I grew up in an old house in Manassas, right off Grant Avenue. As with many old houses, it has accumulated a fair amount of stuff that previous owners left behind – there is still what looks to be a coal or wood burning stove in the attic (!). As a kid I always wondered what some of that stuff was worth. Well, if you’ve ever seen “Antiques Roadshow” or the equivalent on the BBC, now’s your chance.

The Manassas Museum is hosting a “Treasures from the Attic” event at Metz on Feb. 25th where you can get all of your old stuff identified and appraised. It’s a fundraiser and tickets are $12 in advance or $15 at the door. You can get tickets at the Museum store (which is pretty cool if you’ve never been).

It’ll show up on the radar sometime this spring but one of the initiatives that I’m working on is stricter enforcement of zoning laws.

One of the problems that Manassas will face in the future is protecting older neighborhoods from decline. A sure way for this to happen is to allow cruft to accumulate: cars in yards, trash and other types of blight. We currently have a zoning inspector and a Neighborhood Services Coordinator and they are working hard at this but seeing what I’ve seen and hearing what I’ve heard the past few weeks, I just can’t escape the notion that the City Government (not her employees) isn’t placing enough emphasis on the issue. We can’t let this happen. This is our home and we need to keep it squared away!

Just so we’re clear, zoning laws relate to the appearance and use of real property. There are some aspects of it that get into overcrowding but my focus is maintenance and use. The ordinances that I’m looking to get tighter enforcement on have been on the books for years and are nuts-and-bolts municipal authority kind of stuff.

To this end, I’m working with City Staff to put together a program that will leverage all of the public resources the City has to get this problem under control. The folks there are good at what they do and I’ve gotten some good feedback from them that will flesh out facts and make this a better program. Working with them and my fellow councilmen, I’m hoping we can put this together shortly but time will tell.

In short, I’m sick of seeing the problem worsen and it’s time we saddled up and got to it. In Herdon, which has a population of about 22,000, they have Five (5) full-time zoning people. We have one. I don’t know that we can immediately afford more but I do believe that we have resources that can be leveraged to help.