The Northern Virginia Daily

Article date: November 26, 2005

 Authority hears plan for park at Avtex

 By: William C. Flook

The Roanoke-based firm, selected to design a park that will encompass a major portion of the Avtex Superfund site has quite a task ahead of it – making everybody happy.

Hayes, Seay, Mattern and Mattern, or HSMM, delivered an update of their progress on the 240- acre conservancy park to a newly formed committee earlier this week.  The firm has prepared a set of revisions to an original master plan for the project, which takes into account the cleanup work done on the land, according to Troy Kincer, regional manager of HSMM’s civil and environmental division office in Roanoke.

Five groups eventually will review HSMM’s plan :  The Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority , the Environmental Protection Agency, FMC Corp., the Lord Fairfax Soil and Water Conservation District and the Valley Conservation Council, according to EDA Executive Director Paul Carroll.

These groups will examine the feasibility of the plan with the restrictive covenants at the site, Kincer said.

“[The groups are] all focused on getting this piece of property redeveloped and the conservancy park moving forward,” he said.

Royal Phoenix Conservancy Park Subcommittee members Joseph E Duggan Jr. said HSMM is faced with the challenge of a site with many constraints and a multitude of different stakeholders.

“It’s a hard site to deal with,” Duggan said.

The 440-acre property was once the site of a gigantic rayon plant that produced the material for military uses during World War II, and later for NASA and the Department of Defense.  The plant was declared a Superfund site in 1986, and closed in 1989.

The EDA is overseeing the redevelopment of the site, on which a 160-acre business park and 30-acre soccer complex also are planned.  The EDA recently voted to enter negotiations with Lerner Enterprises, a possible developer for the business park.

The ongoing cleanup at the site has affected the features planned for the conservancy park, Kincer said.  For example, HSMM must choose a type of grass to be planted over the capped basins that doesn’t have too long of a root structure, or else it could damage the caps, he said. Trails will need to be located in order to protect some of the remedial features from disturbance, he said.

Kincer said HSMM will make a further set of adjustments after coordinating with FMC Corp., the only non-defunct company to ever own the plant which was charged with a large portion of the site’s cleanup.

“It’s the first few steps in a long journey to get it to come to reality,” he said.