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Friday, May 3, 2024 – Today, City Manager Wyatt Shields announced the hiring of Mary Catherine Chase as the new City of Falls Church Director of Communications. Chase will join the City in this leadership position on June 17, 2024.

“I am pleased to welcome Mary Catherine Chase to the City of Falls Church team,” said Shields. “Throughout the interview process, it was clear that Chase possesses the knowledge, skills, and experience to strengthen City communications. Clear information sharing with employees, community members, and stakeholders in a user-friendly and accessible way is critical to the City’s success. Chase is poised to lead the City well in this effort.”

Significant achievements mark Chase’s career. She spearheaded the strategic communications activities at The George Washington University School of Business, where she serves as the Director of Marketing and Communications. She led in planning, developing, and executing various initiatives, including media relations and refreshing brand campaigns across websites and social media.

Prior to her time at GW, Chase served for seven years with the International Student Exchange Programs (ISEP) based in Arlington, VA, where she rose from the Director of Membership for Europe and Southern United States to the Director of Communications and Strategic Partnerships. In addition, she worked for several years at The British Council, British Embassy in Washington, D.C.

“I am honored to have been chosen as the Director of Communications for the City of Falls Church. This position leverages my experience building inclusive communities through communications and my love for The Little City as a decade-long resident,” said Chase. “In my career, I have realized a need for responsible and inclusive leadership, and leading the City’s communications efforts is an opportunity to advance inclusivity, equity, and belonging in our community.”

Chase earned a Master of Science in Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science and completed the Creating and Managing Strategic Alliances Executive Course in managing strategic external partnerships from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. She currently teaches a course in business leadership at GW.

This announcement follows a comprehensive recruitment campaign for the new Director of Communications. Two panels with internal and community stakeholders interviewed three finalists and provided the City Manager with valuable input in the selection process.

Maggie Redden has been serving as the Interim Director of Communications since March 1, 2024, and will continue in this role until Chase assumes office on June 17, 2024.

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The remaking of Virginia Tech’s campus near the West Falls Church Metro station as a futuristic mixed-use development can officially begin.

The university and Falls Church City completed a sale of the 7.41-acre Northern Virginia Center site to developer Converge West Falls LLC last week, the city announced Wednesday (Nov. 15).

Approved by the Falls Church City Council in August 2022, the $25 million sale required the city to terminate Virginia Tech’s 40-year lease on the property at 7054 Haycock Road. Falls Church retains about $8.4 million of the proceeds from the sale, with the remaining $16.57 million going to the university, according to agreements authorized on July 25, 2022.

The sale paves the way for the academic center’s transformation into a new headquarters for HITT Contracting, a construction company currently based in Fairview Park near Merrifield. The development will also include a construction research lab for Virginia Tech and apartments with ground-floor retail.

“This closing marks an important milestone in a decade-long planning effort initiated by the City of Falls Church,” Falls Church Mayor David Tarter said in a statement. “We are excited about having the national headquarters of HITT Contracting and the Virginia Tech Coalition for Smart Construction as neighbors to our West Falls project.”

Part of a push to revitalize the West Falls Church Transit Station Area, the Northern Virginia Center redevelopment has been in the works since 2019 but stalled in early 2021 after Virginia Tech and HITT decided not to move forward. The lease termination and sale agreements with Falls Church helped revive the project last year.

Converge — a joint venture of HITT and the developer Rushmark Properties — submitted a development plan in September 2022 that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved on July 25.

In a formal unveiling this week, HITT shared that its new six-story, 270,000-square-foot headquarters will emphasize sustainability and serve as a “hub for education and innovation in construction,” while also providing better access to mass transit for its more than 900 local employees.

Features will include a 100,000-square-foot rooftop solar panel array and 40,000 square feet of ground-floor space for Virginia Tech’s new Coalition for Smart Construction, a research center that “will advance building practices and ultimately shape the industry’s future.”

HITT says its research and development team already has over 20 projects that it plans to work on at the new headquarters.

Notable ventures already in progress include a newly patented prefabricated building skin that reduces weight, increases speed to market, and creates more efficient buildings. HITT is pioneering the first use of the Caracol Heron AM robotic arm installed in the US for 3D printing, aimed to augment traditional construction methods, and implementing robotics on-site to support an enhanced experience for HITT’s field team through technology-enabled workflows.

“As an industry, we have to do better to tackle the challenges of rising costs, labor shortages, and our environmental footprint,” HITT Co-Chairman Brett Hitt said. “I believe that Virginia Tech will push the boundaries of construction by bringing its brilliant students to a space where they can work alongside our industry’s brightest minds. Bringing industry and academia together under one roof will help us effect real change.”

Outside the construction world, the project will also deliver a 13-story, 440-unit apartment building with up to 18,000 square feet of retail, 55,000 square feet of urban parks, and a portion of West Falls Station Blvd, a new road that will link the also-redeveloping West Falls and Metro station properties.

HITT CEO Kim Roy said the company is “ecstatic” that it will “continue growing in Fairfax County.

“We’re thankful to the City of Falls Church, the Commonwealth of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Fairfax County for supporting our plans to build this cutting-edge development,” Roy said. “We’re deeply committed to being good stewards of the local community and the environment.”

According to HITT, construction on its headquarters is expected to begin in early 2025 and finish in late 2026.

There are several great restaurant weeks around the D.C. metro area every year, including the City of Falls Church, which is holding its first-ever restaurant week this month. And if you’re a foodie and you’ve never been to the Virginia city, you are missing out.

There are more than 160 restaurants within a very walkable 2 square miles in Falls Church, and just about every possible cuisine has a corner.

