PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Dear Neighbors,

It’s been a busy month for Citizens for Great Falls, and this issue reflects that. We’re covering more county policy in one newsletter than usual, but each of these stories touches something that matters directly to our community — our trees, our roads, our growth, and the character of the county we call home.

We start with the news many of you have been waiting on: the Board of Supervisors’ vote to dissolve the Fairfax County Tree Commission after 53 years, and what the new Environmental Commission will and won’t carry forward. CFGF was in the room for this one, and we walk through exactly where things stand.

From there, we turn to data centers — a topic that keeps coming up in conversations with many of you. We take a close look at what “by-right” development actually means under the county’s current zoning ordinance, why that matters for land right here in Great Falls, and what national polling tells us about where public opinion is heading — plus two fresh test cases: a live Tysons proposal asking Fairfax to waive its own 2024 protections, and Chesterfield County’s move to ban by-right data centers outright.

We also ask whether Fairfax County should be paying closer attention to Chesterfield County’s very different approach to growth — one that prioritizes infrastructure readiness over unlimited density.

Rounding out this issue, we’ve got two practical pieces for you: the second installment of our Safe Roads for Great Falls initiative, focused on school bus safety as the new school year gets underway, and a quick, easy fix for one of the most common (and damaging) landscaping mistakes we see right here in the county — including, it turns out, outside the Government Center itself. And this issue’s News Briefs is fuller than usual, covering everything from crossing-guard cuts at Fairfax’s high schools to a new County Zoning Administrator and a land-disturbance case near a historic cemetery on Sherman Court.

As always, thank you for staying engaged with what’s happening in Great Falls. It makes a real difference.

— John Halacy, President, Citizens for Great Falls

TREE COMMISSION

Fairfax County Dissolves the Tree Commission: What Happened, and Where CFGF Stood

On Tuesday, Aug. 25, the fight CFGF has been tracking since early summer reached its conclusion. The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted 9-1 to dissolve the county’s 53-year-old Tree Commission, then unanimously restructured the Environmental Quality Advisory Council (EQAC) into a new, 15-member Fairfax County Environmental Commission.

The Vote

Sully District Supervisor Kathy Smith moved to repeal the county code provisions establishing the Tree Commission, with Chairman Jeff McKay seconding. Nine supervisors — McKay, Smith, Jimmy Bierman, Pat Herrity, Andres Jimenez, Rodney Lusk, Dalia Palchik, Rachna Sizemore Heizer, and Dan Storck — voted to repeal. Hunter Mill Supervisor Walter Alcorn cast the lone dissenting vote.

A second motion, restructuring EQAC into the new Environmental Commission and adopting its bylaws, passed by voice vote with no opposition. All EQAC members’ terms expired immediately with that action.

What the New Commission Looks Like

The Environmental Commission will seat one representative from each of the county’s nine magisterial districts, one chairman’s appointee, three at-large members, and two students — fifteen seats in total. At least two must hold expertise in forestry and natural resources, doubled from the single seat originally proposed back in July after pushback from tree advocates, including CFGF.

The new panel will meet monthly except in August and December, and its annual work plan must include trees and natural resources as a designated focus area. A concise annual report will replace EQAC’s more extensive Annual Report on the Environment. Until the commission elects its own officers, the director of the county’s Office of Environmental and Energy Coordination will appoint a temporary chair.

The Board’s Debate

Supervisor Alcorn was blunt in his dissent, arguing that eliminating a 15-member commission dedicated exclusively to trees in favor of two reserved seats on a much broader panel inevitably reduces the attention trees receive. In his view, “in the environmental world, expertise is everything.” Other supervisors took the opposite position, arguing that folding tree expertise into a broader environmental panel would help tree specialists weigh in on interconnected issues like water quality and climate resilience, rather than working in isolation. Chairman McKay pushed back directly on the idea that the restructuring signals any retreat from the county’s environmental commitments, characterizing it as a structural change rather than a policy shift. Dranesville Supervisor Bierman enthusiastically supported the plan to replace the Tree Commission, based on his questions to a staff member during the post-hearing debate. Supervisor Storck supported the consolidation but pushed for the new commission to explicitly address conservation, invasive species, and wildlife habitat, and questioned bylaw restrictions on how many subcommittees it could create.

