Planning Commission Meeting   12/14/2021

Let's see.

There we are.

We're now being recorded for all the world to see.

Hello, world.

Got it.

Welcome to the Planning Commission meeting this December 14th at 6.02.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20-A, 16, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

opportunities for the public to access and participate in the electronic meeting will be posted on the Albemarle.org community county dash calendar when available.

Yes, I will.

Mr. Bailey.

Present.

Mr. Keller.

Ms.

Nope, she's coming.

You can see she's connected.

OK.

We see her.

I'll come back.

Oh, there she is.

Ms.

Firehock.

Karen indicated present.

Present.

Thank you.

Ms.

Yes.

Thank you very much.

So we have nothing on our consent agenda this evening.

Yes, Neal Williamson.

Neal, go ahead.

Good.

My name is Neal Williamson and I serve as president of the Free Enterprise Forum, a privately funded public policy organization focused on local government here in Central Virginia.

The Free Enterprise Forum annually presents a fractured carol or story to spread holiday cheer and joy.

It all started with an Albemarle-planning Christmas, followed by Rudolph, the forum-based code, Rio, the small plan, walking in a forum-based code wonderland, and last year's Coronavirus Carol.

Every year presents its own challenges.

This year, considering the Community Development Department's application backlog, the Grinch and me started a poem, All I Want for Christmas is a Building Permit, but I thought better of it.

For 2021, with apologies to original writers Haven Gillespie and J. Fred Kootz, the Free Enterprise Forum presents, Middle Density is Coming to Town.

You better watch out.

You better not cry.

You better not pout.

I'm telling you why.

Middle Density is coming to town.

He's drawing all new colors on the planning map.

He's going to increase the stale zoning population cap.

Middle Density is coming to town.

He sees you where you're sleeping.

He knows your commute when you're awake.

He knows density is not bad or good, but form matters for goodness sake.

You better not watch out.

You better not cry.

You better not pout.

I'm telling you why.

Middle density is coming to town.

With walkable streets and multi-generational homes, community dog parks, and farm-based codes, middle density is coming to town.

duplexes, triplexes, more places to live, new diverse residents, what gifts they will give.

A strong community, more vibrant, with newly colored zones.

Middle density provides opportunity, studies have shown.

New housing affordability, middle density will bring indeed.

Along with increased traffic, K-12 students, and infrastructure needs.

Middle Density is coming to town.

Central Virginia planners will work hard day and night drafting maps, holding meetings, and hearing residents fight.

In the end, their vision is true.

They're gonna build new comprehensive plans with Middle Density through and through.

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm telling you why.

Middle Density is coming to town.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone.

Thank you, Mr. Williamson.

I assume you will also forward back to the clerk so that we will be honored with a physical copy of your tale.

Then with that, we will move into our public hearings and we will hear first ZMA 2021-05 1805 Avon Street PRD.

Good evening, planning commissioners.

Welcome, Andy.

Great, thank you.

As I said, good evening.

My name is Andy Vardelbach and I'm a senior planner here with Albemarle County Planning Division and tonight we are here for a public hearing regarding a rezoning request ZMA 2021-5 1805 Avon Street PRD.

To provide some context on the location of the subject property, I have an aerial view of the site here.

It consists of two parcels that are off of Avon Street extended south of 64.

To the north and east-southeast is the Avenity subdivision.

To the south is property owned by the Southside Church of God.

The property has a small narrow frontage along Avon Street and the Lake Raynovia subdivision is across on.

And then Mountain View Elementary is kind of at the top of the screen.

You can see the parking lot of the elementary school.

So it's just slightly north of the subject property.

The proposal with rezoning, as I said, it consists of two parcels that total approximately 3.627 acres.

The existence of the properties is each one has a single family detached house on it, along with several accessory structures, such as garages and sheds.

And the applicant is requesting to rezone these two parcels to PRD, Planned Residential Development, for a maximum of 85 residential units.

The zoning for both of these parcels is currently R1, which allows one residential unit per acre.

And so at three and a half acres, the by right development is up to three dwelling units possible with additional units, potentially possible with bonus factors.

The overlay zoning districts for this property are managed deep slopes and it is also within an entrance corridor.

However, Avon Street is one of the corridors where the entrance corridor regulations are not currently being applied.

And then in the map to the right, you can see that the Avenity subdivision to the north and east is also zoned PRD.

The Southside Church of God property is also zoned R1.

There are several light industrial properties farther to the south along Avon Street.

And then Lake Raynovia across the street is R4.

And then the PUD up in the north top middle of the map is open space that is part of the Mill Creek subdivision.

In the comprehensive plan, the two subject parcels are part of the Southern and Western urban neighborhoods master plan.

And they are designated as urban density residential, which is the orange on the map.

And this land use designation recommends a density of 6.01 to 34 units per acre with supporting uses such as places of worship,

The recommended residential building height is a maximum of three stories.

And on the right, as you can see, the subject parcels, affinity, and the Southside Church of God property are all designated as urban density residential.

Parcels farther to the south are designated as office R&D flex light industrial.

The Lake Granovia subdivision is designated as, I'm sorry, neighborhood density residential with the green being the parks and green systems, the open space parcels within Lake Granovia.

And then to the north, the Mountain View Elementary School property is designated institutional.

So the specifics of this proposal, the applicant is requesting a maximum of 85 dwelling units per acre, which would be a mixture of unit types, including townhouses, multifamily apartments, and then other single family attached unit types like duplexes and triplexes.

The density would come to about 24 units per acre.

The buildings are a maximum of three stories, which is at the recommendation of the master plan.

As a requested PRD, a minimum of 25% open space is required along with a certain level of recreational facilities.

In accordance with the county's affordable housing policy, the applicant is proposing 15% of the units to be affordable housing at 80% of area median income.

Interior travelways are proposed for access to the units.

The applicant is, however, proposing to reserve right-of-way along Avon Street to allow for future construction of a multi-use path.

and it's estimated that between 17 and 22 additional students would be expected to be generated by this use depending on the exact unit mixture at the site planning stage.

And I think it's important to note that Mountain View Elementary School is already over capacity and would continue to be over capacity over the next several years.

However, there is a,

proposed expansion to the elementary school within the capital improvement program.

However, this expansion would only alleviate the current overcapacity of Mountain View Elementary and not any additional overcapacity coming in the future.

And then Walton Middle School and Monticello High School are both under capacity.

This slide shows the conceptual plan for the development.

Townhouses along the main access way closest to Avon Street, as well as in the rear of the parcel near Avenity.

And then there are several smaller apartment buildings in the middle of the property, along with the open space areas.

And then the applicant has identified that an existing structure is being considered to be repurposed as a duplex or triplex.

There is an interparcel connection with Avenity to the northeast, the rear of the property.

And I would like to point out that there are bollards placed on the property line and that is because the Avenity streets are privately owned.

And so, due to that, the

Potential residents in this new development would not be able to legally use those streets.

So the bollards are being placed there.

However, the interconnection is being constructed and it could be used for emergency access if needed.

The applicant is also proposing to reserve area for future interpersonal connections.

You can see small purple rectangles.

Down here at the southeast corner of access B to provide a potential interconnection with the Southside Church of God property.

And then there's another small purple rectangle up along the parallel parking spaces that would go toward

a currently residential property to allow for interconnection to the northwest as well.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, the applicant is proposing to provide sidewalk along their frontage of Avon Street, and then they would reserve approximately 1,200 square feet of right of way to allow for the future construction of a multi-use path along Avon Street.

