School proffers eliminated for development

Published 11:09 pm Friday, July 5, 2019

A residential developer will no longer have to pay proffers for school impacts of the project since those have changed since the project was first approved more than two-and-a-half years ago.

Coastal Virginia Developers received approval in November 2016 from Suffolk City Council to have 6.9 acres on C Street, off Portsmouth Boulevard, rezoned from general commercial to residential urban in November 2016. The development would include 70 units of single-family attached dwellings.

At the time, it had agreed to a proffer of $3,023.40 per single-family attached dwelling to increase capacity at John F. Kennedy Middle School, and $3,829.89 per dwelling to increase high school capacity at King’s Fork High School.

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The developer stated in a letter that the proffers it offered were due to a “deficiency in capacity at the middle and high school levels which existed as of the filing of the application.”

However, John F. Kennedy now has additional capacity available. With a current capacity of 884 students, an enrollment of 551 students and another 52 students factored into committed development, the school has room for an additional 281 students.

King’s Fork High School has a capacity of 1,638 students, 1,460 students enrolled and an additional 159 students as part of committed development, leaving room for another 19 students.

“The proper conditions no longer have a reasonable and direct relationship to the rezoning of the subject property and consequently should be eliminated from the list of proffers,” according to the staff report of the ordinance proposed to eliminate the proffers.

Suffolk City Council unanimously approved eliminating the proffers at its June 19 meeting.

Seven additional proffers that the council approved in 2016 are still in effect. Those include limiting the development to no more than 70 attached single-family units on the property with each one having 1,250 square feet of heated living space, building a 150-foot southbound right turn lane from C Street onto Portsmouth Boulevard, paying $28,378 to the city for its prorated share of increasing capacity at Shingle Creek pump stations 21 and 22, ensuring each home has a crawl space or a raised slab foundation with the finished first floor a minimum 12 inches above grade, and the use of certain materials for the homes and roofs.