By Lynn Forkell Green
Manassas is moving forward with a plan to shrink a street.
Crews will remove two lanes of traffic from Grant Avenue in the city’s downtown neighborhood, reducing the street’s capacity from four to two lanes, between Prince William Street and Wellington Road.
Work on the $11.1 million project–dubbed a “road diet”–to relocate electrical lines and other utilities, which must be complete before road construction begins, is scheduled to start in March, Deputy City Manager Bryan Foster told the City Council at a special meeting over the weekend.
The project will also include sidewalk upgrades and a new median in the middle of the road. At the special meeting, Councilman Tom Osina asked if this project was “full speed ahead.”
“The city will start the right-of-way acquisition piece soon. Unless the council takes affirmative action to tell us to do something different, the direction of the council to staff has been it is an approved project, it’s funded, we are moving forward,” said Foster.
“There has been a lot of public meetings on this,” added City Manager Patrick Pate. “We have not had any during the pandemic, and there would have been some more if it had been available.”
“There were multiple suggestions that came out of those public meetings that were incorporated into the plans – bus paths, sidewalk crossings, making it more pedestrian-friendly,” continued Pate.
The city remains bullish on the idea of reducing the street’s capacity, even though Van Metre Homes has proposed building a new neighborhood on the soon-to-be shrunken street, across from Georgetown South. The development would have a mix of 288 single-family and multi-family homes.
Over the years, multiple residents have expressed their concerns with the plan to shrink the street.
On August 29, 2019, at a public meeting held at the Georgetown South Community Center–a neighborhood that sits along an affected portion of Grant Avenue–the city staff promised to come back to the community before moving the project forward.
Despite the project finding its way back onto the city’s agenda during a special Council work session, that meeting has yet to occur.
The last public meeting on the matter was held at the Manassas Regional Airport during the September 22, 2020 townhall. Not one person spoke positively about the proposed “road diet” and streetscape plan.
Residents asked the city to demonstrate how the proposed lane reduction would work by erecting new signs and barricades to mimic the newly redesigned street’s traffic flow. At the time, Foster estimated that it would cost about $30,000.
“The cost of $30,000 to make sure we are spending $4.5 Million correctly is nothing, and it’s prudent,” said city resident Bob Potter.
Once utility work is complete, work to shrink the street could begin as soon as November added Assistant City Manager Liz Via-Gossman.
Residents can share their thoughts and concerns via email directly with the mayor and City Council.
