A business park, which would add up to 1.2M square feet of space, has been proposed for the Route 234/Wellington area in western Prince William County. MSNBC is carrying a story with the details.

The Wellington project's commercial components could be well-received, says Sandy Paul, director of research for the mid-Atlantic region of Delta Associates (www.deltaassociates.com). The Prince William office market has a 4.7 percent vacancy rate; the flex/industrial market has a 6.4 percent rate.

After a bit of rooting around, I was able to find the rezoning document from the PWC Planning Commission online. The gist:

A. Request - This is a request to rezone +/-15 acres from A-1, Agricultural to O (F), Office Flex and +/-166.9 acres from A-1 to PMD, Planned Mixed Development to allow development of 624 multi-family dwelling units and either 1.2 million square feet of office space and 400 hotel rooms or an additional 230,000 square feet of potential office space in lieu of the hotel rooms. The application includes requests for waivers and modifications to allow private streets, to waive internal buffer requirements, to modify and waive perimeter buffer requirements, and waive the requirement for more than one dwelling unit type.

B. Location - The subject site is located on the north and south sides of Wellington Road, the east and west sides of Clayton Road, south of Hornbaker Road (see maps in Attachment A). The site is identified on County maps as GPIN 7596-63- 0490.

A. Planning Office Recommendation - The Planning Office recommends approval of Rezoning # PLN2004-00105, Wellington Glen, subject to the proposed proffers dated October 12, 2005. See Attachment B for the staff analysis and Attachment C for the proposed proffers.

The 69-page document is interesting reading, if you care about that sort of thing, since it notes a $6.68M proffer for the changes. The calculation for the proffer is interesting to me, in that schools have a recommended proffer rate of $3492 per dwelling and transportation garners $5258 per dwelling. I had no idea the county had a grasp on the dollar impact of new development. With traffic on many surface streets being so bad, I have to wonder if their calculations are realistic or whether the developers have gotten the upper hand too many times during the past decade.

The MSNBC article was light on the details of the project, which includes plans for 624 "dwellings", which are zoned as "small-lot residential/multi-family residentail." That says townhouses to me, but could include hotel rooms and apartments according to the Staff Report.

Wellington Glen looks to be a good project for the county, with substantial business and sales taxes to be garnered from businesses located there and limited impact to schools and traffic from the residential aspects of the project.

Google map, hybrid satellite and map of the Wellington/234 Bypass area.

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