News and notes from Reston (tm).

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Once More To The RA Board Election, Office Tenants Jumping Ship, and Not-So-Great Budget News: A Springtime Traipse Through Reston News

  • If you haven't gotten enough hawtt Reston Association Board candidate action (or turned in your ballot), here's one more thing, with words, to look at before sending in your ballots.

  • Rumor has it some giant office tenant in Reston is considering jumping ship and relocating to a fancy new office building in Ballston. What do they have we don't, except for a shopping mall across the street and an existing Metro station? Also, in a bit of news that may or may not be related, Accenture is scaling back its Reston office space from a whopping 200,000 square feet to 50,000 square feet. Ouch.

  • Not exactly a shocker, but as Loudoun and Fairfax officials dither over whether to put the Dulles Airport Metro station somewhere, technically, near the airport, the completion date for the second phase of the Silver Line pushing into the particleboard wastelands of Loudoun County has been pushed back to 2017.

  • Fairfax County Supervisor Cathy Hudgins warned a bunch of her Hunter Mill constituents that a "new normal" has arrived, which we think means that we won't be getting our county-funded pink sparkly ponies anytime soon.

  • Fairfax County's school board has kicked off a review of the system's disciplinary process, which is being followed by a group called Fairfax Zero Tolerance Reform led by Caroline Hemenway, a South Lakes High School parent. How'd the first hearings held by the school board go?
    "[The school board discussion] was better than I expected. There were some school board members that I didn't think were on our side who expressed concern," said Hemenway, one of the advocacy group's founders.
    The school system now has a fancy webpage focusing on the issue, so it's safe to say "problem solved," or something like that.

  • The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is holding a public hearing March 29 on acquiring land rights to improve walkways along Reston Avenue from Southington Lane to Shaker Drive. We keep hearing this whole sidewalk concept has "legs," as the kids today don't say.

  • A fancy new tea place (a teaery?) has replaced a jeansery at Reston's Fake Downtown gritty urban core. We'll take a $10 cup of tea over a $300 pair of jeans any day.

  • Reston's "top cop," Deborah Burnett, has retired. The new precinct commander is Andre Tibbs, in case you're keeping score at home.

  • Reston-based MERS continues to get the front-page attention we think it's safe to say they're not exactly hoping for.

  • Always nice to see a fellow Reston web logger get some press.

  • This web logger seems to think that Reston is exactly like Palo Alto, California -- minus Stanford and Facebook, of course. He writes:
    when I was in Reston, I was blown away by the absence of litter ... and the absence of dirt. The place is frighteningly clean (in a creepy, Monaco-esque way), and I wouldn't be shocked if you could do surgery on the street with no fear of infection. Palo Alto is no different. I feel like I should take my shoes off before crossing University Avenue.
    Yeah, but we wouldn't recommend doing that on the Jackson's patio.

6 comments:

  1. Ballston appears to be every city designers ultimate goal. I don't get it. I find the place very ugly. Is there a spec of grass in the area? I much prefer to work and live in Reston. What might be best for overall city design is not necessarily best for quality of live of its residents.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "We'll take a $10 cup of tea over a $300 pair of jeans any day".

    From what I hear from friends:

    a) there ain't no cups of tea. They sell tea ingredients, not ready-to-drink tea.

    b) you may be charged $300 for a container and the loose tea inside it. The sales people are apparently very aggressive in upscaling your shopping experience..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Schmoe,

    Have you walked 5 minutes in any direction from the Metro station in Ballston? High-rises give way to mid-rises give way to townhouses, and then, finally single-family neighborhoods that are essentially unchanged since the 1950s despite being within easy walking distance of Metro. THAT is the beauty of Ballston -- where high density was created in very specific places, then sensibly tapered down to human scale.

    It's also a sign that Reston as we know it might not be ruined by Metro and a bunch of high-density crap adjoining the Toll Road, so long as people pay attention to what's going on.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sorry, Bob's Evil Twin, but if I wanted the Ballston Experience 24/7, I would have moved to Ballston. At least in garden apartments, the garden isn't just a distant green speck somewhere out on the horizon, which you can barely see because of the all of the smog being generated by the traffic along Wilson Blvd and 66.

    No Growth is Smart Growth.

    ReplyDelete
  5. So, about that new police commander of the Reston precinct, does he say

    "They call me MISTER Tibbs!"

    (With apologies to Sidney Poitier)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Schmoe is right, Teavana is more of a place to buy tea for home brewing and they do offer free samples. I'm just glad that I don't have to drive to the Fair Oaks location any longer. Nice to have them in the area.

    ReplyDelete

(If you don't see comments for some reason, click here).