“Last I checked, we have over 40 different types of cuisines available. Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Japanese, Mexican, Peruvian, Salvadoran, Thai, Vietnamese and a ton more,” said Sarah Swinton, marketing manager with the City of Falls Church’s economic development office.

Falls Church restaurants have won awards and been recognized on lists in publications, including The New York Times, Washingtonian and DC Eater.

Many of those restaurants are clustered along the main street in Falls Church, East Broad Street and West Broad Street. More than 40 of them are participating in the inaugural Falls Church Restaurant Week, which is actually 10 days, running from Jan. 19 to 28.

You haven’t earned your local foodie badge if you have not been to one of the main attractions in Falls Church; the 200,000-square-foot, two-level Eden Center is the largest Asian mall on the East Coast, with more than 120 shops and restaurants

“If people haven’t had a chance to explore it, they really should,” Swinton said. “It’s been a major destination for Vietnamese food and culture in Northern Virginia for nearly 40 years. Today, the Eden Center has expanded beyond Vietnamese fare to include other types of Asian cuisines.”

Falls Church is using pandemic-era federal government American Rescue Plan Act money from the Virginia Tourism Commission to promote its first Restaurant Week.

“We are really trying to use this as a way to feature our restaurants and give back this money to them, since they are still probably under a deficit from money lost during the pandemic,” Swinton said.

Here’s a list of participating restaurants in this month’s Falls Church Restaurant Week.

The City of Falls Church is also an under-the-radar standout in the D.C.-area economy. Homes in Falls Church consistently see the highest-median selling prices in the region. It has some of the highest median household incomes, and 75.1% of its adult population have at least a bachelor’s degree, the highest educational attainment rate in the nation.

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FALLS CHURCH, VA — Before Santa makes his final preparations for Christmas, he will make visits to Falls Church earlier this year.

The Falls Church Volunteer Fire Department will bring back its Santamobile from Dec. 8 to 16. Santa will visit different City of Falls Church neighborhoods each evening from Dec. 8 to 12. The remaining days will be set aside for surrounding neighborhoods of Fairfax and Arlington counties.

"This festive community tradition shouldn’t be missed," said Jenny Quinn, the Falls Church Volunteer Fire Department’s Santamobile coordinator. "We can’t wait to see everyone starting December 8.

During the visits, Santa will ride atop his "sleigh" on a fire truck. Santa's elves from the volunteer fire department will hand out candy canes and fire safety information. When residents see the holiday lights and heat the sirens and holiday music, they can step outside to greet Santa.

Here's the tentative schedule, weather permitting:

Residents can find Santa's real-time "Santa Tracker on the volunteer fire department's website, Facebook, and Instagram pages with a real time "Santa Tracker." Any schedule changes and cancellations will be shared on social media.

Questions about Santamobile should be directed to santamobile@fallschurchfire.org. The volunteer fire department asks residents to avoid calling the fire station about Santamobile.

The volunteer fire department thanked the Bitici group at KW Metro and The Freshman Group with Atlantic Coast Mortgage for sponsoring the Santamobile.

Last week, a prominent Northern Virginia church, The Falls Church Anglican, released the findings of its investigation into a former director of youth ministries who sexually abused children for more than a decade while serving as the church’s youth director and subsequently as director of adult discipleship. This horrific, years-long abuse by Jeff Taylor highlights the need for change in how Virginia enables survivors of childhood sexual abuse to seek justice against their abusers and the organizations that turn a blind eye.

Survivors of childhood sexual abuse face immense challenges in coming forward and seeking justice. Many suffer in silence for years, grappling with shame, fear and trauma. This is especially true for men who were abused as children, as we’ve seen in many cases of clergy sexual abuse. When survivors do summon the courage to seek legal recourse, they are often met with daunting statutes of limitations and similar restrictive laws that prevent them from filing civil claims against their abusers and the institutions that enabled the abuse. These statutes and related laws serve as barriers to justice, shielding perpetrators and complicit organizations from accountability and allowing them to evade responsibility for their reprehensible actions.

Virginia lags behind many other states in providing justice to survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The civil justice system in Virginia has not kept pace with the needs of survivors seeking recourse. Unlike 29 states and three territories that have enacted revival legislation for the applicable statute of limitations — including New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, D.C. and North Carolina — Virginia has yet to provide survivors with a meaningful opportunity to pursue civil claims against their abusers and the institutions that facilitated their abuse.

It is long past time for Virginia to take action and prioritize survivors.

A crucial step in addressing this injustice is the enactment of permanent revival legislation for filing civil claims. Passing such a law in Virginia would lift the statute of limitations, allowing survivors whose claims were previously time-barred to pursue legal action. Revival legislation has been implemented successfully in other jurisdictions, enabling survivors to access the justice they deserve and holding perpetrators and institutions accountable for their misconduct. By enacting a similar law, Virginia would signal its commitment to supporting survivors and not the perpetrators and enablers of those crimes.

It is also critical that employers are held to account for the actions of their employees whom they knew, or should have known, were perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Currently, survivors have a limited ability to seek justice against these employers, many of whom are large institutions that failed to safeguard against abuse. As a result, even assuming a claim is not time-barred by the current statute of limitations, Virginia law often prohibits institutional civil liability for the enabling entities. New legislation aimed at providing survivors accessibility to the civil courts must include provisions that hold the institutional enablers responsible for the conduct of their employees.

The time for action is now. Virginia must stand on the side of survivors and ensure that they have access to the civil justice system. Eliminating the statute of limitations or enacting sufficiently viable revival legislation and holding institutional enablers accountable are necessary steps toward achieving this goal. It is incumbent upon the Virginia General Assembly to prioritize the needs of survivors over the demands of powerful corporations and organizations. By taking decisive action, Virginia can demonstrate its commitment to justice, accountability and compassion for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.