‘Embrey Mill-Stafford Courthouse area isn’t the right place for 18-wheeler trucks’

The Stafford Board of Supervisors’ recent decision to allow a massive DHL Distribution Center will add over 1,360new vehicle trips daily to our brand-new, curvy Courthouse Road Divergent Diamond interchange.

A significant amount of this traffic will be heavy trucks. And worse, our Board has awarded big tax incentives (aka your tax dollars) to DHL to make it happen.

A decade ago, a bipartisan Board of Supervisors went on record explicitly stating they did not want more semi-truck traffic and industrial use in and near the planned interchange.

And at that time, we were expecting a full cloverleaf interchange that would have had more capacity and no traffic lights.

We felt so strongly about it that we pushed through a well-publicized and very rare county-initiated rezoning of the entire Courthouse Area between Interstate 95 and Jefferson Davis Highway.

Over the objections of existing businesses like GDC Trucking and Estes Trucking, our Board changed all of the M1 industrial zonings to a rarely used B3 commercial zoning. We did so for the express intent of limiting heavy truck traffic to what was already grandfathered in place.

That decision was reversed when the Board recently approved the new 500,000 square foot DHL trucking hub on Wyche Road next to the interchange.

From a story on a new development at Burns Corner that appeared in the Free Lance-Star newspaper, we already know that the level of service for the interchange will fall to a grade of D. And that is before considering the new 1360 vehicle trips a day added by DHL.

The Embrey Mill-Stafford Courthouse area isn’t the right place for those massive eighteen-wheeler trucks, and, more importantly, it’s not fair to the landowners who had all of their land made less valuable with the zoning change twelve years ago.

Paul Milde
Former Aquia District Supervisor and Chairman of the Stafford County Board of Supervisors