The Northern Virginia Daily

Article Date: April 06, 2005

Committee for Avtex site development ends its work

 By William C. Flook

A committee created to give community input into the redevelopment of the Avtex Superfund site sang its swan song Tuesday night.

The final of the Avtex Redevelopment Advisory, or ARAC, committee, marks the transition of the approximately 440-acre site from cleanup to redevelopment, according to Paul Carroll, executive director of the Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority.

“People are starting to look at this not as a Superfund site, but as a regular development,” Carroll said after the meeting.

The site of the former rayon plant is slated to become a 175-acre business park, a 240-acre conservancy park, and a 30-acre soccer complex.

The ARAC committee, established in 2002, met with Front Royal and Warren County officials, the EDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others to “identify and coordinate issues” on initiatives related to the massive project, according to an ARAC exit summary.  The committee’s efforts were largely focused on the ownership and development of the conservancy park, the building of a connector road in and around the business park, and the creation of the soccer complex, the summary says.

“Probably the biggest challenge was to keep an open mind of really what we want this to look like down the road,” ARAC Chairman Ray Grimm said after the meeting.  He said he wanted the committee to leave a legacy for a site that affected so many in the area.

“A lot of people in the county and town gave a lot of their life and soul in it.” Grimm said.

Though cleanup and remediation efforts will continue for the once highly toxic site, Carroll said the focus will shift.  The ARAC committee and others, he said, laid the groundwork for that transition.

“They did the hard work up until now,” he said.  “They came together and said, ‘OK there is this amazing challenge that’s facing us right now, how do we move this beyond.’  They did the work”

The EDA intends to turn a conceptual plan into a marketing plan for “Royal Phoenix”, the working title for the business park.

Spiros V. Antoniadis, vice president of North American Realty Advisory Services, a firm hired by the EDA to create that plan, said the firm is in the “pre-marketing” stages, but developers have already shown an interest in the site.

“We’ve got very strong interest from people who are not just sitting in Warren County, people with substantial development experience, familiar with doing mixed-use projects like the kind we are thinking about,” Antoniadis said after the meeting.  “They’ve had experience working on formerly contaminated sites, and they’ve got the financial wherewithal to carry it through.”