And that multi-use path was a recommendation in the

Avon Street corridor study that was completed a couple years ago.

To provide some more information on access and circulation in the site, as I mentioned, the main entrance would be off of Avon Street and an exception request for entrance spacing requirements has been approved by VDOT due to the nearer frontage that this property has along Avon.

However, any potential required improvements such as turn lanes or tapers, a stoplight, whatever may be needed to ensure the entrance is constructed safely and to accommodate this development would be reviewed by VDOT at the site planning stage.

The applicant has indicated that they are not proposing to subdivide the property at this time, that all of the units would be under a common ownership.

And so only interior travelways are being proposed, not streets.

However, if subdivision were to occur in the future, the applicant would have to come in and ensure that those travelways are constructed to street standards and obtain any necessary waivers or modifications.

that they may need or would request.

As I mentioned, sidewalk is provided along Avon Street along with right-of-way reservation for the multi-use path, and I've also already spoken about the proposed inter-parcel

The factors favorable to this request is that it is consistent with the uses and the density recommended in the Southern and Western Urban Neighborhoods Master Plan.

It is consistent with the applicable neighborhood model principles.

The proposal does provide at least 15% affordable housing.

And then the proposal provides that reservation of right of way for the multi-use path to meet the recommendations of the Avon Street Corridor Study.

The factor unfavorable is that additional students would be enrolled at area schools, especially Mountain View Elementary School, which is, as I mentioned earlier, already overcapacity and is expected to remain overcapacity into the future.

Ultimately, based on these factors, favorable and unfavorable staff does recommend approval of the zoning map amendment request ZMA 2021-5-1805 Avon Street PRD.

these suggested motions I have listed here for when we get to that portion of the meeting this evening.

And now I'm available for questions either now or anytime later on in the meeting.

Thank you very much.

Rick.

Andy, would you explain

The access management request is a VDOT application.

And that was for the spacing requirements that I mentioned earlier due to the very narrow frontage they have along Avon Street.

The applicant does not meet the spacing requirements between the Southside Church of God property to the South in the existing driveways and ultimately the entrance into affinity to the North.

and so because of that they would need an access management exception from VDOT and that exception request has been granted at this time only to allow for the spacing requirements however they would at the site planning stage still need to demonstrate appropriate design of the entrance and that is when VDOT would

Rick, you good?

Yes, that would be something that VDOT would look into based on the ultimate unit count that the applicant proposes.

Just a final question.

When staff kick it around about the amount of

The applicant has said that they plan to do the 25% minimum required in the PRD.

And the recreational facilities, they would need to do at least two tot lots and a half court basketball court based on the proposed number of units.

And the applicant has demonstrated that they have the square footage at least to meet those requirements.

In the final determination of facilities, the applicant has indicated that they would look at during the site planning stage.

Okay, one last question, Andy, thank you for that answer.

Was there any discussion by staff as to whether it would be appropriate on Avon Street extended for this applicant to provide a facility for public transit, even though currently

There is no public transit that comes down this far south on Avon Street extended.

It's something that has been talked about, I know, for the last six years in trying to provide transit.

And at what time there was some discussion of maybe having transit on demand via

John provide services here.

The thing that I'm struck by and I brought this up last month with a meeting of the Planning Commission is

We found out that the board is very interested now in seeing transit stops provided, and yet those transit stops at a minimum are $15,000 and on up.

And, you know, $15,000 here, $15,000 there, that money could help provide additional furniture in new school space, such as at Mountain View's addition.

Here we have an applicant with no proposal for proffers whatsoever.

We know that there's a need for public transit.

They're providing 15%, maybe not the 20% that currently we're looking for on projects.

like this of affordable housing, but without a transit facility there, it's very difficult for people to utilize the bus.

So I'm glad to hear that it's something that staff kicked around, but I would love to see staff basically suggesting strongly to the applicant, you can't require it.

I hear

the attorney in the background ready to remind me of that.

But it certainly is something that I would have expected some dialogue about.

It seems that this was an opportunity to have that provided for the county.

Anyone else?

I see no one who has their hand up or their finger up.

Good evening everyone.

I'm Justin Shimp.

I'm the engineer of the project.

Let me share my screen here.

I have just a brief presentation.

Certainly, I think everything that Andy covers is very thorough and addresses many of the

Technical questions, I have a little extra background information.

First of this, I'm representing Jason Moss, he's one of the property owners of Victorian Properties who are partnering on this.

Interestingly enough, Jason Moss actually lives on the property.

So we're rezoning the house in which he resides currently.

He has been there with his family, I think in the 30 years sort of range, they have been down there.

His parents' house,

sits up here in the front.

This is a bit of a dated picture.

You all can see my cursor.

Is that correct?

No.

It's not.

So there's a property in front of the vanity, which is now the two apartment buildings going up that came before the commission

two, three years ago.

Those are owned by Mr. Moss, and then his parents' house is next door, and he lives down the hill, and then they've acquired this adjacent property, which makes the 3.67-acre PUD.

Jason, if I can, if I suggest, maybe, I think if you can come out of the mode you're in, we might be able to,

to follow you when you use your code cursor.

Because from our aspect, we see all of the frames and the design aspects of whatever software you use.

There's something better there.

Does that work better for you?

All right, thank you.

So, yeah, so this parcel here is the apartments under construction.

This is the proposed property.

It's a continuation of similar structures to that.

And again, Mr. Watts actually lives on the property right now.

As Andy went over, the comprehensive plan for this is urban density residential.

I don't know if Neil crafted his

Story this year after he saw our application or not, but it very much is that sort of middle density application.

We have essentially a combination of a town home type unit that has a small unit, and then it has a three bedroom above.

Let's see if this will work, I'm sorry.

And then we have traditional apartment buildings.

Let's go to the next page.

The walking shed map, this shows that certainly within a five minute range, you've got access to school, some of the ball fields over there, the play fields for kids to get to.

You can go through a vanity and up to the sidewalks to get out to that when this is constructed.

So it'll be sidewalks all the way to that location.

The plan is to give a reminder to these small buildings here would be townhomes that have a first floor smaller like an efficiency or one bedroom rental unit and then probably a two or three bedroom upstairs because of some different housing types and these are more traditional

apartment buildings which are one and two bedroom most likely.

So we fit basically a efficiency one, two, three bedroom within this development and mixing the housing types up.

We would also have the 15% affordable as required by the county's policy.

Some examples of these, Wickham Pond, Riverside Village has this sort of stacked townhome unit.

You'll see it a lot more.

It's becoming a unit more commonly used as this middle density catches on, allows you to get

a construction type that is not cost prohibitive and it gets you, you know, a mix of unit types that are missing from the market, like a three bedroom rental, four bedroom, a larger rental is hard to find.

And then likewise, a small efficiency apartment is very difficult to find.

So these are the units highlighted here.

Next slide shows the traditional multifamily units, which are the picture you see in the bottom left there.

That is the units under construction.

The graphic in the right was sort of the rendering of that presented to the commission with the approval of those units that are now under construction.

So we're continuing that and these will be very similar buildings built as what's under construction now.

There was some discussion about the green space.

So we've illustrated, this is an illustration of how we can achieve what the requirements are in this particular project.

One thing that is important to point out, I think this, you're going to see this more and more with the PRD ordinance is sort of crafted for like, you know, 30, 40, 50 acre

traditional single family residential, right?

And so in the past, we did those, if we had 100 acres, and you had 25 acres of open space, you'd have 25% open space, but maybe five acres of that was usable, right?

