Board of Supervisors Regular Second Meeting   4/16/2025

Good afternoon.

I'm pleased to call to order this meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors on the 16th of April at 1 p.m.

in Lane Auditorium.

I'd like to note at the desk we have Supervisor Mike Pruitt of the Scottsville District, Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio District, Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, and myself, Jim Andrews, representing the Samuel Miller District.

A quorum is present.

We're also joined here by our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, Mr. Andy Herrick, our Clerk, Ms.

Claudette Borgerson, and our Senior Deputy Clerk, Travis Morris.

Also, let me please welcome Albemarle County Police Officers present, Master Police Officer Jerry Schenk and Officer Caden Pater.

We thank you for your service today, here, and every day on behalf of the

Thank you.

Board, our first item, as always, is the adoption of the final agenda, and I've heard no suggestions of possible changes.

If none, then if someone could make a motion to approve the final agenda.

So moved.

We have a motion from Supervisor Mallek, second from Supervisor McKeel.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

and Supervisor McKeel.

Yes, I just want to recognize and thank staff for participating and doing such a great job with my budget town hall on Monday evening.

We had about, I think about 25 or 26 citizens at Journey Middle School and I believe about 30 staff members, Jeff.

My recollection is great.

And it was a great event, good questions, and folks were very pleased to be able to come and that we had the event for them to find out more about the budget.

So, and that's all I have.

Thank you.

I appreciate also all of the citizens and staff who attended the Western Admiral High School meeting.

A few smaller than we've had in the past, but it was a great turnout, lots of good questions.

My reminder for the community and for the building today is that this Friday, April 18th at 11 will be the 58th, 59th rededication of the Dogwood Memorial, Vietnam Memorial down the road here at the McIntyre.

Park Corner, and parking will be available in the field.

One goes in through the skate park for that event, and hope to see people there.

Thank you.

Yes, and I also wanted to thank all those that turned out for the budget town hall.

at North Fork.

That was really nice.

Staff did an outstanding job.

We had really a lot of good questions from the public.

And we, I mean, we do understand what everyone's going through with our proposed tax hike, tax rate hike.

However, I think the majority of residents, they understand why we're doing what we're doing.

and I do appreciate that.

Our job is to educate everybody and that's what we continuously try to do.

Thank you and I have several announcements just to to mention them because they're on our calendar.

This Saturday is the

Rivanna's solid waste authorities, household waste, unwanted electronic devices collection.

And now this one may be full already, but they're encouraging people to sign up in case people cancel.

If you have signed up and don't intend to make it, please do cancel so that someone can take that spot.

But that's this on April 19th.

And there'll be additional collection days for hazardous household waste April 25th and 26th, 830 to 4.

May 3rd for mattresses and furniture, May 10th for appliances, May 17th for tire collection.

So there's a lot going on at the Ivy material, I should say, recycling center.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Renamed.

It's important.

Also, I first did notice that April 26th is Safe Disposal for Meds National Drug Take Back Day.

And it's a pretty important day for people.

If you have old medications you're not going to be taking, don't throw them down the drain or otherwise dispose them in the trash.

Please take them to, in this case, there are four locations, 10 to 2, 5th Street Police Station, Wegmans, Sentara, Martha Jeffersons Outpatient Care Center, and the Crozet Family Practice Medicine at Park Ridge.

Any of those will take those drugs back.

And also, I just want to highlight that even though we've had some difficulties in keeping all the grants together and things, that the Resilient Together community design nights will be held starting April 28th at Carver Rec, then May 12th at Stony Point Elementary, May 20th at Yancey Community Center, and May 29th at Greenwood Community Center.

Those are the great opportunities for conversation about how we can make ourselves more climate resilient.

Are there any further announcements?

Thank you for bringing up about the recycling for medications.

I was very interested in reading that because it didn't dawn on me, probably did everybody the rest of the world, but it didn't dawn on me that it's also regular medications that you have.

So it's not just prescription, but it's, you know, any old Tylenol or Advil or whatever medications you have.

We do.

We have two people signed up, and there's no one online signed up.

Both of the folks are in person and are very familiar with our process.

So with that, I'm going to shorten the rules for engagement at this point and just simply say that

Individuals are allowed one opportunity of up to three minutes to speak at each board meeting.

Timekeeping is conducted through a timer and light system at the podium.

The green light will go on when you begin speaking, which begins your allotted time.

The yellow light indicates you have one minute to finish speaking, and the red light indicates your time has expired and you'll be asked to end your comments.

All comments are live streamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website.

My name is Gary Grant, Rio District.

I should know that having been in radio for too many years.

Gary Grant, Rio District.

Before I start my comments, I do want to say thank you to all the staff who were calm and competent at all six of the budget town hall meetings that I attended.

Albemarle government held seven budget town halls this spring.

I attended six.

I asked two questions, but I have a few more.

Why is it that euphemisms like contributions and investments are replacing budget terms like expenses and expenditures?

Why is it that supervisors and the county executive have difficulty saying the word raise?

Why is it that supervisors and the county executive don't talk about the hold harmless or lowered tax rate for FY26, which is 81.3 cents by state law?

Why is it that the county executive didn't use any slides about assessment increases, which would show a more honest and transparent calculation of the tax burden on property owners?

Why is it that we didn't hear supervisors nor the county executive express empathy, or at least sympathy, to taxpayers for the increased tax burden from assessment increases and tax rate increase in the same year?

Why is it that we haven't heard supervisors nor the county executive thank taxpayers for the money already being taken and for the even more that will be taken in FY26 with the unanimously approved 89.4 cent increase tax rate for public hearing?

One last why question.

Why is it that the Scottsville Supervisor at the March 20th Town Hall boasted, If I were to describe the thing that Albemarle County does best, we are deeply professional.

Are taxpayers to assume that his elite we also includes he?

Finally, two when questions from the April 10th Town Hall.

When can less deep but still equitable and resilient taxpayers examine the public records for the Rivanna supervisors' personal check for 1,000-plus snow cones and the Rio supervisors' promised snow cones budget move?

Or will such a silly bit of engagement first require an FOIA question?

Thank you, Gary.

Welcome.

This is Justin.

Good afternoon.

My name is Neil Williamson, and I serve as president of the Free Enterprise Forum, a privately funded public policy organization focused on central Virginia's local governments.

There's a typo in the title of one of the AC44 comprehensive plan chapters that you'll be discussing later in your work session.

Rather than a thriving chapter on economic development, the Free Enterprise Forum believes the proper title would be Driving Economy.

Chapter.

In yesterday's EDA meeting, Albemarle County Economic Development Director Emily Kilroy indicated that two days of intense focus groups with employer segments resulted in many consistent themes across industry sectors including housing availability and housing affordability.

and the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce State of Community event that many of you attended.

Weldon Cooper's demographer, Hamilton Lombard, revealed that 40% of our region's workforce commute from outside the region.

Just last meeting, Supervisor Diantha McKeel declared, we are Aspen.

These are just three recent incidents pointing to the dire need for expansion of the Nixonian era development area boundaries.

continuing to restrict the majority of economic and residential activity to less than 5% of your landmass is short-sighted at best and planning malfeasance at worst.

Albemarle County needs room to grow economically.

Whether you realize it or not, attracting and retaining employers is a competitive effort.

For years, other regional competitors have touted, but we're not Albemarle as a slogan.

Absent an increase in permitted supply, the projected demand will continue to drive all land prices up, pricing more workers, including teachers, firefighters, and police officers out of the region.

The challenge with a comprehensive plan is just that.

It is comprehensive.

Everything relates to everything else.

And by its very nature, it's political.

The politics of change is hard.

But the politics of no change is harder.

If Albemarle County chooses to maintain its Nixonian era development boundaries, you will continue to need service workers, teachers, and public safety employees, and they will have to drive further to get to work.

I am curious how this will impact absenteeism, employee retention, as well as the significant impacts of driving two hours every day.

Like I said, everything relates to everything.

It's your choice.

Do you want a driving economy or a thriving economy?

Board, this brings us to item 8, the consent agenda.

I have not heard any suggestions for anything to be pulled from it, so I'm looking for a motion to approve the consent agenda.

We have a motion from Supervisor McKeel, second from Supervisor Mallek.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Board, we have a couple of action items.

Our first action item is a special exception 2025-5-3130 Sugar Hill Lane Homestay.

And this is being led by Ms.

Leah Brumfold, Senior Planner 2.

Welcome, Ms.

All right, so as noted, my name is Leah Brumfield, Senior Planner II in the Zoning Department.

Can you pull the mic a little bit closer?

It got scooted back a little bit.

There you go.

Thank you.

And I am bringing to you today a special exception request for a homestay at 3130 Sugar Hill Lane.

This special exception is fairly straightforward.

It is a small space above the garage being used for use as a homestay.

The property is owned and occupied by the applicants, Stella and Albert Kim.

And the special exception would be to County Code 18-5.1.48C22, which requires that homestays on large rural area properties be operated only within the primary dwelling or within an accessory structure built before 2019.

The parcel in question is a 7.27 acre parcel.

It is in the rural area.

By right, an owner-occupied rural area parcel is permitted to have a home stay with up to five guest sleeping spaces.

The guest sleeping spaces do need to be within a single family dwelling or within an accessory structure built before August 7, 2019.

Both the dwelling and the accessory structure of the garage were built in 2023, so the applicants are requesting an exception to permit use of the accessory structure for their homestay.

Looking at an aerial for the parcel, the parcel and its surrounding neighborhood, which is near White Hall, North Crozet, the parcels are very heavily forested and they're used primarily for residential uses.

The Kim's parcel butts up against the Mormons River at the back.

And both the house and its accompanying garage and the parking and all the use on the parcel are not visible from any additional from any surrounding parcels.

The property is accessed by a private driveway at the end of a private road.

Here, looking at the Parking and Structures exhibit, the Kim's accessory structure, shown with the red star, is perpendicular to their home and both the home and the garage create a surround around the large parking area, which does have ample parking.

Kind of noting here a photo of the actual structure on the left and the dwelling on the right.

The classification of the garage as an accessory structure is due to the lack of conditioned space between the primary dwelling and the garage.

And that's just the way that we approach accessory structures.

But the garage is attached to the dwelling through a breezeway.

and summarizing this application, the applicants who own and occupy the parcel are requesting a use of an accessory structure for a homestay on a large rural area parcel.

We received no negative feedback from neighbors regarding this application.

One neighbor did call in asking about which property was the subject to the request.

and when she was informed that the applicants were the Kims, she said that they would be exemplary hosts and she had no concerns.

Additionally, I want to note, if you look at the background of this photo, it does show that the space of the garage does not constitute a full dwelling.

It has a sink and a mini fridge and that is the extent of the kitchen spaces here, so I have no concerns about that as well.

As such, staff does not believe that this homestay would create any adverse impacts to the surrounding neighborhood or general public health, self-safety, or welfare.

The homestay use itself is by right in an accessory structure previously built to 2019.

The use is considered consistent with the comprehensive plan as its accessory to the dwelling.

The accessory structure being proposed for use is consistent with the size and type in the neighborhood.

And as we've analyzed the use itself based on the property, the use in the greater context of the neighborhood, staff does recommend approval for this application.

