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Business Insider
Bill Freehling is a business writer for The Free Lance-Star and Fredericksburg.com. This blog is on Fredericksburg-area business. Send an e-mail to Bill Freehling.
UMW planning parking lot near heating plant
MORE: Read more news from Fredericksburg
The parking lot will be built near this Pizza Hut location.
The University of Mary Washington Foundation plans to build a parking lot for faculty and staff off College Avenue on property it acquired a few years ago.
The lot will be near UMW’s heating plant off College between Thornton and Powhatan streets. It will be on 1213, 1215 and 1217 Thornton St. and 1214 Powhatan St. The nearby Pizza Hut, a property that the UMW Foundation also owns, will not be affected.
UMW Foundation CEO Jeff Rountree said the lot is being developed with an eye toward a parking crunch that could otherwise ensue next summer when the 120,000-square-foot campus center project begins on the current site of Chandler Hall, which will be torn down and its parking lot eliminated.
Rountree said the UMW Foundation acquired the lots specifically to add university parking that could avoid issues with nearby residential neighborhoods.
The foundation plans to demolish two vacant houses and one duplex it owns in that area. The number of parking spaces depends on whether the UMW Foundation gets a special exception from the city to reduce the required amount of landscaped open space from 30 percent to 15 percent.
Rountree said the foundation could fit many more cars on the lot if the city agrees to the 15 percent landscaping threshold. He said that request “appears to have overwhelming support from the neighborhood.”
Fredericksburg’s Planning Commission will take up the request at its July 11 meeting. Also on the agenda at that meeting will be the final subdivision plan for the 79-lot Telegraph Hill neighborhood off Lafayette Boulevard near Lee Drive, and the site plan for the Amelia Square development in downtown Fredericksburg.