So I think there was never a

Never was there a 25% truly green space that was usable land.

It was made up of stormwater facilities, steep slopes, things that people didn't want to build on.

So when we look at these PRDs, these small infill ones, we're going to see maybe 25% requirement, but not necessarily 25% of land as a recreational use.

That's really not practical.

It's not necessary.

You can see here we have space for a playground with required equipment.

We have a little picnic shelter.

a terraced garden area.

And these will all be amenities available to our residents.

So we think this will be something they'll all enjoy.

It will be more than adequate for the number of residents here.

Last one, so Avon Street, there is a reservation, so we have additional about eight feet of ride away we'll dedicate for that future

shared use path.

But in the meantime, we're proposing a sidewalk that we would build and that that would we'll see how things connect.

That's the infrastructure that's out there now.

So reserving the ability for the shared use path, but constructing a sidewalk for the time being, not knowing when that shared use path might happen, but more likely than the short term, a sidewalk connection is made.

And then in the long term, a shared use path gets built and that can simply be replace this path.

that we construct.

So that is the conclusion of the things that I wanted to go over.

I know there are a few questions brought up.

I know that Andy answered some of them.

Questions for our applicant.

And Mr. Shim, thank you for making the notes at a size that didn't require me to put on two pairs of glasses to read.

That's much appreciated.

Does the cat have a question?

Does the kitty have a question here?

I see for Corey and anyone else.

So Corey, why don't we start with you and then see who else?

as they're taking in the presentation.

Sure.

Just a quick question.

Thank you, Mr. Shep.

Just curious, is this neighborhood a service for trash collection by service or would there be a dumpster on site?

There'll probably be a dumpster on site, this type of thing, but you could also have a trash collection.

A little bit depends on

At the end of the day, what the developer wants to do would be more expensive to have everyone have their own trash cans to pick it up.

But it would save the space of having the trash can.

So there's a county requirement for that based on the number of square footage abilities and things.

So I don't know how we'll do that exactly.

Thank you.

Justin, while people are sort of gathering themselves up, could you go back to and share what is the space that is right below the top lot?

And there's an empty square there.

Go down, keep going down.

Right where the top lot is to the south, I guess that's yeah, that's to the east.

What is that?

You've got those.

Look, if I were someplace else, I might think it would be an open arena, but I don't think that's what it is.

It's a clear square.

Keep going down, down.

It really is directly to the east of the tot lot on the upper part, on the north side of the pit down.

Now just go to the right.

Keep going, keep going.

There, what is that?

That's it.

I can't hear you.

So maybe you don't want me to know.

Not at all.

I'm just being clumsy with the Zoom controls here.

That is actually Jason Moss's house.

Oh, is it really?

So that's the structure that gets converted to like a duplex or triplex.

So he recently built that and so we're kind of working around that and that can become a rental unit when the development's done and then he chooses to leave the neighborhood.

Are there other questions?

Yes, thank you.

I saw the detail of the sidewalk and the planting strip on Avon Street.

So in the entrance corridor, we'd be required to, well, the entrance corridor is weird here.

So there's a zoning ordinance requirement for the street trees on Avon that have to be there.

There's a parking lot ordinance requirement for a certain number of tree every X number of spaces.

If the road is treated as a access road internal, there's also a street tree requirement on that.

So there'd be basically, I can't imagine why we wouldn't plant those trees anyway.

But we would have essentially trees down this street.

It would be built like a street, but it's just not to necessarily every technical standard of the county.

OK, thank you.

So while we're on page nine, then

of your concept section where you have access A and access B. Could you just identify where access A and access B are located?

Sure.

So yeah, access A just through the main travel way up and down side, and B, what's happening is we have a reservation and B for potential future connection to the Church of God property.

And so we just identify those.

OK.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

Can we open up?

Then in that case, we will open this.

Oh, let me first find my Carolyn.

Yes, we do.

All right.

I will open it.

Hold on.

First, I have Diane.

Diane, please state your name, address, if you're affiliated with a group or organization.

Thank you.

My name is Diane Greeder.

I live at 141 Blackthorne Lane, Charlottesville, which is the Lake Raynovia neighborhood.

I am a member of the

Fifth Street and Avon Commission for the Board of Supervisors, the Advisory Committee for Fifth and Avon Street.

When we had our last meeting,

We discussed the VDOT traffic study and we learned that the VDOT traffic study for this particular development occurred during the height of the pandemic when we know there was hardly anybody driving up and down Avon Street.

and we requested that a new traffic study be conducted because it is already difficult right now from the traffic perspective to even make a left-hand turn out of the main entrance of Lake Renovia and now this particular site having

which consists of the two homes right now becoming 85 dwelling units will add quite a bit of additional traffic.

All right, next I have Paul McCarter.

Paul, please state your name, address, and if you are with the group or affiliation.

Yes, my name is Paul McCarter.

I'm a resident of Avenity, which is right next door to the subject property 2012 Avenity Loop, to be exact.

We don't have an HOA, so I'm not speaking on behalf of the HOA, but we have a community advisory committee, which has discussed this project.

But at the same time, I do not speak on their behalf.

I'm speaking just as myself.

There's a couple things I want to point out with this.

First, overall,

Overall, I don't have an objection to the concept of this property.

I think it supplies something that's really needed in terms of rental units that aren't apartments.

So I like that idea of the project.

The two concerns that I have, the first one is the really making sure that the

there is not interconnectivity with a vanity because our streets just aren't designed to be able to handle the increased traffic nor the expense of the increased traffic.

But I wanna make sure that the ballards that are currently put in there, one, those don't drop off during the future reviews that happen.

And also that there's some steps put in place to make sure that the current or the residents that will be occupying these houses

know that the amenity amenities and amenity property is separate.

We had this same discussion with the apartment buildings that just got built at the front of the amenity.

There's a lot of confusion.

It looks like they're connected when they shouldn't be.

But my bigger thing that I want to bring up is talk about the overcrowding of the Mountain View School District.

This isn't the fault of this applicant, but we are currently crisis management is a crisis management is probably an understatement of it.

It was mentioned that we're overcrowded, but there's a

There's an expansion planned, and that's only going to resolve our current problem.

That's true, but we also have to remember that the Planning Commission has approved Springfield Village, which is adding more kids, Avon Park 2, which is adding more kids, and the Southwood community, which even though many of the kids are already going, is going to add additional kids also.

and from all the studies that we've seen through the meetings with the schools, the estimates that are done are almost always under, they underestimate the additional students.

So I think from a planning commissioner and then a board of supervisors perspective, approving anything until that situation is remedied in the Mountain View School District is irresponsible.

and just really shows that the kids are put to a very low priority in this situation.

There has been talk of having a new school built and that should be taken care of and decided before anything else is approved.

That's all I have.

Still no one?

OK.

And we'll close the public hearing.

Thank you.

Yes, if I just clarify the traffic.

So this this development is under any kind of county threshold for more of an area wide traffic study.

So the traffic study we did provide was focusing on the entrance.

And it is true that the traffic would be lower at that time.

But this is also why VDOT doesn't grant approvals for turn lanes and things like that based on the rezoning.

So they'll require a new count when the site plan goes in to determine these things.

So we cannot, they do not say just because you have a rezoning approved, let's say this year, doesn't mean you're entitled to the traffic conditions this year.

They do it when you actually build it.

So next year we'll get a new traffic count for those turn lane warrant analysis and things related.

that will be accounted for in the final construction.

So everyone knows there's no sort of loophole about that.

