Boathouse Eyed for Potomac River Virginia Shoreline

The National Park Service (NPS), ., is now setting its sites on Arlington, VA too. Boathouses could one day spot the landscape on either side of the Key Bridge.

Tuesday, NPS will hold a public scoping meeting on "proposed siting and construction of a public facility for non-motorized boats on the Virginia shoreline of the Potomac River," according to the project website. The meeting will be at from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Congress tasked the NPS in 1998 with identifying sites in Arlington and in 2002 the agency published a feasibility study for the area.

"The study examined building a facility, which included indoor storage space and floating docks at four possible locations—two on the waterfront near , one south of the CSX/14th Street Potomac River Bridges, and one on Daingerfield Island, south of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport," according to the project website.

NPS is now re-initiating the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process for the Virginia shoreline that stalled in 2006. The public is invited to comment on locations previously identified for potential boathouse structures.

In December, the National Park Service began a new feasibility study for a non-motorized boathouse zone , running from 34th Street to about 1,200 feet upstream of the Key Bridge.

NPS first proposed a non-motorized boat zone for the Georgetown side of the Potomac in 1986. Since that time several iterations and stages of the plan have advanced only to later stall.

The new feasability study has not yet been released for Georgetown's Potomac shoreline, though the NPS timeline estimated a late summer or early fall deadline. The re-initiated EIS process on the Arlington side could possibly fall in line with the EIS process on the D.C. side.