CFGF’s Role in the Record

CFGF was one of six speakers at the public hearing, and one of several organizations urging the Board to reconsider. CFGF Secretary Jennifer Falcone testified on the organization’s behalf, reaffirming the concerns CFGF first raised in its August 3 letter to Chairman McKay and acknowledging the county’s move from one to two reserved forestry seats — while noting that this remained a steep reduction from a 15-member commission focused entirely on trees. Tree Commission Chair Barbara Ryan and Reston Citizens Association President Lynne Mulston also spoke against dissolution, with Mulston calling the county’s projected savings “penny-wise and pound-foolish” relative to the value of independent oversight on land use and infrastructure decisions.

The County’s Rationale

Staff maintained throughout that portions of the Tree Commission’s work overlapped with EQAC’s, and projected that dissolving the Tree Commission would save roughly $20,000 in meeting-facilitation costs and about 600 staff hours annually, with the Environmental Commission’s more streamlined reporting saving an additional 400 staff hours. No direct financial savings were identified from the EQAC restructuring itself. Supervisor Smith framed the change as part of a longer pattern of evolution in the county’s advisory structure, noting that these bodies have shifted over time as needs and operations change.

What’s Next

The Tree Commission is gone as of this vote, and its September 3 meeting — already in question before the hearing — will not occur. The new Environmental Commission will begin standing itself up under a temporary chair, with tree and natural resources guaranteed a place on its annual work plan, but with far fewer dedicated seats and a considerably broader mandate than the body it replaces.

CFGF’s full August 3 letter to Chairman McKay, along with the remarks Secretary Falcone delivered at the Aug. 25 hearing, are available for any member who wants the complete record of what our organization asked the Board to do — and why. Links will be added once posted to the Documents section of the CFGF website; in the meantime, email CITIZENSFORGREATFALLS@GMAIL.COM for copies.

DATA CENTERS & ZONING

Data Centers, By-Right Zoning, and a National Mood Shift Fairfax County Should Be Watching

At the 11th Annual Northern Virginia Regional Elected Leaders Summit, held Aug. 26 at George Mason University’s Fuse at Mason Square in Arlington, Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay offered a measured defense of the county’s approach to data centers. Fairfax County has between 3 million and 4 million square feet of data center space, McKay noted — modest next to Loudoun County’s tens of millions. He said the county had already strengthened its zoning rules, argued Virginia should set minimum statewide protections while letting localities go further, and said data centers are necessary to support the technology residents and businesses use every day. As he put it: “We’ve just got to make sure we’re putting them in the right places with the right rules.”

That’s a reasonable-sounding standard. But it’s worth looking closely at what “the right places with the right rules” actually means under Fairfax County’s current zoning ordinance — because in a meaningful number of cases, “the right places” still means no public hearing at all.

What “By-Right” Actually Means in Fairfax County Today

Fairfax County’s data center zoning amendment, effective Sept. 11, 2024, is genuinely more protective than what came before. But it did not eliminate by-right development — the pathway that lets a project proceed through administrative site plan review alone, without any hearing before the Planning Commission or Board of Supervisors. Under the current ordinance:

• C-3 and C-4 commercial districts retain a by-right ceiling of 40,000 square feet of gross floor area.
• I-2, I-3, and I-4 industrial districts allow by-right development up to 80,000 square feet.
• I-5 and I-6 heavy industrial districts retain the broadest by-right allowance of all, with no equivalent size cap tying the project to a Special Exception review.

Anything larger, or seeking relief from the ordinance’s mandatory standards, must go through the Special Exception process — which does require public hearings before both bodies. That’s not hypothetical for Great Falls: the parcels along Downey Drive, off Leesburg Pike, sit within an I-5 heavy industrial district, meaning a data center proposed there could proceed through the same by-right, no-hearing pathway, provided it meets every applicable standard.

