Have you ever been on a business trip, sitting in your hotel watching ESPN and found yourself thinking “I really wish I could watch Falls Church City TV right now.” Me too. Now, you can.
We recently relaunched the FCCTV web site, which now includes a live video stream — so you can watch from anywhere.
There are more plans for the web site, so keep an eye out. Also, follow FCCTV on Twitter. We don’t use it much yet, but that will change as well.
Note: another note from our friends at CBC … They’re coming up with more content than Andy & I are anyway …
CBC to Celebrate 50th Anniversary
Falls Church, VA – November 3, 2009 CBC - 50 years strong, an advocate for good city government, responsive to the needs and interests of the residents of Falls Church City. Citizens for a Better City will celebrate its 50th anniversary at the CBC annual meeting and dinner 5:00-9:00 pm on Sunday, November 22, 2009, at the Falls Church Community Center.
The celebration will include a business meeting at 5:00 pm, followed by cocktails, dinner, recognitions, and awards.
The gala event is open to the public. One does not need to be a member of CBC to attend. Tickets will be sold at the door, $20 for adults, $6 for children. Please join CBC in celebration - All are welcome.
Note: our friends at the CBC asked us to share this information & spread the word about this event …
CBC to Hold City Council and School Board Candidate Forum
Falls Church, VA — October 28, 2009 – Citizens for a Better City (CBC) will hold a public forum to provide information to anyone interested in becoming a candidate for the Falls Church City Council or School Board. The CBC Executive Committee has scheduled a “Candidate Forum” for 7:30 PM, Thursday, November 19, 2009 at the Thomas Jefferson Elementary School. “I want to emphasize that this Forum will focus only on the logistics of running for office in Falls Church. It is not a Forum for discussion of issues. That will come later,” emphasized CBC Executive Committee member Sally Ekfelt.
CBC President Deb Gardner will emcee the event. She will answer questions and provide handouts to prospective candidates regarding 1) candidate eligibility requirements, 2) information on candidacy registration and campaign guidelines, and 3) the general expectations of those elected. In addition, a Forum panel comprised of Sara Hassan, former School Board member, Craig Cheney, former School Board chair, David Chavern, former City Councilman and Jane Scully, former School Board chair and former City Councilman, will share their experiences of seeking election and later serving in their respective City offices.
“Given these tough times, effective leadership has never been more needed,“ said Gardner. “The survival of our independent city and our independent school system is at stake. For anyone who ever thought about giving back to our great City, now is the time to step forward. CBC invites you to come to the Forum and find out how to take the first steps to seeking election to one of our City’s leadership positions.”
CBC’s mission is to encourage proven community leaders to seek local public office. The CBC Candidate Forum is open to all members of the Falls Church Community. Membership in CBC is not required for entry or participation in the Forum. CBC is not affiliated with any national political party.
Contact:
Deb Gardner
dgardner77@verizon.net
Sally Ekfelt
ekfelt@gmail.com
The City of Falls Church has a great Farmer’s Market every Saturday morning - 52 weeks a year! My kids and I stop by almost every week (and probably spend more money than I should). During the summer the crowds get fairly big but it’s never overwhelming.
This weekend I recorded some audio while walking through the market and took a few pictures. Here is a short slideshow.
City of Falls Church Farmer’s Market from Falls Church Insider on Vimeo.
A few photos from the Farmer’s Market this week - accompanied with audio captured while walking through the market.
I have been a member of the City of Falls Church Economic Development Authority since earlier this year and I keep meaning to post recaps of our monthly meetings. In an effort to actually do that I’m going to keep them kind of short.
This month our chairman, David Tarter, once again pulled together and interesting panel. The topic was “Developing Green: How Arlington and Communities around the Nation are Successful in Supporting and Promoting Green Buildings and Homes” and the presentations were very interesting. There were three panelist and this first up was Jeremy Cohen from the U.S. Green Building Council (the folks who define what LEED is). Jeremy gave us some background on LEED and how it’s been growing over the years. Later, in the Q&A section, he also gave us some insight on how they plan to evolve LEED specifications over the years.