And that's why VDOT doesn't require a new study is because they don't at this point in time, they don't need to.

They'll require it when we actually get to build it.

So I think some folks realize it wasn't a weird time with that study, but it won't affect the end requirements because VDOT has an ordinance already in place to deal with the situation.

The schools, you know, it is a tough situation, but at the same time,

I think it's our experience of schools has always been, they've never, we have never once received a statement from them in our correspondence that we can't educate these children for their credit.

they go out and find a way and they do a great job.

And I think one of the things about Albemarle I liked in these sort of projects is that it does open up an avenue for people who are trying to move into the area who are looking for something a little more affordable to get into a house in these school districts that will be a good thing for their kids.

And I know it's a problem to be dealt with but I also think there's opportunity there.

And the more children we get educated in a quality environment the better off we all are in the day.

And so I think there's a lot to be said for that.

I know it's a burden on everyone there, and it's a problem the schools have to figure out.

But again, to their credit, and all our communication with them and these rezonings, never once have we heard, we can't handle this.

They have to say, here's the numbers, and we'll figure it out.

So we think that'll happen here.

And we appreciate the patience of those who are in these districts, but just remind folks that it's an opportunity for new folks to come in and to get that quality education with their children.

So thank you.

Nothing else.

Nothing further.

OK, thank you.

We'll bring this back to us.

And are there any other questions from commissioners for the applicant before we we consider this matter?

OK, fine, then it's back to us.

Who would like to start the conversation on the 1805 Avon Street?

Well, no one must be getting into this sort of moment in the year where silence is golden.

You all have sore throats.

You have a sore throat, but I'll still use a little bit.

I think overall, I agree with some of the staff assessments that this is a good use of the property.

I've been down to Avenity several times.

I know it's not related in that area and the growth.

and I think there's a natural connection there that adding this type of development next to it is a nice flow.

I think the main concern that I have overall, I've expressed is just the increased pressure on Mountain View and then increased on the schools.

And so at that point, that's where I'm still trying to

Thank you.

Well, I hate to be a downer in my last meeting, but I think that regardless of the fun piece that Neil Williamson gave us on middle density, I think that this project and others that we'll be seeing point to considerations that the county

Planners and elected officials are going to be needing to think about in the comp plan and the jump to adding middle density.

Look at the water.

Just look at the water flow on those slopes and think about the water that's going to be sheeting down that hill on that and many other projects along Avon Street expended already.

I'm hearing from

folks that it looks like housing costs are maybe going to be as much as a third higher post-COVID from pre-COVID.

So what is affordable housing going to really mean here?

I just think it's sad the way, when we look at the west side of Avon Street extended, where there was thoughtful planning because there were larger parcels that were put together,

curvilinear form roads, much less site degradation than we're seeing on the east side.

And this is just a case in point.

So in terms of all of the things that we have to make the decisions on, this is most likely a go, but I hope that it

Others.

Well, I'll just say briefly, I mean, this particular location is the place to be doing infill.

And I do like the fact that the kids could walk to school here, which you don't have a lot of sort of walk to school opportunities in the county because of the suburban development pattern that we followed.

If we had purview over the design, I would wish to see more interesting architecture here.

I know that we're trying to make things affordable, but some of this is a series of big boxes, and I wish that there was a little more architectural interest, more attention to making it feel like home, like a neighborhood a little bit more.

I like the diversity of housing types, but I just would like to see

More interesting architecture, more attention to the design so that it doesn't feel like a place you live temporarily and then move on.

I know that sounds harsh, but it is going to be its own little neighborhood in a sense.

But like I said, I think that this is the right place for this type of density.

I like the fact that there's diversity of options there instead of just only one type of product.

And I do think that it's going to be a place that people can walk to visit their neighbors, even though you can't walk as easily between the neighborhoods.

at some point get out onto Avon Street and go visit.

So I don't have any big objections to this site.

Rick.

I'm disappointed that they're not more affordable housing units here.

It's 7.1% of all of the proposed units, which is embarrassing given the location, the proximity to the city where most of the people living in these units will be working.

I'm disappointed that there is nothing offered here to help alleviate, as Daniel has pointed out, the additional pressure on the elementary school situation in this corridor, whether it be Mountain View, whether it be Mountain View's addition, or whether it be the new elementary school, which was also proposed in the discussions by

and the Capital Improvement Plan Committee.

So, however I agree with Karen, it is the right location for middle density.

I'm a little concerned about the level of density that both of these projects will have created in the midst of otherwise.

Single family residential housing, but you have to put middle density and infill development somewhere.

And this is a location that seems as well suited as any.

So I'm torn on this application, but I don't see any reason not to approve it, given the fact that the cavalry is coming.

in terms of Mountain View Elementary School expansion or elementary school expansion in the corridor.

We just don't know when they're going to arrive at the Alamo and whether they arrive too late and thereby a lot of children have to be living in trailers for an extended period of time.

But I do think the county recognizes

a need to address it.

I would have liked to have seen, as I said, something set aside here to the county as a proffer towards that elementary school space expansion and also for a transit stop at this location for people wanting to take the bus into town and back.

Build it and they will come.

Build it and the service will be extended.

Corey?

This is the last one on deck, but I'm generally in favor of the proposal.

I didn't understand the 7.5% that Commissioner Randolph mentioned about affordable housing.

I read it to meet the minimum requirement of the 15% that's necessary the way I read that.

I think it's an appropriate solution for the parcel that we have here.

And as we previously discussed, I'd like to see some public transit eventually out there.

You have Wegmans and the whole shopping center, the Fifth Street stations right down the street.

So I think that'd be a nice highlight when that does come.

But in general, I'm in favor of the proposal.

So I would add I'm also supportive of this project.

I would have been more joyous, shall I say, if the project had shown a bit more new way to create community in a small space.

I think we've seen and heard, and particularly from

Mr. Shimp, we've seen him do some pretty interesting things in small spaces.

And so I would hope that perhaps there would be, well, it's not my money, so I'm not the developer, but I do think there are ways in which to bring those kind of interesting communities to that shape of space.

I will say that I am moderately concerned about traffic flow.

and how all that's going to be managed in sort of one way in, one way out, kind of, and then the parking lots that are adjacent to the multi-story buildings.

That feels sort of old school.

It feels like we've actually had seen some different kinds of traffic flow in infill spaces, and so hopefully there

When this finally goes before a site review, there'll be some consideration of how do we move people around and how do we create sort of ease for moving from one side of the street to the other side of the street and protect children as they do run between those areas so that we don't have unfortunate incidences with people either not paying attention or trying to move someplace quickly.

So that was the one thing that I was actually kind of concerned about that given the mix of housing that's going to be there, we're probably going to have people who are

who are going to have children, who are going to have tots, and who may be a little rushed in their comings and goings, and how do we create a travel way that doesn't put all those things in conflict.

But I'm supportive of this.

And also, we'll say, you know what?

We hear constantly, and I think all of us in our end talking to our supervisors and talking to the Board of Education people that come in and out of our lives, that

You know, we get a lot of pressure on the commission to sort of be the solution maker for school populations.

And while we hear a lot of it, and it also then gets transferred up to our supervisors, that's not our role.

Our role is to sort of continue to hit that bell, as Commissioner Randolph has said, and others have said over the course of our time together, but we're not the solution.

We can't bring a solution

for schools populations from our seats on the commission.

We can continue to say this is something that's very important that continues to be a burden to the kinds of things that we look at and how things that we think about and how our planners and our staff are trying to sort of balance all that.

