Campaign to stop 1,006-home Cardinal Ridge project heating up in James City County

It's Feb. 23. Today we talk to the couple spearheading the campaign against Cardinal Ridge. And we celebrate the 100th birthday of longtime local columnist and Holocaust survivor Frank Shatz.

Feb 23, 2026

Jean and Harry Fahl, left, Cardinal Ridge plan, right. (Williamsburg Watch photo)

Correction — this story has been corrected to reflect the correct vote in the planning commission.

A James City County couple is spearheading a campaign to stop the Cardinal Ridge development being proposed for up to 1,006 homes on surplus Eastern State Hospital land.

Over the past two weeks, Jean and Harry Fahl have met with all of five James City County supervisors, distributed flyers through the area and gotten more than 549 signatures to an online petition against the project.

The Cardinal Ridge project would include up to 309 single family homes, 247 townhomes, and 450 apartments as well as 162,000 square feet of commercial space.

“Our task right now is to speak to as many organizations as we can, to get as many flyers out as we can, to have people write the board of supervisors, to have people sign the petition,” Harry Fahl told Williamsburg Watch.

They say the project would destroy thousands of trees, endanger the Powhatan water shed and add thousands of cars daily to Longhill Road.

“You never know how many people are gonna actually move into a thousand new homes, Fahl said. “Is it going to be four per home? Is it going to be six per home? How many kids? How many adults? How many cars do they have… and how many Amazon trucks are going to be coming in?”

James City County’s planning commission approved the project in December by a vote of 4-2.

But supervisors have not yet voted on the proposal. They must first hold a public hearing on the developer’s novel proposal for a way to pay for road improvements to handle traffic.

Horton is asking the county to create a Community Development Authority to float bonds to pay for transportation improvements such as roundabouts. Cardinal Ridge homeowners would bear the cost of repaying the bonds, with fees that would range from $900 to $1,200 a year at first, rising to $1,600 to $2,500 for townhouses and single family homes, according to Trant.

The Fahls live in The Mews, a townhouse development that sits on Longhill Road near the corner of Depue Drive.

Paul Doucette, president of the Mews board of directors, is asking development residents to lobby supervisors to kill the project.

Fahl said there is about 900 feet between the corner of Depue and Longhill and the 199 intersection. He said it is hard enough to get out of the development now without thousands of more cars traveling through at 45 mph.

County Chair John McGlennon, Vice Chair Ruth Larson and Jamestown representative Jim Icenhour have all met with the Fahls and their neighbors in the past two weeks, Fahl said.

Fahl said a better use for the surplus land would be light industry like an electronics assembly plant, which he said would generate less traffic and bring more taxes without burdening public schools.

Adding more than 1,000 homes would mean more car washing, lawn chemicals, and other runoff into the watershed, he said.

“We realize something has to be built on there,” Fahl said. “The land is too valuable not to have something built.”

Frank Shatz hosts his weekly salon, left, reviews news clips, right. (Williamsburg Watch photos)

By Digby A. Solomon

In 100 years of life, Frank Shatz went from being the son of a well-to-do Jewish family in Czechoslovakia to a slave laborer for the Nazis, a member of the Zionist underground, and a well-known columnist in Williamsburg and lecturer at William & Mary.

The sprightly Shatz still navigates four flights of stairs to the immaculate condominium he and his late wife Jaroslava bought here decades ago. He is still very much the old-world gentleman, partial to berets and ascots and participating regularly in what he calls, his “Salon” of friends. They meet every Friday over coffee at the New Town Barnes & Noble to discuss world events.

This week, York County will present him with a proclamation honoring his life’s work.

Shatz estimates he wrote more than 2,200 columns over 45 years for the Virginia Gazette, where I met him while I was CEO of the Daily Press Media Group. He gave up writing as his eyesight weakened, but “I am still writing the columns in my head.”

His column was unusual for a local newspaper, because he would give a local spin to world affairs.

Shatz lectured regularly on the Holocaust and international affairs at William & Mary, where his papers and correspondence are held in the special collections center at Swem Library. He was closely involved with the university’s Reeves Center for International studies and was named honorary alumnus in 2015.

Shatz was born Feb. 26, 1926 in free Czechoslovakia, which was dismembered after the Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the prime ministers of Italy and France. His hometown on the Danube was ceded to Hungary, a Hitler ally.

He was sent as a teenager to work forced labor building railroad tracks for the German army across the Carpathian mountains. Shatz recalled it as “back-breaking work on a starvation diet. I was 16 going on 17. And physically I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

Shatz said he survived because the camp commander needed a groom to care for his horses and lead his carriage on his trips, since “the Hungarian officers didn’t have cars.” As he visited local villagers, he made friends with several locals who would give him extra food and odd pieces of clothing.

Shatz and his fellow laborers were sent on “a death march” on foot to Budapest, where he was put to work on a railroad bridge spanning the Danube. He managed to escape during an allied bombing raid and hooked up with the Zionist underground in the Hungarian capital, where he smuggled papers and provided bribes to Nazi commanders to help others escape.

He returned to Prague, now under Soviet domination, to work as a foreign correspondent. He and his wife finally made it to the United States in 1958, where they lived in various cities and settled in Lake Placid, where Jaroslava ran a boutique.

They discovered Williamsburg during one of their trips and purchased a second home here, alternating between the two towns until they moved permanently 45 years ago.

Shatz, a patriot who is passionate about the United States, now worries about some of the parallels he sees in world affairs and what he lived through: the current administration’s ambivalence towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its near-isolationist approach to Europe, and the rise of Hungarian and Slovakian leaders who favor the Russians.

He asked the Gazette to reprint a 2023 column where he recounted his journey to this country, telling the newspaper “I never thought that I would see people dragged out from their homes and cars by masked ICE agents. It is not the America I love, and am a patriot of.”

He told Williamsburg Watch that to him and his late wife, “America was a shining city on the hill. People often ask me if I would like to live my life all over again. And I said, “Certainly not the first part of my life. But from the day we stepped on American soil, everything was just perfect. I had a good life, so I would repeat it.”

Brad Rinehimer, left, Government Center sketch. (JCC images)

Williamsburg Watch will host a town hall about the James City County government center with Assistant Administrator Bradley Rinehimer Wednesday, Feb. 25.

The event takes place at the Williamsburg Library from 5:30 to 7 pm.

Although the free tickets are sold out, we will livestream the event. Readers will receive an email before the livestream begins that will connect them to the event.

James City County

James City County’s board of supervisors, meeting as the board of the James City County Service Authority, hold a retreat starting at 8:30 Tuesday to review the authority’s plan and rate increases. The retreat is open to the public and takes place at the county operations building, 119 Tewning Road.

Board of Supervisors business meeting. Feb. 24. 1 p.m. Government Center Board Room, 101 Mounts Bay Rd.

Board of Supervisors special meeting. Feb. 27. 8:30 a.m. Government Center Board Room, 101 Mounts Bay Rd. to consider a resolution to amend the adopted county by more than one percent to pay a $16 million tax refund to Busch Gardens.

Williamsburg

Public Art Council meeting. Feb. 23. 3:30 p.m. Stryker Center Room 127.

Architectural Review Board meeting. Feb. 24. 6:30 p.m. Stryker Center.