Blacksburg initiates Toms Creek Basin planning study

The Town of Blacksburg continues to look for ways to grow responsibly, and now it has hired a consultant to plan to that end in the Toms Creek Basin.

A delegation from consulting group Development Strategies visited the Montgomery County town Monday in the first of four visits over coming months to establish a planning study for the 4,000-acre tract on the northwest side of Blacksburg.

The town’s primary goal is to get ahead by understanding what the community needs and wants in the space, Deputy Town Manager Matt Hanratty said.

If development went unchecked, “we’re going to lose the options to connect areas of the basin over time, and we know we’ll regret it later,” Hanratty said Monday. “As a community, it will look like a hodgepodge … and we want to be proactive about that now before it’s too late.”

That’s where Development Strategies comes in. Principals Matt Wetli and Justin Carney and project planner Catherine Kazmierczak were on site Monday to get their feet wet in the process, listening to town employees and presenting their process to the media. They intend to work with town representatives and fellow consultants from Chicago-based Camiros and Charlotte, North Carolina-based SeamonWhiteside on the plan, but the key, Carney said, will be Blacksburg’s residents and their vision for their own future.

“It’s a public dialogue,” said Carney. “What are the qualities that we want to preserve? What is the experience that people have of the basin?

“It’s those viewsheds. It’s what people see. But there’s also elements of recreation. … All of these things are coming together, and we’re going to be exploring these tradeoffs and trying to understand both from a quantitative … the components of what an ultimate vision is.”

For Wetli, the natural scenes in the area stood out immediately.

“There are places, there are views, there are pastoral countrysides that resonate with us as people, and I think resonate especially with residents of this town,” he said.

Satellite views of the basin, bordered to the east by the U.S. 460 bypass, to the south by Prices Fork Road, and to the north and west by the town limits, show mostly farms, fields and wooded areas, in sharp contrast to the residential and commercial developments that take up much of the rest of the town’s area. Just under 3,500 of Blacksburg’s 45,000 residents live in the basin, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.

The plan, Hanratty made clear, was not to open Toms Creek Basin up to unbridled housing development. Instead, the focus will entail a strategy for residential development in concert with the area’s already vibrant outdoor recreation and agricultural assets. Both road and utilities infrastructure will be at the forefront as well.

“We have a need for housing. I think we all know that,” Hanratty said. “But just allowing a ton of housing over here is not going to solve our problems. We just need to be strategic about it.”

The town began its planning study process with Development Strategies in March and expects to move into the public input phase in the early summer, either June or July. Final recommendations are due in February 2025. Hanratty said the town’s LetsTalkBlacksburg.org website will have updates on how community members can get involved in the discussion.

One of the reasons Blacksburg invited Development Strategies into the process was the success it has seen with the town’s 2019 downtown strategic plan , which the firm helped create. Hanratty said the town will spend about $200,000 on consulting for the Toms Creek planning project.

“It’s a big lift, but we need a vision for the basin,” Hanratty said. “There’s a direction for folks to take it as a starting point. They’re not guessing what the town wants to see, what the community wants to see.”

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