WINCHESTER — City officials are postponing the creation of one of four proposed Neighborhood Design Districts and have instead decided to set up a new district in Old Town Winchester.
That’s according to Winchester Community Development Director Mike Ruddy, who first introduced the Neighborhood Design District (NDD) concept one year ago.
NDDs are areas of the city where officials hope to target growth by proactively rezoning properties to allow for residential and commercial development. The goal is to entice developers to build within the districts where the appropriate zonings will already exist, rather than having them build in other areas that require rezonings and/or the issuance of planned unit development (PUD) designations by City Council.
Infrastructure improvements within the NDDs would pay for themselves with a practice called Tax Increment Financing. Businesses and homes that locate within one of the districts would pay the city’s standard taxes on real estate, personal property and so on. As more development occurs within the district, property values would increase and, correspondingly, so would the amount of taxes paid by its business owners and residents. The extra tax revenues would be used exclusively to create and support infrastructure and public services within the districts, sidestepping the need for citywide tax increases to build roads and other improvements.
Initially, Ruddy and the city’s Community Development Department selected four areas of Winchester that would support the NDD development approach:
- Fairmont Avenue in Ward 1.
- Berryville Avenue in Ward 2.
- South Pleasant Valley Road in Ward 3.
- Valley Avenue, Cedar Creek Grade and Weems Lane in Ward 4.
Two of the NDDs were approved by City Council in November.
The first is the Ward 4 district, which would include the conversion of Ward Plaza and its 19.6 acres in the 2400 block of Valley Avenue into a mixed-use development with homes, retail shops and a Publix grocery store. This district is now known as the Cedar Valley NDD.
The second is the Ward 1 district, which would change a formerly industrial area into a walkable, landscaped community with housing, retail businesses, offices and public recreation areas. This district is now known as the Cider Hill NDD.
Ruddy said on Friday that officials are continuing to flesh out the Berryville Avenue NDD in Ward 2, and plans for that are expected to be presented to City Council in the coming months.
The NDD on South Pleasant Valley Road, though, has been put on the back burner due to lingering environmental concerns at the former Federal-Mogul manufacturing facility at 2410 Papermill Road, which produced Abex-brand brake pads and components from 1947 to 2013.
When the Federal-Mogul brake-production facility closed in 2013, hazardous materials that had been leeching into the 44.8-acre property for 66 years were left behind. According to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on the site, lead and asbestos were used in the factory’s manufacturing process until 1988, but those contaminants were subsequently contained and managed in landfills on the property. Of bigger concern to the EPA was a solvent known as trichloroethene (TCE) that had been used by Federal-Mogul and which threatened to contaminate groundwater.
In December 2018, the EPA and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality completed an extensive process to clean up or contain the hazardous materials. The landfills with lead and asbestos are fenced in, have protective coverings above and below ground and are prohibited from being excavated or disturbed, and the use of groundwater at the site has been restricted until all the remaining contaminants in the soil have broken down.
The EPA has authorized the Federal-Mogul site to be reused for limited commercial development, but has not yet given the green light for residential properties.
Working through the EPA’s restrictions will take time, Ruddy said, which is why creation of the South Pleasant Valley Road NDD has been delayed.
“There is a lot of opportunity there in the future to do something with the balance of that site,” Ruddy said, “but because of those encumbrances on the property, there’s no pending application or pending interest in doing something right now.”
Rather than wasting time waiting for clearance to develop the Federal-Mogul site, Ruddy said officials have decided to create a fifth NDD in downtown Winchester.
“A broader planning effort that pulls all of the downtown together would make more sense right now because there’s a lot of interest, there’s a lot of things happening down there,” Ruddy said about Old Town, which in recent years has become a highly coveted place to live, work and shop.
The Winchester Community Development Department is in the process of outlining the boundaries of the downtown NDD and developing a concept of how it could become a walkable community. Ruddy said the goal is to tie together Old Town’s primary and secondary assessment districts “and do something good down there — not just for those areas, but areas surrounding them, too.”
Ruddy said his department will turn its focus to creating the downtown NDD in the next three or four months.
Meanwhile, city officials are finalizing plans for the Berryville Avenue NDD, and Ruddy expects to present those to the Winchester Planning Commission for initial review within the next few months.
“There’s a lot of interest in Berryville Avenue and there’s a lot of interest in downtown,” he said. “We want to try to capture that and build upon the momentum that’s happening right now.”
As for the South Pleasant Valley Road NDD, Ruddy said: “I would imagine that once we finish these next two planning efforts, we’ll come back to that. I would say it’s going to be 2026 at least.”
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