Decision comes despite Planning Commission’s recommendation to deny proposal
A plan to build affordable housing for 44 senior military veterans took a huge step forward last week when Warrenton Town Council approved a rezoning request for the corner of Church Street and Moser Road late Tuesday night, allowing the project to proceed.
The community is slated to include 22 single-story duplexes and a community building on about 5.2 acres of what’s now vacant land owned by the church nearby.
By providing the land, Warrenton United Methodist Church promised to eliminate the greatest roadblock of the development of affordable housing — the high cost of undeveloped land at the center of Warrenton.
But nothing like this exists yet in the community, or in the zoning code, a fact that both supporters and opponents point out.
“This project is a unicorn,” Graham Sheffield, who lives nearby, told the council members on Dec. 10, “Nothing else like it exists in the vicinity.”
The description struck to the development’s core issue — the innovative mix of housing, nonprofits and senior care which needed the council to rezone the corner of Church Street and Moser Road.
After years of debate, hours of public comment and despite the Warrenton Planning Commission recommendation against the project, the council voted 5-2 to enable the nonprofit Hero’s Bridge and its partner on the project, Warrenton United Methodist Church, to build the “pocket community.”
For three outgoing members of the town council, the Hero’s Bridge vote was especially consequential. For Heather Sutphin of Ward 1, Brett Hamby of Ward 3 and James Hartman of Ward 4, the Dec. 10 meeting was their last on the council, and all three voted in favor of the project, joined by at-large council members Paul Mooney and David McGuire.
“Your vote on Hero’s Bridge is a legacy vote,” John Lesinski, a former Rappahannock County supervisor, had told the council members. “I know that you are not afraid of the elderly; you are not afraid of veterans, and I ask you: Do not shrink from a legacy vote.”
The public hearing and anticipated vote on Hero’s Bridge Village drew so many people that the hall was standing room only. A half-hour before the meeting, 15 supporters of Hero’s Bridge were waiting for the doors to be unlocked. Nearly 50 people spoke during the public hearing, many of them veterans, town residents or Fauquier County residents.
Only three opposed the project — all residents from the neighborhood where it’ll be built.
Council members William Semple of Ward 2 and Eric Gagnon of Ward 5 voted against the development, which will be built in Gagnon’s ward.
“I represent everyone in Ward 5,” Gagnon said, “including a very large number of residents who live in and around the Hero’s Bridge Project.”
Multiple residents of Ward 5 spoke at the hearing, a majority of them in favor of the project.
“Everyone I talk to wants this project,” Ward 5 resident Joe Ficarelli told Gagnon. “Look how many people from our ward are here.”
Gagnon explained that one of his concerns was that the dense development might reduce property values of nearby residents.
That claim was rejected earlier by multiple speakers, including Fauquier Habitat for Humanity CEO Melanie Burch.
Those speakers said increasing development is more likely to increase home values.
“Multiple white papers show you … that it does not reduce home values,” Burch said. “I’d love for all of you who have received those particular papers from me, Mr. Gagnon, to actually read them.”
Earlier that day, Gagnon had said residents would be more comfortable with an alternative presented by Hero’s Bridge, 12 group homes that could be built without Town Council approval.
“They said they would be fine with the by-right,” Gagnon said during the work session that morning. “They look at this by-right illustration, and they say, ‘You know, it looks like a developer came in and put in regular houses, and we can deal with that.’”
But that option would have housed more than twice as many people as Hero’s Bridge, exacerbating concerns that many neighbors had mentioned at past hearings and shared by Council Member Brett Hamby.
“You’re talking about well over a hundred people in that small parcel,” Hamby said of the group homes. “You’re talking about running the water and sewer, per gallons per day —
I’m just doing some quick math here, over 15,000 gallons a day, trash service, anything else.”
Later that evening, Hamby said the possibility of group homes had helped to sway his vote for Hero’s Bridge Village.
“The by-right option is way more intense than I would like to see. That’s why I support the project the way it is right now,” he said.
Even after the rezoning, Hero’s Bridge has a lot of work ahead.
In a newsletter issued two days after the vote, Brooks said the project still has to raise $10 million and go through the town’s site-planning and permitting process before it can break ground.