Reston Association has decided not to move forward with a proposed name change for its Shadowood Recreation Area, which includes a swimming pool and tennis courts.
The RA Board of Directors voted 7-2 last night (Thursday) to retain the current name of the recreational area at 2201 Springwood Drive after public feedback suggested community members were split on a change.
The decision came just two days before the scheduled reopening of Shadowood Pool, which has been closed since the end of the 2019 swim season for an extensive renovation. The facility will be welcomed back with a grand reopening party starting at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow (Saturday).
Prior to the vote, Director Margaret Perry, the apartment owners’ representative, thanked staff for organizing the outreach efforts to get community input on the potential renaming.
“While I appreciate some members thought it was a waste of time, I feel the fact that we did it because members asked us to is doing our job,” she said.
Suggestions that Shadowood should be renamed have cropped up repeatedly since 2010, as surrounding community members, including the Shadowood Condominium’s management, reported confusion from people who didn’t know that the facilities were open to all RA members, according to an RA staff memo for the board meeting.
Though the RA board decided not to change the name in 2011, the proposal gained new momentum after the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee (PRAC) voted in December 2021 to “recommend the facility name be changed to reflect a broader area than ‘Shadowood,'” per the staff memo.
The committee also recommended that the pool be renovated instead of repurposed, as an RA work group had proposed earlier in the year, citing low usage of that and three other pools.
According to RA staff, PRAC suggested “South Lakes” as an alternative, since that’s the main Reston street that the recreation area fronts.
When staff solicited input on the Shadowood facilities from clusters in the area in 2022, advocacy for a renaming came “almost exclusively” from the Colonial Greene cluster, the memo says. The topic was also disussed at a listening session for the South Lakes District in March 2023.
The Board of Directors directed staff in May to officially gather feedback on a possible name change.
An online survey drew 351 responses with 52% expressing support for a change and 47% opposed, a 15-vote difference, RA communications director Cara O’Donnell told the board yesterday. However, a review of social media comments found that a 3-to-1 majority were against a change.
According to O’Donnell, staff recommended not changing the name “because there is not an overwhelming desire to rename the pool,” confirming to Director John Farrell that there had been a previous board vote on the issue in February 2011.
Farrell said that, when he committed to bringing up the Shadowood renaming issue after the March 2023 listening session, he hadn’t been aware of the earlier vote. When he asked later why the issue should be revisited, he said he never received an answer, leading him to move that the board “take no further action.”
“The next question I asked is, how can we view this proposal as anything other than an attempt to distance this pool from the working class people of color who live in Shadowood?” Farrell said. “…That would be totally against the philosophy of Reston.”
Director Izzy Santa said, historically, one of the factors driving the push for a name change has been stigma related to Shadowood’s “associated socioeconomic status, possibly the crime.”
She suggested that instead of renaming the recreation area, RA should encourage inclusiveness and community-building between different neighborhoods in the area and “make sure we create that dialogue so the confusion goes away but we’re also neighborly.”
At-Large Director Trevor Grywatch, the board’s vice president, who joined Perry in voting against Farrell’s motion to not move forward, later proposed that staff develop guidelines for the board to follow in the future when considering name changes.
RA CEO Mac Cummins said staff could deliver a recommendation to the board by the end of this year, but the motion failed with four directors supporting it, three opposing and two abstaining.
Farrell noted that Lake Audubon is only one other facility he’s aware of with a name change currently on the table.
“I just think we’ve got more important things for staff to do,” Farrell said. “I won’t be voting in favor of the motion, not because I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s not a priority.”
