By RUTH FINCH
Fredericksburg and its surrounding communities need to protect open space.
On that much the decision-makers at yesterday's Reality Check envisioning exercise agree.
Sort of.
The Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce predicts that the region will get 200,000 new residents and 125,000 new jobs in the next 25 years. Yesterday it invited 150 elected leaders, government officials, businessmen, developers, preservationists and environmentalists to the Riverside Center to decide, theoretically, where to put the jobs and the people who will hold them.
Without exception, each group of participants said when the session began that open space protection is a priority. But when asked to build their plan for accommodating growth out of Lego blocks, many groups actually increased the percentage of people and jobs in the region's open spaces.
Right now, about 30 percent of the region's population lives outside the area the U.S. Census bureau defines as urban--essentially Fredericksburg, State Route 3 west and the Garrisonville Road area in Stafford County.
The Reality Check participants' plans for the region involve increasing that percentage to anywhere from 34 percent to 47 percent.
The results don't necessarily contradict the stated goals, said Gerrit Knapp, executive director for the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, which facilitated Reality Check.
"Although the total concentration is not as tightly centered around the Fredericksburg and Garrisonville areas, there is still a tight fit between housing and jobs," he said. "The new urban pattern is that smaller communities are going to get more developed in terms of both housing and employment."
About three dozen community leaders have been planning the Reality Check regional planning retreat for several months, ever since some local leaders came back from a similar exercise for the greater Washington area.
It's important for the entities that normally square off in land-use decisions--developers and preservationists, for example--to come together face to face to agree on goals, said Bob Hagan. He participated in Washington's Reality Check as chairman of the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors and helped plan yesterday's local event.
He also said it's useful for elected leaders in one jurisdiction to see how their decisions affect neighbors across the county line.
"The problem is we make land decisions in a vacuum," Hagan said. "We don't have input from neighboring jurisdictions, even though we make decisions that affect all of us."
Participants at yesterday's event were divided into 13 groups. Each group was furnished with Legos to represent new houses and jobs, a green pen to mark the areas that should be out-of-bounds to developers and a regional map. The map had roads and waterways marked, but political boundaries were erased to encourage people to think more regionally. Each group also had a facilitator from the community to get the discussion going and a scribe from the National Center for Smart Growth to record the group's plans.
Most groups clustered development around the Interstate 95 corridor and set aside areas such as Civil War battlefields and Crow's Nest for open space.
Beyond that, the groups diverged wildly on what principles should guide their decision making.
Eight of the 13 groups recommended clustering as a way to protect open space.
Five drew buffers around military bases.
Two specifically mentioned encouraging affordable housing.
One suggested redeveloping already developed areas that are faltering.
One table made protecting drinking water sources a priority.
Some teams were also much more willing to accept high-density development as a means for protecting open space.
For example, table 12 used nearly all of its blocks to build towers 10 to 20 stories high, representing extremely dense development in the Fredericksburg and Garrisonville Road areas. One group over, table 13 made short stacks of four or five blocks and clustered them along Interstate 95 from Ladysmith to Quantico, representing a more even distribution of growth.
When the game was over, the National Center for Smart Growth provided some preliminary averages of the results.
The average of the scenarios developed yesterday:
Put 7 percent of the population within one mile of public transit stations, compared to 6 percent today.
Put only 58 percent of the population in the urban area, compared to 70 percent today.
Put only 60 percent of the jobs in the urban area, compared to 71 percent today.
The Chamber of Commerce will put out a more detailed report of the results in a few months, said Chamber President Linda Worrell.
Hagan said he would like for that report to eventually form the basis for a regional comprehensive plan that would guide each locality as its leaders make zoning and land-use decisions.
The most important thing, Knapp said, is to keep the conversation going.
"You need to continue to consider what your regional vision looks like," he said. "Bring it out of Legos."
To reach RUTH FINCH:
Email: rfinch@freelancestar.com