Manassas will advertise and hold a public hearing on the Mathis Avenue streetscape after four residents asked for one on the last day they could.
Planning and Community Development Director and Assistant City Manager Matthew Arcieri said Wednesday that former City Council member Lynn Forkell Greene’s request triggered the meeting. Greene is running again this fall as an independent for one of three open council seats on the Nov. 3 ballot.
On Thursday, he put more on the record: Greene was not alone. The city received three other written requests from residents, all dated Aug. 26 — the deadline printed in the city’s “willingness to hold a public hearing” notice.
No date or location is set. Arcieri said that will be decided in September.
The hearing concerns the current design of the Mathis Avenue Improvements (T-086). The city plans to rebuild Mathis Avenue from Sudley Road to Liberia Avenue with two travel lanes, a planted median, dedicated turn lanes, and wider sidewalks.
City materials put the cost at $10.94 million. Construction is still scheduled for summer 2027.
Potomac Local News sent questions Wednesday to the city manager’s office and to each member of City Council, with a 5 p.m. Thursday deadline. Arcieri answered for staff. Council member Tom Osina answered for himself. Mayor Michelle Davis-Younger and the rest of Council did not reply by the deadline.
A hearing only if someone asked
The city did not automatically schedule a design hearing. It advertised that it would hold one if someone requested it in writing by Aug. 26.
Arcieri said notice went out this way:
- Legal ads in the Prince William Times on Aug. 6 and Aug. 20
- The project website
- Signs at each end of the corridor
- Bilingual letters to adjacent property owners
That process exists because the project uses Virginia Department of Transportation and state construction money, City Manager Steve Burke has said.
Arcieri confirmed Burke’s other points:
- The design is generally similar to the 2022 version
- Construction is expected in summer 2027
- The city already planned fall meetings, plus separate meetings for property owners who will be directly affected
Thursday’s commitment does not change that plan, Arcieri said.
He described the upcoming session as “a public hearing to review the design.” The point, he wrote, is to update the community on the final design and construction schedule and to allow the design team to meet with affected owners and flag issues before the plans are locked.
Osina, a sitting council member who has said he wants to succeed Davis-Younger as mayor, said VDOT requires a hearing only if someone requests one, because the design is only partially finished. He supports holding one anyway.
“I have shared my position with city staff,” Osina wrote.
He wants a stand-alone meeting in the style of the city’s Community Conversations: residents see the drawings, question the people working on the project, and put comments on the record.
“The decision to move forward with the Mathis Avenue Streetscape has been made,” Osina wrote. “But that does not mean every detail of the design is set in stone. Resident input matters, particularly while there is still time to make improvements.”
Osina told InsideNoVa this month that he is seeking both an interim appointment after Davis-Younger leaves office Sept. 30 and a place on the ballot in a later special election to finish her term through 2028. Vice Mayor Mark D. Wolfe has also said he plans to seek the mayor’s office.
What the city says it already told people
Staff’s position is that Mathis has not been a secret.
The concept dates to June 2019. Survey work finished in April 2020. The city held a virtual meeting on Feb. 23, 2022, and an in-person meeting on March 17, 2022, at the Prince William Islamic Center, 9002 Mathis Avenue.
An online comment form has stayed open since then. The project website has been updated as design moved. The streetscape also came up during the 2025 community conversations on the city-owned Manassas Shopping Center at 9018 Mathis Avenue.
Arcieri pointed reporters to that website and to the adopted Capital Improvement Program. The FY 2026 CIP still carries Mathis Avenue as project T-086 at $10.937 million:
- $5.737 million in prior years
- $956,000 in FY 2026
- $4.244 million in FY 2027
The mix is Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, state, federal, and city utility funds.
City crews already replaced 2,145 feet of water main on Mathis Avenue between Sudley Road and Reb Yank Drive in summer 2025, work timed to get ahead of the street rebuild.
The same corridor is tied to two other city priorities. A planned roundabout at Sudley Road and Centreville Road / Route 28 has been packaged with Mathis in older grant materials as one gateway project. And the Economic Development Authority of the City of Manassas bought the Manassas Shopping Center in 2024 for $16 million, with a redevelopment master plan still taking shape.
Access, medians, and driveways on Mathis will matter to both.
The question Council mostly left unanswered
The questions for the mayor and each council member were not limited to the meeting date.
They asked whether residents should have to find a legal notice and request a hearing before the city walks the public through current plans, costs, access changes, and the overlap with the Sudley Road / Route 28 roundabout — or whether that briefing should happen as a matter of course.
They also asked whether Council supports a full hearing or public meeting before construction, including at the Sept. 21 town hall if a formal hearing cannot be scheduled that quickly, and how the city should handle notice on major capital projects after the Grant Avenue road-diet fight.
Grant Avenue was the last comparable streetscape fight in the city: a plan to drop a stretch of the road from four lanes to two, later built as a $6.5 million project with wider sidewalks and a roundabout. Design meetings for that job were in June 2019.
Arcieri cited those meetings, and a July 2022 meeting on the Sudley Road and Centreville Road roundabout, as proof that design hearings are “a routine part of the process.”
Why the street is being rebuilt
The Mathis Avenue project is the public-works half of a two-decade plan to turn a commercial strip into a walkable, mixed-use gateway into downtown. The 2006 sector plan and the city’s comprehensive plan call for housing and ground-floor retail along Mathis, with density stepping up into mid-rise buildings four to six stories tall. Officials have said for years that the street has to change first — drop the center turn lane, plant a median, widen the sidewalks — if that kind of redevelopment is going to follow.
The city then bought the biggest parcel on the corridor. In 2024 the Economic Development Authority paid $16 million for the Manassas Shopping Center at 9018 Mathis Avenue and has since talked about apartments, townhouses, retail, and parks on that land. The streetscape, city officials said at the time, is meant to complement that redevelopment. The design hearing is about the road. The road is about what the city intends to put next to it.