To be clear, “by-right” doesn’t mean unregulated. A qualifying by-right data center must still meet a 200-foot residential setback, a 300-foot setback for generators, a minimum one-mile distance from Metro entrances, noise studies, and updated screening standards — real guardrails won by residents during the 2024 rulemaking. But guardrails on how a data center is built are not the same thing as a voice in whether it gets built. A project that fits the by-right threshold can move forward with no public hearing and no discretionary vote, regardless of how neighbors feel.

The Concerns Aren’t Hypothetical

Skeptics sometimes frame these as abstract worries. But Fairfax County and its neighbors already have documented cases showing what’s at stake. In Sterling, just across the Loudoun County line, residents near a Vantage Data Centers campus running on gas turbines have lived with a constant, high-pitched whine for the past year — resorting to mattresses against windows and personal decibel meters, even though measured levels stay under Loudoun’s numeric violation threshold. A study for a regional environmental group has since raised separate health concerns about the turbines’ emissions.

Fairfax doesn’t need to look outside the county for the next example. The Plaza 500 data center in Lincolnia was approved administratively, by-right, with no Board hearing — but it can’t function without a large new Dominion Energy substation proposed less than 100 feet from homes in the adjacent Bren Mar neighborhood. Because substations go through a separate, state-mandated review, the only public hearing residents get is before the Planning Commission, with no Board vote. It’s a clear illustration of a broader gap: Fairfax’s 200-foot residential setback applies to the data center building itself, but the substation infrastructure it depends on can sit far closer to homes, under a weaker process.

Beyond noise and substations, researchers have linked data center campuses to measurable local heat-island effects, and regional studies have flagged the industry’s water use — nearly 2 billion gallons in Northern Virginia in 2023, up 63% in four years — as a growing pressure on the Potomac and Occoquan systems that supply much of Fairfax County’s drinking water. Diesel backup generators, and increasingly on-site gas turbines, raise additional air-quality concerns for nearby residents. None of this means every data center is a problem — but the infrastructure a data center depends on can generate impacts of its own, on a separate and often less visible approval track.

A National Mood Shift

Public sentiment has moved sharply. According to Heatmap Pro polling by Embold Research (a national survey, not specific to Fairfax County), the country was roughly split on data centers a year ago — 43% support, 42% opposed. By this May, seven in ten opposed one being built near their home. The most recent survey, released Aug. 20, puts opposition at 75%, with more than six in ten strongly opposed; strong support has collapsed from 13% a year ago to just 4% now. The swing cuts across nearly every demographic group, and more than 530 counties and municipalities nationwide have now restricted or banned data center construction in some form.

Two Fresh Test Cases

Two recent developments show just how differently jurisdictions are responding to this same pressure. Chesterfield County went further than Fairfax in the opposite direction: after approving three Google data center campuses (one now under construction), the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors amended its zoning ordinance to require a conditional use permit, a public hearing, and a Board vote for any future data center — eliminating by-right development for the industry entirely. County officials say Chesterfield’s door is now closed to further proposals. Notably, the Board is also weighing whether tax revenue from its three approved campuses — projected to eventually exceed even what Dominion Energy currently pays as the county’s top taxpayer — could fund cutting the county’s car tax rate nearly in half, from $3.25 to $1.79; a vote has been deferred to Sept. 23 for more public input. (This is a separate Chesterfield story from the growth-and-density debate covered elsewhere in this issue — but it’s the same county drawing a similarly firm line.)

Closer to home, a live case in Tysons is testing how firm Fairfax’s own 2024 protections really are. A developer has requested a rezoning and Special Exception for “Vienna Cloud,” a proposed data center of more than 316,000 square feet — nearly four times the by-right size threshold — on Quantum Drive. The plan would place data center buildings 131 feet from townhomes and 107 feet from an apartment complex, well inside the 200-foot residential setback the Board adopted in 2024, a standard Chairman McKay called a “quantum leap forward” at the time. The site also sits within a mile of the Tysons Metro station, another distance the same ordinance was meant to protect, and the developer is offering to pay roughly $46,000 into the county’s tree fund rather than provide on-site canopy. Because the project needs a rezoning and Special Exception, it will get the public hearing a by-right project wouldn’t — but the case is a direct test of whether the county holds the line on standards it adopted less than two years ago.

