Request for Clarification

Frustrated that Supervisor McKay had not yet provided additional information about plans for Hooes Road, I wrote again.

I have not yet received from your office additional information about the old Hooes Road neighborhood in Springfield as you promised when we exchanged messages earlier this week. I have checked the county’s transportation master plan, and I can see in it no projects that obviously address issues in this area. I have tried to contact the planning office but my message has not been answered or even acknowledged. I have contacted VDOT and learned from them them that there are no plans for an interchange with VA 7900 at Neumann Street. I think it’s pretty weird that I can get information from the state bureaucracy more easily than from my local government, and I fear it’s because there was no good reason for closing Hooes Road at Constantine. Right now it’s easy for me to believe that the county took this action without any serious concern for the problems it would create and knowing that there were no definite plans to create an interchange at Neumann Street. I find it hard to believe that you or any other supervisor would adopt an action that so obviously advantages one neighborhood while it disadvantages so many others.

I can’t see the issue of closing Hooes Road merely as an issue of eliminating cut-through traffic, and I can’t see cut-through traffic portrayed as the source of so many evils as is was so effectively Monday. My street is on a cul-de-sac, but I too see speeders endangering children and other residents, I have had my cars egged, I routinely pick up cans, bottles, and other litter in my yard, and like most of my neighbors I have had my mailbox vandalized.

So once again I ask you, what is your plan for providing relief for traffic problems along Hooes Road? What is your commitment to making it happen? How will you let residents in the affected areas know what is going on?

This prompted a mostly unhelpful phone call from the Supervisor’s office, but it did promise that the County Planning Office was preparing a response. We’ll see.