Noted here is the recommended action.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Supervisor Pruitt?

I have no questions.

Supervisor McKeel?

No questions.

I don't have any questions either.

It's a good location, nice and private.

Mentioning of the particular owners brought to my mind that because there's an annual, as opposed to the permission going more to them as opposed to going with the land because of the annual registration, that has to happen.

No, so the special exception does run with the land.

They need to re-register every year for safety inspections, but we don't require a new owner to reapply for another special exception.

They would need to get a new home state clearance.

and they would need to continue to get the safety inspections and the registry every year, which is just informing us of the contact information of whoever the primary contact is.

If the application meets all of those requirements, then it is good to go.

It is by right.

Thank you.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley?

No questions, thank you.

And I have no questions and am fully supportive.

I guess my understanding, of course, is that this could not be a dwelling.

Right, I understand.

Thank you.

If there are any other comments, we're looking for a motion from the White Hall district.

We have a motion from Supervisor Mallek, second from Supervisor McKeel.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms.

This brings us to item 10, Old Dominion Village Private Central Sewerage System.

It's an action item with Mr. Gregory Kristiniak, Civil Engineer II.

Welcome.

and Mr. Sabal.

Excuse me.

Good afternoon, members of the board.

My name is Greg Kristiniak.

I'm a civil engineer to plan reviewer and engineering here today to present the Old Dominion development request for a central sewer system.

The location is the east side of the Crozet master plan area on the north side of Route 240.

A good local landmark is the Old Dominion vet hospital out there.

A little more detail on the location, White Hall district.

Local address is 58, 52, 58, three notch.

You could see on your screen in the corner there with Parkview and 240 is the vet building and then the single family home which will be taken out.

The property is zoned neighborhood model.

Jurisdictional area is Albemarle County Service Authority and it is in a water supply protection area.

A little bit of history.

Back in 2022, a couple of board actions set to stage.

The first one was a zoning amendment, taking it from a rural area to a neighborhood model, the max of 110 units and a non-residential unit for the vet.

There was also an amendment to incorporate the two tax map parcels, 5667B and 5674A into the jurisdictional area for Albemarle County Service Authority.

The existing conditions don't support anything except what they have, the two drain fields for each business and residential.

And the proposed system is a 111-unit connection, components including gravity, force main, and two pump stations.

As this is a central system, County Code Chapter 16 calls for the definition of a central system as three or more connections.

So we do have that and requires public hearing and board action to approve the central system.

This is a little bit busy.

The next couple of slides, I'd just like to show you the system in the development.

This is a busy plan sheet, but I've colored in a couple of key colors.

The dark green is the gravity, light green is force main, and we have five branches of

Gravity that take out of the laterals and the connections of the individual homes.

And they go up to the individual pump stations, pump station one and pump station two.

And then from there, the lime green gets out through the development and then out off site to the closest Albemarle County Authority sanitary sewers.

The next slide is about 1,100 feet, just to show you that the off-site will require that force main for about 1,100 feet to the closest manhole.

Looking at some factors, favorable and unfavorable, it does support goal number three of the county's strategic goals, infrastructure and placemaking.

DEQ will be issuing the construction permit and be responsible for regulating the operation of the system.

And then finally, it's not a smaller HOA.

There is a maintenance cost burn that will get shared over 111 connections.

Perhaps the one unfavorable is that the system would be privately maintained.

These are the, I don't necessarily want to talk to any one of these, but these are the five proposed conditions staff recommends as part of the resolution to support the project and the central system.

We can go back over those if you have any questions.

The last two highlight the commitments of the Property Owners Association to assume full responsibility for operating, maintaining, and doing annual documentation of the system.

Before I conclude, I was remiss, we do have the engineer, Tim Miller here, and I'm not sure if Couture made it, I don't know.

But if you have any questions, and if not, I have a motion after this.

Thank you.

We'll go through our order.

Yes, thank you.

Staff report and the review was pretty straightforward and clear.

The only question I have, if you go back one slide on the condition four, that assume full responsibility, what's the actual

I guess, requirement on our end that they meet that?

Are they just providing some sort of HOA covenant or bylaw that says that the community ownership must keep a certain reserve?

I mean, they just say, yes, we are.

My understanding, sir, and we can get that, Tim, I don't know if you could help answer that question, but when the HOA is developed and brought up and created, that should be part of that condition.

Okay so I get that I think I understand how the HOA will go about it I guess what I'm asking is the requirement to us is just that annual I mean five sounds it's different than four.

What says that the county or what is our legal

The county is not responsible.

The permitting process through DEQ is how that will be handled.

The permit will be issued to the HOA, to the entity that they create today.

All right.

I guess at the end of the day, and I guess I'm thinking of examples where I don't remember clearly if they were full on HOAs or just community associations.

but if they fail in their responsibility to maintain the system and then come knocking on other doors to handle the cost of repair or fix or whatever there should be something that is on our side that says no this is on you and you can't escape that way so you must do special assessment or whatever your bylaws or docs say I mean I'd be satisfied with other things to get put in and we keep on file but

that just stating it doesn't sound like enough to prevent in 25 years them coming to the county and going, whoops, we didn't plan for proper, and I'm not, to the gentlemen that's here, I'm not trying to suggest they won't do it the right way.

Yeah, Mr. Herrick might be able to help me out if I get this incorrect, but I don't believe there's a mechanism or enabling legislation that allows us to bond

So that's correct.

And what condition four would do would require just upfront that agreement, the county engineer could certify to that.

But because this is not part of the zoning ordinance, unfortunately, it could not be enforced as a zoning violation.

It would not be something to which the county was a party.

It would be something again that the county engineer could certify before it was approved of.

All right.

I understand.

This might not be a question that staff has the ability to answer and might be better directed at the applicant, but I'm curious if we know at this time how the deployment of this is going to be financed and delivered.

Meridian Civil Survey Tim Miller with Meridian Civil Survey, the design engineer.

Katura is on his way.

He's not quite here yet.

And I'm sorry, I won't be able to answer the financing question.

Thank you.

I am familiar with the fact that there are basically specialized investment organizations that just do this.

They do outlays of capital for sewage infrastructure development for communities, and then they capture the loans for that.

I would assume that the HOA probably doesn't have enough liquid capital to actually be able to deliver it.

This is something I'm thinking about.

I'm not sure this applies here because it looks like there is not an alternative to a privately developed one.

But I raised this to the board's attention just because I think it is prudent for us to always be thinking, is there an extra party that doesn't need to be here who is making money?

Because that is a net loss on the public, right?

This is something I raise whenever we think about these kinds of additional costs that can arise in HOA infrastructure.

This is going to be a net loss to the public, whatever value that investment trust is capturing from their dividends.

I don't know that there's an alternative, but I just want to point that out.

Supervisor McKeel.

I don't think I really have any questions.

I'm glad Ned asked what he did because the reality is after 20 or 25, 30 years,

We have all had, I imagine, in our district, at least I certainly have, a breakdown of some of them.

Bart's nodding his head yes.

So just trying to figure out how it's not up to us, I guess, to

I mean I'm just asking Bart what... So normally that's done through their covenants so the realtor is required to give that document to them and documents how they do maintenance, what the fees are, how that free structure is done.

I imagine that to Supervisor Pruitt's point is that

as part of the development that will be built in probably to the cost of the lots to get it up and running and then the maintenance will be done through that particular HOA or community.

I think they actually have to create a business for that.

Someone will own it.

There was a discussion we had about a central well system not too long ago.

I think it was either here or the PC similar and what the result of that was, this was to

Supervisor McKeel's point, the system was 30 years old or so, but the neighborhood kind of bonded together and said, hey, we need water, we need this, we need to figure out how to do it.

And I understand why, but often they first come to us.

Yeah, it is what it is, right?

I get that.

Yeah, I was just curious.

I'm through.

That was all I had to ask.

I'm going to turn it back to Supervisor Pruitt.

Do you want to ask your question again?

Sure, yeah.

How the project's going to be financed.

Nice.

Thank you.

Move the mic a little bit.

Thank you.

Is that better?

Yes.

How's it going to be financed?

Yep.

It's a whole question.

Okay.

So the HOA would be taking out the loan?

Who's taking out the debt?

No, the developer.

The developer.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I said, who would be financing the ongoing maintenance of the HOA?

From contributions from the 110 lots.

OK.

I'll wait for my turn.

This is your turn.

Oh, OK.

Then I'll start.

I'll come back to that in a second.

When this came up for discussion for the rezoning, there was assurance that, oh, this would be fine, no risk, no problem.

But now I see on slide five that there's gravity going north in that line that

All these ones on the east side are going north, which means it's going downhill.

Yes, ma'am.

I'm not worried about the sewer.

I'm worried about the fact that a major stream for Beaver Creek Reservoir is right there at the top of your map.

So this is all built in a drinking water watershed here.

This is a great concern to me and to the people who spoke at the public hearing, which was held during COVID and was really difficult to manage.

None.

That's why we had to design this.

We searched high and low for a gravity sewer line out.

As we've dealt with this, Emerson Commons has a very few little lots, but they have a pump thing as well, but nowhere near the density or the output from 111 different units.

So that's just a given concern for me.

I guess, I don't know who would answer this.

What sort of maintenance and inspection is going to be done on this on behalf of the

HOA, how frequently, because I consider this to be an extremely high risk location for failure.

And if something fails, the whole drinking water system for the 12,000 people who already live in Crozet will be at risk.

So I would like to know more details about how frequently this would happen.

So as far as the systems maintenance, there are two pump station locations.

They're designed by the engineer and constructed by a competent contractor.

And then they have backup generators in case there's power failure just to keep them working.

Yes, ma'am.

Barts LaBota, just so we know for the record that we switched speakers.

It's not as sophisticated or as cumbersome, let's put it that way instead, as cumbersome as say what we do for our own

Water and sewer treatment plants, right?

But there are regulations that go with this type of facility.

And I imagine ACSA will also be interested in what's happening there because it is going into our system.

So some extra, Brandon Karakoff is the water guy in Harrisonburg, so I guess he would be involved with that.

All right, so there's that question.

Going down the list.

Do we know what the annual maintenance cost is going to be for these inspections and things like that?

I wouldn't think not.

They're due to operate for a long time.

The development directly behind here is also on a pump station for that entire project.

What is the financial burden?

determined about this is that whether it's private systems for water or maintenance of a neighborhood dam, when there was a dam that needed to be fixed and was told by the state to fix it in 2008, the community refused in 2018, it blew out and then had to be replaced for five times the cost it would have cost in 2008.

It's a terrible situation in which to put people.

And so I'm just trying to figure out where the documentation gets written down

that's a buyer into this should know ahead of time what their obligations are going to be and so is that something that is put into the the the deed before the court documents whatever the sale documents just like you have to notify a buyer that there is an alternative acso alternative off-site septic system it took 10 years to get that required but it is required to be notified now before

a sale happens.

I agree 100%.

They'll be notified about that condition and it'll be in the HOA documents that we'll review beforehand.

If a pump has to be replaced, it's going to be $5,000 to $7,000 for removal of the pump and put a new one in.

