Once More To The RA Board Election, Office Tenants Jumping Ship, and Not-So-Great Budget News: A Springtime Traipse Through Reston News

• If you haven't gotten enough hawtt Reston Association Board candidate action (or turned in your ballot), here's one more thing, with words, to look at before sending in your ballots.
  
  
• Rumor has it some giant office tenant in Reston is considering jumping ship and relocating to a fancy new office building in Ballston. What do they have we don't, except for a shopping mall across the street and an existing Metro station? Also, in a bit of news that may or may not be related, Accenture is scaling back its Reston office space from a whopping 200,000 square feet to 50,000 square feet. Ouch.
  
  
• Not exactly a shocker, but as Loudoun and Fairfax officials dither over whether to put the Dulles Airport Metro station somewhere, technically, near the airport, the completion date for the second phase of the Silver Line pushing into the particleboard wastelands of Loudoun County has been pushed back to 2017.
  
  
• Fairfax County Supervisor Cathy Hudgins warned a bunch of her Hunter Mill constituents that a "new normal" has arrived, which we think means that we won't be getting our county-funded pink sparkly ponies anytime soon.
  
  
• Fairfax County's school board has kicked off a review of the system's disciplinary process, which is being followed by a group called Fairfax Zero Tolerance Reform led by Caroline Hemenway, a South Lakes High School parent. How'd the first hearings held by the school board go?

  "[The school board discussion] was better than I expected. There were some school board members that I didn't think were on our side who expressed concern," said Hemenway, one of the advocacy group's founders.

  The school system now has a fancy webpage focusing on the issue, so it's safe to say "problem solved," or something like that.
  
  
• The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is holding a public hearing March 29 on acquiring land rights to improve walkways along Reston Avenue from Southington Lane to Shaker Drive. We keep hearing this whole sidewalk concept has "legs," as the kids today don't say.
  
  
• A fancy new tea place (a teaery?) has replaced a jeansery at Reston's Fake Downtown gritty urban core. We'll take a $10 cup of tea over a $300 pair of jeans any day.
  
  
• Reston's "top cop," Deborah Burnett, has retired. The new precinct commander is Andre Tibbs, in case you're keeping score at home.
  
  
• Reston-based MERS continues to get the front-page attention we think it's safe to say they're not exactly hoping for.
  
  
• Always nice to see a fellow Reston web logger get some press.
  
  
• This web logger seems to think that Reston is exactly like Palo Alto, California -- minus Stanford and Facebook, of course. He writes:

  when I was in Reston, I was blown away by the absence of litter ... and the absence of dirt. The place is frighteningly clean (in a creepy, Monaco-esque way), and I wouldn't be shocked if you could do surgery on the street with no fear of infection. Palo Alto is no different. I feel like I should take my shoes off before crossing University Avenue.

  Yeah, but we wouldn't recommend doing that on the Jackson's patio.