City of Falls Church:
“An almost four-hour long sequence of meetings at City Hall
Monday night culminated with a 5-0 unanimous vote by the Falls Church Planning
Commission to recommend approval of the proposed Kensington Assisted Living
project at the W. Broad site currently occupied by a Burger King. The Planners’
recommendation of approval was a key step to getting final approval from the
Falls Church City Council, which sat with the Planners through the first nearly
three hours of a work session deliberation. Following the joint work session,
the Planners went into formal session in the Council chambers awaiting some
last-minute clarification language on the 18 proffers offered by the developers
— Ed Novak of Nova Habitat and Harley Cook of Kensington Homes — and when they
were hammered out and signed off on by the developers, it then did not take
long for the Planners to finish the night’s work around 11:20 p.m. tonight with
their unanimous vote.
The key to overcoming concerns by some on both the Council
and Planning Commission that persisted to tonight had to do with additional
language added to the Kensington’s proffer package that served to insure the project
would yield significant new revenues to the City annually. The change was more
semantic than substantive, but it worked to make it clear the project was not
seeking a subsidy, but on the contrary is willing to make ‘supplemental
payments’ on its tax obligations to, as City Manager Wyatt Shields said, ‘pay
its fair share of taxes.’ In an effort to underscore this, the project
developers were willing to submit to a tax payment schedule annually equal to a
basket, as it was stated, of comparable average tax payments of the 10
highest-taxed commercial entities in the City in any given year.”
~Writes Nicholas F. Benton of the Falls Church News-Press
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