I know that from the cost of what's going in.

The biggest cost is digging the hole, putting in the tank, setting up the generator, so on and so on.

and we'll have, hopefully, gas there to run that on.

The dotted line.

Okay.

All right.

That's a great solution.

All right.

I guess I will stop there.

Thank you.

I'm basically familiar with this because where I live, we have our own private water and sewer.

And so everything is in the documents when you purchase the land.

It's all in the HOA documents.

any documents we buy that this is a private system that we are responsible for.

So we do pay monthly dues into the water and sewer.

The sewer?

No, it's a grinder pump and it's pumped up directly to the

Okay.

Okay.

Which is probably better.

Ours we do ourselves.

So we have our own station, you know, cleaning up the water and everything like that.

So I am familiar with it.

Okay.

Public water.

Got it.

Okay.

And we have well water.

So, you know.

But that's something that it really is cleared up, at least from my perspective, before you purchase, when you purchase the land.

You know, it's all on the documents and everything.

But I have no other questions.

Thank you.

And most of my questions have been answered by excellent questions from the other supervisors.

Slide eight.

Thank you.

Condition five must annually document compliance.

But then the operation and maintenance requirements, maybe those of the state and they'll have their documentation as well, but we'll have some notice of anything that's not been done if there's anything starting to go wrong.

And the only other concern that I had after hearing the comments, and I think it's okay, is that I know in connection with private water, there have been issues finding maintenance, appropriate maintenance, people who are willing to do it, contractors who are willing to do it, but this sounds like this sort of a system is a little more common and available for maintenance.

So, thank you.

I have no other questions.

Very good.

Well, I will count on the assurances of all of you, Greg and Bart.

Thank you very much.

We have a motion from Supervisor Malek, second from Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Mr. Galloway?

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

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OK, 15 minutes.

Be back to do our AC44 work session.

Board, most of our activity will be spent now in a work session, combined AC44 discussion on draft chapters on thriving economy and community facilities and infrastructure, all led by Mr. David Benesch, development process manager, assisted by Mr. Michael Barnes, director of planning at sea.

Welcome.

Okay, great.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And yes, David Benesch, Development Process Manager with Community Development Department.

We do have two presentations for you and essentially two work sessions or two sections of this work session.

We will begin with going over the thriving economy chapter.

We'll be looking for your feedback.

The amount of time we have allotted will allow us about up to 60 minutes per item area.

And then we will, once we complete the fire of an economy, we'll go through the community facilities chapter.

Again, having about 45 to 60 minutes, we hope to cover these items.

For the thriving economy, the agenda for this is to go over the summary of the Planning Commission and Board's previous feedback and the community themes that we heard early in the process, do a basic chapter overview, summarize comments from the Planning Commission, and this was also reviewed by the Economic Development Authority, so we have a few comments from them as well.

We'll quickly go over the update, the upcoming schedule for you,

finish up with our discussion of this section.

We do not have any specific questions for you here, so as we go through it at the end and get your feedback, we'll just be going through the objectives and actions in sequence.

The earlier feedback that we heard from the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors

Regarding a thriving economy is to address the readiness and availability of land for target industries and to retain the industrial designations and zoning that we have currently in our comp plan and related zoning.

to focus in on providing for more Tier 4 and Tier 5 sites, including infrastructure for those Tier 4 and Tier 5 sites, or more of a short-term inventory of lands that are available to provide for business location opportunities.

to address cost barriers to small businesses and to support small businesses and also address those cost barriers and support for employees and to focus in on workforce development and training, excuse me, and economic opportunities, strategic economic opportunities in the rural area that are consistent with our growth management policy.

Our community themes that we heard was a desire for having career ladder job opportunities, focusing on some of those industries that we defined as our target industries, and to attract new jobs in general.

And again, to support small businesses and entrepreneurs,

by providing startup spaces.

There was discussion and identification of artisan and craft businesses having an important role and to reduce restrictions for low impact home occupations to allow those kind of businesses as small startups to better be located and started.

Land and infrastructure needs was a common theme that we heard again business locations and adequate infrastructure to try to focus in on infill and adaptive reuse to address that demand and need and to streamline the development review process to facilitate the use and redevelopment and development of lands and businesses in the area and to support local workforce development again jobs and technical training and

and doing that through partnerships with local colleges and vocational schools and providing or allowing for encouraging support services that can serve both employers and employees.

Specifically noted, often noted was childcare, transportation, and as we all know, affordable housing.

Chapter overview.

In developing this chapter, I think we recognize that achieving a thriving economy is something that is supported through many of our chapters.

And a lot of the recommendations and actions, not just in this chapter but other chapters, serve to provide for and help to create a thriving economy.

that economic development efforts specifically by the county are, have been guided by and are intended to support our comp plan, that is our growth management policy, rural area land uses, and development area land use plans.

In updating this section, we were mindful of our equity and climate action initiatives in

addressing updates and we did work very much with our economic development office in developing this chapter.

This chapter scope and as it's drafted recognizes that the the in progress update of our economic development strategic plan and it recognizes in this draft plan our intent was to recognize that the economic development strategic plan the EDSP

is really intended to be one of the lead documents for economic development strategies.

That we wanted to ensure that this chapter doesn't conflict and that there's a good relationship between these two plans and it's understood where that guidance is coming from.

And in recognizing that

that EDSP will contain further guidance and actions that augment and go into more specificity than this chapter is at this point in time.

What is in the actions in this chapter is focused in on land use and infrastructure as it most relates to the things that we deal with in the comprehensive plan and the land use plan.

So those actions that you see are mostly heavy into

Land use and infrastructure and those actions that we think will be consistent regardless of the end product of the EDSP.

We also recognize that as the strategic plan is adopted that there may be a need to refine, go back and clean up or amend this chapter.

There are other sections of our comprehensive plan that do address economic development.

Obviously the development areas chapter in the rural areas, specifically rural areas addressing tourism, ag forestry, industries, outdoor, historic and cultural activities as it relates to tourism and agribusiness.

Development area supporting the quality of life, supporting density, mix of uses, and our employment and activity centers are seen as a focal point for industrial activity.

And also the transportation and the upcoming community facilities plan provide for some of those services and infrastructures needed to support businesses.

I won't go through these, but some of these are actions and objectives that do come from the Rural Area Land Use Plan and the Development Area Land Use Plan that speak specifically to or relate to economic development efforts.

Things that include encouraging agribusiness type activities in the rural area and zoning ordinance amendments that allow for those that are consistent with our growth management policy.

I have a number of them here.

We can go back to them as needed if you have questions about what might be in other chapters.

The challenges to address that we focused in on were gaps in the inventory of industrial land, the need for site ready locations, continuing efforts to support existing target industries, to address needs of existing businesses,

and the need for employee support services, career training, barriers to employment, childcare, transportation and housing, and again, increasing career ladder jobs.

We have a listing of the objectives.

We will be getting into those later, but we believe that the five objectives at a high level do address those issues that we feel that we need to address.

The feedback from the Planning Commission's work session.

There was a desire for more information to clarify the build-out analysis, how it was created, and where those numbers came from.

Just a little bit more detail to make it clear.

to study and emphasize more dense development and redevelopment to support economic development activities and incentivize that work for economic development purposes.

The board emphasized the importance of infrastructure and transportation in economic development to emphasize strategies for business retention

and attracting and retaining employees noted was difficult due to housing affordability and the need for support services and those efforts should be emphasized and to continue to expand and support tourism and note more significantly in this chapter and also recognize recreational related economy as a

The changes from the current plan

Really the focus of the changes is a little bit higher level of detail that is not as much specificity about particular actions that is in part due to where we are with the development of the economic development strategic plan and that that strategic plan work and development may guide more specificity for actions.

That the chapter, this chapter recognizes that relationship

and otherwise the general overall themes are relatively consistent with the 2015 plan in terms of our overall objectives.

We did attend the meeting with EDA to receive their comments.

Several of the comments did relate to some suggestions for additions to the chapter.

One was to objective three, there was a

suggesting that the word attraction should be added to strengthening the objective that suggests strengthening business retention and expansion, which is intended to imply that we're more willing to attract outside businesses as opposed to just fostering internal growth of businesses.

They felt there should be a more prominent note of agriculture and agribusiness in the chapter

There are, as noted previously, several recommendations that are in the rural area chapter that do relate to agribusiness.

And the existing project enable also has goals and objectives that specifically relate to agribusiness.

So as the EDSP develops, there may be some coordination needed into where that discussion of agribusiness is located here in the EDSP.

That pretty much concludes my overview of the chapter.

I think as tradition we give you a quick update about what's coming up in the future.

Obviously we are doing this work session today with you.

On the 24th we'll have a virtual lunch and learn on housing and community facilities.

and Hasling will be presented to the Planning Commission for discussion on April 8th and the board May 7th, transportation on May 6th to the commission and the board on the 28th and cultural resources and community resilience to the PC on May 13th and the board June 4th.

That's it for me for right now unless you have any questions.

OK.

What I suggest is that we want to do clarifying questions, but with the expectation that we're going to first talk about the text of the chapter and then separately talk about any concerns with specific objectives and actions for the chapter, which we may take one page at a time because they can be put up on the screen for all of us to see.

Unless there are some overriding questions that would

be needed now, although just expect that we'll start with the chapter text and go through questions and comments on it.

Yep.

So, I mean, basically the text in the, where this current draft sits, I'm generally pleased with where it's at.

I don't mind the painting in broad strokes.

As I started to react to this and write a lot of comments and notes, I was like, wait a minute,

This is the type of work I should be doing when that strategic plan's in front of me, not here at the comp plan level.

So I really think the devil's in the details of that project-enabled strategic plan update.

So this, I think, referring back to it, capturing the flexibility of what could be in that strategic plan, I think is appropriate.

I mean, remind me, when did the current comp plan actually get voted on and approved?

Was it 15, 16?

By the time we vote and approve this, it'll be 2025.

So it's been 10 years since the last comp plan update.

That strategic plan could go through, and I'm not saying because there was some outlying circumstances, it might not be 10 years for the next one, but it probably will be.

By the time it actually gets started, it'll be five years, but when it actually gets completed, it might be closer to seven, eight, or nine.

We could go through a whole other economic development strategic plan update in the meantime.

So I think it's appropriate to kind of paint in the broad strokes.

For what I think is missing, this idea popped up.

And as I was working through this, I think this is the right chapter.

But if others think it should go somewhere else, then I'd be open to suggestions.

But this came up in our town hall at the center, Mr. Richardson.

I'd even appreciate some comments by you on this today if you thought it was a good idea.

If you don't think it's a good idea, then you can lean back and not say anything.

One of the speakers at, we had two questions that day, one of which I brought up earlier at another board meeting that was talking about do other counties or jurisdictions do creative things with how they do taxing to try to do things.

And this was speaking to our out there pitching or selling the idea that we're trying to diversify our tax base.

So that's the umbrella I'm working under here.

and you know that's led me to do some stuff looking around I've asked questions of staff and things like that trying to get at that because I've never pondered that question before.

The second comment from another resident was well if you're trying to reduce the burden which is going to move to 68 if we vote on the budget as proposed the burden on our housing on property is going to be 68%.