Part of what’s driving proposals like this: data centers are simply outbidding almost everyone else for land. In Loudoun County’s Ashburn, a developer has reportedly offered homeowners in the 130-acre Regency neighborhood roughly $4.4 million per acre — more than $576 million total — to redevelop their properties for data center use, though the neighborhood’s HOA president says no formal offer is on the table yet. Whatever the final number, land worth several times more to a data center developer than to a conventional homebuilder helps explain why the industry keeps asking localities to loosen protections they adopted only a year or two ago.

Why This Matters for Fairfax County’s Approach

Chairman McKay is right that data centers aren’t going away and that blanket bans raise real practical problems. But “right places, right rules” is only half a framework if a meaningful category of projects can still be sited without residents ever getting a hearing at all. As the Vienna Cloud case here in Fairfax and Chesterfield’s new stance elsewhere in Virginia both illustrate, national opposition is hardening and other jurisdictions are moving to close the very gaps Fairfax has left open. Fairfax County’s decision to preserve broad by-right pathways in its heavy industrial districts increasingly looks like an outlier among its neighbors, not a middle path. Closing that gap in I-5 and I-6 — or at minimum extending the same size thresholds that already apply in C-3, C-4, and lighter industrial districts — would be a logical next step, and the same logic applies to the substations these projects depend on. For Great Falls, with I-5-zoned land of our own along Downey Drive, that’s not a distant policy debate — it’s a question about our own backyard.

GROWTH & INFRASTRUCTURE

Chesterfield County Is Asking a Question Fairfax County Should Be Asking

Something interesting is happening in Chesterfield County, and Fairfax County should be paying attention.

Chesterfield County expects a lot more people to move in over the coming years. You’d think that means planning for more housing and businesses everywhere. Instead, a draft plan would cut back the amount of housing and commercial development allowed countywide — residential building by almost 10%, commercial by about 7.5% — in part to keep traffic from getting worse. That’s a very different path than the one Fairfax County has been on.

Fairfax remains Virginia’s largest jurisdiction, with more than 1.15 million residents — though the county has actually lost population every year since the 2020 census. Even so, its planning documents still assume growth to roughly 1.3 million residents by 2040, and its land-use policies are built around that assumption. Chesterfield is smaller, at around 401,000 residents, but added more new residents than any other Virginia locality between 2020 and 2025. Even as Fairfax’s own numbers soften, its policies keep assuming it needs to build for a bigger future — while Chesterfield, growing faster right now, is choosing to plan more cautiously. If anything, that strengthens the case for infrastructure-first planning, not weaker.

Fairfax has been moving toward more housing and denser development, including a current proposal to loosen rules on Accessory Living Units (ALUs) — small basement apartments or backyard cottages on residential lots. These can genuinely help young families, downsizing residents, and people priced out of a traditional single-family home. But Chesterfield’s debate raises a fair question Fairfax shouldn’t dodge: at what point does adding homes start to outpace the roads, schools, and services a community needs to support them?

Every new home, even a small ALU, adds some strain on roads, schools, stormwater systems, and emergency services — strain that doesn’t disappear because the unit is small. Traffic on corridors like Route 7, Route 50, and I-66 is already a daily frustration, and the experience of CFGF’s own members with VDOT suggests that widening roads doesn’t solve the underlying problem, since added capacity tends to fill back up within a few years. Denser housing also means more cars competing for streets built for one or two per household. Schools, police, and fire departments are already operating under tight budgets; new residents without new resources mean larger class sizes and longer response times, since new housing doesn’t automatically come with new teachers or first responders. And older sewer and water systems in many Fairfax neighborhoods weren’t built for today’s population, let alone tomorrow’s. Chesterfield deserves credit for weighing whether services can keep pace before locking in more density, rather than assuming the two will sort themselves out.

