By Julia Robins, Staff Writer
On October 7, interested Gloucester residents attended a public meeting to discuss the future use of the Lands End subdivision.
The meeting, funded by Virginia Sea Grant, was held by the Middle Peninsula Chesapeake Bay Public Accesses Authority and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). VCU graduate students pursuing a Masters of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) degree guided attendees in discussing ideas and considerations for future land use. The attendees also shared insights into and knowledge of the land, Gloucester’s history, and community needs.
The students are taking a VCU course on community outreach, one of five MURP classes involved in the project, including courses in GIS, land use planning, design, and economic development.
“This was our preliminary brainstorming meeting,” says Emily DeHoog, a second-year student in the MURP program who helped facilitate the meeting. “We wanted to gauge how the community feels about this area as well as its larger hopes for how it will be used, so we can send our land use team in the right direction.”
Says Susanna Finn, another second-year MURP student who led the meeting, “We wanted to understand the community values and aspirations for this area so that we can add value to it through the most appropriate and compatible use.”
Some of those values include preserving privacy, minimizing traffic, maintaining safety, and conserving the pristine nature of the land. To illustrate the importance of these values, one attendee recalled how amateur starwatchers used to drive an hour to come to the area to get away from light pollution in more developed areas.
One improvement attendees suggested was to add water access points for recreational boats. Residents have long used the Severn River, which runs alongside the waterfront, for activities including kayaking, fishing, and boating. A local high school crew team even uses the site to practice year-round. Attendees asked about the possibility of adding parking and boat ramps to facilitate water access. Some suggested elevating parts of the land and creating a different access road as a way to avoid occasional flooding caused by high tide and marshy land.
While there are challenges to building these kinds of structures—such projects would require additional funds, as well as VDOT participation, which could be hard to secure—the MURP program isn’t ruling anything out yet.
Finn says she wasn’t worried by the attendees’ concerns or reservations: “I think we expected to hear all of the attendees’ concerns, but it was nice to hear them anyway to know that our team is thinking on the right track, that we’re not too far off base, and that we’re all going to come to a conclusion for the best use.”
To reach those in the surrounding neighborhood who weren’t able to attend the meeting, the class posted an online survey on the Gloucester County website. With this information, another MURP class, the land use team, will begin its work, analyzing the insights from the surveys and meeting to determine possible next steps. The community outreach class, which led the meeting, will compile the data with potential design and land use plans to share back with the community.
“Hopefully we can get some feedback on some concrete ideas at the next public meeting,” says Finn. That meeting will be held November 5 at the Gloucester County Library.
“I hope that the attendees were able to talk to each other about how they’d like to see the site used and also to get them involved in the process so that the site turns out to be what they want and what’s useful for the community—something that’s valuable,” says DeHoog.