The resident said well if you're really wanting to move that number maybe you should set some goals and some things and state

Well, this is what we're going to attempt to do, and this is when we're going to attempt to do it by.

And basically how we do everything, right?

So we're out there pitching this idea that we want to diversify our tax base.

We're using our economic development activity as the how we're going to accomplish it.

But yet we don't really state it anywhere in our planning documents.

So I think in this particular thriving economy section, this is a great place to state,

Look, part of the reason that we have an economic development plan and part of having a thriving economy means for the county that we should be bringing in more revenue from the commercial sector.

and then even start talking about targets potentially or timeline of how we're going to achieve that.

And I think that's bigger than just, you know, Rivanna Futures because there's a lot of other economic development activity like Home Depot and other examples that I could give.

Another one on Rile Road will be coming here to us in a month or so and that's gonna bring a property back onto our tax rolls.

That's currently not because it's housed by a utility.

So I think if we're going to go out and state

Rightfully so, as clearly as we have in our budget town halls, that we're trying to diversify our tax base and economic development is the answer or the approach to get there.

That should be in our comprehensive plan.

I think we should state that as philosophically this is where we're at.

This is a strategy of the county to accomplish it.

And then it would give us time to go, well, if we had to come up with a couple of objectives or action steps to achieve that, it puts us on notice that

We can't just go out and tout it and say we're going to do this, but then not lay out a game plan.

I mean, I think we all agree on that.

But this seems to be the appropriate place.

Yes sir, and I was standing beside you when that discussion happened at the budget town hall and the citizen honed in on the fact that on commercial industry right now, in terms of our revenue picture, we're 11.3%.

On residential, we're at 72%.

Mr Sumner, our Chief Finance Officer who's not in here at the moment has done some initial analysis to show that that 11.3% on commercial industrial used to be in the 15% range and that's not to suggest that there's been a mass exodus of commercial and industry in the community

but what it does suggest is that the residential side in terms of assessment and new growth has grown much faster than commercial and industry and this board has seen that in just the time I've been here when you get the reports from Mr. Lynch in the December time frame he'll break that out and he'll give you assessment growth on the residential side versus commercial side and usually the residential is far outpacing the commercial industry side.

What I would suggest, and I'm not sure I have all the right answers, Mr. Gallaway, is that it is discussed in the economic vitality chapter and that as the work comes back from the economic development strategic plan,

that if there are performance benchmarks that the performance benchmarks live in the economic development strategic plan and the broader reference is in the comprehensive plan that you're looking and recognizing that you need balance.

I do want to say one more thing because for people that are listening they may say I don't get that just commercial and industrial growth reduces the reliance on the residential taxpayer.

And without this third piece, you don't.

And that is the cost for services study.

Weldon Cooper did that.

They're going to be back in front of you on May the 21st to dive into that study.

And just in broad strokes, I want us to remember that residential service from local government, the cost to serve residences, are more than the cost to serve commercial and industry.

and so from building that side of the tax base, we earn revenue that helps to seed some of the obligations and services that we provide through the county.

Yeah, I think I agree that, or appreciate the point about performance metrics could be in the economic developments, because that also gives us a chance to do the work on it and figure out what those benchmarks may be versus just guessing at it, I guess, in here.

But you're, so the other, so I missed, I'm just not remembering all my chapters apparently.

So there's, you're thinking that maybe the wording, well, I guess it could be in both or in the other chapter that you'd mentioned.

In any case, if it's in the comp plan is what I'm hoping for is something that folks could understand or appreciate and want to do.

And it sounds like that could be possible there.

So I'll leave it to the team to figure out.

And again, this came up during the town hall meeting.

So I apologize, didn't bring this up in an earlier time.

I just didn't think about it.

I think from a text standpoint, I think all my other

All my other comments are probably in the actions and the goals.

Ditto.

I don't have, well let me just go through and say a couple of things.

I have more comments about the body text for the next chapter than I do for this one, just to say that.

But I will say that in looking at this document, I really would like to see the pictures identified

as to what they are underneath.

We identify some of them, but I'd like to see just a small identification under those pictures.

Is that Sentara?

Yeah, the captions.

That's a better word.

Thank you.

But I'd like to know what I'm looking at.

There are a couple of typos and I'm not going to bore you with typos but you're nodding your head so you're aware of that.

Okay, because I circled a few and I thought this is... I do agree with a couple of people that I've heard mentioned on the page four that we have the top 10 employers

which I think is interesting, right, for folks to know.

But I'd like to also see what the sectors are.

I think that would be a really good idea.

That's a good place for that to go.

And I must say I was quite taken back

I don't, for example, on page six, I have no clue where that top picture came from.

Again, identifier would be nice, but I'm a little taken back with the KTEC picture.

KTEC is not an Albemarle County school.

Now we have children that go to K-TEC, Albemarle County K-TEC, but if we're talking about a 21st century model,

Oh, thank you.

But that's not the model that we need our children to be.

Albemarle County Public Schools is in the center model and some of those are much better.

And I did note on page seven that we have retail, office, industrial, hotel, manufacturing is missing.

Maybe it shouldn't go there.

Oh, I'm sorry.

On page 7, it says, non-residential land use is within the belt out and analysis are divided into categories, but manufacturing is missing there.

Maybe the industrial covers it.

Light Industrial, I don't know.

Anyway, I'll leave that up to you all.

And then when we get to some of the other discussion, I will say that it does seem like to me that this is a good area to discuss

We don't have any documentation in here that I'm aware of on how much of the 5% of the development area has been underutilized.

In other words, we have 5% we talk about all the time, but Biscuit Run has taken a lot of that land away.

some maybe we could we could argue about whether a lot of it but some of it and there are other things that we have made decisions about deliberately that have removed land from the development area we have right now heightened sense of need for housing and we have a lot of pushback from the community about the density

So I'd like to have somewhere or some information in this document about what amount of land we've actually lost and what the picture is right now as opposed to back in 15 or even when we began with our 5% of the development area.

Yeah, maybe so.

But it does seem like to me that this is a good place to talk about that.

Because there's no doubt that we have reduced the actual usable area, that 5% of usable area, and I think it's worth noting.

And at what point or where in these documents are we going to talk about the, we talked about and you all presented to us, criteria for potential removal of land from the development area.

Remember we were talking about swapping out and we talked about criteria.

The larger picture for the conference plan are three major sections.

There's an introductory section.

There's one that talks about growth management policy.

Yeah, we're hoping to wrap up the calendar that David put on there, his last slide, showed you getting through these 10 chapters, which are really the constitute part three of the conference of plans.

And we'll be finishing that with you all up in early June.

And then we'll be coming back for a work session really on those first two sections.

Yeah, so that's good because it also talks about Albemarle, a property that's owned by Albemarle County.

I'd like to get to that at some point too and see.

In the community facilities section, we are developing a draft that may have all county owned lands on it as an inventory.

Yeah.

These are just thoughts I had as I was reading through this and trying to figure out where they would be appropriate to go, right?

And ideas that we have discussed.

And the only other comment I would make right now on this is that I did note some of the data needs to be updated.

We ought to have, there's a way of getting, I think, more current data than we have.

And I understand there, data can always be lagging.

And sometimes it's hard to capture and I get that.

But I really do think as best we can, we should make sure that we have updated data and not referencing what was in, you know, happened five years ago or whatever.

Yeah.

And that's all I have for right now.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Go back here one second.

Please put on your future list.

I was adding on to what Ned had said about the build-out analysis or someone had presented, I guess PC said about building.

So there was some discussion at some recent meeting about how frequently that was going to be done.

And I don't want that to get lost.

This is not something that should be a five-year interval.

It should be more frequent than that.

So please put that on the someday list.

I'm really grateful for the discussion about the diversification of revenue because I remember Ken Boyd saying that he was worried in 2010 about the high dependence upon residential value and we should be getting more money from commerce and business and it's only gotten worse since.

But I also appreciate what Mr. Richardson said a few minutes ago about the fact that our

residential has taken off.

So it isn't that we're losing on the business side, it's just the residential side has completely obliterated the formula, the fraction.

And so that's going to be harder.

What we haven't talked about, but it's lingering out there and it's not really appropriate for the comp plan either, is in order to reduce the burden on our residents, we have to somehow

level off the or slow the growth of operational costs and hopefully we're getting to that point having had these big investments and things that are the perfect storm right now because ever increasing is ever increasing but having a fairly stable

budget and then having more of the percentage coming from the business side will be very, very helpful.

One clarification for Biscuit Run, 400 acres of it was in the growth area and 800 acres of it was already in the rural area when it was changed back in, whenever that was, 2010.

Now, let me go to my pages here real quick because I have a couple of little things.

On page two, objective four,

It talks about access to jobs and job things, but it neglects to say anything about workforce training for the workers.

So whether that should be a different objective or not, I think that participating workforce training efforts to strengthen skills of workers, because that's something that businesses always mention.

and I had in my notes proposed an extra objective that says encourage rural businesses to thrive consistent with quality of life of rural residents because we're leaving the rural area totally off the list and it is, it may not be as per business as much as enough to scientific but there's still a lot of our residents who are making their living growing something in agriculture.

So I'll just leave that for future thing.

On the top 10 sectors thing, that's something already was mentioned.

Page 5.

The defense industry, this quotes the 2020 impact, which is more than I think almost double what it should be from the 2024 report.

So that's really important to get that updated with information which we already have.

And the total jobs was over 10,000 for all three of those categories several years ago.

So I think it's only going up since then.

The other pushback I will have in the last bullet on the right-hand column, I wrote a note that I've sent in to staff already.

Due to the efforts of our family vineyard and winery owners with the assistance of the CACDB, our community was recognized with that success.

What is written there makes it sound like the CBB did all the work.

And I think that's a real affront to the people who did grow stuff and make the quality of the product that brings that about.

Page 6.

I may be ignorant, but I've heard the term primary business, but I'd never heard the term traded sector business.

So if that's what you mean, hopefully there'll be some better explanation about that.

Or, I mean, there are things in here that are not in the language that I've heard discussed here locally, which makes me wonder where it came from.

On page seven, third line,

Designation of adequate land needs to be adequate, in my opinion, adequate and appropriate for commercial, industrial, and office.

And at the end of that first paragraph, I agree with what is written here, but it's because where higher population can support the businesses is where these businesses will succeed better.

We have a lot of empty

places throughout the rural area where multiple tenants have come and gone and there just aren't enough customers to go by to do any good.

And so we have to be thinking about that, where the buyers are and where they want to do things.

I agree completely about putting manufacturing clearly in that second paragraph because that was something that I had written down as well.

And on the last bullet on the left column,

We don't talk about all the land that we've removed from its prior designation as industrial and heavy industry.

I mean, where Wegmans is now was the brass property and that was industrial and it was employment.

And so for the convenience of owners, the boards have, for certainly the last 20 years until quite recently,

been eager in a way to support transitioning that really expensive and highly desirable property for employment into residential.

And I just think we should avoid doing that.

So that's what that note is all about.

The column on the top on page seven, what are today's numbers?

because 20 years from now, we don't know where we're starting and I don't know what any of those numbers mean unless it says what we have now.