It’s also worth asking why Fairfax has moved in this direction. Over the past decade, the Board has consistently favored greater density and redevelopment — and one reason isn’t hard to find: new development generates new tax revenue, which can look like an easy way to expand the tax base without raising rates. That’s a legitimate fiscal strategy, but it deserves real scrutiny: will the incremental tax revenue from something like ALUs actually offset the added school enrollment, road wear, and service demand each new unit brings, or will it prove to be a trickle by comparison? Fairfax policymakers should be able to answer that with real numbers before expanding the policy further, not after.

The real question isn’t whether Fairfax County should grow — it’s how much, where, how dense, and who pays for the infrastructure that growth requires. Chesterfield’s approach offers a simple reminder: growth is going to happen no matter what, but how dense that growth is remains a choice — one best made by thinking about infrastructure, taxpayers, and existing neighborhoods first, not as an afterthought.

SAFE ROADS FOR GREAT FALLS

Getting School Bus Safety Right

Part 2 of CFGF’s Safe Roads for Great Falls initiative

When we launched Safe Roads for Great Falls in last month’s newsletter, we promised to dig into the specific hazards our community faces on our own roads — not just abstract traffic statistics, but the blind curves, narrow shoulders, and missing sidewalks that make Great Falls unique. With Fairfax County Public Schools opening its doors for the 2026-27 school year on Monday, August 24, there’s no better place to start than school bus safety.

Why Great Falls Bus Stops Are Different

In most of Fairfax County, a school bus stop means a sidewalk, a curb, and a short walk from the front door. In Great Falls, it more often means a child standing on a narrow shoulder — or no shoulder at all — waiting for headlights to slow down on a road with no sidewalk in sight.

That’s not a hypothetical concern. VDOT’s own safety assessment of Walker Road, finalized last October, documented exactly this problem along the two-mile stretch connecting Colvin Run Road to Georgetown Pike: narrow shoulders, blind curves, and a lack of bicycle or pedestrian infrastructure that residents have long flagged as a source of speeding-related crashes. Bus stops along corridors like this one put children in exactly the kind of low-visibility, high-speed environment where a distracted or impatient driver has the least room for error.

The Law — and Why It Matters More Here

Virginia law is unambiguous: drivers approaching a stopped school bus with its red lights flashing and stop-arm extended must stop, from either direction, unless separated from the bus by a median or physical barrier. On an undivided, two-lane road with blind curves — which describes much of Great Falls — that legal obligation is also a practical necessity. A driver who doesn’t see the bus in time, or who guesses wrong about whether it’s already stopped, has far less margin for error here than on a wide, well-lit suburban street.

Fairfax County’s School Bus Cameras Are Expanding — Slowly

Fairfax County and FCPS finally launched a School Bus Camera enforcement program in the spring of 2025, after Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay pushed for it for nearly a decade. The program began with School Bus Cameras on 50 buses — a small fraction of the more than 1,600 buses FCPS runs every school day — with a 30-day warning period before $250 fines began. FCPS leadership has cited aggressive driving and a general disregard for stopped buses as the driving motivation behind the program.

Fifty buses out of 1,600 is a start, not a solution. CFGF believes Great Falls’ rural, high-speed corridors — exactly the kind of roads where a stopped bus is hardest to see in time — should be a priority as the county expands School Bus Camera coverage. We’ll be raising this directly with FCPS Transportation and our Board of Supervisors representative as the program grows.

The Numbers Are Sobering

This isn’t a niche problem. A national survey by the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services estimated that drivers illegally passed stopped school buses roughly 218,000 times on a single average day nationwide during the 2024-25 school year — a figure that, projected across a full school year, points to tens of millions of violations annually. Locally, similar School Bus Camera programs in other Virginia jurisdictions have logged thousands of violations each year once enforcement began, an early sign of just how common the problem is even when it’s not making headlines.

