Five acres sit at the center of downtown Herndon, mostly cleared, mostly asphalt, with a construction fence around part of the parcel and one building still standing. On Monday, September 14, a judge in Fairfax County Circuit Court begins a three-day trial that determines who owns them.
The case is Town of Herndon v. Comstock Herndon Venture, LC. The town filed it in July 2025. Comstock still holds the deed. The judge signaled a ruling by May and has not issued one.
The judge’s ten-week estimate ran out in May
Both sides asked the court to decide the case without a trial. They argued their cross motions for summary judgment on February 27, 2026, and the judge took both under advisement.
Mayor Keven LeBlanc told FFXnow on May 5 what the court had indicated about timing. “The judgment would be against our core case, not against [Comstock’s] demurs or other actions,” he said. “The judge said it would be about 10 weeks, and we’re at the 10-week mark.”
That was four months ago. No ruling has appeared. The town’s own project page has not been updated since March 5, 2026, when it said the judge would issue a written opinion “in the coming weeks.” Nothing has been posted since, and no local outlet has reported one.
So the case arrives at Monday’s trial date with the summary judgment motions still, as far as the public record shows, undecided. A trial that begins on schedule means the judge denied both motions and wants evidence. A trial that gets continued means something else happened. Either way, Monday resolves a question that has been open since February.
The block holds downtown’s parking and a plan that was never built
The parcel occupies the northeast quadrant of the Elden Street and Center Street intersection, bounded by Center, Elden, and Station streets and the Washington & Old Dominion Trail. The town assembled it in pieces from the early 1990s through 2015.
In its complaint, the town describes the site before redevelopment as “blighted with rundown buildings, a culvert, and served mostly as host to 75% of the necessary parking for downtown.” The 75% figure is the town’s own, and it measures demand rather than supply. A large share of the parking downtown Herndon needs sits on this block. Restaurants and shops along that stretch of Elden Street run on it. Whatever gets built there has to replace that parking before it adds anything, which is why the approved plan put a public parking garage at the center of the design and slated it for the first phase of construction.
The agreement the town signed in 2017 called for 280 residential units, rows of street-level retail, a 763-space garage, public pedestrian plazas built for art exhibits and outdoor seating, and an 18,000 square foot arts center as the anchor. The design shrank over the following seven years. By the final version, the apartment count had come down to 273 and the arts center to 4,265 square feet, a cut of roughly twelve thousand square feet made in September 2024. The garage landed at 761 public spaces.
None of it exists.
A bookstore closed and an arts group was told to move out
A Thousand Stories, the bookstore at 750 Center Street, announced it was closing on December 4, 2024, because the building was coming down for the redevelopment. Comstock had already told the town on November 19 that it was walking away, and delivered the formal notice two days after the bookstore’s announcement. The owners said they could not find a new location. The store closed. The building it left is still standing.
Arts Herndon faced the same displacement from the same building in March 2025, after the project driving it had already collapsed. The town offered the organization part of the police station at 397 Herndon Parkway and committed $343,000 to prepare the 2,000 square foot space. Board chair Michael O’Reilly said it would not accommodate much beyond storage. Arts Herndon is still in the building at 750 Center Street.
Downtown Herndon has plans, and the plans assume this block eventually gets built. The town is running a Downtown Action Plan, a Metro Gateway effort, a W&OD corridor initiative, and Herndon 2050, its comprehensive plan update. Every one of them has to route around a parcel the town does not control. A property owner weighing whether to reinvest in a storefront on Elden Street, and a buyer deciding what to pay for a townhouse two blocks off it, are both making a bet on the same five acres.
Herndon spent twenty-five years buying the land, then conveyed it for free
Herndon spent roughly twenty-five years buying the land. It issued a request for proposals in 2015, drew two responses, and selected Comstock in 2016. The two sides executed a Comprehensive Agreement dated November 1, 2017.
Herndon supplied the land. Comstock developed it. If Comstock could not or would not build, the land came back.
In 2018, three neighboring property owners appealed the Heritage Preservation Review Board’s approval, which forced Comstock to withdraw its plan and resubmit. The board approved the new version in May 2019. Then came the pandemic, construction cost inflation, supply chain disruption, and a rate environment that made construction lending hard to secure.
In December 2020, the parties amended the agreement. Three parts of the amendment are in front of the judge on Monday. It let the town hand over the land before Comstock had satisfied all the closing conditions, with a deadline of December 31, 2021 to satisfy the rest. It gave Comstock a “Market Pause” that could delay that deadline by up to 24 months. And it gave Comstock an exit, a “Notice Not to Proceed” that let the company walk away from construction without going into default.
The town conveyed the property to Comstock on December 14, 2020, at no cost. A town press release at the time called the partnership the centerpiece of Herndon’s revitalization plan for its historic downtown.
Four years of deadline extensions followed, formalized through a series of amendments. The deadline moved four months to April 30, 2022. Comstock invoked the 24-month Market Pause, pushing it to April 30, 2024. The town extended again to August 15, 2024, and then twice more, to December 10, 2024. The complaint says the town granted those last two after “public promises from Comstock’s CEO” that one more brief extension would let the project break ground no later than April 2025. FFXnow’s account of the August 2024 hearing puts it more softly, reporting that Comstock officials expressed hope they could break ground that spring.
On November 19, 2024, three weeks before the final deadline, Comstock told the town it would issue the Notice Not to Proceed. The notice arrived on December 6.
Section 8 holds both the town’s exit and Comstock’s claim for money
Section 8 of the December 2020 amendment is short, and both sides read it differently.