And I think that certainly in Jeff Werner's old files is all sorts of great data that Rob can find for you that will tell us where we've been for the last 20 years.

And the last thing on this page, in the three zones in the Schick Razor there on the right-hand side, where does redevelopment fit?

and it's not mentioned anywhere.

We're talking about new properties, new properties, new properties, but we're totally ignoring hundreds of acres of parking lots and other places that need to be repurposed in a more effective way and

On page 8, on the right-hand side, only one property met the description of tier 4.

Shopping centers have all those utilities and things involved.

Many of them have transit already, but they're not being considered, I don't think, in the analysis which has happened so far.

And it also, they were not considered in the build-out analysis that I think is going to be redone in the next period of time.

That will change the numbers considerably.

So prioritizing redevelopment is important to me on that.

And I will stop.

Thank you very much.

I would just add to make sure that we are working on a development, we are working to a new build out analysis.

We just signed a contract this week.

And we've talked to you all about this before.

It's basically updating and providing some other figures to talk about having a tool when we go to rezoning to see how well we're using the development area.

So we're hard at work staff level to do that.

OK, well, that's that's wonderful.

And the criteria you've added in the criteria that the board suggested during that earlier discussion that weren't there before.

Great.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand what you were referring to.

Are you saying that we are, you're updating all the data that we have here from 2022, etc. ?

Good, that'll be great.

Thank you.

So on page four, I noticed you said the top 10 employers in Albemarle County by the total number of employees, which is important.

It would also be, I would like to see, and maybe no one else, but I would like to see

the top money-making employers in the county.

So, for example, let's say you have a business that maybe only has three employees but they bring in five million a year, something like that.

You know, I would like to see by

Businesses or and even maybe types of businesses like maybe you have different types of businesses that are all related but independently owned but as a group what do they bring in?

I don't know if you have stats like that but that would be something to maybe if they do bring in a lot of revenue for us to be able to look at and maybe support that.

That was my thinking.

On page

On page seven, the lower right hand corner, you say 22,900 total development area parcels.

Okay, so that's in the development area.

Page seven, I'm sorry.

See the little triangle on the lower right hand corner and it says, underneath that it says 39 development area tier qualified parcels.

Doesn't say how many of what tier.

There's 39 different parcels that fit the criteria.

To be a tier one, two, three, four, five, or to start out as a one and then go up to a five possibly.

Those are the, within the triangle are the,

the parameters by which that define those parcels so they have to have a minimum of three acres they have to be vacant and they have to be appropriately zoned and designated so this is an analysis of sort of short term you think of it as sort of short term availability for some

for a business that can come in and build either immediately, it's what we call a pad-ready site, or that they could build within the next 12 to 18 months.

So it's not a total analysis of inventory, it's really an analysis of sort of what level of site readiness for someone to be able to develop kind of risk-free without having to rezone.

So 39 parcels fit those qualifications out of 22,900.

That's right.

Okay, that's interesting.

On page eight, we only have one property that is tier four.

Where is that located?

On page 8, it says only one property in the development area met the description of a tier 4.

North Fork?

Oh, bud.

Thank you.

EDO did most of that analysis.

Welcome, Ms.

Good afternoon.

I'm Emily Kilroy, Director of Economic Development.

Thank you for having me here.

That would be the North Fork Discovery Site property.

And as was earlier referenced by the Board of Supervisors, some of that information has changed a little bit.

For example, that analysis that was done a couple of years ago doesn't have Rivanna Futures in it at all as even an opportunity parcel.

And so, you know, it's a shifting landscape.

Some of the reasons for the dated information is sort of waiting for what results we get and what analysis we get out of the Economic Development Strategic Plan.

That makes sense.

Thank you.

And then underneath that to the third bullet, staff on page eight, staff estimated that nine additional properties could also be supported or could also support development.

and the 12 to 18 month timeframe, but may requires some extension of infrastructure.

I mean, to me, that's, I mean, nine potential, that's important.

And that's something I think we wanna bookmark and make sure that we do accomplish that.

And that it's in an area that we can actually, the EDA can actually promote development

And those are all my questions right now.

Thank you.

And I'm just going to maybe summarize, but also just add my comments to some of the comments already made.

I certainly agree with Supervisor Galloway's comment about the need to diversify the tax base being something that should be highlighted in here as part of our economic development chapter.

And I agree identifying the photos would be helpful.

and fixing typos and things like that.

I also agree that the top 10 employers is nice, but additional information, maybe top sectors would be very helpful.

I understand also maybe perhaps top revenues or thinking about other ways to parse this.

In that juncture, I wonder whether

We look at the current governor's Virginia research quadrangle efforts and whether how we fit in with that could be part of our aspirations as well.

We haven't really brought that in to bear here.

I was missing what the fourth one was.

And obviously I agree that industrial includes manufacturing maybe could just be put in as a reference.

There was a question, a comment about identifying lost land and I think that a lot of this is part of the growth management policy, so I appreciate that.

But there's also a lot of updating.

that I think has been identified and I hope will happen.

I recognize that this is tied heavily to the Economic Development Strategic Plan but I wouldn't want to see old data go in even though the other is going to have more updated data.

I'd rather pull it out than put in old data.

And with respect to some of the comments about redevelopment, I guess I had a question there when it comes to a spot like Home Depot, for example, that parcel empty as a mall,

no longer being utilized.

Where does that, how is that categorized?

It's vacant in one sense and not in another.

I'd have to go back and not being as closely involved with that, but with the build-out analysis, what is looked at is

the relationship of what is developed in its value versus its total value of the land as a proxy to determine whether something is developed or not.

Okay.

So I think we'd have to go back and look because while the mall was almost dead, it wasn't completely dead.

And that's one of the things that the mission was suggesting was a little bit more information about how that study

Some of the background of that study would make it a little bit clearer what those numbers mean.

I do think that some of that vacant land does show up in the inventory, but I can't answer specifically for that site.

But if a site is underdeveloped, the value of the property is a certain percentage of the total value, the built

the invested built value, then they're determined to be underdeveloped properties and available for redevelopment.

Okay, I very much appreciate that.

I just would wonder then when this, Supervisor Malle called it the Schick Razor Graph, I think, or something like that.

It took me a moment to understand the triangle and how that reference came about, but 22,900 total development area parcels is whittled down to 39 development area tier qualified parcels.

I guess I don't know where

Parcels that are underdeveloped fit in this, whether they're not even included or whether they're included.

And so I would want to make sure that that was clear before we start putting that in and start thinking we don't have things, but they are in fact lots of properties that are underdeveloped.

I don't know.

Just wasn't very clear to me.

I also agree with Supervisor Mallek's comment about not understanding traded versus primary.

They're used two paragraphs in a row and one talks about traded versus non-traded then the next refers to primary and I'm not sure what the difference is.

Perhaps

Emily Kilroy is responsible for that.

So primary was language that we've used traditionally here in Albemarle County.

Traded sector is really more in lined with how my peers in the Commonwealth sort of talk about the types of business attraction work that they are trying to do.

I can't speak to the full history of was there a shift in the parlance of economic developers, but traded sector is how other communities talk about those types of businesses where they're selling goods and services beyond just the specific community that you're in.

and so it's referring to the same thing.

I think it's just an attempt to align the language that we use here in Albemarle with the language that's used by the Virginia Economic Toolmen Partnership, the Regional Partnership for Economic Development and others.

Thank you for that clarification.

And again, I'm repeating a lot of the comments that were previously made because I agree with them and I just say ditto otherwise.

The only other comment I guess I'll make is just to clarify for the other supervisors, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about identifying industrial loss to commercial, then change to residential.

And so I did provide just as a background Southern Western neighborhoods parcel that's the

Before we go on, the discussion has made me think of something.

Diversification, which Ned talked about and Ann highlighted as well, I certainly agree with that.

I'm curious because we talk about now we're at 11% with the commercial.

and I can remember, I don't know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, maybe 12 years ago, we were, and I think somebody referenced it a little while ago, we were somewhere around 15 or 16%.

My question really is, I was told by staff at that time, because I remember telling the community this, that a healthy

The economy, which is what we're talking about, should have a mix of about 30% commercial

that high.

And I guess I'm asking, I don't even know what is, what I'm trying to get at is, what is best practice?

If we're at 11, and we're trying to get to 16, where a community should really be at, just make it up right now, right, 25, is there a best practiced percent?

I'm just,

No, sir.

The answer is a frustrating, it depends.

It depends on what your community's assets are.

So if we were located on the Chesapeake Bay, we would put a lot of effort and attention on growing our tourism sector.

and that might account for 60% of our revenues.

If you had a small town, coastal town that was really a tourism driven economy.

Heavy industrial cities have a much higher percentage of revenues that are gonna come from commercial.

And so part of it is, is that us?

Does that feel right?

There's not a magic percentage that folks look at, but it's really, 11% is low.

but is a target 20%, 30%, 40%.

That really depends on how much industrial activity and commercial activity, larger commercial activity feels comfortable in the community and that's where the land use conversation gets folded into the economy conversation.

That's helpful.

Thank you.

Yeah, and that was really a good answer, Emily.

I think what I would add, Board, and you did some two-on-two work with the economic development consultants.

Remember when they came and they said, we've looked, we've tried to find peer communities that have attributes like here.

and all of you are well traveled and you have been to other communities where you would see similarities to this community, differences to this community and I think the consultants did a good job of trying to find, you're not going to find communities that are identical to us but you'll find communities that have what I would call attributes that are driving, helping to drive

the economy of what the economy looks like.

And so what I would basically say is through this work with the economic development consultants, we will learn about what other communities look like.

And then we would be able to drill down and lean in a little harder on

what we see and how that informs us with our community.

And then there's just things about us that are just like no one else.

Like the fact that we have a 95-5 split in the rural area that's existed for decades that helps to drive the balance between the rural quality of life and the urban quality of life.

that we talked about at the community breakfast about how this is a unique community in terms of its wealth and how that affects things like local composite index and it cost us 10 million dollars last year with school funding from the state and then what kind of pressure does that put on local government to diversify revenues and to look to within the development area

that develop density that can help to better balance the problems that we've got associated with rising residential costs.

And so I think that strategic plan is going to come back and can maybe help plug that in.

What Mr. Sumner has done is he's also looked at other Virginia communities just to do simple benchmark analysis on looking maybe at 10 to 15 communities in Virginia.

to see what's that balance look like.

Also, I think we need to pay attention to the city because, again, it's confined with ten and a half square miles, but this board knows well that we are tied to the hip with the city if for no other reason the revenue sharing agreement, which is substantial.

It's a substantial amount of money that moves back and forth between the city and the county.

I think all of that helps to drive things that we need to consider.

I think where Emily and I would land quickly is 11.3% is too low.

And I believe the year-over-year assessments with residential has sort of balanced that.

I sort of bubbled that to the top.

It's a really long answer, but it's really important.

And I really appreciate that and I appreciate taking the time to have this discussion now because I really do think it's critical.

And Jeff, I would add to what you just said, we also have the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia Foundation who continue to take properties.

and that's worthy of at some point talking about too and how much properties are they taking or are at risk.

We've got to get wrap our arms around that because it's critical for planning if nothing else.

