Toms Brook Town Council members — with Mayor Lisa Currie in the center — and Shenandoah County planners question developers about plans for an apartment complex straddling the town line. The meeting was held in the gymnasium of the Toms Brook Apartments.
Toms Brook Town Council members — with Mayor Lisa Currie in the center — and Shenandoah County planners question developers about plans for an apartment complex straddling the town line. The meeting was held in the gymnasium of the Toms Brook Apartments.
“If this was Woodstock or Strasburg, the town would have been involved from the beginning.”
Toms Brook Mayor Lisa Currie, expressing frustration at what she sees as a lack of transparency, opened up with this remark at the beginning of a recent information session on a planned apartment complex to be built just outside the town’s limits.
Currie and members of the Town Council complained that the developers took nearly two months to notify the town after applying for a special-use permit to build 72 apartment units, which will utilize a narrow strip of land inside the town to build a street connecting the complex to U.S. Route 11.
“We didn’t know anything about this until we had a public meeting at the end of August,” Currie said before turning to the main topic at hand. “The only three-story apartments you’re going to find are on the north end of Strasburg and the south end of Woodstock, and we don’t have the infrastructure [to support the apartments].”
The proposed 72-unit residential development is a subject of controversy in the small town, with a population of 276 as of the last census. Locals fear the complex would cause a dramatic increase in traffic along the town’s small stretch of Route 11, as well as a strain on existing utilities infrastructure serving the town.
Two men representing the developer — contract purchaser Daniel Michael and landscape architect Craig George of Valley Engineering — attended the meeting to talk about the plan and answer questions.
“We’ve worked with the county water department and they approved up to 72 units,” Michael said, referring to the Toms Brook-Maurertown Sanitary District office. “That’s all we can do until they upgrade the water treatment plant.”
George later clarified that the sanitary district had only conducted a preliminary review of water treatment capacity, which observed that current water and sewer infrastructure could accommodate up to 72 units as well as another unnamed development in the district.
After Michael and Craig made several references to the developers’ meetings with battlefield conservation groups, Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation CEO Keven Walker stood up to clarify.
“I wanted to make sure that the impression wasn’t that we made any arrangements with you,” Walker said to Michael. “When you say things like ‘these fences would be acceptable to the Battlefield Foundation’… We never got anywhere near that.”
Walker also noted that the property was designated core battlefield area by the American Battlefield Protection program in 1992, six years after its rezoning to high-density residential in 1986.
Shenandoah County Planning Commission Chair Scott Rinker repeated the question of annexation that he posed to the council at its last meeting.
“With all these questions of fire services, of street maintenance, things of that nature… It would really help the town out with revenue,” Rinker said of the town annexing the land. “I hate to say it, but it would get more taxes from the residents.”
Michael responded that this would have to be done further “down the road,” as the process of annexing land from the county is a long journey. He pointed out that the town of New Market has been trying to amend its interlocal agreement with the county for more than a year and has little to show for it.
A public hearing on the special-use permit application is scheduled for Nov. 3 at the Shenandoah County Planning Commission meeting. If the permit is denied, the developers will still go ahead with a row of duplexes, which are allowed by-right under current zoning laws.
County supervisor Dennis Morris, Northern Shenandoah Valley Regional Commission Director Brandon Davis and county planning commissioner Debbie Keller also attended the informational meeting held last week.
— Contact Brent Johnson at bjohnson@nvdaily.com
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