But I would suggest people who continue to have and push with the board of supervisors and the school board, those are the people who as community members where you can

have affected pressure points.

Sir?

If you would ask Andy to put up CMA 2021-00005, I'll go ahead and- Are you ready?

Are you ready?

Oh, and look at that.

There it is.

It is almost there.

I move that the Planning Commission recommend approval of ZMA 2021-00005-1805 Avon Street PRD for the reason stated in the staff report.

Second.

Seconded by Corey.

Was that you Corey?

Yes, seconded by Corey.

Is there any further discussion?

Yes.

Mr. Clayborne?

Aye.

Mr. Randolph?

Aye.

Ms.

Firehock?

Aye.

Mr. Keller?

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you, everyone.

So Mr. Shrimp, you see that we've moved it forward to the Board of Supervisors.

I think you heard a sort of a rich and varied set of observations presented to you and your client, Mr. Moss.

And hopefully the two of you and your staff will sit down with Charles and his staff and Andy.

and perhaps think of there are ways in which we can reflect to be prepared to have this conversation with the Board of Supervisors after they've had an opportunity to review our comments in anticipation of your meeting.

Be safe in your travels over these days and we'll look forward to seeing you in the new year.

Moving on to our next public hearing, matter before us is a public hearing, which is SP 2021-13, the Living Earth School.

Good evening, commissioners.

I'm Scott Clark with the Community Development Planning Division.

This item is a public hearing on a request for a special use permit for a day and overnight environmental education camp located on Pounding Creek Road.

To give you an idea of the location, here's the property in the red outline.

It's over 400 acres, located about a mile east of Batesville along Pounding Creek Road.

and here's a aerial view of the site as it exists here recently.

And you can see the west edge here, that's where Pounding Creek Road is and this existing forestry right here is roughly in the area where the entrance parking and proposed headquarters building of the camp would be located.

So the proposal is to have a camp that would have six weeks per year

of summer campers up to 160 campers per day.

Current proposal is that day campers would arrive and depart by shuttle bus up to 75%, the remainder by individual vehicles.

And that there would be overnight campers up to 60 out of that 160 total who would arrive on Sunday afternoon and individual vehicles stay for the week and depart on Friday by individual vehicles.

Outside of that six-week period, this camp would have day and overnight programs, generally smaller, but at times up to as many as 150 attendees.

These would vary quite a bit in terms of classes, overnight camps, things like that related to environmental education.

And in this case, for the programs with more than 40 attendees, they would arrive and depart using shuttles.

The proposal also includes two fundraising events per year for the applicant organization, up to 200 attendees.

Improvements on the site would include the camp hall, gravel driveway and parking, storage, staffer cabins, platform tents for the campers, bathhouse restroom facilities, and pavilions and a nature library.

Here's the conceptual plan of the use.

Again, here at the western edge is Pounding Creek Road.

All the facilities are located north of this stream here.

And you've got the more developed facilities, the camp hall and the barn and the parking down here.

And then farther up the hill on this, mostly on the southeast facing slope, we've got staff cabins, tent areas, related facilities.

This plot here breaks up the property into three pieces, and this is what we're using to indicate the limits of the use.

This parcel E of 125 acres at the northern end is where the camp facilities would be located.

All righty, to go over the zoning ordinance criteria for special use permit reviews.

First, detriment to

nearby properties, there would be no substantial detriment to the adjacent properties from the effects of the use itself in that there would be no amplified sound.

It's a long distance to the nearest dwelling, which is 2200 feet from the camp area.

There are no directly adjacent dwellings.

So given the low key nature of the use, the lack of amplified sound, et cetera, we don't feel that there would be direct impacts on the adjacent properties.

However, there are some potential detrimental impacts on other residents who use the same road, but I'll address that in more detail in a later section.

Harmony with various aspects of the ordinance, in this case, the purpose and intent of the chapter.

You can see here the main purposes of the RA zoning district.

agricultural and forest lands, water supply protection, limited service delivery, and conservation of natural, scenic, and historic resources.

This use again is a fairly low impact environmental education camp that relies on a large rural parcel in order to operate.

So we felt that there were these limited impacts meant there were limited impacts on key resources identified in the RA zoning section and that the site could potentially be returned to

non-commercial or commercial ag and forestry uses if the camp were to be removed.

Service demands again would be limited because this is not comparable in intensity and service demands to, for example, by right residential development.

Also under Harmony, the use is permitted by right in the district.

There's no conflict with existing or future agriculture or silvicultural use.

Most of the facilities are low impact and easily removed, as mentioned.

And the final Harmony section is with the public health, safety, and general welfare.

This is where the majority of the concerns are with this particular proposal, especially in the category of traffic impacts.

This table and the one on the following slide will give you a rough idea of the

amount of trips to be generated by the proposed use.

You can see that on Sundays, we have some staff and those 60 campers.

So there are some up to 92 trips on those days arriving and departing.

Again, those are individual vehicles.

On weekdays, the applicants are estimating that they would have

about 40 trips plus the shuttles Monday to Thursday and then more trips on Friday, more individual vehicle trips on Friday because both the day campers and the overnight campers are going home.

Saturday, there's no generation during this time of the year.

For the remainder of the year,

There could be as many as 150 people on the site.

My understanding with applicants is they expect most of their activity to be more in the up to 40 range.

So they would have up to 40 people for most of those operations that would involve individual vehicles accessing the site.

However, over 40 people, they would use shuttles.

And again, this is any day of the week.

The issue with this is that the access to the site is along Pounding Creek Road.

You can see at the top of your screen, the intersection of Pounding Creek and Dick Woods Road.

And it's about 1.3 miles down that section of Pounding Creek down to where the entrance would be for the camp.

The issue here is that there are multiple narrow pinch points along this road.

Those points vary in width from 10 to 12 and a half feet, excuse me.

That's not lane width, that's entire road width.

So given that the VDOT standard, the lowest VDOT standard really is 18 feet plus shoulders, we're talking 10 to 12 and a half feet with limited or no ditches or shoulders and site distance limited by both horizontal and vertical curves,

Impossible, difficult or impossible for traffic meeting in opposite directions to get through these pinch points in an organized fashion.

It's going to cause backups, possibly collisions.

And there will be situations where vehicles simply won't be able to get past each other.

This is especially an issue when you have vehicles arriving, dropping people off the camp and heading back out again.

So you've got two way traffic on this very narrow road.

just to give you some examples of some of these narrow points I've mentioned.

These are just photos of starting down here with just north of the camp entrance and going on upward road with 11 or 12 feet just using a county vehicle.

It's about six feet wide as an example.

And you can see that there are often these sharp cuts coming right down to the road surface.

There's no shoulder that could be used for passing these locations.

A little farther north, basically the same situation.

We've got one point of 10 feet with a slope next to it.

Otherwise, it's often 11 or 12.

So, SAF's recommendation to the applicants was that if they use shuttle access to avoid two-way traffic in these pinch points, that would alleviate a lot of that concern.

You wouldn't have many multiple vehicles, you would just have a certain number of shuttle buses that come down the road all in one direction at the beginning of the day, stay on the site, and then all go back out the same direction in the evening.

However, upon considering that the applicants needed to propose something slightly different to make their proposed operation work.

And so their proposal was that, again, 75% of the summer camp daily attendees would come by shuttle.

The remaining 25% would come by individual cars.

They felt it was important for all overnight campers to arrive with their parents in individual vehicles for drop-off and contact, which is understandable, I think.

And finally, with the non-silver programs, they would use shuttles if they were over 40 attendees.

