Monday, March 09, 2009
Letter: Conduct Cost/Benefit on Nature Center
It seems to me that the decision whether to preserve Gulf Branch Nature Center should be based on a cost-benefit analysis of the number of countywide visitors relative to the overall costs, including salaries, maintenance, utilities, supplies, etc., of the facility.
The interested pleading of the Center's immediate neighbours cannot be a valid criterion, since validating them would mean that everyone in Arlington would also deserve a nature center in their neighborhood. (This holds for those who also wish to maintain the services of Westover and other branch libraries.) These considerations are especially important during the current budget crisis.
Ken Moskowitz
Ashton Heights
Labels: budget, gbnc, gulf branch nature center, nature
Friday, March 06, 2009
HeraldTrib Today, March 6 2009
Plans for Buckingham Village 3 slid as easily as expected through the recessed county board meeting on Tuesday Feb. 24. (For the most recent story on this, click here).
At that meeting, the board voted to commit about $36 million to the purchase of the ground and buildings that make up Village 3, and they committed money from the Affordable Housing Investment Fund to help preserve the apartments as affordable. On March 19, the county will buy the building and grounds from Paradigm Development and its partners, the current owners.
In the plan, the county OKed a long-term lease, 75 years, with Telesis Corp. of Washington. Telesis will own any improvements made to the property. Arlington must enter into these sorts of deals as the county is legally barred from owning housing.
“There was an area in southeast D.C., it was a very, very old place; they [Telesis] turned that place around,” said Patricia “Pate” McCollough, at the Feb. 24 meeting. McCullough, formerly of Buckingham, but late of Fairfax County, said the apartments in southeast changed from “the wild west” to a nice place to live. She was part of the working group that chose Telesis for this project. Lois Athey, an activist with BU-GATA, the tenants association echoed the sentiment. “We asked for participation, well we got it,” Ms. Athey said of the experience working with Telesis as that company plans the takeover. Village 3 covers about six acres of land north of N. Pershing Drive between N. George Mason Drive and N. Thomas St. The 16 buildings that make up the village fell under the protection of the county’s Historical Affairs and Landmark Review in 2006 when the county entered a memorandum of understanding with Paradigm Development Corp. and its partners, the current owners. Under that MOU, Paradigm began to renovate Village 1, which sits next to Culpepper Garden assisted living facility of N. Pershing Drive. Village 2, at the corner of N. George Mason Drive and N. Henderson Road is being redeveloped “by right” and has about a dozen upscale townhomes on it now. All 140 units on the property will remain affordable, starting as affordable rentals. A plan to sell the units at affordable rates is being considered. SunTrust bank will hold the first deed of trust on the property.
It looks like Lubber Run Center will lose some hours of operation under the county manager’s proposed budget.
Programming might not be cut, but the potential is that it would move to other locations in Buckingham or Arlington. “During the day, it’s pretty darn busy [at Lubber Run Community Center]….I don’t believe there’s a lot of programming in the evening,” said Susan Kalish, the director of marketing and communications for the county’s Department of Parks Recreation and Community Resources. It might be, too, that the building, at the corner of N. George Mason and N. Park drives stays open on some odd hours, maybe late on one day of the week but not on others, Ms. Kalish said. The county will be looking at what is offered in the evenings, how the people who attend the events get there, and whether those people would be able to get to another location.
Could have been worse for the Lubber Run Center—at least the county is not threatening to close it as they are the Gulf Branch Nature Center in far-north Arlington. The county manager’s budget aims to close the building and move indoor programming to Potomac Overlook Regional Park and elsewhere in the county. Read the full story here.
Ms. Kalish said in an email after the story ran that letting the park itself run down is not in the plan, though it was a concern for Suzy Wagner, a neighbor interviewed for the story. “Funding to maintain the park environments is alive and well,” Ms. Kalish wrote. She admitted in a later email that she supposed the park could be sold, but building on the property is really hard. “It’s a Resource Protected Area…by the Chesapeake Bay Local Assistance Department. Demolishing on the site won’t be too hard, as long as you provide extra care. But building—oh my—you can’t build bigger than the current footprint, as well as not impacting the stream and nature,” she wrote. It was exactly that fear that drove Ms. Wagner to take up action to keep the building open she said. At the same time, in the interview she said how tough it is to do anything in a Resource Protected Area, something she learned while renovating her house.
I’ve set up and gotten used to the whole Twitter idea. I need a different phone to really make it work, as I can’t stand the press-the-two-key-three-times thing to type a “c” only to have typed a lower case “c” when I wanted upper case! I tried twitting from the National Mall for the inauguration, but had to stop as the press-the-two-key-three-times thing to type a “c” thing really was too much while walking through masses of people.
Surf to www.twitter.com/heraldtrib to follow my little updates. Only business-related items; I won’t tell you “My shorts are bunching. Thoughts?” as Roland Hedley on Doonesbury did the other morning! Go ahead and follow my twits!
For those of you unfamiliar: twitter is a web site much like a blog. The trick, though, is that someone posting a twit only has 140 characters. It was started by a guy who thought it would be fun to tell people stuff like “I’m drinking coffee” from work. In the last couple of months, it has grown. Twits can still only be 140 characters, but many news types have them in this info-overload world.
The Week’s Headlines…
As always, you can scroll down to see all the recent stories, or simply click the links below (if the link doesn't work, scroll down to find the story, and email to tell me what's busted: heraldtrib@gmail.com --Steve Thurston).
