Blog posts are the personal views of Letty Hardi and not official statements or records on behalf of the Falls Church City Council

Dear Friends,

Come join me at my office hours today at 12 pm at Clare n Don’s and share your priorities for the city. Budget season for us starts next Monday with the presentation of the FY26 budget by the City Manager and School Board Chair. Join us or tune in – our annual budget is the best time to ensure our investments align with the community’s needs. After Monday, we’ll have 6 weeks of work sessions, public hearings, town halls to hear from you and deliberate on the budget before we adopt the budget on May 12. This is a tough budget year for the region. I am grateful that our revenues have been strong due to growth and the real estate market, such that we’ll plan to decrease the tax rate again to partially mitigate the impact of your tax bill. There is enough uncertainty ahead that I think we should be cautious, contingency plan, and support those who need it most. If you can’t join me today, I’ll have two sets of walking office hours in April.

On a brighter note – we discussed good news on several fronts in our work session:

1/ Community survey results are out, with 94% surveyed that quality of life is good/excellent which is the best in the region (and up 5 points from 2023).

2/ Our tree canopy is 48%, which has held steady and is quite high for an urbanizing inner ring suburb. We discussed kicking off work to establish tree canopy standards for certain types of commercial projects. As the first Tree City USA in Virginia, we love our trees and want to keep raising the bar. That said, there are often misconceptions about trees, where they’re cut down, and what we can do about it. Read on!

3/ We’re close to a final draft agreement for sewer capacity purchase with Fairfax County.

Hope to see you soon – if you haven’t signed up for Civics Bootcamp this weekend, we have 50+ already joining with just a few spots left.

Best,
Letty

What Happened This Week:

(1) 2025 Community Survey Results

With the top line results showing 94% of our residents feel quality of life in Falls Church is good/excellent and 89% are satisfied with city services – I am grateful to all of our local public servants for delivering these results. And timed right before budget season, this is a good confirmation of the communities’ priorities – sidewalks, traffic calming, streets and road conditions, fiscal stewardship, growth, and housing. Some highlights from the presentation (and the full 1300 page results here should you really want to dive in).

Note – street conditions was one of the few areas of satisfaction that dropped between 2023 and 2025 – with spring paving season underway now, hopefully you’ll start noticing improvement soon. ICYMI this week, the re-paving on Park Ave was long awaited!

Do these results resonate with you?

(400 people were surveyed, representing a statistically representative sample of our demographics which are also below – unlike opt in surveys which can have participation bias.)

(2) Tree Canopy Discussion

Our tree canopy across the city is about 48% which has held steady and is quite high for an urbanizing, inner ring suburb. For comparison, Arlington is at 35%, Alexandria at 36% and the Fairfax County districts closest to Falls Church are 43%, 45%, and 58%). Our 48% is in line with goals set by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, to reach 50% region-wide, where densely-urbanized counties are encouraged to set goals between 35-45% to achieve these goals.

There was majority support for adopting minimum tree canopy standards for by right commercial projects to be 10%, which is the maximum as allowed by state code.

My thoughts: We all know the benefits of trees and a healthy urban forest – and we can always raise the bar so adopting standards for by right, commercial uses makes sense and is something we should do quickly. I suggested we also come up with standards for open/green space and how much of that should be publicly accessible.

That said, it’s important to put this in context. By right commercial projects represent a very, very small percentage of re-development we see in the city – the best example being the Stratford Motor Lodge conversion to the Stratford Garden Inn now underway. Mixed use projects, which are not by-right and undergo the Special Exception process, are where we can negotiate higher tree canopy %s. You might be surprised to know that our three most recent mixed use projects exceed the 10% tree canopy already: West Falls at 15%, Founders Row 2 at 14%, and the not yet underway Quinn/Homestretch project at 19% and those projects largely replaced asphalt and impervious surfaces with low tree canopy.

Also it’s important to remember that commercial/mixed use projects have touched 38 acres of land in Falls Church over the past 20 years in comparison to residential redevelopment in our neighborhoods which have changed 100 acres. Unfortunately, our residential tree canopy code is already the strictest as allowed by Virginia (20% canopy in 10 years). Likewise, with the often discussed T-zones which is just 3% of the city’s land, we also adopted the maximum tree canopy % as allowed, where there were no canopy requirements before – 10-20% canopy within 20 years depending on the density. This is a repeated focus of our lobbying efforts in Richmond every year to request more authority.

(3) Sewer Agreement with Fairfax County

Sewer systems are one of the hidden parts of local government core infrastructure that doesn’t get much fanfare – we just expect it to work. As background: the city doesn’t have our own sewer system – we send our sewage flows to Arlington and Fairfax. Every new project pays something called “availability fees” that go towards additional capacity for that development – it’s part of the planning that happens with every project. Staff reports that we’ve collected over $20M in fees that have paid for pipe bursting and other additional infrastructure and capacity upgrades (some of the street construction we’ve all experienced!) and it’s been part of our capital planning for the past 10 years.

Here is the staff report from our work session discussion on forward planning for sewer capacity. Underway over the past year have been discussions to buy additional capacity from Fairfax with the forecasted growth and/or send more flows to Arlington where we already have excess capacity. The current agreement with Fairfax County has been in place since 1978. The staff report and the presentation explains the issue with peak flows, when there are heavy rain events and stormwater ends up infiltrating into the sewer system (called inflow & infiltration) and there have been staff negotiations with Fairfax County on how to address that – including the idea of a basin at Cavalier Trail Park to capture excess flows and slowly release into the system. Unfortunately there are inaccurate, incomplete soundbites about sewer when in actuality, I&I is a legacy issue that has worsened with heavier rain events. As currently planned, we will use the combination of sewer availability fees and debt (funded by new development) for the additional capacity purchase for $8.8M and $10.8M basin to manage peak flows.

What’s Coming Up:

Monday, March 24 – City Council Meeting* (Budget Presentations)

Wednesday, April 2 – Ask the Council Office Hours (City Hall, 9 am)

Monday, April 7 – City Council Work Session*

Monday, April 14 – City Council Meeting* (final vote for Accessory Dwelling ordinance)

*Mondays (except 5th Mondays and holidays) at 7:30 pm. You can access the agenda and livestream here, including recordings of past meetings

Letty’s Office Hours:

Friday, March 21 – 12 pm (Lunch at Clare and Dons)

Friday, April 11 – 12 pm AND 5 pm (Walking Office Hours – meet at Broad St entrance of Howard Herman Trail)

Wednesday, May 21 – 5 pm (Walking Office Hours – meet at Cherry Hill Park)