Unfortunately, the issue we had with this is that compliance with these percentage requirements

Any remote location like this is really difficult or impossible for the county to monitor, verify, or enforce.

And even with the 75% number, you can still have some vehicles encountering two-way traffic in these very narrow one-line sections of the road.

One other traffic issue that I just wanted to mention quickly, to locate you, we're here near the intersection of Dick Woods Road and Pounding Creek Road.

In this photo, we're looking west.

So here's the intersection of Pounding Creek Road, which is running south from this point.

There are two issues here, both for arriving vehicles turning left onto Pounding Creek Road and for exiting vehicles coming out of Pounding Creek Road.

There's very limited sight distance past this point to the hill that traffic is coming over from the west.

This is a

you know, high quality two lane paved road traffic tends to run at about 55 miles an hour from my recent observations, casual observations, but that's not a lot of time for vehicles to be sure that they're clear to come out of there or to turn left there.

The other issue is that the Pounding Creek Road is not really visible until you're upon it.

So even the intersection itself is very hard to see.

Okay, so that's the public safety aspect.

Final special use permit criterion is consistency of the comprehensive plan.

And here we felt that the proposed use would support several comprehensive plan goals, both in protecting the natural resources on the site and using the site to inform citizens on many aspects of the rural areas and on biodiversity in our county.

So in that sense, it's supportive of the comprehensive plan.

All right, briefly wanted to mention the community meeting process.

Community meeting was held back in August.

We notified 89 landowners.

You can see the, in pink here, magenta, the half mile radius from the subject property.

We actually notified several properties beyond that point that were also close to, or close to,

connected to Pounding Creek Road between the western part of the property in the question and the intersection at Miller School Road because we wanted to make sure that everybody that was on that road was notified of this proposal.

Several members of the public spoke at the meeting and the concerns expressed included road capacity and traffic safety issues,

what the water sources would be for the camp and also impacts on internet service capacity from any additional demand from this camp being there.

So in summary, favorable factors included the minimal impact on adjacent properties and the supportive, excuse me, the fact that the use would support the county's comp plan goals for educating citizens about the rural areas and biodiversity.

The unfavorable factors included dangerous road conditions on Pounding Creek Road with two way traffic on a very narrow road, the difficulty of monitoring and enforcing the shuttle requirements for the summer camp, and also the difficulty, the same issue with the larger over 40 person events the rest of the year.

Given all of that, staff recommends denial

of the SP for Living Earth School.

However, if the commission tends to recommend approval, I do have a list of conditions that I can show you.

I'll just run past them here.

I won't read them all over unless you all have questions.

You've seen them in the staff reports.

And at this point, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have.

I know the applicants are ready to make a presentation of their own.

Thanks.

I just have a couple questions for Scott and then maybe the applicant will take this up as well.

So I'm curious if one of the things that wasn't in any of the reports from the applicant or the county was the fact that there's a bridge that goes over the creek from Pounding Creek Road into the site.

So you have to actually cross the creek.

and the bridge is not in good shape.

I'm no bridge engineer but I don't feel that that is an appropriate bridge say if an ambulance needed to come up that.

The other part of that question is the fact that the app can talk about the fact that there is access road in there.

It's a road that was probably used in prior logging operations but it's not

You know, built to what I would call adequate standards to minimize erosion control.

So does the county is a county looking at the actual access into the site?

Or that just left up to the applicant?

It's certainly an issue we always look at in this particular case.

You're correct that the old logging road and the culvert over the creek are not at all ideal, but if this use was approved, that would be dealt with in more detail during the site plan review, because they're going to have an entrance

that has to meet B.DOT standards, they're going to have to have access that meets county standards for the site plan.

So I assume that there would be some changes to the if this is approved, that there would be changes to the driveway.

Certainly there would be grading involved with the parking and then the stream crossing.

Rick and Tim.

Scott, I want to thank you for illustrating the pinch points here.

It was very useful.

My remarks are premised on the fact that earlier this evening, I got an email from our daughter who indicated what a valuable experience CBI's Forest School was for her four-year-old.

daughter or granddaughter.

And experiential environmental education is something that we certainly need a lot more of in a day and age where people still challenge concepts such as global warming and melting glaciers

But I have a question for you, Scott, actually two questions.

The first is, did anyone on staff explore the option in coming out of the entrance exit to the site on the Pounding Creek Road to establish in going to the right and thereby going north to Dick Woods Road, that that would be one way

And then if going south out of that same entrance onto Pounding Creek Road would be two ways road.

What that would do by having a one-way road is ensure number one, there would be

Only exiting traffic that would go north up Pounding Creek Road, and I only counted on the excellent map you provided that there were two lots in this entire section that had houses.

The other thing that could be done on that road to reduce the amount of dust that gets generated on dirt roads is to keep the speed limit low and the board is actually looking at the possibility of having electronic monitoring of speeding

It would be very easy to put such a device on this road and thereby anyone who speeds their license plate number would be provided to the police department and they would be billed accordingly for speeding.

But that would take care in going right, you would be on a one-way road,

and going to the left you would have a two-way road.

It would take care of some of the issues that have arisen from the number of letters we received concerning safety.

The other thing I would note is I appreciated your pointing out that pounding

Creek Road coming into Dick Woods does not have a lot of line of sight there.

And that's really a responsibility for VDOT to go ahead and reduce speed limits through this corridor.

because of the safety issue.

Now, there clearly could be an improvement made on Pounding Creek when it comes in to Dick Woods Road, but short of going ahead and leveling Dick Woods to the west, the best that we can do is just to get VDOT support for lowering the speed limit through there, and that would address the safety issue.

So my question is, Scott, did staff ever kick that idea around?

Well, we discussed several options for alleviating traffic impact, and you'll see in the proposed condition, I believe it's number six, would actually require that all departing, this is I believe is the reverse of what you were suggesting, but would at least require that all departing traffic go westward on Pounding Creek out to Miller School.

with staff of the camp there to direct the traffic.

And that at least would control the direction of the departing traffic, which is the only thing we really can control.

We can't effectively control the direction of the arriving traffic.

People will choose their route as they will, and we don't have any way to influence that.

So short of having traffic guards at the north end of

and Pounding Creek, which just isn't practical.

So we did discuss that option and others, but the best that we could do if this use is approved is to have that control of the exiting traffic, so at least that is being forced out toward Miller School Road, which is paved and has more capacity for the

exiting traffic without the hazards of Pounding Creek Road.

We didn't really consider the issue of speeding.

I'm not sure that the, I would be impressed by anybody or worried by anybody who consistently made it over 25 miles per hour on Pounding Creek Road in some of these sections.

So I don't think it's so much speeding that's the issue as it is lack of visibility and lack of capacity to go through at two directions at once.

Understood, but if pounding

Creek Road from the exit out of this site is one way to the north, then we lose the, we don't have as a major concern here any longer about traffic safety because they're proceeding on a road that's dedicated to traffic only going one direction.

Anyhow, I don't want to belabor the point, but thank you for your input on that.

There's Karen, I thought I saw someone come up, their hand come up after Rick.

Scott, thank you again for a very clear presentation of this.

This is sort of a model, I think, for rural project presentations of this sort.

And in the past, since we've

been all together.

There have been several projects where the road, the entry road was a major concern.

I'm thinking about the panorama farms and the burial grounds, the garden out towards Free Union that was to be a wedding venue.

Can't remember the name of that.

