From Buses To Trails, MVCCA Advocacy Evolved Through Time

Wednesday’s meeting of the Mount Vernon Council of Civic Associations had a special guest speaker in Dr. Glenn Fatzinger, whose has been active in local politics since the 1960s.  

Fatzinger called the MVCCA the most active district council in Fairfax County.

“And over the years we have a lot to show for it," he told the 50 people assembled at s library. "But it didn’t all happen by accident.”  

After serving in the Army and attending graduate school, Fatzinger in 1961 took a job as a historian for the Air Force and lived in Belle View. He became involved in the neighborhood civic association after he and his wife bought a house in 1964.

In the 1960s in Mount Vernon, Fatzinger said there were major commercial and residential development pressures. It was a single-family home neighborhood, and citizens were concerned about intrusion of commercial and multi-family development.  

He said citizens were unhappy and restless dealing with a weak planning and zoning staff. Worse, he said, several politicians were stuck in a small-town, rural mindset.  

“Unique to this area, we had a lot of well-educated, knowledgeable citizens who weren’t willing to take second-rate, third-place public services or public facilities,” he said.  

Citizens demanded to meet with their District Supervisor, a man named John Parrish who Fatzinger said “didn’t seem like he was doing much.” As it turned out, Parrish may not have been operating on the up-and-up.

Upon his death in 2008 at age 88, The Washington Post reported that Parrish had been convicted of taking $5,250 in stock in exchange for his vote to rezone property for a shopping center in Annandale. He lost his seat on the board and his law license, and served nine months in prison, the Post reported.

“We were astonished, in this area, as intelligent as people we were, had a supervisor who went to jail!” he said. “What’s this all about? What should we be doing?”  

Fatzinger said citizens decided to take the initiative to implement changes in the wake of this scandal. They developed committees, and created presentations for the Board of Supervisors to get things done.  

In response to the county’s poor enforcement of zoning laws, Fatzinger and the Mount Vernon Council in response created their own comprehensive master plan, a 76-page document they self-published on Nov. 30, 1966. He said it set general guidelines for development for the next 15 years and influenced a 1968 plan approved by the Board of Supervisors.  

It didn’t stop there. Mount Vernon residents reached out to experts on growth, transportation and economic development from across the country, Fatzinger said. 

They contacted officials in Baltimore and Toronto to learn about their reputable transit system. They spoke with Philadelphia officials to hear about their great parks system. They asked people in suburban Chicago about their top-notch community skating rink. All that input from expertys contributed to their planning processes.  

Another community project was to develop express bus service into Washington D.C., which involved working with the City of Alexandria to get a dedicated bus lane, so a bus commute would take about the same time as driving to work.  

The bus service launched in December 1969 – about the same time that ground was being broken for the very first Metro stations – and passengers included all classes of people, Fatzinger said, from regular office workers to military generals to members of Congress, Fatzinger said.  

Another project that got off the ground in the late 1960s, as bicycling grew in popularity, was the Mount Vernon Trail. Civic groups teamed with the National Park Service director at the time to allocate funding for the trail.  

“He shifted money around to get the trail built, but he lost his job over it,” Fatzinger said. “They transferred him to Atlanta, I think. I know as a result of getting our bike trail built on the river out here, he lost his job in the process.”  

Other plans never quite came to fruition. Civic groups in the 60s also had planned for a commuter rail line from Alexandria to Fort Belvoir. Another unrealized plan was to expand Fort Hunt High School by 3,000 students, but that school was merged in 1985 with Groveton High to create West Potomac High.

For Fatzinger, who teaches business courses at Marymount University, said it was importatnt to pass along this kind of information to the next generation.

“I find the students don’t have any sense of history,” he said. “You say something about Watergate, they don’t know what that is. Not just recent history, but history of any sort. They don’t seem to read much.”