Planning Office Presents their Recommendations

On Tuesday, September 24th the Prince William County Planning Office held a third community meeting on the implementation of the Rural Preservation Study. The meeting was held at the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas. As with other meetings many in the community were left confused by the presentation, and truthfully only by reading all the materials posted by the Planning Office more than once do I feel I have a handle on their recommendations. The discussion below is from the Planning Office’s Rural Preservation web page. I’m hoping that studying the summary and maps has given me a clearer understanding of the proposals.

The Planning Office states that some of the recommendations in the 2014 Rural Preservation Study recommended an inappropriate levels of density within the County’s rural areas. In most of the hundreds of comments received residents expressed their concern at the development of the transitional ribbon, therefore, in the final recommendations Planning Office staff does NOT recommend adoption of a transitional ribbon. The community also expressed concerns about the extent and cost of sewer extension in the rural area, therefore the Planning Office staff is NOT recommending a county-wide extension of sewer lines. Instead, the Planning Office staff recommends the creation of permanent conservation easements that would to prohibit the crossing of sewer easements in the conserved green space of clustered developments.

In addition, the community indicated there was a need for TDR (Transfer of Development Rights) receiving areas within the Development-Area of the county. Planning Office staff has recommended several Regional Activity Centers in the Development Area as receiving areas for TDRs as seen on the map below. The community rejected the idea of increased density in rural cluster subdivisions, therefore Planning Office staff does not recommend a county-wide increase of density in the rural cluster regulations, though Planning Office staff is not recommending a change to the minimum lot size in the A-1 zoning district.

To encourage the use of TDR’s the number of TDR’s per property was increased to 1 TDR per five acres for the area in the map below designated Agriculture and Forest (orange areas) and 1 TDR per three acres in the area designated Estates and Subdivisions (yellow area). These are donor areas only so the development must take place in one of the TDR receiving areas above. This holds promise of reducing the future development in the Rural Crescent.

Finally, the Planning Office staff proposes that Prince William County create a new use classification and zoning of Conservation Residential, CR-1 within select areas of the Rural Area. The Conservation Residential areas is where cluster developments would be built, would allow extension of sewer and would require 60% of the property to be dedicated in a permanent conservation easement. The buffer around the entire property be restricted so that no sewer easements or crossing of any kind is permitted within the buffer area, effectively creating a permanent “green” obstacle to sewer extension into rural areas. The 60% of open space will be placed in a permanent conservation easement and be located adjacent to the Rural Area. Easement terms could include farming, passive recreation or open space as determined through the rezoning process.

These are just the crib notes on the Planning Office recommendations. These recommendations will eventually be scheduled for public hearings before the Planning Commission and the Board of County Supervisors. The Planning Commission may choose to recommend portions of these tools, or they may recommend no action or policy change and retain the existing land use policies in the Comprehensive Plan today, and the Board of Supervisors may act as they choose. Full texts of the draft policies and ordinance are in separate documents linked on the County’s website. You need to contact your District Supervisor to have your views heard.