Randall on Supervisors race: Make Stafford a destination county

Potomac Local Podcast

This post is a transcript of a Potomac Local Podcast interview.

• This post was edited for brevity.

Uriah Kiser, Potomac Local Podcast

Joining us on the podcast today is Barton Randall. He is the Independent candidate for the Garrisonville District Supervisor seat.

Mr. Randall is no stranger to Stafford County. He’s lived in the county for years and currently serves on the county’s Planning Commission.

Barton Randall, candidate, Stafford County Board of Supervisors Garrisonville District

Well, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to talking to you and talking to your listeners about the things that I’m excited about in Stafford County.

Kiser
One of the things that you have been wrangling with for four months is a major project on the Planning Commission. It’s one that has gotten a lot of attention from residents in North Stafford, both in the Garrisonville and the Rock Hill districts, is the proposed expansion of the Rock Hill quarry.

And last night [the Planning Commission] met and this was the last meeting the Planning Commission had to make a decision on whether or not to allow the quarry to expand its footprint. The quarry is located is just north of Route 610 in North Stafford in a very populated area.

The quarry abuts two neighborhoods. And as not far, that’s a stone’s throw from many other neighborhoods as well. And so noise has been an issue. Vibration has been a complaint of neighbors. And on top of this, we’re looking at the as the quarry owners of Volkan Quarry wants to not only expand its footprint there and start mining for more minerals, it was allowed to relocate a concrete plant there. And as part of its what’s proposing to do now is wanting to expand the hours of operation.

Tell me about the actions you took last night on the Planning Commission?

Randall
Well, thank you for bringing that up, that is exactly a concern we have had. This was brought to us in May for the first part of the public hearing. It is a complicated process.

There have been they have been operating the Vulcan Quarry for about 40 years now. There have been several proffer amendments that have been made over that last over the course of 40 years through three or four different processes to acquire land.

And so one of the benefits of this process was they were going to bring all of the proffers, all of the conditions under one umbrella rather than dealing with three or four different umbrellas. We were going to bring them all under one.

They wanted to expand their operations in a southern to the southern direction, closer to the residents. And then they wanted to relocate the concrete plant that’s currently over by the courthouse.

And so the timeline for that that the Board of Supervisors gave us to deal with this ends August 20 and with the board with the planning commission’s summer schedule. We had our meeting last night and our next meeting would not be until August 25.

Randall
And so we needed to adjudicate the matter last night or we needed to go back to the board with the applicant’s permission, go back to the board for additional time. And so the decision was made that we wanted to try to adjudicate it. Last night we were there starting at six o’clock.

Kiser
Not a typical meeting for the Planning Commission, 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. That’s not normal.

And one of the things that that’s important to note here is that the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission receives land use cases that are sent to it from people, from applicants, as they’re called, landowners who want to do a rezoning or expand their property.

What have you and then your job on the planning commission to essentially review their proposal and make sure that it fits within the current zoning laws in the county and then make a recommendation to the Board of County Supervisors, which will actually approve or deny that proposal.

So in the end, what was the Planning Commission’s recommendation to the Board of Supervisors?

Randall
The with one person absent, the decision on the board of the decision of the Planning Commission, was to deny the applicant by a four to two vote. And again, our job was to make a decision to recommend or deny, but was also put together the best package that we thought was beneficial to the county, to the Board of Supervisors.

We don’t know what the Board of Supervisors is going to do. They will vote on the package that we put together with Vulcan’s help.

[Vulcan] made a lot of concessions to us. And that final package is what’s going to go to the Board of Supervisors. If we had adjudicated this in May and simply said yes or no in May, the package that would have gone to the board would have been substantially less the less detailed, it would have been less what I think was a good thing for the county.

Kiser
And so and I do want to point out some of the concessions that were made last night from Vulcan. It wanted to do nighttime hours. They curbed those. They wanted to operate something in the neighborhood of one hundred and forty nights a year. They cut that down to 62 calendar days per year.

Part of this debate was actually the water needs of Stafford County. We have a pit over there that’s been blasted and drilled.

And the plan was to close that pit in and around 2035 and if need be, fill that pit with water for drinking water for the residents of Stafford County. There was some debate over whether or not they would close that pit early because part of what they’re asked was to not have not to have to close the pit in 2035.

Vulcan came back and said, “if you need this pit by 2040, give us five years notification, and in 2045 and we’ll have it ready for you to fill it with water.” And so those were some of the agreements by Vulcan who wanted to come back and work with the county. So now onto the Board of Supervisors. Do we know when the board might take up this case?

Randall
My understanding is that they are trying to obviously with the turnover that will be happening on the Board of Supervisors in November and December time frame, that they’re going to try to they try to clear their docket as much as possible. I would expect that it would happen maybe in September, but I’m not sure. I don’t have not privy to that scheduling of the board.

Kiser
Stafford County is a growing County, we’ve now surpassed the 150,000-mark in terms of population.

And so one of the most recent actions the board took was to approve a master plan for its downtown Stafford development and its 23 acres of county-owned land, and then an adjacent parcel, about seven acres of land.

We are going to build more than 300 new apartments on just that seven-acre piece of land. And the 23 other acres will be also developed in some way, shape, or form, hopefully creating what county leaders say is a walkable downtown area where people can live, work and play similar to what we’ve seen in our neighbors to the Potomac Town Center of Woodbridge, or in Reston, or Loudoun County.

