How do you solve a problem like Hockett Road?

How do you solve a problem like Hockett Road?

On Monday, May 14, the first community meeting about yet another proposed 400 plus home subdivision on the east side of Hockett Road was held. People filled the Company 3 meeting room, but many bugged out early to avoid an oncoming storm. Supervisors Bob Minnick, District 4; Board Chair Ken Peterson, District 5; and Manuel Alvarez, Jr., District 2 attended as did John Shelhorse and Tom Rockecharlie, Planning Commissioners for Districts 4 and 5 respectively.

A storm of another, familiar, sort was brewing, however.

Residents of, presumably, Broad Run and Kinloch, toney enclaves  west of Hockett Road expressed outrage at the addition of  more homes on small lots in the area. A woman asked “At what point did  Goochland decide it was going to change from a horsey farming community and become Short Pump?” Wonder if she has ever been west of Manakin Road? They worried that their taxes would be raised to pay for overwhelmed schools.

Another person opined “we’re okay with this if they fix the rush hour traffic.”

The subject property, Hermitage Gardens—sorry that sounds like a cemetery—is approximately 176 acres comprised of parcels of land, most part of West Creek. It is south of the Reader’s Branch subdivision, between Hockett Road and Route 288.

Jim Theobald, Chairman of the Hirschler Fleisher law firm, and a preeminent land use attorney, speaking on behalf of developer Riverstone Group, tried to explain that Goochland has a capital impact model to address the fiscal impact of growth using cash proffers to offset those costs.

Theobald was familiar with the 25 year capital improvement plan, which includes costs and a timeline to build new public facilities. It was used to craft a sophisticated  capital impact model that employs a case-specific mechanism to calculate a dollar development cost for new homes. Hermitage Gardens, he estimated, will ultimately pay Goochland $2 million for road improvements “to mitigate traffic so that everyone can live in peace.”

One woman snarled that she was not notified of the meeting and did not have time to check her computer every day for updates. The notice for this meeting was on the county website http://goochlandva.us/ for several weeks. Did she expect a personal invitation? If so, she should sign up to receive email notifications of public meetings, it is easy and free.

Theobald said that Goochland has one of the most open transparent zoning policies in the region. In addition to “as many community meetings as it takes”, the rezoning process includes, at a minimum, public hearings before both the planning commission and board of supervisors, which has the final say on the matter. There is no guarantee that  any rezoning application will be approved.

The most critical and substantive objection to this proposal, however, is traffic on Hockett Road, whose intersections at Broad Street Road, Tuckahoe Creek Parkway, and Route 6 are already dysfunctional at rush hour.

As illustrated by the conceptual plan presented at the meeting, Hermitage Gardens will have connecting internal streets that access to Hockett Road in two places. Frontage was estimated at one thousand feet, which several speakers contended is too short a distance to dump that many cars on a main road. Theobald made vague reference to a third access point to Broad Street Road through a wetland. He opined that, if constructed, it would be at a much later date.

The build out timeline was vague; at one point, completion in 2025 was mentioned, another in ten years. It seems unlikely that Hermitage Gardens will have “spec”  houses, so ultimate completion of this community will be determined by market forces. Cash proffers are paid when certificates of occupancy are issued, so build out effects when the county collects the money for improvements.

In response to a query, Theobald said that Hermitage Gardens will not have its own exit from Rt 288. The Capital One flyover, he said, was funded with state money.

Traffic engineer Erich Strohhacker of Green Light Solutions, a familiar face at Goochland rezoning hearings, repeated his shtick— Hockett Road has enough capacity to handle lot of additional traffic without being widened; the problem is the aforementioned choke points.

Theobald contended that the road cash proffers from Hermitage Gardens will swell county coffers to fund necessary road improvements. The problem may be more  VDOT—the state agency whose motto is “OOPS!”—than money. VDOT has the final say when traffic lights are installed. Its formula for intersection signalization seems to include chicken bones and a full moon rather than numbers of drivers growing old waiting to negotiate an intersection. Turn lanes at Broad Street Road and Route 6 require obtaining rights of way from private property owners, which developers cannot control.

Then, there is the issue of the incredible shrinking West Creek. We keep hearing, as more parcels are removed from the office park, that there will still be plenty left for economic development. A bite here, a bite there, pretty soon, only crumbs are left.

According to Theobald, single family homes in Hermitage Gardens will be on approximately quarter acre lots, start in the $300k range, with around two thousand square feet and go up from there. Lot widths will be about 80 feet, which he contended are wider than those in The Parke at Centerville. It will have walking trails, a pool, and a clubhouse.

Future neighbors were not amused. They moved here for a rural lifestyle with a large lot horse culture. It would be interesting to know if any of them realized that when their communities were rezoned, that the people who lived there before them were not happy with interlopers building homes on small lots either. Parcel size is relative.

Someone mentioned a negative impact on property values. Broad Run residents were put out when Kinloch came along, snarking something along the lines of “there goes the neighborhood”  and so forth. Each new residential enclave in the area improves rather than degrades property values. The land in question is pricey. Because it is in the Tuckahoe Creek Service District, residents pay an extra ad valorem tax in addition to connection fees and regular water and sewer bills. The more property values in the TCSD rise, the greater the chance that the ad valorem tax will decline.

Hermitage Gardens is in the county’s designated growth area, generally east of Manakin Road, which is intended to serve at a protective moat to keep 85 percent of Goochland rural. How much development there is too much has yet to be determined.