Urban Planning Expert Supports City Waterfront Plan

Professional planner Stephen Fuller, a professor in urban and waterfront planning for 42 years, sent a letter to Alexandria Mayor Bill Euille expressing his support for the city’s waterfront plan.

Fuller lived in Old Town for decades – on Lee and Wolfe streets among other places before recently moving to Arlington. He also served on the mayor’s Sustainability Task Force and is now the director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis.

“The waterfront is one of the competitive advantages upon which the City's future economic vitality is dependent,” Fuller wrote to the mayor. “It, along with several other key development assets, were identified by the Mayor's Sustainability Work Group in its October 2007 report as being underutilized and having significant economic development potential that could help secure the City's economic future. At that time the uncertainty that now exists concerning cutbacks to federal spending in the local economy did not exist. With the inevitable reductions in federal spending threatening the region's economic future there is a new urgency."

Robinson Terminal Corporation asked Fuller to help it about two years ago determine “what could be done with those sites” and recently asked him to write a letter in support of the city’s plan, he told Old Town Alexandria Patch although he said he was not a consultant to the firm.

He said the city should act now on the plan so that it’s prepared to enjoy a likely economic uptick that could occur in about 18 months or so.

“This is a good time for the city to step forward and say what the city is going to do,” he said. “Lots of investors are lining up thinking about what they are going to do in a likely positive net business cycle somewhere around 2013” through 2017…"The timing now is more important than it was two years ago…It’s a chance for the city to reposition itself quickly while other regions struggle with their identity.”

He added that whatever the city does, “it must fit in with the texture of Old Town.”

Fuller said he hasn’t done the market work on whether hotels would work on the waterfront in Old Town but hopes that the city would ensure public access to the water.

“I like to be able to see and touch things on the waterfront, an active waterfront is important. It’s complex, and it’s easy to have a lot of different opinions,” he said.