ARB Chairman: New Courthouse Doesn't Fit Downtown

After narrowly approving the Certificate of Appropriateness for the city's $35 million courthouse complex, Architectural Review Board Chairman Jamie Scully publicly criticized City Council for a flawed process that gave the advisory group a complete design that doesn't fit the character of the downtown historic district.

Here are Scully's full comments that he made Tuesday night during the City Council's public speaking portion of the meeting. City Councilman Fred Howe, who is running for mayor May 1, addressed Scully's remarks during a campaign event Thursday night at the Marriot.

Scully's comments come one day following the ARB's 4-3 vote to approve the certificate. Scully said the only reason members decided to approve the certificate was because of language in the ordinance that states that the applicant can appeal the ARB decision to City Council, and the majority of council has already shown its full support of the project. One of the main objectives of the ARB is to determine if a project is compatible with the city's historic district.

Scully said that the council members and city staff should have engaged the ARB long ago, instead of sending it a fully designed project without any input from members—a process that Scully pointed out as being abnormal for big projects in the city. An example he gave was that the Marriott Hotel project started with an informal meeting where ARB members reviewed the initial concept and provided input.

"The courthouse design proposal was not only fully conceived but also constrained by the City Council's structured competitive process for the design-build contract," he said. "Thus, although the ARB was tasked to consider the new building’s scale and massing, it was clear that the issue had already been determined and resolved many months earlier by the Council."  

Scully said some of the concerns are that the building will fill nearly 100 percent of the site on Princess Anne Street and look out of place downtown.

"What we mean by this is there are inadequate exterior public spaces and areas for landscaping that would be afforded by appropriate steps or modulations in its facade," he said.

Scully said the design is attractive and it met compatibility factors but it would be better suited to be built somewhere else than in the historic district. Scully said the ARB wants City Council to file a task order to the design-build consultant FirstChoice Public-Private Partners to modify the design to incorporate changes to its facade and that these changes occur after consulting with the ARB.

Howe said during his campaign event that Scully's comments were "100-percent dead on." Howe was one of three council members who voted against the courthouse project, and he said Thursday night during his campaign event that the process did not engage the public and it should have.

"This thing was short of a fast train out of the City of Fredericksburg," Howe said. "I wouldn't have bought a car in the way the process went down."