What You Can Do

If you drive in Great Falls:

• Slow down well before marked bus stops, especially on Walker Road, Georgetown Pike, Springvale Road, and other curving, shoulderless corridors.
• Anticipate the stop. As soon as you spot a school bus ahead — even before any lights are flashing — ease off the gas and assume it may stop. On blind curves and narrow roads, that head start can be the difference between stopping in time and not.
• Know the signals. Assume every yellow flashing light means the bus is about to stop — and every red flashing light means you must stop, no matter which direction you’re traveling, unless a median separates you.
• Never pass a stopped bus “just this once.” On these roads, you may not see a child until it’s too late.

If you have a child waiting for the bus:

• Reinforce the “five giant steps” rule — children should wait at least ten feet back from the roadway, and never assume a driver sees them.
• No sidewalk? Make sure your child waits as far off the traveled roadway as possible, facing traffic if they must stand on the shoulder.
• Walk younger children to the stop, particularly on roads without sidewalks or with limited sight distance.

What CFGF Will Be Doing

As part of Safe Roads for Great Falls, we’re compiling a list of Great Falls bus stops that residents consider especially hazardous — poor sightlines, no shoulder, high speeds — to share with FCPS Transportation and VDOT. If you have a stop you’re concerned about, let us know at CITIZENSFORGREATFALLS@GMAIL.COM. We’re also asking the County to consider Great Falls corridors for the next phase of School Bus Camera expansion, and to keep pressing forward on the kind of shoulder and visibility improvements VDOT has already recommended for Walker Road.

Watch for the next installment of Safe Roads for Great Falls, where we’ll look at aggressive driving and speeding enforcement on Georgetown Pike and Walker Road.

TREE CARE

Stop the Mulch Volcano: A Simple Fix That Could Save Your Trees

Photo: A row of trees in front of Fairfax County’s Government Center — each one mulched into a mound rising up against the trunk.

Take a look at the photo above. It’s a row of healthy young trees lining the entrance to Fairfax County’s own Government Center — the building where the county’s environmental staff go to work every day. And every one of those trees has been mulched the wrong way.

It’s such a common sight that most people don’t even register it as a problem. But arborists have a name for it, and it isn’t a compliment: a mulch volcano.

What’s Wrong With a Mulch Volcano?

Piling mulch up against the trunk of a tree — instead of spreading it out in a flat ring — does the opposite of what most people assume. Rather than protecting the tree, it slowly damages it:

• It traps moisture against the bark. Tree trunks aren’t designed to stay wet. Constant moisture at the base invites fungal decay and rot exactly where the tree can least afford it.
• It suffocates the root flare. The flare where trunk meets roots needs air exposure. Bury it in mulch and you cut off the oxygen exchange the tree depends on.
• It invites girdling roots. Trees mulched this way often send roots up into the mulch pile instead of down and out. Over years, those roots can wrap around the trunk and slowly strangle the tree from the outside in.
• It shelters pests. A mulch mound is a cozy home for voles and other rodents, which gnaw on bark at the base of the trunk — sometimes badly enough to girdle and kill a mature tree in a single season.

According to the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), volcano mulching is one of the most common — and most preventable — causes of premature tree decline in landscaped settings. The frustrating part is that it’s almost always well-intentioned. It looks tidy. It looks like someone cared enough to mulch. But done this way, that care can end up costing the tree its life over three to five years, with symptoms that show up as a slow decline rather than anything dramatic enough to raise alarm bells while there’s still time to fix it.

What Good Mulching Actually Looks Like

The fix costs nothing extra — it’s the same mulch, just placed correctly:

• Spread mulch in a flat, even layer 2 to 4 inches deep.
• Keep mulch pulled back 3 to 6 inches from the trunk, so the root flare stays visible and exposed.
• Extend the mulch ring outward toward the tree’s drip line rather than piling it high near the trunk — wider and flatter is always better than tall and narrow.
• Think donut, not volcano.

That’s it. No special tools, no added cost — just raking the same mulch into a better shape.

