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Parents Concerned About Proposed Hotel's Proximity to School
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Casey Catterton, whose children are in kindergarten and third grade at St. James, said he was concerned the hotel could be "a safe house" for pedophiles and a magnet for crime in general. He cited the Virginia crime report for 2006, which showed that 141 aggravated assaults and 215 robberies were reported in hotels statewide, and 819 assaults and 1,158 robberies were reported in parking garages or parking lots.
"Hotels and parking lots . . . bring crime to the area. It's a fact of urbanizing and density," he said at the meeting. "That's exactly what this city is heading towards."
Mayor Robin S. Gardner, who is running for reelection, attended the meeting and told parents that she would seek to address their issues. "Be it a hotel, an office, we want to make sure parents will feel comfortable with it," she said.
Robert A. Young, who is leading the project for Jefferson Park, said his research of crime statistics indicates that any tie between pedophilia and hotels is unproved. He argued that safety in the area would be enhanced by the addition of a hotel because it would add more life to a sometimes empty street. He plans to add lighting and slow traffic near the school to make it safer for students to cross.
"I would not build a project if I thought it had any chance of [compromising] the safety of the children," he said.
Drew Oosterbaan, father of an eighth-grader at St. James, said he is a prosecutor who has handled cases of sex crimes against children. He said that such crimes are "vastly underreported" and that the city should take seriously the potential risk of having a hotel near a school.
Oosterbaan said he supports the concept of building a hotel. "But I'm willing to pay whatever it costs for that hotel to go somewhere else," he said.