Next we heard from Joan Kelsch who is the Arlington County environmental planner. She talked about how Arlington has been successful using various techniques to encourage green development in Arlington. A particularly effective technique that they’ve used is allowing builders extra density (i.e. a bigger building) in exchange for various levels of LEED certification.
We wrapped up with Patty Shields who is the principal of Metro Green, a residential development firm that focuses solely on green residential projects. She also happens to be City Manager Wyatt Sheilds’ wife! She mostly talked about the house they recently build in Arlington which meets the highest standards of LEED and incorporates an amazing number of green building techniques. It was really interesting to hear how the house was built and the technologies and techniques used to make it environmentally friendly.
A handful of people turned out for the presentation - but we had a much better turnout for last month’s presentation on a similar topic. Dave does a great job pulling together these events and it would be great if we could get more folks coming out to participate.
After the forum wrapped up we covered standard EDA business (which is also open to the public). We’re doing a joint work session with the Planning Commission on July 20th and decided to cancel our August 4th EDA meeting. The session with the PC should be interesting. We want to see how the EDA can be more plugged into planning to help promote economic development.
Finally, we had a lively discussion about the unsolicited proposal to the DOE that was approved at the last City Council meeting. This was covered in the Falls Church Times as well as the Falls Church News-Press and Nick Benton wrote an editorial about it. I won’t get into the details of the EDA’s discussion of the topic (you’ll have to come to one of our meetings and hear it for yourself) - but we’re a bit divided on the issue. Most people tend to support the basic idea - using stimulus money to develop green technologies in the City - but a lot people also feel like the proposal was rushed and hasn’t had enough scrutiny.
My personal opinion (not universally shared on the EDA) is that we should pursue the grant and in the off chance it is awarded we should be very careful with how the money is used. We don’t want to establish programs that are unsustainable after the stimulus money runs out.
And that’s my recap. Feel free to join us for the joint work session with the Planning Commission in a couple of weeks. Otherwise, our next scheduled EDA meeting is September 1st at 6:30pm in City Hall.
Two recent issues floating around the City over the past few months have led me to an idea about implementing a transit solution that would actually be beneficial to the City. I’ll explain my idea here.
Recently there has been discussions going on in Arlington about reconfiguring the East Falls Church Metro station. There are many aspects to the plan but the one that stuck out to me was the idea of creating an entrance to the station that is close to North Washington. Currently, if someone wanted to walk from inside the City on North Washington to the Metro entrance they would have to walk up North Washington a bit, turn right and walk along the W&OD path all the way down toward N Sycamore, cut back off of the W&OD down to 19th Road N, go down some long stairs to cut around the Kiss and Ride part of the Metro parking lot until they reached the entrance.
This walk is feasible (I’ve done it many times) but doesn’t necessarily qualify that part of the City as Metro accessible. However, if there were an entrance to the Metro near North Washington you would suddenly put a decent chunk of commercial land in the City within an easy walk to the Metro. That could be a huge boost to existing and potential new development on that side of town.
The other topic we’ve kicked around is how to make GEORGE (the bus) useful. The current routes mimic existing Metrobus routes (more or less) and clearly serve people commuting from the City to places outside of the City. Starting next month the schedule will be reduced further to effectively make the bus useful only for commuting (no mid-day, night, or weekend service). Having an easy way to commute out of the City for work certainly benefits the City - but it doesn’t do much for economic development within the City.
The City is currently served (sort of) by two Metro stops. West Falls Church is on the side of town where mixed-use buildings are not being developed. East Falls Church is on the right side of town but due to the entrance location any bus service has to either go out of it’s way or cut through residential streets before getting to any of the commercial parts of the City.
And this is where we get to my great idea! If the East Falls Church Metro had an entrance on or near North Washington we could run a bus (trolly, streetcar, moving sidewalk, gondola, hay ride, whatever) along North Washington from one side of town to the other (potentially cutting over to South Maple Avenue at Broad Street). All the bus would do is go back and forth. One route - a straight line - about 1.5 miles long. Run 2-4 small buses at the same time so the wait is never more than about 5 minutes. Have the buses running any time Metrorail is running. Nothing fancy, just back and forth.
