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Improvements slated for Glenkirk in 2010
Long-awaited improvements to Glenkirk Road in Gainesville are set for next year, raising discussion about what will happen with future transportation and education projects in the area.According to Tom Blaser, the county's director of transportation, the county government will spend the upcoming winter ironing out details before putting the project up for bid in the spring. He said he anticipates that once the lowest bidder is determined, paving should begin in the summer.
Glenkirk Road is a major thoroughfare but a one-mile stretch remains unpaved. In some places, it is too narrow for two cars to pass each other.
Total costs will be about $2 million, according to Blaser. That money includes approximately $500,000 from county TRIP funds, or discretionary cash designated by county supervisors; and $1.5 million from the state government.
"The funds are there and they're trying to purchase the properties they need to," said Supervisor Wally Covington (R-Brentsville).
Costs associated with the paving include engineering, moving utilities, removing trees, fitting ditches and storm water management.
According to Covington, the storm water issue has become more prevalent and more expensive to engineer throughout the decade because of regulations put in place to "make sure the storm water is clean before it gets back into the rivers and back in to the Chesapeake Bay."
Fixing the road
"The challenges are really maintenance and traffic," Blaser said, mentioning that the actual paving of the road itself is not that complex.
Blaser explained that transportation officials do not want to widen the road "but we are increasing the prism of the road and the amount of impervious surface."
That will require some right-of-way purchases, though fewer than what it would be to build a new lane, which is not under consideration.
Petitioners at the Web site PaveGlenkirkRoadNow.com wrote in 2008, "This is no longer the country lane that it once was. It is a busy, important and dangerous cross connection that must be brought up to modern standards immediately."
Covington said his constituents who live along Glenkirk Road expressed mixed feelings about the one-mile stretch being paved. While paving would greatly reduce safety hazards, it would also invite more vehicles to use the road and at faster speeds.
School boundaries
Perhaps the most peculiar part of the Glenkirk Road issue is that the unpaved part of the road is within Nokesville Elementary School's attendance area.
The school is 10.5 miles from the Lake Manassas bridge that separates the paved road from the unpaved road while Glenkirk Elementary School is only one mile to the northeast of the bridge.
One of the goals of the school boundary lines is to keep school buses from making trips along that stretch of narrow, unpaved road.
Fiscally, however, officials have a problem with buses driving 20 miles round-trip when their routes could be less than two miles.
Glenkirk Elementary principal Lisa Gilkerson said she believes Glenkirk, which is already overcrowded by almost 400 students, should be the school for the kids along the road.
"It never has made sense to me that those students don't just come to Glenkirk," said Gilkerson, though she noted six already do as transfers.
Regarding transportation, Gilkerson stressed that the biggest help for Glenkirk would be if the county made the boundary line decisions for two unbuilt western Prince William county elementary schools at the same time next year. The new schools she referred to are the ones at Kettle Run near Route 28 and Vint Hill Road and one off of Linton Hall Road.
Currently, the Kettle Run school is set to open in 2011 and the Linton Hall school is due to follow the following year. The Linton Hall school is designed specifically to help relieve Glenkirk of overcrowding but the Kettle Run school is not.
Having a smaller student body would mean fewer vehicles on the road near Glenkirk. However, with the school population largely coming from the still-expanding Ellis Mills, Saranac, Morris Farms, Glenkirk Estates and the sold-out Linton Crest subdivisions, Gilkerson acknowledged it will be a long time before Glenkirk ever operates below capacity again.
She did mention though that the school's students are exceptionally well-behaved, which makes managing them much easier.
Gilkerson cited an instance earlier this school year when an author came to talk to 600 elementary students for an hour and did not face any disruptions.
"We have a tremendous student body," she said.
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