I will say that I do hear often in our community we're doing a great job everything is just fine we don't want to change anything.

Everything should just stay the same, like it has been for the last 30 years.

And I don't want people to run in circles, scream and shout, but I'm just saying that there are some things that we need to change, such as diversification, or we are really going to be pricing much of our community if we have not already priced some of our community out.

And this is part of the discussion.

And we're not perfect.

No one is perfect.

But the decisions that we make certainly impact where we are right now and the problems we have right now.

And to just keep on doing the same thing is not going to work.

It's going to get only worse, I'm just saying.

And that comes to diversification and looking at how some things need to change.

Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but some things need to be changed.

Thank you.

Board, I next propose that we go through the objectives.

And at the risk of some page turning, perhaps we can do objectives one and two together because two spills over to the next page but has a lot of the same type of topics.

And then we can try to do three, four, and five together.

I forgot to mention in the first round the addition of and attraction is incredibly important it's not just retention and creation because what ends up happening if we don't focus on attraction we have to remember that companies that start here grow here are attracted by others and then they may leave here because they need to for their own business viability we will try to compete to keep them but we're not going to be successful in that if we're not doing the same thing then we're undercutting our own efforts

Now, we get to control what those sectors are and what we want to attract.

But if we're not trying to attract new stuff, outside stuff from coming in here, it's going to be incredibly difficult to move that percentage, that share of percentage for commercial.

Because there's only so much that can start up and go, and there's only so much growth that current companies can do.

So I think that's an important addition to that and agree with that.

I think this is probably more for the economic strategic plan, but tier 4 and tier 5 prep, so I'm just going to call it out here, but coming up with some sort of incentive, game plan, all of the above approach,

to take lands, whether they're vacant or somewhat developed or underdeveloped, and moving them to tier four and tier five, especially I think with the emerging biotech sector that's happening, biotech's not gonna come in and build a building.

They're not going to come in and put the pad down.

If they don't have a place that they can move into, they're going to go to a community where it exists.

And we have one tier four site, and that tier four doesn't have a building on it.

It's just pad ready.

So those tier five sites, we have to start thinking, how do we get some of these places to that?

And as a locality, how do we start to incentivize that?

And it's not just incentive by meeting dollars and coming out of our ADA fund, but it's also the literal work that we do, whether it's staff, whether it's county executive department, supervisors, all of the above, to network, to build, to talk about things that get those companies in here.

The biotech, I mean, it's just how businesses work.

If you hit your spreadsheet and have to build a building and a parking lot and put in infrastructure, and you've got another community that's already got that, why would you do that?

And sometimes we think, well, because it's Albemarle.

You get to pay extra and be an Albemarle.

Well, come on.

I mean, I get that.

I think our supervisor, Fairchild and Fluvanna talks about come here's and from here's.

Well, if we think of businesses that way, our from here's appreciate that.

But the come here's are looking at a lot of other places.

And so we have to figure that out.

But that's probably the detail level performance objective work that we're going to do in the strat plan.

But at least I'll call it out there.

I think 2's, for having 11 actions and then some sub-actions down there,

It almost speaks that there's probably an Econ 4 or 5 that needs to be figured out.

I don't know, maybe not.

I'm not going to get too worried about it, but there's a lot under Econ 2 and then we're throwing in the Rivanna Futures and the defense sector stuff and that's where we start getting 11 and 11A and 11B.

We may need to either refer it to the strategic plan or we may want to rethink when anytime I see an objective get this bulky with action items that maybe there's different categorization and maybe not, I could be wrong.

I will say under 2.4, let me read my note real fast. 2.4.

Analyze use of county-owned land to adjust priority land use needs, include opportunities to develop, initiate county-led.

So my note was need to take this further.

The point was made about losing commercial to residential.

The pressure to convert to housing cannot take away our highest and best use for further tier four and five sites.

So we have to take this analysis further.

They might be a tier two, but if that's a prime tier five location,

then we have to have a way to analyze that so we don't go with just the incredible need for housing and go there.

I mean I know there's a project coming out that'll be coming from Rio to convert some commercial over but it's a smaller location and it's probably a good use for it to convert to residential.

But there are other sites in the county that I would not say that about.

because of where they're at and their location and how much space there could be there.

So I'd like to see that two, four maybe thought out more.

That's such a long action item that that probably is even a couple of there's probably a couple of action items in there.

So maybe just take a look at that one and

See what we can get at.

And again, this is the one chapter where I've been coming more and more comfortable with punting to the strategic plan.

Because this stuff, you have to be flexible on this stuff.

There's just no way to, because you don't know what you're going to encounter.

Two.

I don't know which one this is.

I didn't write my name.

This must be generally for econ too.

But somewhere in these action items, I think I saw some, I forget what it was called.

It wasn't called expedited review, but it sounded like there was some sort of streamlining or some sort of language for that.

I just want to make sure that we are in these action items, not just thinking about incentives,

that we give like grants or other things, but capture on the work we're doing in CDD that's streamlining the process.

Because just like in housing, how fast or how slow it, how long it takes to get it up and functioning is critical.

And I would almost suggest even more so for businesses.

I mean, a timeline, how fast you can get to market if you are new, factors in.

And, you know, my guess is there's just places that, and I'm not just going to blame it on Albemarle, I'm sure there's other counties that are like, that take some time, but the fastest ones may win.

And that's just part of the analysis they do.

And we have to contend with that.

So I think that we need to call that out or state what we're trying to do to expedite process generally.

and not just calling out favorites that we're going to expedite review for.

And just to clarify, we do actually have a priority review process.

Oh, there it is.

Update the priority review process.

Yeah, that priority review process.

And that one speaks to the environmental stuff.

That was the language I was looking for, that priority review process.

I take your point.

For special projects, we really need to move fast.

I just want to add on to Supervisor Mallek's point about some rural area type of businesses.

He was talking about inappropriate locations.

I made this point somewhere earlier in one of these AC44 meetings about like crossroad communities or how these businesses function out in the rural area.

Well, historically they popped up.

My point then was that they popped up because somebody had the genius to do it and the wherewithal to do it.

And then that became the crossroad community or the trigger.

And now if we try to force that,

It didn't create that way, so why would we think it would work if we tried to force it to create that way?

But if we also try to say, well, we are only going to put rural area businesses where there are people, you lose what the rural area could provide and has provided in the past.

What we have done with our rural area is we've put regulation and other things that could inhibit or prohibit business practices for making those things profitable that didn't exist back when some of those rural area businesses came in to be.

And this was my point about restaurants.

If you limit, or not restaurants, the 10 seats or whatever in some store, it's like, well, okay.

That's a regulation that inhibits the ability of that business.

It's really quaint and nice for those of it that like to visit a little spot like that out in the rural area.

But for the business owner, it's a killer.

So I just wanna call out that in a thriving economy,

Again, restate that we can't just think of it as thriving development area economy and that the development area somehow has to subsidize an average performing rural area economy.

thriving means something different in the development area than it does in the rural area.

And we should adjust in a similar fashion that we look at land use rules.

We should probably look at rural area, target sectors that we think are good for our, that would work with our rural area strategies.

And then really look at our zoning to say, what are we inhibiting or prohibiting that makes an existing business that started and is growing and trying to thrive in Albemarle.

hitting a wall and now they can no longer set to thrive.

I think this is probably in our breweries and cideries and wineries.

I think this is in some of those.

These can't just be pet projects, people that have lots of wealth.

They have to be able to perform in a way that produces success for the business owner because then in turn it will produce success in what we're trying to do in collecting revenue from those places as well.

For the purpose of nose counting, I want to just quickly note some things from the previous round that I would like to just co-sign, co-stamp text captions for images.

I mentioned this in a previous chapter, but I would apply it here.

I think that's probably prudent and helpful.

I do believe it would be valuable to in some way, either in the narrative or maybe in an objective, highlight our own stated goal, which feels like a fairly newly fully arrived at, but something we've been talking about of revenue diversification.

And I am, like it sounds, both Supervisor Gallaway and Supervisor Mallek.

I'm fully in favor of an additional objective talking about rural economic development.

I think that's going to also be quite a thorny thing as we kind of all try and agree on what we think rural economic development means and looks like.

But I think the ideas that have been thrown around here are probably appropriate.

for kind of scoping that discussion about what a Econ 6 objective around how we're going to work with incentivizing, encouraging, and enabling

rural economic development that still is consistent with the expectations of the rural community.

And I'm not going to throw those ideas out right now because I don't have to.

I wanna talk about 2.2, right?

This is kind of a crux of a lot of what we are looking at when we're talking in the comprehensive plan, which is kind of the intersection of land use and economic development.

And I also do want to recognize like,

I am not entirely sure if we actually have separate parts of our comprehensive plan that expressly contradict us.

I'm thinking we have discussed at some length, in part thanks to some friends of ours in the audience, the conversion of existing commercial to residential.

And I wonder, I know we have a slide of

that cross references the development area, things that are implicated in this.

Is that touched on at all on that slide?

We went by it very quickly.

A crosswalk of development area objectives and actions that are implicated in this chapter.

Because I do think we have a specific action, right, that is about commercial redevelopment or repurposement for residential.

These are some of the actions that we cited in the development area that we felt related to providing for inventory and providing for the employment districts and activity centers.

I guess I just raise this to highlight.

I think it's valuable for us to note when we have created a pinch point, right?

Like we can say the nice things all day long on the action statements, but sometimes we're creating cost benefit decisions and 2.2 is a cost benefit decision, right?

It conflicts with some of our other goals.

and we will, maybe that does not need to be dealt with at this stage.

Maybe it's something that we deal with when we actually implement the tier below action of like metrics that we're observing.

But I just want to highlight this board, right?

Like when we say we're going to protect high value sites from encroachment of incompatible land uses, that means we are going to fight the conversion of commercial to residential.

We are going to fight the conversion of light industrial

to residential because that is the most likely encroaching land use, right?

That is the highest economic deliverable that you can get from land right now in Albemarle County.

So that is the thing that's going to encroach.

So if we mean that, we need to knuckle down to what that means.

And I'm not sure this board has fully grappled with that kind of conflict.

And you also might notice I'm not specifically coming down on our conflict because I don't know that we have the shaping language for that conversation right now.

So help me out.

This applies to 1.1 and also how I think about this.

When we talk about economic development, we talk at some great length about target industries.

And I don't believe we actually use, we identify them or even use that language much in here.

I think

If the timing were different, I would envision that this comprehensive plan would cite what those target industries are.

But there is the potential for those adjustments to those target industries.

So in drafting this with the Economic Development Office, we felt it was maybe a safer approach at this time not to cite those until we know that they're going to continue to be the same.

But I think you can go either way with that.

I think ideally it would be good for this document to sort of cite those higher level expectations.

That's a pretty high level, but clear expectation.

So that's why it's not shown in there.

I believe that's most of what I have.

I would say something

I don't know how to articulate this into a change, but something that leaps off the page for me is when I see something that seems responsive to current circumstances rather than like generational outlook, right?

I think of this as a 20 year plan.

I know we review it every five years, but we don't change it every five years.

We change it every 10 years at best it looks like.

And we notionally say it's a generation 20 year plan.