Today's Headlines:
Headlines from Earlier in the Week--the race for the 47th:
Headlines from Earlier in the Week--the county budget:
Labels: blues, buckingham villages, budget, BV3, cephas, gbnc, lubber run center
Monday, March 02, 2009
Political Storm Coming to Gulf Branch
On fence posts and the sides of log buildings hung more signs of another kind of storm.
“Shame!” one read, and “Save Gulf Branch Nature Center!” read another. One listed a March 14 rally at the park.
In the proposed budget released Feb. 21, County Manager Ron Carlee has asked to close and demolish the “obsolete” Gulf Branch Nature Center building, moving all the animals and indoor programming to the Potomac Overlook Regional Park, not quite two miles away, or to other locations in Arlington. Outdoor programming at the forge and log cabin in the Gulf Branch park would continue, the county has said.
Email listservs buzzed over it. Lillian Prins started a facebook page which now has over 1,900 friends. Gulf Branch Neighborhood resident Suzy Wagner started a web site and petition. Over 2,000 electronic signatures have been collected.
Ms. Wagner does not believe the claims that the building is obsolete and that the programs could be absorbed into other places in Arlington.
“It’s not accurate. It’s not true,” she said.
She believes that other places like Potomac Overlook and Long Branch Nature Center (just off S. Carlin Springs Road) do not have room either for all of the indoor activities or for all of the animals—Gulf Branch has a beehive, lizards, turtles and fish.
She wondered what would happen to the Native American exhibit in the lower level of the building. The display of weapons, pottery shards and a reproduction of an Indian canoe are part of the 25-site Native American historical trail in Virginia.
The rest rooms will be gone when the building is demolished, so the programming outside will be limited, she said.
Ms. Wagner lives on the trail that leads to the park, and she said she still hears her late father calling it “the gem in the woods behind you.”
If the center is cut from the budget as a step toward more efficiency, it would not close until the end of the summer to preserve summer camps, said Susan Kalish, the director of marketing and communication for the Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources. The cut would save about $132,000 in this year’s operational budget and would cut the position of the nature center director.
She has not been let go yet since the budget has not been adopted. Given the uncertainty of her position, however, she is elligible for other jobs in the county.
“Hopefully she’ll [Director Denise Chauvette will] apply for something else,” Ms. Kalish said, adding that the staffing cut had nothing to do with performance as all the staff and naturalists are good people. Some positions in the county government have been made available for people who wish to, and are qualified to, move. Larger severance packages than normal are being awarded for those who leave, Ms. Kalish said.
If the building were gone, the county would not need to spend the money on projected repairs and maintenance.
“A recent report said that we had to spend about $236,800 in maintenance to keep it running by [the end of] 2010,” Ms. Kalish said. By the end of 2024, that number is about $910,000, about $56,000 per year.
Of the $236,000, $153,000 is to fix the fire panel, Ms. Kalish said. But the old stone house nestled on a tree-covered hillside needs a lot of other work, too. The county needs to repair shingles, overlay asphalt, repair the retaining wall, and provide safe access to the attic, among other repairs.
“Of everything I just said, $71,000 has already been done,” Ms. Kalish said.
If it is so close to unusable, Ms. Wagner wondered, “then why did they invest $70,000 in it last year?” She said she feels as though north Arlingtonians pay much of the county’s taxes, but that their services get taken.
“I don’t think they’re trying to punish us who provide all the revenue to the county,” she said, but with the fights over Gulf Branch and, in the past, the Cherrydale branch library, the county does not see their needs.
The age of the building is not the only issue.
“The other bigger issue, I think, is that it’s not ADA accessible,” Ms. Kalish said. The building, an old home with access to the main floor only via a stairway, was never meant to be a nature center and is not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. A certain level of major renovation eventually would force the county to make the center compliant, she said. She said that the federal government considers the Potomac Overlook center to be ADA compliant.
Ms. Wagner countered that Potomac Overlook Park with its long hill from the parking lot to the center is still not wheelchair friendly.
Closing the Gulf Branch center will not have to start until end of summer after camps and other planned programming have finished. The pond (the spring peepers are already coming out), the creek, the spring house, forge, and other outdoor programming can stay, Ms. Kalish said. Pretty much all the staffing for programming will stay, but they will not need the director.
David Turvene, of Lyon Park, walked the woods with his children on Saturday. He said he comes rather often since it’s a great place for the kids to see a little nature.
“I think it’s a shame” that the center might close, he said, adding, “I understand the budget issue, though.”
He said he is involved with people fighting for funding the Thomas Jefferson Center and school and knows that county will have to make tough decisions. “It’s all priorities,” he said.
On the wooded hill above the nature center Saturday, Jeff Dolan piled invasive plants that he pulled up from around the trees. He is a volunteer who has a section of the woods to care for; his section, like those of other volunteers, is marked with a little, black sign on the side of the trail. He plucked enough English ivy and other plants to fill a large garbage bag.
Mr. Dolan has worked in the woods a couple times and said he will miss the center’s staff if they have to work from the Potomac Overlook Regional Park.
“We won’t have them to go to,” he said. It is a big deal for the environment of the park, he said. “They do a lot of good stuff.”
Ms. Wagner said that she fears the county is not saying all that is really going on. She fears that if the center is gone, the park itself will fall into disrepair.
$150,000 a year to run the center is not all that much money, and some of that could be made up by charging more for summer camps and other uses, such as birthday parties at the center. She said the county could rely on more volunteers and a full-time director that is shared with Potomac Overlook park. There are ways to close the budget gap without closing the park, she said. If the park falls into disrepair, however, the county might just look to sell it to a developer.
Closing the center “just doesn’t add up,” she said.
Related sites…
Labels: budget, environment, gbnc, gulf branch nature center
