Three months after it was put on hold, a divided Fairfax City Council has brought the $6 million Pickett Road Connector Trail project back to life.
After Mayor Catherine Read cast the tiebreaker in a 4-3 vote last week, planning will restart on the proposed 1,260-foot trail running south from Fairfax Blvd to Thaiss Memorial Park on the east side of Pickett Road.
“I don’t think it serves a justifiable purpose continuing to delay this project,” said Councilmember Billy Bates, who added the issue to the July 22 agenda. “I do not support canceling this project and do not want to do anything to jeopardize it.”
In April, Bates had voted with council colleagues Thomas Peterson, Stacy Hall and Rachel McQuillen to temporarily halt the project in response to concerns raised by Friends of Accotink Creek and other environmental advocates about the impact of the trail on wetlands in the vicinity.
At the July 22 meeting, Bates joined Read and council members Anthony Amos and Stacey Hardy-Chandler to restart the proposal.
“We should get the ball rolling again,” said Amos, who had joined with Hardy-Chandler to oppose the pause enacted in April.
Peterson, Hall and McQuillen maintained that the project should stay on hold. Hall attempted to have a decision delayed to a future meeting, but couldn’t convince a majority of her colleagues to go along.
City Manager Bryan Foster said that while there was no pressing need to act that evening, a decision on the project’s future ultimately needed to be made.
“At some point, VDOT [the Virginia Department of Transportation] is going to ask us what the heck we’re doing,” Foster said.
The 10-foot-wide trail is planned to include two bridges and boardwalks over sensitive wetlands. It is envisioned as a key connection among a growing number of pedestrian and bicyclist trails in the city and surrounding areas.
“The new trail will connect the Wilcoxon and Cross-County Trails to the City of Fairfax Connector Trail, which leads to the Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Metro station,” city officials say on the project website.
Environmental concerns have also stymied work on the George Snyder Trail that will extend 1.8 miles from Chain Bridge Road (Route 123) to Fairfax Blvd (Route 50). After considering an alternative that would only construct a portion of the trail or canceling it altogether, the city council voted 4-2 in June to continue with that project as previously planned.
The Pickett Road trail project’s cost is being covered by 2019 funds from VDOT’s Smart Scale transportation-funding initiative. It has now reached the 60% design phase, a key milestone.
Land acquisition currently is underway with construction set to begin next year, according to a city timetable.
The state funding was authorized specifically for the Pickett Road trail project, Foster said at the July 22 meeting.
“If we don’t do the project, it’s not like that money is still available to us to do other things,” he said.
In a related action, council members agreed unanimously to Peterson’s request for a community meeting to be held in October. The forum will focus on safety concerns along Pickett Road, particularly for neighborhoods on the west side of the roadway.
“My sense from having conversations with both representatives and residents is they are both in the dark and very much interested in being able to talk about their wants and needs in terms of transportation safety,” Peterson said. “They certainly have some concerns that they’d like to express.”
Amos, among others, said he was fine with a community meeting while also restarting the trail project.
“We can do both simultaneously,” he said.
