction with a BYPASS for this US highway and truck route.
It has ballooned well east of its original terminus, lost the bypass, and the traffic counts for Gilbert's Corner were surpassed several years ago.
No matter; drive out to Upperville and see the first waste of your federal taxes: the "improvements" there apparently weren't engineered with horse vans and trailers in mind (another profound piece of stupidity, given the fact that that is ground zero of horse country) and someone's van goes through the landscaping on a regular basis. The plantings have already had to be replaced.
The traffic calming (off the record, because the traffic guys won't say it any other way, since so much money and power is behind the expensive idiocy) will cost a lot of money to implement, and some years down the road will cost far more to rip out and do right.
This is an "experiment"--the first and only time in the US that two US highways will be intersected via traffic circles.
It won't get much calmer than gridlock, that's for sure!
Posted by BarbaraMunsey (anonymous) on August 25, 2008 at 11:08 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Traffic Circles are in EVERY major city in Europe, and in many cities here at home. They all handle massive amounts of traffic efficiently.
Posted by honchonumberone (anonymous) on August 25, 2008 at 11:43 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Dean, that IS the party line on this porker, but the fact remains, Europe is simply not comparable with the way they are going to be used here.
The traffic counts for which these circles were engineered have been surpassed, and the mission-creep on the project is staggering.
At the very least they should have made Upperville navigable for one of the major users!
The original project was to be confined to safety improvements in Upperville, Middleburg and the village of Aldie, in conjunction with a bypass.
There are now circles stretching well east of route 15, when they originally stopped well WEST, and no bypass. It will be a mess of unimaginable proportion.
In any event, the new formerly unheard of one at Lenah Rd (planning staff was surprised by that one a year ago, when the Lenah gas station came in to add pumps) is not the major issue with the school sites; primary access seems to be from Braddock.
Dean, what do you think of the Luck Stone Bull Run quarry being submitted as a "vacant" parcel to be reviewed as a possible replacement?
I can laugh, but it really isn't funny.
Posted by BarbaraMunsey (anonymous) on August 26, 2008 at 12:31 a.m. (Suggest removal)
"[A signal]... will also serve as a break in traffic and increase safety for buses"
Aha, so glad to know that this is the reason why NoVA has so many traffic signals. Pardon me, but there are already so many signals that things are damn near gridlocked. Leave it to LCPS to assume that the roads are conduits for the school system first, and commuting/travel is an afterthought.
Posted by Hoqenishy (anonymous) on August 27, 2008 at 6:51 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Hoq, you might want to read the post on the LCPS web about their discussions with OTS.
Traffic engineering reports show that signalization and turn lanes are the most cost-effective solution and produce the best level of service overall.
The roundabouts will require widening of Route 50 (itself anathema to the same protesters) in order to produce any level of service for a reasonable time, with eventual failure ANYWAY due to traffic that has nothing to do with the schools.
This week should be very interesting: the At Large rep to Parks and Rec is meeting with County officials as the representative of her NEW group (in addition to her unofficial group that filed paperwork on a county-owned property to get her own private rec center). I'm hoping she will discuss why they submitted that ridiculous map, but I'm afraid it is most likely to discuss a property south of Braddock near Elk Lick Run, as a replacement for the Lenah site.
This site was unacceptable to the protest crowd when it offered an elementary site as part of a rezoning. (That rezoning, by the way, would have paid for utilities and road improvements to the elementary via the housing and commercial in the project.)
The site has no sewer, and any road improvements would require land acquisition through a neighboring property. It also has significant environmental constraints with wetlands.
The rumors are flying, that it can be ready to bid as a replacement site by March. Ummm, are they going to forego the wetlands studies, because the SOUTHERN transition area is not nearly as sacred as the western transition area?
And the neighboring landowner is just going to give up property for a road, right?
And sewer is no big deal, since land in Dulles South is clay over diabase, and consequently percs JUST GREAT.
I hope the people that seem to be speaking for the property owner and for Mr. Miller come out with some real info soon. Preferably in public. In fact, now that the Board has taken action on initiating a land inventory, maybe the "realtor's info" he's been talking about should be public.
Including who commissioned it, and who paid for it.
Posted by BarbaraMunsey (anonymous) on September 1, 2008 at 3:08 p.m. (Suggest removal)
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