But I wonder if you and Kevin could kind of weigh in on

how a decision is made based on the roads because we've had different advice from staff on those different roads and yet I think that there are some parallels and narrow gravel roads that were difficult to have two cars pass.

Well, I suppose it's done very much on a case-by-case basis because these roads vary so much.

Water Perry Farm, which you mentioned, which actually never got as far as a hearing before it was withdrawn, and this particular application are probably the two with the narrowest roads with the most capacity limitations that I've seen.

Some of the others we've seen have also had rural roads, dirt roads even, but that were not quite as limiting as those two.

It's challenging because a lot of the VDOT review is focused on the entrance.

And so we're left to figure out what to do with the remainder of the road.

And so we tend to just examine the road in a lot of detail and see where the danger points are, the pinch points, the limits on capacity.

There are a fair number of gravel roads in the county that are plenty wide enough for passing traffic and can,

accommodate all that.

There are others like Bellards Mill and like Pounding Creek that simply can't.

I can definitely respond.

I'm not sure if it'll be any more intelligent.

I think Scott did a really good job of covering all of this.

Kevin McDermott, planning manager Albemarle County, once again.

So, you know, I thought, Tim, to your question, it's a very good point because we were reviewing this application at the same time as Panorama Farm came in, the natural cemetery there, and also the other Living Earth

venture out there on the other side of Batesville, both of them located on dirt roads.

And so I wanted to go into a little more detail.

So I did take site visits to the place and review them.

And really what it came down to was in those other two

The road was, I think, markedly better condition than Pounding Creek.

The narrowness and also just the overall condition of the road were much

lower, much worse shape.

And then also those other two applications both proposed a much lower amount of use that would generate much less traffic.

That's where we kind of looked at all of it.

I don't remember the other one that you mentioned in Free Union.

I don't know if I was around when that one came out.

or if I just didn't see it, but with those other ones that was the case that the lesser traffic volumes they would generate and the condition of the road being better made us think that those were, you know, that we could address those problems, the road problems with those, whereas we could not with this one.

So that's where we looked at that.

I can also comment with Commissioner Randolph's suggestions about the one way

I don't know if it's possible to make that officially one way.

Now, we could probably put a condition on this that they have to direct traffic one way out of there, but trying to monitor that I think would be very difficult and make sure they're getting that correct.

I'm sure there's going to be plenty of instances where we miss it, where there's other people that are on those roads that don't know the one-way traffic or the traffic patterns.

guests that come out there.

So I think that would be an issue that we have a concern with.

And then the speeding or the entrance at the northern end there at Dick Woods.

I think that I'm not sure if we would be able to lower the speed limit if that's what Commissioner Randolph was

recommending was lowering the speed limit on Dick Woods.

VDOT has a process where they'll evaluate that.

A lot of times what they consider is that lowering the speed limit in almost every case does not lower the

actual speeds of traffic unfortunately.

So we look at other ways to try and reduce speeds.

So if we were to move that speed limit even down to 35, I think you would just see more people going significantly over that speed limit.

So I'm not sure if we'd be able to address that safety problem with that.

I'm happy to answer other questions about this, but I think Scott really did nail that on the head.

Yes, as a follow up.

Thanks.

This has been very helpful for both of you.

Could you clarify again, this might be more for the public.

I think some of us understand this, but

The state maintains our roads and there's sort of this fine line between what are the state standards and the county standards.

Yes, I absolutely believe that.

I think that, well,

VDOT, to clarify, VDOT maintains all of our roads and they review and regulate all uses on those roads for us so that Albemarle County purview to deal with that.

All of our requirements match VDOT requirements so they have to meet VDOT requirements to do these things.

These are public roads, so if we wanted to lower the speed limit we have to get VDOT to approve that through an engineering study, which they do.

Pounding Creek Road, they would maintain Pounding Creek Road.

Another issue to consider is that we don't have the maintenance dollars generally to continually maintain these roads, especially the dirt roads that have caused a lot of problems.

So the level of traffic that you would see on Pounding Creek from this development would have an impact on the

the condition of the road that I don't think VDOT has the funding to be able to regularly get out and address.

So that's another issue to consider.

Thank you very much.

Karen?

Oh it's Karen and Kevin time.

So I do have another question for Kevin.

So you actually addressed some of my questions I was going to ask just now.

One thing that came across in the materials was in preparing for this meeting was somebody suggested that the owner could scoop out some sideways bypass areas so that if two cars were coming to a tight space, somebody could pull over into a bypass area.

and that the owner will be willing to scoop those out.

But my understanding is VDOT is still in charge of the roads, regardless of whose plat they show up on.

And so much as we all have big equipment and fun toys, we can't go out there and start making these improvements on a VDOT road without VDOT approving that.

So could you clarify that?

Because that was in the materials.

Sure, absolutely.

So yes, that is correct that we could make improvements to the road.

However, this road is not is not on state right of way or county right of way.

This is the road

is on an easement and that easement essentially covers the width of the existing road and so if they wanted to do any improvements adjacent to that they would have to get permission from the adjacent landowner to make those improvements because once they get out of the road then

They would be working on someone else's private property unless they did it only on their property.

But obviously that is an option that they could look at.

They would need permitting through VDOT.

And like I said, they would need permission or easements from the landowners adjacent to it to do it.

Anyone else have a question for staff?

Can you hear me, Hub?

All right, perfect.

Well, thank you all.

My name is Hub and I'm one of the founders of Living Earth School and I appreciate all the time that you all, I know it's late and you'd probably rather be putting your feet up, but I appreciate you all taking the time tonight.

Scott Cunningham, who's on the screen as well, who's going to speak in a moment.

We've been working with Scott Clark, who's been great through this process and

We're just, I mean, one of the reasons why we really liked this, I'll address some of the questions that came up as well.

But one of the reasons why we really liked this property is access.

It's convenient location to the community.

And it's also, it's hard to find parcels where kids can scream and get excited about something, about being out in the woods and having fun without impacting people.

And this is like such a great island in the middle of nowhere in a sense.

that we really like.

And we've been doing nature education for 19 years to a lot of, every year the demand increases year after year, and we feel faster.

And it just speaks that the community really wants this, really needs more of it.

And this land will help us address a lot of that.

And land care is a major, like,

Land care is a major value that we have and teaching that we find that since we've been in 19 years, a lot of our older campers have gone on and say that the work that they did at our camp really impacted their future and how they want to care for it and the jobs that they've taken.

So we're excited about that.

We're excited about this location and

The one way road thing I've never thought of.

So I appreciate that comment about is that a possibility except could alleviate some things.

But I think Scott Cunningham is going to get to that minute.

Karen, you mentioned about the bridge and access to the property.

And yeah, thank you.

I know you came out months ago when it was hotter out to that land.

And yeah, it was right now.

It's just a logging road.

But and the bridge, it was strictly a bridge put in with some big logs to be a logging bridge to get the logs out, which was not

You know, our doing that was there with the land before we came to it.

And we've talked to people about what would it take engineering wise, the cost to put a proper bridge in that wouldn't impact the creek and what kind of road could we put in?

So one, it's not just dumping the road water right into the creek, but actually how do you mediate that?

So we've had a lot of discussions about how to do that well, because that's one of the things that we're excited about having a site like this is to create a model of

Good design for the kids that come because they repeat what they see and they get inspired by what they see and we want to make a beautiful site for them that they can be a part of and they can help shape and plant trees and restore that area that was cleared and turn it into a legacy forest that they can come back with their kids and be like

I planted these trees and this forest is and they're walking under there with their kids and they get to be like yeah I think this is the one I planted or well no I just think there's a lot of that longevity of a permanent site for us because we've been moving around and we have the halved property to do some summer camps but it barely meets our capacity needs and

There's more I could say, but I think Scott Cunningham has a more pointed presentation to address some of the traffic issues.