It says that if Comstock delivers a Notice Not to Proceed, the company has no further obligation to build and is not in default, “but Herndon shall have the Right of Reentry set forth in Deed of Conveyance to Comstock identified at Exhibit C to the Comprehensive Agreement.” The same section also terminates the Comprehensive Agreement, which matters to the question of what obligations survive.
The same section contains the reimbursement language. It entitles Comstock to payment of certain third-party costs and expenses only if, “at the request of Herndon,” Comstock is asked to convey the property and its final project plans to a new developer. Both triggers live in the same clause, which is why the case turns on it.
The town exercised its Right of Re-entry on January 23, 2025, asking Comstock to sign and return the deed and closing documents by February 21. Comstock did not. On February 24, the company sent a letter that, in the complaint’s description, sought a revised contract giving Comstock more time to build and “appears to” condition reconveyance on payment of its costs, a figure the complaint says Comstock put at “several million dollars.” The town notified Comstock of breach on February 28, recorded a declaration terminating Comstock’s interest the same day, demanded nonbinding mediation, and filed suit on July 11, 2025.
The town’s argument is that the Right of Re-entry carries no conditions. There is no new developer, it says, and it never asked Comstock to transfer anything to one. It also points to Section 4.10(6) of the original agreement, which put the cost of the project plans, construction drawings, and site plan on Comstock “at its sole cost and expense.”
Letting Comstock issue a Notice Not to Proceed, avoid default, and keep the land indefinitely while demanding reimbursement “turns the deal the parties struck on its head,” the complaint says. The filing calls it “heads I win, tails you lose.”
Comstock’s chairman and chief executive, Christopher Clemente, responded publicly four days after the town filed, calling many of the allegations “inaccurate and without merit.” He said the company spent considerable time working with town officials and the design team to cut costs without hurting the project, believed construction would start in 2025, and paid everything it owed including real estate taxes. He attributed the failure to deadlines town officials set in 2024, which Comstock could not meet given the documentation required. He also said Comstock still wants to build the project or hand the land to a developer the town selects, “once the Town selects a new developer and the timing of the cost reimbursements pursuant to the Comprehensive Agreement is determined.”
Both sides say they want the same building. They disagree about who pays for the drawings.
The demurrer failed in October, the summary judgment motions stalled in February
Comstock first filed a demurrer, which in Virginia practice accepts every fact in the complaint as true and argues that the pleading still fails to state a claim. The court heard it on September 19, 2025 and overruled it on October 29, letting the case proceed. In December, Comstock moved to certify an order for interlocutory appeal; the town’s record shows no action on that motion. Both sides moved for summary judgment in January 2026, briefed the motions in February, and argued them on February 27.
Then the record goes quiet. The judge took the motions under advisement. LeBlanc’s ten weeks came and went in May. The town’s page stopped updating on March 5.
The town wants the deed back and a ruling that it owes nothing
The complaint pleads two counts. The first is breach of contract, on the theory that Comstock broke the agreement by refusing to honor the Right of Re-entry. The remedy the town wants for it is specific performance, an order compelling Comstock to sign the documents and hand the land back. The complaint argues money cannot substitute, because “due to the unique qualities of the Property and its location in historic downtown Herndon, monetary damages cannot adequately remedy Herndon’s harm.” Courts grant specific performance sparingly, and real property is the classic case where they will.
The second count asks for a declaratory judgment, a ruling that settles a legal question between parties without necessarily awarding damages. Here the town wants the court to declare that it owes Comstock nothing for predevelopment costs and that Comstock must reconvey the property immediately. The town also seeks its costs in bringing the action.
A three-day setting is a substantial block of court time for a contract dispute, which points toward testimony about how the parties dealt with each other over eight years rather than a clean reading of the contract language. That cuts against what both sides told the court in January, when each argued the case could be decided on the papers. Trials also settle, and a case that has survived a demurrer and a failed mediation can still resolve on the courthouse steps.
A town win restarts downtown, but not quickly
If the town wins and gets the deed back, downtown restarts, with a delay attached. LeBlanc framed the town’s readiness to FFXnow in May: “The hope is, once we have that deed back, we’ll have everything else already done in work with the community.” Herndon could issue a new request for proposals into a market that differs from 2017 in both directions. Construction costs are higher. But the Silver Line has run since 2022, and the town has four planning efforts underway that all feed the same downtown.
Comstock can appeal a ruling against it to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which would extend the uncertainty well past a verdict. And even a clean win starts a sequence of RFP, developer selection, entitlements, and financing that does not produce a building quickly. Anyone expecting construction in 2027 should adjust that expectation.
If Comstock holds leverage, whether through a ruling that the reimbursement is owed or a settlement that pays part of it, the effect depends on the number and who writes the check. A settlement that clears title and returns the land has real value even at a cost. A ruling that leaves Comstock holding the property while the parties argue about price extends the freeze into a third year.
The five acres are worth roughly the same either way. Monday decides who gets to build on them, and how soon.
Watch the ruling, the trial date, and the RFP that follows
The summary judgment ruling has been pending since February against a ten-week estimate, and it may surface before or at Monday’s hearing. Civil trial dates move, so the September 14 setting may not hold either. And if the town prevails, its next move is a new request for proposals. LeBlanc says that groundwork is already done, which would shorten the stretch between getting the deed back and naming a developer.
We track Herndon and Fairfax County land use filings every week and will post what comes out of Fairfax County Circuit Court. If you own property near downtown Herndon or you are weighing a purchase within walking distance of it, this case is a larger variable in your five-year picture than anything currently on a planning commission agenda. Reach out if you want to talk through what it means for a specific address.
