Around the Corner today;
Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling is raising awareness about budget cuts hitting the bike coordinator position at Fairfax County. It is a disturbing irony that we now have plenty of money to waste of bad road widening projects (like pointlessly widening Route 123 within Tysons for $22 million) but have no funding for planning staff specifically for cycling orders of magnitude less expensive.
Fairfax County has a huge shortage of planning capacity for weeding through bad projects and finding good shovel ready projects. This cut makes it that much harder to efficiently use county funds and means more mega-projects that do nothing in our futures. (FABB)
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Capital One is getting a thumbs up from Fairfax County staff for their proposed 470′ headquarters building, which is up for final approval next month. Washington Business Journal has a pretty solid summary about the proposal. The new headquarter building is expected to begin construction as soon as later this year, and would be the tallest private building in the Washington Metropolitan area. It would also signal Capital One’s intentions to continue to grow, bringing jobs, and likely close to $3 million in real estate tax revenue from this building alone. (Washington Business Journal)
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WAMU’s Martin DiCaro provides the most well rounded and comprehensive review of what’s going wrong in the Silver Line construction process. Congressman Davis seemed to be pretty upset about Bechtel’s lack of status update, but is he upset enough to push for Bechtel to lose its pre-qualification merits.
In my experience when design builds get to this point where both parties are talking through each other, it becomes more about documenting and putting dates on the others missteps than solving the problem. Unfortunately for the public, it appears that’s exactly where this is going. (WAMU)
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Speaking of litigation, a new construction law firm, VLMG, is opening in Tysons. No word yet if they chose Tysons because of the Silver Line, or if they chose Tysons because of the Silver Line. That might have been a cheap shot.
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The Fairfax Chamber of Commerce is coming to the neighborhood, to the former Custom Ink space at 7900 Westpark. The building is adjacent to the former Sunrise Assisted Living headquarters building which is now undergoing a major facade renovation to update the space. Tysons will also be seeing the Georgetown MBA program moving into town, and has seen a steady increase in venture capital activity, possibly evidence of the area’s maturing from federal IT and defense contracting.