By Michele Clock
May 15, 2003
Three years ago, Elena Schlossberg and her husband, Scott Kunkel, purchased a 10-acre property in Haymarket.
Ready to raise a family, the couple moved from Centreville to a less populated section of Northern Virginia: western Prince William County’s Rural Crescent. Today they have both a house and a 17-month-old son, Eli. But Schlossberg, 35, says she’s afraid that a plan to develop a chunk of the county’s rural preserve into a large golf course community could ultimately hurt her family’s quality of life.
Next week, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors will consider a proposal to allow a subdivision called Greater South Market on 663 acres, about 190 acres of which is in the Rural Crescent — an 80,000-acre preserve of agricultural land, where development is more or less limited to one house per 10 acres. The project calls for a Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course, 720 age-restricted homes, 525 non age-restricted houses and an office park. The site is near Haymarket, bounded by the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks on the north, Route 15 on the east and Thoroughfare Road on the west.
Vienna-based KSI Services Inc., a major developer in Northern Virginia, said the plan, first proposed in January 2001, has the potential to bring millions in annual tax revenue to the county. For the proposal to work, KSI is asking for a series of changes to both the Comprehensive Plan and county zoning. The county’s Planning Commission already approved the package April 16.
In 1998, supervisors narrowly voted to create the Rural Crescent. The protected swath of land runs from Quantico Marine Corps Base to the Loudoun and Fauquier county lines. Since then, numerous development proposals have sought to chip away at the designated land or to build adjacent to it. Some have succeeded.
Schlossberg, a leader with Advocates for the Rural Crescent, a group formed in 2001, is focusing her opposition on next week’s meeting. She’s mobilizing her organization’s 80 members and other slow-growth activists.
“I feel like the citizens are being betrayed by the people who are supposed to be looking out for our interests, our investments,” she said. “When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. When I say I’m going to preserve a rural area, I don’t allow people to find sneaky ways to get around it.”
Edward Byrne, KSI’s vice president of planning, said that his company has already acquired 500 of the 663 acres and that if approved, construction could begin by summer 2004.
Currently, KSI’s acreage includes sections zoned not only for agriculture but also for more than 500 single-family houses, including about 250 townhouses, a strip shopping center and other commercial development such as warehouses or manufacturing, said county planner Bob Bainbridge.
The land is zoned in an patchwork way in which there’s a chunk of rural land nearly surrounded by land zoned for development, including a parcel zoned for light industry, Bainbridge said. The hodgepodge of zoning designations doesn’t make for the smoothest transition between development and the Rural Crescent, Bainbridge said.
With Greater South Market, Bainbridge said, houses would be interspersed in between holes of the golf course. The course would serve as a type of buffer, and motorists would be able to see little more than grass and trees, Byrne said.
Bainbridge and Byrne also pointed out that about 62 percent of Greater South Market would be designated “open space,” which includes golf course acreage.
“It’s a better plan than what’s on the books now, better use of the land, better configuration,” Bainbridge said.
This is an unusual situation, he said, and not one that would necessarily open the door to developing the Rural Crescent, as some fear. This is not pure encroachment on Rural Crescent land, Bainbridge said.
Supervisor Ruth T. Griggs (R-Occoquan) is unconvinced.
“It was stupidly planned anyway,” Griggs said. If you’re going to rezone, “make it all rural. . . . We never say ‘let’s down zone.’ ”
Griggs said there are other ways to attract upscale housing to western Prince William than by building another golf course. She said that in the end, she thinks the proposal will pass.
In the meantime, Schlossberg said she sees the possibility of developing part of the Rural Crescent as a violation of a contract between the county government and residents.
“We bought into the contract with the Comprehensive Plan, and now they’re trying to change it,” she said. “You start allowing private developers to come into the Rural Crescent, and the seal is broken. Once you break it, the precedent is set.”