Henrico, airport officials seek enhancements to Williamsburg Road corridor

To visitors who arrive by plane at Richmond International Airport, the Williamsburg Road corridor in Eastern Henrico offers a first impression of the Richmond region.

It’s an impression that county and airport leaders would like to improve.

The corridor currently is home to a string of modest business uses (including small shops, fast food restaurants and dilapidated motels) and limited landscaping.

But county officials hope to drive investment and redevelopment along the corridor – broadly between the Richmond city line and Beulah Road in Sandston, but even more specifically between Laburnum Avenue and Airport Drive – and enhance it with some of their own efforts, as well.

Through a market study conducted earlier this year by the Henrico Economic Development Authority, officials identified health and life sciences, professional services and mixed-use development as three attractive categories of reuse along the corridor, EDA Director Anthony Romanello told the Henrico Board of Supervisors during a retreat Dec. 2.

Officials hope that the corridor’s location within a Virginia Enterprise Zone and Henrico Investment Program zone will help speed some redevelopment efforts there. Both programs offer a host of tax credits and other incentives to property owners who make various improvements to their sites. Since it was implemented earlier this year, the HIP, which covers five separate regions of the county ripe for redevelopment, has generated $88 of private investment for every $1 in county funding, Romanello said.

In particular along Williamsburg Road, Henrico leaders want to rid the corridor of the plethora of low-end motels and hotels that currently dot it and whose presence, data shows, is contributing to an unwelcome mix of crime and fraud in the area. The HIP includes a special incentive – a 15-year real estate tax abatement – for owners of substandard hotel or motel sites in the zone who demolish those facilities and build something else instead.

The corridor “is a vital gateway to the county,” Henrico Planning Director Joe Emerson told supervisors.

Officials have studied it several times in the past two decades in attempts to spur the type of redevelopment they envision. And while those hopes have been enhanced by the formation of the HIP earlier this year, the county now also intends to make improvements itself through efforts that could include the construction of sidewalks, streetlights, new pavement, curb and gutter, landscaping and streetscape enhancements and bus stop improvements, among others.

Funding for those efforts could come from a number of different funding sources, whether local, state or federal, County Manager John Vithoulkas told supervisors.

“There’s not one way forward – we have multiple paths forward as to how to do this,” Vithoulkas said, mentioning the possibility of using some of Henrico’s funding allocation from the Central Virginia Transportation Authority toward the concept.

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Separately, airport officials are weighing several potential concepts that would enhance the entrance to RIC with landscaping, signage and even a monument or lighted tower with the goal of making the site “look like a place that is welcoming to businesses considering moving to the Richmond region,” Capital Region Airport Commission Chief Operating Officer John Rutledge told the board.

Three concepts – dubbed “Fall Line,” “Ringed Entrance,” and “A River Runs Through It” are among the options being considered.

The Fall Line model would include a monument depicting Virginia and its five regions, with significant landscaping added to all four quadrants of the Airport Drive/Williamsburg Road intersection, Rutledge said. The Ringed Entrance concept would create a structural “ring” around the intersection with signage. The River Runs Through It concept would include a lighted tower and signage on the southwest quad of the intersection, which also would feature landscaping efforts.

Airport officials also are considering building a new roundabout at the secondary entrance road (near N&W Salvage) to the east of the main entrance, in the area where the Air National Guard base once existed.