n the City of Manassas Park, the area Rotary Club meets on Wednesdays. In the City of Manassas Park, the police chief will call you at home at night if you forgot to lock up after work that day. In the City of Manassas Park, if you need answers on a specific aspect of the business permitting process, you can call the relevant city official – direct – and get a quick response and a straight answer.
   Here's what else happens in the City of Manassas Park, a mere 26 miles (42 km.) southwest of Washington D.C.: A burgeoning cluster of leading-edge technology companies provide systems support for some of the country's most sophisticated enterprises, firms with multimillion-dollar federal contracts to keep the nation safe and to ensure that the business of running the country stays on track.
   Thriving and savvy firms, searching for skilled workers in a region with one of the nation's lowest unemployment rates – 2 percent – explore new ways to expand their worker pool by partnering with the rapidly expanding local university and by tapping into the region's increasingly diverse population with "Help Wanted" ads in other languages.
   Flying under the radar, Manassas Park offers the best of many worlds – the comfort of small community, blended with the sophistication and excitement generated by proximity to a big city. It's a place where the mayor's office and city services are seconds away from anywhere. But it's also a place with easy accessibility to major East Coast logistics hubs and international shipping ports, three airports, an expanding public transportation system, an ever-replenishing pool of young, bright and ambitious workers, a diverse range of housing, federal agencies with procurement dollars to spend, and the nation's corridors of power.    While most site consultants and corporate real estate executives can bandy about the names of such familiar Northern Virginia jurisdictions as Fairfax County, Tyson's Corner, Arlington and the Dulles Corridor, many may be unable to place the precise location of Manassas Park, a 2.5-square-mile city that didn't exist in the 1950s. Surrounded by Prince William County and the City of Manassas toward the southwestern edge of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan statistical area, the city is often combined with its neighboring localities to provide a broader picture of the surge in activity taking place in areas that were mostly farmland forty years ago.
   Just a few miles off I-66 headed west from D.C. and due south on Route 28 from Dulles International Airport, the city is part of a region that ranks 7th in the nation for best places to do business, according to a recent report from the Milken Institute.
   Location consultants may want to sit up and take notice of Manassas Park, which is on the cusp of its own quiet growth surge, but often overshadowed by some of its blockbuster neighbors like Fairfax County, Va., and Montgomery County, Md. As vacancy rates drop lower and the cost of doing business rises in other parts of the area, Manassas Park may offer a more affordable alternative.
   Not to be confused with its larger cousin, the nearby City of Manassas, Manassas Park began as a bedroom community of lower-priced homes marketed to veterans of World War II and the Korean War. The city separated from Prince William County, which surrounds it, in the 1970s.
   "The prime attraction of the area is its affordability," notes Larry Fitzgerald, senior vice president of Grubb and Ellis, a corporate real estate firm. As an example, lease rates for Class A office space average around $23 per sq. ft. (psf) in the Prince William County area – which includes Manassas Park – while rents run toward $28 psf in Tyson's Corner and $33 psf in the closer-in suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria. In Washington D.C., space ranges from $45 psf for Class A to $28 psf for Class C, according to Delta Associates, the research arm of Transwestern, a national commercial real estate firm.
   The city is situated in the heart of the growth zone: Overall, the region has gained close to 600,000 jobs in the last five years, the majority in Northern Virginia, with D.C. gaining 65,000 new jobs and suburban Maryland gaining 157,000, according to George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis.
   The numbers provide some insight:
   • In the next 25 years, Manassas Park's population is expected to grow by 63 percent, more than the 45 percent growth anticipated across the broader metropolitan Washington, D.C., region.
   • In the next 25 years, the number of jobs in Manassas Park will increase by more than 80 percent, compared to a region-wide increase of 49 percent. By the year 2030, the entire region will employ 4.1 million workers.
   • Ninety-one percent of Manassas Park's work force currently commutes to jobs outside the city.    With a name like Manassas Park, it's hard to forget the area's ties to a painful period in our nation's history, the 1861-65 Civil War that divided North and South.
   But this is a city that acknowledges its historical legacy while refusing to be defined by it.
   Set back slightly from the city's crossroads, the stone façade of Conner House, a field hospital that treated injured soldiers during both Manassas battles of the Civil War, stands as a constant reminder of the area's ties to the past.
   On an adjacent site, earth movers are shaping a 28-acre swath of red dirt into a new urban grid, underpinned by the high-tech trappings of a 21st Century development, a design that incorporates the latest thinking on smart growth, and pedestrian access to the funky commuter rail – Virginia Railway Express, or VRE – that connects thousands of workers each day with corporate hotspots in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.