Done right, this kind of short bus route could effectively extend the “Metro accessible” zone into the heart of our current development efforts (North Gate, City Center, Pearson Square) and would open up several other areas for development. It wouldn’t do a lot for commuters leaving the City (they can hop on an existing Metrobus) but I think it would have a huge impact in two other areas.
First of all, it would make the State Theatre and quite a few restaurants (as well as the City Center) easily accessible from the Metro. People not wanting to drive into the City for a night of entertainment could easily take Metro. This would help with parking, the environment, getting tipsy drivers off the roads, and it would increase business at these establishments. If the bus extends all the way to Pearson Square it would give a big boost to the new Arts space.
Second of all, it would make locating a non-retail business in the area much more appealing. Small to mid-sized businesses would love to have a location where employees and clients could get there via Metro. Again, this would help parking and environmental issues as well as mitigate traffic problems. We currently see office buildings flourish along the Orange Line because easy access to Metro is in high demand.
I’ve created a Google Map to illustrate this idea - click into it to check out what I’m talking about.
This weekend in the annual Tinner Hill Blues Festival in Falls Church. When people ask what I love so much about living & working in Falls Church, this is one of my go-to examples. Andy and I did our part to support the event by selecting the Tinner Hill web site as one of Viget’s pro-bono projects. The team had a blast working on it, and hopefully the site has helped promote the event and the foundation itself.
I won’t repeat the history of Tinner Hill (which is fascinating) or the other great coverage about the festival this weekend. I’ll just encourage you to come out and enjoy the community.
UPDATE: I just uploaded a batch of photos that I took during the first couple hours at the festival on Saturday afternoon.
When I told Matt Smith that I wanted to get involved in the community, he gave me a few ideas — including joining the cable access board — and said something to the effect of “if you really want to get involved, you need to look into the CBC.” I won’t try to explain what the Citizens for a Better City is here. AC did a good write up (post one, and post two) on the Falls Church Times. Mike has his recent post here, asking CBC to lead. The CBC even has a web site.
So, last fall I went to the annual CBC dinner. I was eventually asked to join the CBC Advisory Board, a new and loosely formed group that is supposed to get together every few months to talk about the future of the City and CBC’s role. Last night was my second such meeting.
There are interesting decisions to be made about the future of the CBC. Mike’s rant about leadership isn’t far off — what do we want the CBC to be? Is it relevant anymore? Do newer residents in Falls Church know or care about the CBC? What would happen if the CBC went away?
From my (so far limited) perspective, I believe that the CBC can be more relevant than ever. Between the debates about mixed-use development and the challenges we’ll face with the growth of our schools (to name a couple of massively-city-altering topics) there are important issues on the horizon that need to be addressed. People care about these issues and don’t know how to influence them. There needs to be a well-organized, energetic group dedicated to encouraging our most capable citizens to get involved in the community.
A core question seems to be: are there citizens out there who are willing — dare I say really want — to be involved in a group like the CBC, but aren’t aware of it? Is it therefore a communications and outreach challenge? Or has the makeup of Falls Church changed so much over the past 20 years such that people are too busy, disinterested, and passive to volunteer their time?
I’m cautiously optimistic. I think that there are a lot of people who live in Falls Church in part because they want to be more involved in the community, and the CBC is in a great position to help them figure out how to do just that.
Yesterday, over lunch, we had a special EDA meeting to discuss the GEORGE bus situation. Normally the EDA meets just once per month but we didn’t get to talk about GEORGE in our March meeting and with our April meeting pushed back by a week to accommodate Spring Break we wouldn’t have had time to get any feedback to the City Council before they have to make final budget decisions.
In addition to most of the EDA members, there were a couple of folks from the Falls Church Times in attendance as well as the City’s EDO staff, City Manager Wyatt Shields, and Wendy Block Sanford from the City’s planning staff who has the most knowledge about GEORGE. Wendy gave us the presentation that she gave the City Council during their work session last Thursday.
I think the EDA will come out with “official” recommendations to the City Council in the next couple of days, so I won’t jump the gun on those.