A Question Worth Asking

How many Fairfax County employees — including staff in the very departments responsible for the county’s environmental and urban forestry policy — walk past these trees every single day without noticing? It’s a small, human reminder that good intentions and institutional knowledge don’t always translate into what’s actually happening on the ground, right outside the front door.

If it’s happening at the Government Center, it’s worth checking your own yard, too. If you’ve got a mulch volcano of your own, grab a rake this weekend — your trees will thank you for it.

NEWS BRIEFS

Utterback Store Road Crosswalk Update

CFGF continues to track the proposed pedestrian crosswalk near Forestville Elementary School, at the Utterback Store Road/Loran Drive intersection. The project — which would add a crosswalk, signage, and roughly 1,000 feet of multi-purpose trail connecting to the existing trail on Leesburg Pike — is awaiting VDOT’s review and a countywide prioritization of projects based on the recent survey results. Further information is expected after Labor Day.

School Crossing Guards: Budget Cuts Reach the High Schools

Fairfax County has maintained crossing guard coverage at both Forestville and Great Falls elementary schools despite recent budget pressure — both sit on higher-risk corridors (Georgetown Pike and Walker Road) where speeding and recent crashes make the coverage especially important. The picture is different elsewhere: School Board member Melanie Meren noted this month that none of FCPS’s 26 high schools has a crossing guard this year, after years of reduced funding culminated in the last remaining guards being cut. That leaves South Lakes, Oakton, Annandale, Centreville, Chantilly, Edison, South County, West Potomac, West Springfield, and — per recent reporting — Langley without guards this year.

County-School Board Tensions Escalate

Relations between the Board of Supervisors and the School Board have grown tense in recent months. On Aug. 18, the School Board rejected the Supervisors’ proposed $300 annual fee for middle-school after-school programs, the latest flashpoint in a dispute over the county’s roughly $3.9 million annual contribution that’s been building since last fall. That follows a May exchange in which Chairman Jeff McKay apologized after reportedly calling School Board member Melanie Meren a “bimbo” in a text message during a dispute over high-school crossing-guard funding. With another funding fight now underway, it’s fair to ask whether the two boards are working together — or just trading costs and blame.

County Appoints New Zoning Administrator

Fairfax County named Andrew B. “Drew” Hushour as Zoning Administrator on July 22, succeeding the retired Leslie Johnson. Hushour has held several county planning and zoning roles, including Assistant and Deputy Zoning Administrator, and worked on the county’s zMOD modernization of the Zoning Ordinance. The position oversees interpretation and enforcement of zoning rules that directly affect property owners and neighborhoods; CFGF will be watching how consistently and transparently those rules are applied in Great Falls.

Land Clearing Prompts County Review Near Historic Cemetery

The county cited the owner of 1002B Sherman Court — between Seneca Road and the Sherman Court subdivision, near Seneca Corners Shopping Center — on July 30 for unauthorized, excessive land disturbance on a parcel that also contains a historic cemetery. The owner has installed silt fencing and must submit a survey and grading plan, with progress reports to the county every 10 to 14 days; officials expect the review to take 60 to 90 days. Grass seed has since been planted, but no explanation has been offered for the vegetation removal, and no new permits have been requested. The property has an approved 2008 site plan for a single home, though zoning changes over the past 18 years may require it to be resubmitted.

GET INVOLVED

We Want to Hear From You

This newsletter is only as good as the community behind it. Do you have a story idea, a neighborhood concern, a question about something happening in Great Falls, or a topic you’d like CFGF to look into? We want to hear it.

Members are welcome to submit article ideas, drafts, photos, or tips for consideration in our next issue. Whether it’s a road safety concern, a local landscaping observation, a county policy question, or something else entirely — if it matters to Great Falls, it matters to us.

Send your ideas, submissions, or feedback to CITIZENSFORGREATFALLS@GMAIL.COM. We look forward to hearing from you.

CITIZENS FOR GREAT FALLS

P.O BOX 383
GREAT FALLS, VA 22066