   In a nutshell, this captures the essence of Manassas Park: a city on the move – quite literally, as it builds a new downtown from scratch – while retaining its sense of place and history.    The city has long been blessed with strong and visionary leadership, elected officials who understand the importance of economic growth and a changing environment. Today, the city is ramping up its efforts to attract new business, as it transitions from bedroom community to a model for the new urbanism. A bit constrained by its small size and the relative lack of open land, the city is focusing on encouraging redevelopment, smart growth and establishing the legal and regulatory infrastructure that would ease the way for new commercial development on the remaining tracts of buildable land. City officials are doing more than just talking the talk. Here's a look at recent actions and institutional additions that target economic growth:
   • The City of Manassas Park Economic Development Authority: a central agency to assist existing firms wanting to expand in the city and to attract new businesses;
   • The Community Development Authority: to finance needed infrastructure improvements that are prerequisites for companies in search of new locations;
   • PPEA/PPTA legislation: to enable innovative public-private partnerships that lead to projects, such as Park Center, that benefit the city.
   Ease of doing business goes deeper than the number of agencies established and laws added to the books, to be sure. Many localities boast such features but this doesn't mean that a firm looking to locate there will have smooth sailing through the permitting process.
   In Manassas Park, though, they do make it easy, say the experts – the business owners who have gravitated to the city and expanded in place.
   "There is much less red tape in this city than in other localities," observes local car dealer Keith Farrish. "A city is only as good as its officials, and here city officials take a common sense approach. They understand the mind of the business person, and they don't have the bureaucratic mindset that I've seen in other jurisdictions." Farrish, who is also a developer, says that commercial development projects in other localities that languish for months because of regulatory obstacles move through the Manassas Park pipeline with ease.
   Bob Anderson agrees. The president of Metro Sign, a full-service signage company, says, "In Manassas Park, you can build out in six months what would take two years in Fairfax County."
   Anderson adds that while land costs are somewhat lower than in some of the neighboring jurisdictions, the real difference lies in the hidden costs. "If you buy a piece of ground and have to sit on it for two years with a big note while all the necessary permitting happens, that can really add to your project costs," Anderson says.    The city's small size is an advantage, too, say local business executives.
   "The people that make the decisions are the people you are talking to," says Guy Hinkler, CEO of V2 Systems, a technology infrastructure outsourcer. "In larger localities, you have to go through so many layers of bureaucracy that just to change your sign becomes very complicated, taking more time and more money."
   Hinkler moved his business to Manassas Park three years ago because of the city's welcoming atmosphere. And he's planning on staying, even though the company is growing aggressively, with a recent acquisition of a Fairfax County-based systems integrator, Artifex IT. "Our clients are all around the Beltway [the major highway that encircles the D.C. core]," he explains. "Manassas Park gives us easy access to all the major highways that connect with the Beltway and to our clients."
   While Hinkler has established a sales office in Tyson's Corner, the heart of the area's IT corridor, he anticipates that the company's next facility expansion will occur in Manassas Park. "This is a very strategic spot, in the middle of a lot of things that are happening," including the anticipated migration of defense agencies in need of local IT service providers to nearby Fort Belvoir, Springfield and Quantico.
   "The city has everything I am looking for, from great Internet connections to great business connections," Hinkler says. He also credits his rapid expansion since he opened his doors in 1995 to the support he received from the Flory Small Business Development Center. The Center acts as an incubator for promising small businesses, providing guidance on the range of business needs such as developing business plans, hiring, training and financing.
   City officials acknowledge that they have made a concerted effort to make life easier for businesses – and will continue to do so. Take, for example, the issue of incentives. The city does not have a formal incentives program in place. But that may be because no one's asked.
   "If a business was interested in the city and thought tax reductions would be helpful, we would be more than happy to talk to you," says City Attorney Dean Crowhurst.
   Crowhurst notes that the city tried to incentivize commercial development by reducing land costs in the late 1990s, but there were no takers. "We were prepared to virtually give a parcel of city-owned land away to a qualified private developer to build the new town center, but the developer pulled out," he says.
   Ironically, after reviving the public-private project to construct the new downtown three years ago, the city received a number of serious inquiries, all from developers willing to pay market price for the land. "We had a substantial number of very good offers from reputable firms, including some major commercial developers with a national footprint, and we got a very good price for the land," Crowhurst says. Ultimately, Clark Realty Capital won the right to develop the project.

   For further information, contact Mercury T. Payton, city manager, at 703-530-0393, or visit on the Web at www.cityofmanassaspark.us.