One interesting aspect of this issue is that the GEORGE service is fairly unsupervised by the City. Prior to digging into the service as a result of the budget planning, which is what Wendy has been working on, the City basically leaves things up to WMATA. It sounds like WMATA sends the City a bill for managing the service but some aspects aren’t understood well by the City. For example, the City seems to realize about 50% of the full fare based on ridership numbers. For example, with 70,000 trips when the fare is set at $0.50 the City sees only about $18k of the potential $35k. We know that several factors impact that number. Some developers have been given bus passes in exchange for investments supporting GEORGE. There are days in the summer when the bus is free due to extreme weather conditions. There’s also the issue of transfers to and from Metrobus and Metrorail (and reasearch shows that 99% of GEORGE riders do transfer in one direction or the other). The problem is that we don’t really understand how that works and it sounds like WMATA doesn’t provide any kind of a statement explaining it.
For example, we talked about one of the recommendations - which was increasing the fare from $0.50 to $1.00 or more. However, it wasn’t clear if we would see only $0.50 from a $1.00 fare or if we would see something closer to $0.75. Ultimately though, with the ridership numbers we see on GEORGE, another option would be to just make the bus free.
There were a few other aspects of the bus service that the City staff is still trying to sort out. I’m sure it’s a daunting job to ramp up on all the details quickly to help the City Council make critical budget decisions. Wendy seems to be doing a great job at it - but I get the sense that WMATA isn’t the easiest organization to deal with. I also get the sense that GEORGE is a very small fish in the WMATA pond so that probably makes things even more difficult.
Overall, I thought the meeting was productive and interesting. I know I’ve learned a lot about public transportation. I encourage folks to come out and see one of these meetings in person. I find it encouraging to see volunteers (EDA members, concerned citizens, etc.) working with paid City staff to try and find solutions to real problems that we’re facing.
Without speaking too soon on the conclusions we came to (obviously we’re still sorting out the finer details of our recommendations), I think most of us felt like the current bus service is very inefficient and almost impossible to justify but the idea of a local bus service seems like a good one - we just have to figure out how to have it make sense.
My plan was to have two more posts in this series on GEORGE. This post was going to be a fun one kicking around various grand ideas for a modern solution. But I’m starting to burn myself out on the GEORGE issue and the City Council is moving through the process quickly (they had a budget working session Thursday night where they discussed the GEORGE issue). So, I decided I’ll just cut to the chase and let you know what conclusions I’ve come to after all this thinking.
Okay, I’ll quickly mention some ideas that won’t work (at least not now). The original idea for GEORGE was to be cutting edge and use electric buses - how cool is that?! Turns out the City lost a good chunk of money (actually, more like some regional and federal money) on this idea as the two vendors they tried couldn’t produce reliable buses. While electric buses would be cool - they’re still just buses driving around on streets based on a schedule.
What about a streetcar solution (either an actual one or a tolly-like bus)? It would be less formal than a bus but could be cute and might even be more useful for residents getting around town. Light rail and unground subways probably wouldn’t work out for us.
It’s too early for a flexible schedule system - where people request rides/routes via the internet and a system of vehicles are intelligently routed in real time to accommodate riders. The technology is probably close to being there but the people who would use the system aren’t ready for something like this. I’m sure someday (20 years?) we’ll see solutions like that - especially in a small place like Falls Church.
While we’re kicking around unrealistic ideas - what about a modified guided bus solution where the buses could drive around town picking people up and then travel on existing rails (like Metrorail) to other destinations. I know, that’s crazy.
Okay, okay, back to reality. What do I really think we need to do?
Until these plans (specifically the move to shuttle buses) can be implemented we need to keep the existing GEORGE running. If we can save money in the short term by cooperating with Arlington’s ART system then that’s a good idea. Even dropping the mid-day service to save money until we can make the jump to shuttle buses is probably okay.
If we shut down GEORGE now it will be next to impossible to bring a new shuttle bus service online anytime soon. Also, while 70,000 trips per year isn’t a lot if we just shut GEORGE down we’ll lose those loyal users.
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