I look at section 2.2 on and I see something that is responsive to the planning and activity we are currently engaged in in Rivanna Futures.

And I think those are all the right steps.

They're all the things I would expect us to be doing.

And it is also basically stating our current activities and our current intentions.

It does not smack of the kind of, frankly, long range planning I would want to see in this, right?

What are we going to think about how we're going to energize and incentivize?

the second order effects of Rivanna Station.

What are we going to try and lobby for with state support for broader like expansion of what even is possible, right?

We're talking about defense because that is the opportunity that is presented to us by existing circumstances.

What are the opportunities we want to develop?

What are the ones that we want to partner with state agencies to create opportunity windows that don't currently exist?

I'm not seeing that in there.

And that seems like the kind of thing that, you know, I think we want our comprehensive plan to be aspirational and long range.

And that is the kind of aspirational and long range thinking that I would like to see captured there.

I appreciate that it kind of gives me kind of a tutorial of what the next five years of Rivanna Station is going to look like, or Rivanna Futures is going to look like, but I want to see beyond that.

And I want to have the confidence that the comprehensive plan is seeing beyond that.

Thank you.

I don't disagree, or I agree with much of what has been said already.

Well, we seem to have gone beyond that, so maybe we should in light of time, and I'll give people a chance to come back.

I get worried because when we have that many, I don't know whether some of them can be collapsed together, some of them can be put in another, I don't know, I'm going to leave that to you guys, but I think looking at that list is, it's too long.

And they're all, I mean I'm not saying they're not worthy, but I just think that there must be a way to not, go ahead David, what?

No, okay.

Just getting ready.

Anyway, you get my point.

I have already addressed a couple of my thoughts on some of this as when I made some earlier comments.

I will say that just a general principle, we talk about CACVB and tourism and that brings a lot of revenue into our community and I'm all in favor of it having said that.

We have to be very careful, and this is just a broad statement, of not putting our eggs all in one basket.

Because with a downturn in our economy, it's really easy sometimes for tourism to go away.

And so I just am always looking at that balance

of what tourism, how to balance our revenue sources, right?

Oh, and I'm, well, are we going on?

Should I go to three and four, Jim?

Okay, so I pretty much said for three.

When we talk about local workforce access to job training, we have got to figure out how to work better to get the county public school system

and us in the Chamber of Commerce who hire our graduates or should want to hire our graduates, right, to keep them local.

We need to figure out how to make that connection on career pathways and creating the jobs that our students as they graduate can take here so they can stay here and live here if they choose to.

And I just, I see us, I see the chamber over here and the public schools over here and us here and somehow or another we've got to figure out a better connection to all three.

There was a time when the school division was very involved with the chamber, not anymore.

and we were perhaps more involved with the chamber.

I'm just saying.

But it's really important when we're talking about career pathways and job prospects and the kids.

We talk about on five, action item five, essential transportation and infrastructure improvements to access employment opportunities.

And I really want to stress that because that is so critical, especially perhaps in my district, so selfishly in my district, but we often spend a lot of time talking about bike paths and connections for recreation.

And I think that's all fine and good.

But in my urban area, I'm trying to get sidewalks for people so they can walk to a grocery store, so they can walk to a pharmacy, so they can walk to their job safely, right?

And I'm not sure how many of them are going to bike.

I mean, I leave that up to, but most of them will walk.

And I just feel like we don't have enough conversations around how to get people safely to critical needs like grocery stores.

Pharmacies and jobs.

And I'm not putting down recreational biking, and certainly it can be an economic driver, but we need to focus, I think, especially when we're having a downturn in the economy like we are now in some chaos.

We need to figure out how we can help people get to this infrastructure.

And

I've already mentioned this, need to know how many acres of developed land we have lost to parks and other rezoning criteria for trading land.

I've already mentioned that because I had notes about that.

And you know, I remember when Roger was here as our economic development director.

And we ask that every rezoning, remember this Ned, that every rezoning that came to us needed to go to economic development for them to make a comment on whether or not it was an appropriate rezoning to take.

commercial or industrial land away.

And we have stopped doing that.

Maybe we stopped because, if I remember correctly, every time the staff went to him and asked, he said, oh, that'll be fine.

Well, if it's a rubber stamp, then that's not going to help us any, right?

It has to actually be meaningful.

And we would have to be willing if they said no.

You're pulling that mic down and I'm looking at your body language.

Do you remember Ann and Ned?

Yeah.

I think, and I think the, I'm sorry, I think the intent is with this kind of scorecard when developments come before us.

I remember that we used to do it and, um,

It was actually useful internally for my recollection.

Much more useful for you all than before it gets to us.

Yeah.

And that's all I have.

Thank you.

No, it's fine.

Thank you.

Let's see.

A couple of notes that I just don't want to forget for your future work.

Having dates for tables, things like that, you have some and some without, so that would be very, very helpful.

We've talked about primary business already.

I wrote a couple of things down when we were discussing about the business and commercial and residential.

If you are a community with a nuclear power plant, it's much easier for you to have a 60-40 split, which one of our neighbors does have.

But they have a small population and very, very high value tax revenue source there.

If you're a county with Reagan Airport, even though you have much greater population, you have

Huge assets.

So we are in a difficult spot with, and it's more challenging perhaps, and we have to figure out, I'm not diminishing the need to do it.

I just think, boy, these are things that make it trickier for us.

But I certainly get it about what the location appropriate measure, the Chesapeake Bay for Matthews County, that was just a fantastic example.

I guess I need to, I know we're going to be discussing the cost of services at a future meeting, but for those same counties who have lots of business still, they did not go out and seek residential

Rapid Development on purpose.

They wrote it down to say, we know that residential is not going to pay for itself.

And therefore, to protect our existing taxpayers, we're not going to go out there and become the bedroom for Richmond, for example.

And there are lots of counties throughout the Commonwealth whom you read about who are still very clear about that.

And they understand the give and take on that issue.

I love the discussion that Ned started about the rural businesses because it brought to mind Mickey Tavern, which was in Earliesville, was on the stagecoach road between Richmond and the Valley.

That's where it went.

And so that's just a perfect example.

Murray Electric Box was out there and employed 1200 people for 20 years.

And it was put on the backside of the Murray Farm panorama and on Rio.

I mean, Ray's Ford Road.

So these are things where the transition happens in the modern globalization that it's gone to warehouse and small business now and has cabinet makers and other important small business craftspeople in there.

So it's in very good use, but not quite the same as being one of the two largest manufacturers of electric switch boxes in the country, which is what it was for a long time.

Rural economic health.

Yes, that's going to be interesting.

I would support having a separate objective for military facilities.

I think that would be a way to quickly sever option two or objective two in half as to be able to or wherever that is.

There it is.

Yes, to make it more manageable and

In response to another comment talking about protection of those for non-compatible sites, I think Mike was mentioning this, what came to my mind was a rezoning for high density residential just directly south of Rivanna Station, which would have been an incredible security risk for them.

And now that is something with site control that the county has, which will not happen.

but it's that's the kind of interference that I was thinking of rather than versus industry versus housing but there are as many different examples as we can can do but I have no idea what the next 10 years will bring in economic development or at Rivanna Station only because in the last 18 years it seems like it's been a whole new ballgame about every three years and so my brain can't have that

any detail about that right now.

I am very worried about tourism as

was mentioned on the radio yesterday.

They talked about the Canadians are the Virginia's highest cohort in tourism.

So we're going to be up against it real quick.

I'm also completely supportive of prioritizing sidewalks in the 5.1 because in addition to Jewett, older Crozet neighborhoods within a half mile of major shopping and employment and the people are walking in the street and they're facing dump trucks and it's just awful.

Okay, now let me jump over here.

All right, number 2.3.

Well, attraction is

important to talk about and that'll be a bigger discussion.

I think the previous discussion five years ago or more was let's strengthen what we have here now rather than be chasing our tails again to bring some new people in when we haven't done our homework job to keep our homegrown folks growing and happy and able to stay.

So

For 2.3, prioritize redevelopment of existing buildings, parking areas, and brownfields is a way that I would reorganize that and have sent this to staff for their consideration already.

We definitely need more details about 2.4 and dividing that into something more manageable, fewer sentences to be able to manage it.

Really establishing more detail.

I'm looking forward to the enhanced detail on the other sites coming forward.

I already talked about that.

Okay, 4.3.

I've said this about 100 times in the last three months.

We cannot ignore the major source of funding for job workforce training, which is the federal and state workforce WIOA money.

And we've got to put it in there that we are partnering with federal and state workforce training systems.

Public schools should partner with these agencies, not try to duplicate them.

And the Pathways was a state program that was locally adopted.

So I just really want to try to get this language so that it's

We don't have to do everything over again just because we're Albemarle, just like Virginia seems to think it always has a better idea than everybody else in the country, the Virginia way.

But I'm not sure that it's always right.

So I just want to try to make the best use of any and all information that we can get, as well as the funding which is available that we should be using instead of duplicating it out of the county budget.

And I will stop there.

Thank you.

I won't be long, but I do agree with the major, actually almost everything that Supervisor Galloway said, I thought he brought up some really good, strong points for looking into the future.

Especially, I'm gonna mention something, the permit process, and I know you've mentioned about how we have priorities and then regular ones, but I think

I think the whole system, and I think you're working on that if I'm correct, that you're working to improve that.

That's what I hear from developers, businesses, is that the permit process takes way too long.

But I think you are addressing that, which I'm thinking, is that correct?

Yes, we are looking at that extensively.

I mean, EP&L is going to certainly help us with the new software program to be able to track our

Because, you know, that does mean money.

That is money, the time that it takes to develop this.

Another thing, I think, Supervisor Andrews, are you bringing this up?

I brought it up earlier.

Pardon?

I brought it up.

Oh, you're going to be discussing?

We did briefly, but... Well, I know.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, I mean, I, we're talking about not making office light industrial into residential, but I thought we had looked at that.

I don't think it's the, you know, I'm changing my mind.

I don't think it's the greatest area for frankly, residential, but we're talking about having

I think that's something that the EDA needs to be

We're going to...

Pardon?

We're going to.

That's fantastic, fantastic.

I know retention of the youth was brought up, but we lose the youth here, 25 to 35, I think that's the basic age gap.

They're here, they get educated, they go somewhere else.

Why?

There's a lot more to offer.

than what we have.

I think employment-wise and things to do, although I do think, I do believe that tourism really plays an important part because with tourism that also gives activities for our youth to do.

So maybe they may remain, you know, we have rafting, we have biking, we have

wineries we have, good food.

There's a number of things.

But what we found is that the youth, they come back once they start families.

Then this is the place they come back to.

But it is interesting to be able to retain that.

I'm not quite sure how we do that.

I do believe in the rural areas that we encourage small businesses in the rural areas that are appropriate in a rural area.

Not just open up the floodgates, of course not, but crafts and things like that.

There are places in the rural area where you can have businesses and that does add to the economy.

Now, is it everywhere?

No, of course not.

But it is appropriate in some places.

We have that now, you know, little markets, little venues for people.

So those are my

main considerations.

And I will say regarding tourism, tourism brings in 1.3 billion.

