An anticipated two-decade-plus effort to redevelop Fairfax County’s 48-acre judicial complex has taken its first major step forward.
County supervisors approved a conceptual plan on Tuesday (Dec. 3) that ultimately could add four new office buildings, affordable housing and parks to the site at 4110 Chain Bridge Road, adjacent to the City of Fairfax. The construction would bring the amount of development on the campus from 1.4 million square feet to about 2 million.
“This is going to be a big improvement and do a lot of positive things,” Hunter Mill District Supervisor Walter Alcorn said leading up to the vote, which was unanimous with Springfield District Patrick Herrity (R-Springfield) away from the dais at the time.
The approval by the Board of Supervisors set the stage for construction on the first part of the project: a 90-foot-tall office building on the site of the former Massey Building, which served as the county government’s headquarters from 1969 until opening of the Fairfax County Government Center in the 1990s.
The nine-story building later hosted county police and fire operations before getting razed in 2020, freeing up space for new development.
Under the conceptual plan, many existing operations — including courts and the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center — will stay in place. Before multiple additional phases can be implemented, county staff will need to come back to supervisors for approval after going through public engagement efforts.
The Fairfax County Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval of the conceptual plan after delaying a vote planned in early October to settle some details, including concerns about parking and the location of the proposed affordable housing.
With no public speakers appearing, the Board of Supervisors wrapped up Tuesday’s public hearing on the topic eight minutes before the advertised 4:30 p.m. start of the next hearing.
“This never happens,” Board Chair Jeff McKay said of the board being ahead of schedule, putting the meeting into a brief recess.
It was a quick conclusion to a lengthy process for the judicial complex redevelopment plan. This week’s vote came three years after the approval of a site master plan that had taken two years to craft.
“We’ve been at this for a few years,” Providence District Supervisor Dalia Palchick acknowledged, calling the conceptual plan’s approval “a wonderful outcome” that will result in “an incredible improvement” from existing conditions.
As part of the development plan, the existing one-way loop road through the property will be converted to a two-way grid. A farmers’ market will remain, although it ultimately may be moved elsewhere on the parcel.
There also will be a 10,000-square-foot addition to the county’s Historic Courthouse, which was constructed in the 1800s at the time when the surrounding area was fields in a mostly rural county.
Surviving damage by both Union and Confederate shelling during the Civil War, that courthouse building housed Circuit Court operations until the 1980s and the Juvenile & Domestic Relations District Court until 2008. It last saw a major renovation in the late 1960s. The new plan calls for removal of non-historic wings of the building.