What do you think about this type of development?

Randall
Well, one of the things we talk about on the campaign trail and I talk to people about, is making Stafford County a destination county that we no longer need to be where we’re where large is mentioned and we’re getting larger. We’re having people come to us. We’re not going to be able, as I tell people, I can’t put a stop sign three and say, just keep moving. We don’t want you here. That’s obviously not something we can do.

So they’re coming, they’re going to come to Stafford. The same reason I came to Stafford, the same reason people are moving to Stafford now. And so what we need to do is we need to develop a process to make Stafford a destination county. And one of the things that I think would be beneficial to a destination county is a vibrant downtown. We desperately need that. That’s going to be a linchpin of making Stafford County a destination county.

And we have a unique opportunity with the 23, 24, 25 acres of the county land to really do this right and to really make sure that what we want happens. Yes, we have an email, you a JPI. They said instead of us building five single-story businesses that may not fit into our downtown picture.

If you’ll give us three hundred apartments, here’s what we will do to help you build that downtown and help you build the courthouse and those types of things.

Kiser
And so JPI being the owner of the six to seven acres of property, was the reason for the new “U-D 5” zoning classification of the most urban zoning ever in Stafford County.

That’s where those 300 homes to go. So JPI owns that. And they sort of have an, as you mentioned, a memorandum of understanding about what type of housing that they will build that will fit the county’s vision for its downtown.

Randall
Yes. And they’ll be retail underneath on the bottom, the bottom floor. They’ll be apartments at the top. There’ll be a pool, there’ll be a dog park, there’ll be a fountain park. All the things that fit into much better than a downtown picture that the county has versus 5 one-story strip mall strip malls with businesses that may or may not be full.

Where’s the movie theater?

Kiser
You are running against Pamela Yeung, who is an elected member of the Stafford County School Board.

If you were to win this race, you will also inherit a development project that has yet failed to launch, and that is The Garrison in North Stafford. It’s right there off Route 610 — it was supposed to have mixed-use development. We’re talking Holmes street-level retail, a new movie theater.

We began reporting on it back in 2015. And still today we have not seen any shovels in the ground. What do you tell people who say, can we just get one thing done before we move on to the next?

Randall
Well, and I talked to people about it, believe it or not, I get this question a lot as I talk to people as well. And one of the things that we discuss with them is that the quiet town center was given the opportunity. The people on the board at that point in time gave the developer an opportunity to build the residential before any of the commercials was built and then once the residential was built. We never got to commercial.

In my opinion there, this is late. We need to get this going. But one of the things that we’ve done with The Garrison is we [the Board of Supervisors] recognizing that we need to put some commercial development place before you get residential.

I think that [luring commercial development] has been an issue to that extent, obviously. And again, I’ve had some conversations with them, with the owners [of The Garrison], and they have said that obviously during the pandemic, a lot of of those retail stores backed away from back away from expansion. And they were not able to get who they wanted right there at the front of the garrison, right next to get a simple road. But again, they won’t build it unless they have the lease signed.

Kiser
You bring up the pandemic and I do want to switch gears on you here. Your opponent, Pamela Young, the Democratic nominee for the Garrison District Board of Supervisors sea, two nights ago voiced her support for universal masking of students.

This will be the first time that children will be allowed back in school buildings five days a week, one hundred percent since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. You are not running for a school board seat. However, the Board of Supervisors does provide the majority of funding for the school division in the county… as a parent, do you think that your children, anyone’s children should have to be forced to wear a mask when they go back to school in just two and a half weeks?

Randall
You know, that’s a great question. In this country, our lives are based on our freedom of choice. Some people say it’s not a freedom of choice because you have to live with the consequences of that choice. But we believe in freedom of choice. We believe in the opportunity to make decisions on our own without being dictated to. If if we decide that it’s important that we as parents decide that it’s important we wear masks, then by all means wear a mask.

Kiser

It’s fair to say that the coronavirus cases, new coronavirus cases in Stafford County, we’ve seen more than one hundred of them in over the course of the past seven days, today being July 29, 2021. But it’s also fair to say, as I look here at the numbers from the Virginia Department of Health, that nearly 54% of Staffords population is estimated to be fully vaccinated.

So as a would-be leader who would make policy in Stafford County, what’s the magic number in terms of vaccination percentage, that we should be able to say, “OK, well, we’re good enough. We can we can learn to live with the coronavirus,” which, apparently isn’t going anywhere.

Randall
No, no, it’s not it’s going to be here, you know, we have to make every effort to provide everyone who wants a vaccine the opportunity to get a vaccine. I don’t know if there is a magic number. But then in the end, you have to make a decision for yourself and you have to live your life as you see fit.

Randall is married to his wife of 35 years. Both share two adult children, a daughter who is finishing graduate school in North Carolina and a son who works as a police officer in Northern Virginia.

After two years of college, Randall participated in a church mission in Japan in the early 1980s. Afterward, Randall spends 20 years working in the nuclear power program in the Navy, retiring in 2009 as a master chief.

Randall has lived in Stafford County for 15 years and currently works for the Coast Guard supporting their national security cut program as the acquisition manager.

Randall will have a campaign kick-off event Saturday, July 31 at 11 a.m. at Mission BBQ in North Stafford.

Early in-person voting in the General Election begins on September 18 at the County Government Center, at 1300 Courthouse Road at the Stafford Regional Airport at 95 Aviation Way.