Tourism brings in more than Rivanna Station as far as the tax base and such.

So I think that's something that we can continue to really promote.

Once again, I think we need to be flexible and not, I don't, as a government, I don't think we should be

This is what we've done.

I think we do need to open up other venues.

We do need to have other ideas.

We need to bring in other types of businesses that will come here.

Because if we don't, no businesses may come here.

We have to be creative.

I think that's what entrepreneurs are looking for, frankly.

That's what happened with the Biohub up in North Fork.

I mean, that's now really on the verge of

of Exploding, that was a really good investment.

And I think that could be, and we're going to be a biotech center, then we have to expand that.

So those are my comments.

Thank you.

I agree with a lot of the comments that have been made.

I'll try to be very brief and just be specific to the objectives that are in here.

I guess I agree that two is just too big and unwieldy.

I also found there was places where things overlapped and I didn't understand why there were more than one.

So 2.4 talks about

initiate county-led rezonings.

But then 2.8 talks about initiate county-led rezonings.

I'm missing something.

2.6, 7, and 9 all talk about site readiness in different ways.

So again, there seems to be some just could be some tightening that could happen.

2.7 talks about from startup to corporate.

And I guess I know what that means, but I find the language a little odd because startups are often just corporations that are starting up.

Certainly I agree with the comments about attracting businesses that belongs in objective three where it talks about retention and expansion and it could be considered there as a place to add additional actions related to how those might fit in with the plan.

In addition, Supervisor Galloway had mentioned

priority review, and 3.1 and 4.2 both talk about that.

But obviously, I think the comment was that it should be broader than just those specific reasons.

And 4.3, Supervisor Mallek mentioned the workforce training.

And I wondered whether some mentioned since it talks about the high school center model, some mention of working with PVCC, whether that belongs in this section as well when we're talking about workforce development.

I agree with the idea that an objective ECON 6 on rural opportunities might be something worth flushing out to see where it could lead us so we can discuss that.

A comment I'll make is that there's a lot of comments about people being able to stay here and I feel very fortunate to have been able to come back here after having gone to school here.

But thousands and thousands of students come through Charlottesville to go to school.

And it's just not always going to be possible that they'll be able to stay.

But yeah, I understand.

Families, it's also, but it's part of the same picture in that they're all ultimately competing for the same type of opportunities.

And we'll have to see where that discussion could lead.

Thank you.

We are running short of time.

Super quick, and that is a suggestion from a constituent.

We didn't mention veterans.

So in our military chunk, the contribution for the active duty and the veteran residents who returned to our area was the suggestion in addition to sort of doing some wordsmithing on the military component there.

Thank you.

and that's, I wanna talk about objective four real quick.

I am so glad it's here.

And I recognize that this is in part in response to a lot of community feedback we got on this issue that it's kind of incorporated in for us.

It feels to me, and I think I've kind of heard people responding to this, but maybe in less pointed language, it feels really underdeveloped to me currently.

And to speak broadly before I speak specifically on this, I want to recognize, right?

economic development capacity as a county has developed so much very quickly.

And I think we see that a lot, right?

Like there's so much new learnings that are coming to us from our economic development staff.

And it's also heavily, I mean, it's heavily business partner focused learnings, right?

That is what that new capacity is heavily focused on.

I don't think that's wrong, but I don't see that level of formation and development and capacity in how we think of workforce development yet.

from staff.

I just don't see, and maybe that's unfair, but I don't feel, this does not reflect to me the level of comfort and proficiency with what workforce development looks like that I see from the rest of this chapter.

It is just underdeveloped.

It does not represent to me a level of expertise.

And with that, I want to say like the objectives, specifically one and three, or sorry, the actions one and three, are

are broad to the point that anything could take credit for them.

And they're not particularized enough to actually direct any kind of meaningful action to me.

One, like promoting the development of industries, right?

That could be creating an evaluative criteria for economic development programs that are going to come to us.

It could be creating a guidance document for

what we would want to see from an economic development partner, from an industry partner related to workforce development, right?

Like here are the things we expect from partners.

I don't think we have such a thing.

It could be increasing resources or support to our career one stop that was, as I understand, formed about four years ago and then like checked off as a box.

We have a career one stop and I don't know that we have continual engagement.

or continual reevaluations and assessments of that program.

It could be reinvestigating our partnership with the local workforce development board, which is a resource that I think Ann Mallek knows about, and I'm not sure I hear talked about other than from her.

And that's kind of like a core piece of this.

Similarly, providing resources to Albemarle County schools,

I don't think we're thinking through what that means.

I'm not seeing on the page what that means.

That could be we as an employer can sponsor apprenticeship programs.

We can convene employer consortia to partner with the schools.

We could, I mean, PVCC isn't talked about at all, but like a core thing we could do is we could be providing stipends to PVCC.

We could even identify specific trades or industries we want to stimulate by providing

We don't have any of that particularity here.

And some of that I'm sure will come from like the KPIs we established with this, but

I think there needs to be a little bit more particularity in this plan because right now it seems like, I mean, do I just say, oh, I've completed 4.1 because we have a career one stop?

I think I could.

And that to me reflects an issue with the plan.

And I know it feels maybe unfair, but it does to me raise alarm bells with kind of

our own proficiency and competency as an organization with this domain of economic development that I feel like I've reflected similar concerns when we've talked about workforce development before.

And I'm just not necessarily sure I'm seeing that comfort that it does not feel conversant in what the current standards and trends in workforce development are.

Thank you.

Just to comment, thank you Mike, I appreciate that and I am certainly, just Jim to be clear, when I'm talking about students staying here, I'm not talking about University of Virginia students staying here.

We have plenty of that.

I'm talking about families whose children are in Albemarle County Public Schools and those children need to be able to have jobs that probably, in many cases, don't even require a college education.

They can start as an apprentice.

They can be a plumber.

They can be an electrician.

Our businesses need us to be training those folks.

So please don't the same that I meant that we needed all the University of Virginia students to come back here and live because we have plenty of those.

Yeah, I understand.

Yeah.

Thank you.

OK, we're going to move on to community facilities.

Sorry, I'm just doing a quick check to see who from other agencies are in the got a few.

OK, again, I'll jump through some of these slides a little bit quicker.

The agenda format is pretty much the same as we just went through.

Again, we have no focus topic questions for you.

We'll just go through this in this section in sequence.

Highlight of what we heard from the PC and the board previously, water and sewer service to properties and housing in the development area and adjacent to the rural areas that's lacking public utilities was identified as an important issue.

This slide actually notes some of the changes or

ways that we've addressed it in the draft, but I'm going to skip over those and just hit the highlights here.

Need for third places for communities meeting spots was identified.

Consider wireless service for public parks as a safety issue.

And then other comments that we heard from the Commission of the Board were actually addressed in other sections of the Conference of Plans, specifically Resilient Communities section addressed

hazard mitigation for catastrophes and fire hazard overlay district was discussed.

Solar and support for food systems and sustainable resources.

Those suggestions that we heard as part of community facilities were addressed in that chapter.

The overall community themes we heard

More library services, we heard that in particular for some of our rural area concentrations.

Concern for school capacity and bus availability, after school programs, more recycling options and education and incentives for recycling, and improve access to facilities, walking, biking, transit, park and ride lots and such.

Improved stormwater management to address more significant storm events, providing adequate water supply and dealing with potential drought concerns still.

The issue with above ground power lines and loss of power during storms and addressing failing septic systems, especially when there's an impact

to public water supplies and when homeowners need financial assistance.

Some of that septic system was addressed in the rural areas section of the conference of plan or draft chapter.

Again, in developing this, as we all know, facilities and services are an important implementation tool for our growth management policy and for economic development as we just suggested, as well as other sections, and that the implementation of

Facility recommendations probably more than any other is driven by budget issues and also management of other agencies, some of which are ours and some are shared or joint or partnership agencies.

Just a table to sort of highlight that relationship and the importance of the budget process.

and the various agency or department work programs and their funding limitations.

As relates to this section and how it differs from the 2015 plan, the objectives and actions on 2015 focus on supporting implementing the growth management policies that

continues on.

Continued flexibility for providing health and safety facilities to the whole county was happening to my presentation here.

So what's changed, really just more greater clarity in the policies for allowance for health and safety facilities in our rural area, where they had been permitted previously under more or less exceptions.

We've recognized that health and safety facilities need to be provided based on health and safety access issues.

So a little bit more

Clarity and when fire rescue and police services and such could be provided.

Recognition that private central and water and sewer system maintenance is becoming an issue in our rural areas.

And that there are in this draft, there are actually fewer actions and

standards for service.

In the previous plan, there were more service standards and things that related to operations of facilities.

And we're trying to step away from that, recognizing that those agencies actually have a relationship with the board or the school board in establishing operational issues.

So you won't see as many service standards provided in this draft plan as you would have seen in the prior plan.

Feedback from the Planning Commission.

Generally, the Commission felt that some of the objectives could be combined because they were similar in nature.

They also noted that technical demands and needs for electrical service were not identified or discussed with much depth in this section of the plan.

I do recognize we have some limitations on our ability to plan and control and impact

utility planning, but that was a note that they had.

They felt the green infrastructure should be noted in this section or at least cross-reference from where it's noted in other sections and add or improve the content to indicate that package treatment

wastewater treatment systems are discouraged.

They felt the language was a little bit weak in that section.

Those were the overviews from the Planning Commission.

Sorry to skim through that a little bit quick, but I think we can maybe open it up for the clarifying questions or a narrative portion.

I propose again that we start with just the text of the chapter before we get to the specific actions and objectives.

And my apologies.

There's too many typos in this one.

My apologies for that.

Supervisor McKeel?

Okay.

I was thinking I was third.

This particular section, I think, really needs to be tightened up.

There's a lot of duplication.

and unlike many of the other work that you all have been giving us, I just think this one really needs some tightening.

And I was trying to see how I threw out document duplication and it did occur to me when I was reading this, and I'm not skilled enough to do it, but I would love to take this chapter

and put it through AI.

Or, I'm just saying, or as our Secretary of Education would say, A1.

But anyway, if we put it through AI, it would be interesting to see, and we put in the criteria to tighten it up because this is the one document I think that really needs skinning down.

And for example, well, and I probably don't have to, but look at all of the objectives here.

which I guess maybe we do need 11, although I always question when we get up to numbers like that.

But there is just a lot of duplication of language and ideas in this book.

I do think there's a lot of objectives because it covers a wide array of stuff.

Yeah.

And the other thing I noticed, and I'm not, maybe not to spend so much time, but the other thing I noticed was that there's some information in here that's actually not accurate.

when you're talking about the Albemarle High School campus, you're talking about some of the other, I mean, it's old information, it's no longer accurate.

And it needs some of this information in addition to tightening it up needs to be updated so that it's current, at least current for now.

But under Fire and Rescue, we talk about former Fashion Square Mall and we talk about the,

County Public Safety Operations Center, and then we go down two paragraphs and we talk about it again.

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

That's a type of thing.

Yeah, yeah.

For the most part, though, I don't disagree with what I'm seeing in here.

But it does, I just think it needs to be, I'd try running it through AI if I was skillful enough to do that, to put the criteria in.