Nearly three years after a medical emergency abruptly halted a community meeting on the topic, Reston Association is reviving its consideration of a possible renaming of Lake Audubon.
The homeowners’ association anticipates holding a new community meeting to gather input on the proposal later this spring, while staff finalize a policy establishing a formal process for changing amenity names.
“We will start to put some educational materials on the website, and we’ll work towards an engagement campaign down the road,” RA acting CEO Peter Lusk confirmed to the Board of Directors at its Feb. 26 meeting.
RA began exploring the possibility of renaming Lake Audubon in December 2022 at the suggestion of at-large board director John Farrell, who proposed that naturalist and slaveholder John James Audubon might not be the most appropriate namesake for a lake in a community intentionally founded on principles of inclusion and integration.
At the time, the National Audubon Society was grappling with its namesake’s legacy of racism, including his family’s enslavement of Black people and public opposition to abolition, in the wake of the racial justice protests that cropped up across the country after George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020.
While the National Audubon Society ultimately opted to retain its name, the Audubon Naturalist Society adopted the new name Nature Forward in October 2022, and many local chapters dropped Audubon from their names. That includes the D.C. and Northern Virginia chapters, which now go by the Bird Alliance.
The Northern Virginia Bird Alliance is based in Reston, holding its member meetings at the National Wildlife Federation’s headquarters building at 11100 Wildlife Center Drive.
RA held a community meeting at the Walker Nature Center on March 18, 2023, but the gathering was suspended after 20 minutes due to an attendee experiencing a medical emergency. A new date was never announced.
The name issue reemerged in early 2024 as RA was also discussing a possible change for its Shadowood Recreation Area. That renaming was considered to address reported confusion from community members who thought the amenities were only available to residents in the Shadowood condominiums.
However, the RA board voted in June 2024 not to move forward with the Shadowood renaming, and the Lake Audubon name change was put on hold, according to a memo from Lusk, who has been serving as RA’s acting CEO since Mac Cummins resigned in January.
At his first board meeting as acting CEO on Jan. 22, Lusk raised the idea of reviving the Lake Audubon renaming discussion and suggested that RA should adopt a renaming policy or procedure to guide any future changes.
“The [Board of Directors] was receptive to this idea and moved by unanimous consent to establish a deadline of directing staff to bring the Board a draft procedure for renaming facilities at the May 2026 BOD meeting,” Lusk said in his memo.
At the Feb. 26 meeting, Lusk reported that RA Communications Director Cara O’Donnell was working on materials about the proposed renaming for the association’s website, but there was some confusion about whether the community engagement process on Lake Audubon should wait until after a renaming policy is adopted.
“I’m more than happy to have material put up on the website, but we started and moved a while ago to begin engagement with the community – not to come out with a solution, but to have a dialogue,” Farrell said.
Board President Travis Johnson noted that publicizing the proposal on RA’s website could count as “the beginning of engagement” with the public.
South Lakes District Director Jennifer Jushchuk suggested that a community meeting on Lake Audubon could be held while the renaming policy is being developed, rather than further delaying a process that initially started three years ago.
Margaret Perry, the board’s representative for apartment owners, clarified that the board had agreed at its Jan. 22 meeting to wait until this spring for a meeting since more people are likely to come out and participate anyway.
“If you are continuing working on a process anyway, I would suggest continue working on that with the anticipation that there will be some meeting in the spring,” Perry said after observing that she doesn’t oppose the community engagement plan but personally “don’t think this is what we should be spending money on at the moment.”
Lusk confirmed that spring was the intended time frame for a community meeting.
Farrell thanked Lusk and Perry for their clarifications and added that he feels RA is “behind society” in its reexamination of Lake Audubon’s name.
“There are lots of local organizations, including what used to be the Audubon [Society of Northern Virginia], that have dropped the name for all of the reasons that I think we should,” Farrell said. “So, we’ve lost time. We’re behind the curve. I would like to get us to where we would’ve been but for the medical emergency.”