Because I think there's not a ton of issue, from what I understand, about what we want to do on the site and the impact in the neighborhood.

It's mostly the public road.

All right, I'm going to share my screen here for just a minute.

I'm Scott Cunningham.

I'm the director of operations.

I've been working closely with the team on this.

Don't be scared.

This is a very small PowerPoint slide.

I'm not a PowerPoint advocate so this will be quick and painless.

Living in our school, we are a 501c3.

We are a non-profit.

First of all, I wanted to say that the special use permit process is new to us.

It's been a little bit of a challenge, but the staff, Scott, Francis, and all have been very, very helpful and professional in helping us through it.

We also look at this as this is not a personal

It's more of just dealing with the facts of what we're given, so we understand that, but there is room for interpretation of those guidelines, and that's what I'm going to focus on.

Overall, we don't have a problem with the use.

We're a nature school.

I mean, you can't get much nicer.

That's it.

But again, what we're talking about is the one area which is the safety perception of the traffic, of the roads specifically.

VDOT says it's okay for commercial use, and I do want to make a clarification here that actually our summer camps and somehow I got lost in translation it's probably because my ADHD but we have nine weeks of day camp, six weeks of overnight.

But the bottom line is that it's six Sundays that we have parents dropping kids off for a week of camp, six Fridays that we have parents picking up kids from a week of camp, and the rest of that we're looking to do shuttles and carpooling and be more efficient.

But if you look at a whole year, we're literally talking about 12 days of potential traffic.

So what we have proposed is that very specifically that, and I'm going to skip this slide because we've been through it enough, but we've proposed managing the traffic.

And actually what we did propose was 75% would be bussed in.

And I'm a very realistic person, and there is no way I will commit to 100%.

It's unrealistic.

I got parents that have kids with dentist appointments.

I got parents that kids wake up late.

Parents are running late.

It's just not possible.

So I don't even want to put that out there, which is why we said 75% would be shuttled and some remainder would not.

It's just people that live around the corner are going to drop them off.

So I'm much more practical about it.

And I understand that it makes it difficult, but understand

We have to take ownership and responsibility for trying to make our programs as environmentally friendly and as safe to meet these guidelines.

But that's why we picked 75%.

I won't commit to 100%.

It's not realistic.

We also talked about

Traffic Management Plan, which would exactly do that when all the traffic comes in to drop off kids, they park, we have an event, they're dropping off the kids, and then we kick them out.

And we block off the Pounding Creek Road so they all have to go down towards

Miller School Road.

So we want them away from Dick Woods Road.

When we send them out of our campsite, we send them to Miller School Road to exit.

And that's a two-way street, so that could handle both, and that's we avoid.

But I also like the idea of having a one-way to Dick Woods Road.

I'd be more than happy to support that, because we do agree.

That second part, there's not a question.

We're not arguing it.

That second part of that road is

too curvy, too many blind spots and a lot of pinch spots.

So we're proposing a solution.

It might not be enough, but we're working on it.

Let me think what else.

Not too many realistic numbers.

One of the things that I do think that needs to be brought up here, though, it's really important, is that the fact of the matter is that we have one opportunity here with this land to make it a use value

meaning that it's something for the community and we have an opportunity to get it away from the exchange value of somebody using it for the maximize the dollar return.

This is not a big money maker.

We do have full-time staff.

We are growing, but if this doesn't go through, I would expect in the future at some point in time, there'll be some development on it.

It's just, that's how our world works.

So understand, I think that's an important consideration.

I hope you have.

That's all I have.

We agree the road's not perfect.

We have a proposed solution.

I think it's a realistic solution.

Thank you.

Thank you for the presentation.

I just want to make sure I have the numbers right.

As I understand it, there's going to be 10 cabins and maybe 60 children that can sleep over.

There's 10 cabins, but there's going to be 10 platforms.

I think we have like 10 to 14 platforms, and those are just non-permanent tents, and that's what the kids use.

So these are just 14 by 12 platforms that have a

There's a three-sided structure on it and that allows a number of children to sleep in there.

Yeah.

No, it's all tense.

It's all in the stars.

There's no light pollution.

We have a center fire and a fire pit.

We've had the forestry department out there already and looking at it, but no, nothing like that.

These are very rudimentary.

This is survival skills and primitive skills training and tracking and tree identification and wild edibles and all kinds of fun stuff.

Yeah, except for emergency.

I would say for the cabins here, they're pretty standard type tent platforms around the country that the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and a lot of outfit camps do.

And they're kind of under primitive cabins.

And, you know, there is emergency protocols in place with the fire department access with 911 that we have to have in place for them to even approve it.

Other questions for the applicant?

We looked at this a couple times.

I was looking at the conceptual plan, but what is the, I'm sure you have it and just would be curious since they're in these temporary cabins, you know, which are

to be located away from some of the permanent structures in the event of, I'm assuming you have some type of alarm system, in the area that we have with increasingly frequent, unpredictable weather and events, as we unfortunately saw in Kentucky, you know, what is, how does that work for getting more permanent and safe sheltering?

on site.

And this, you know, I'm all forward to inventory spent a lot of time in the Army spent my fair share and rudimentary conditions.

But how does that work in this conceptual plan?

And where are those?

How do they those kind of ability to provide that shelter and event of some of these if they're gonna be there for a week in the event of a of a storm or something that becomes unpredictable?

Scott, can I take this one for a moment?

That's a good question because safety, obviously parents are entrusting us with their children's safety and we've had a great record for the past 20 years.

the plan on this is to have like there's a main camp hall that will have like be built into the hillside and we'll have like that's where the commercial kitchen and like the main like a big group gathering space that's protected from the weather of all season type pavilion or not pavilion but um camp hall that

is not as of right now where the tents are being proposed is probably about 300 feet from that building.

And I was at the Girl Scout camp when the derecho came through and I had a whole bunch of kids there and I saw it coming.

There was no news report that it was coming, but I saw that it was getting nasty out quick and we all went to the main camp hall and we were fine.

Grant, a lot of damage to the camp facility, but we were able to get the kids out and that our same thing here.

Now we have internet, which we didn't have back in Sugar Hollow, that we would just have, we watched the weather all day long, the coordinators watch it, and we make the calls if a big storms coming, we know that campers need to be close.

And if it seems like it's coming to us, then we get them in the building soon.

We have the staff are trained in that staff training.

Here's our emergency policy.

Here's how to do it.

Here's where you go.

If you didn't make it there, here's the aspects best case scenario, because it is always good to plan for the what ifs.

Yeah, it does.

I think just and it was probably mentioned, but the the I'm assuming this Camp Hall can, you know, assuming you had to be in there in an extended period of time, it can easily handle.

The proposed amount of campers at your max capacity.

That's what we're talking about having it designed for.

So.

We talked about the camp hall being able to support the 150 person events that would be fundraisers.

There'll be plenty of space.

Hi.

And overall, I think this is great.

Great idea, in many ways a great location except for the transportation issues.

But just one point you all made in terms of development, another way to protect this land would be to put it under protective easement and still have areas for the development.

So there are mechanisms that we all could see other than just straight up development.

I wonder if you could discuss a bit the relationship between

your group and the owners, because it's my understanding that special use permits run with the land.

So if for some reason it was no longer a school, we, I think in future planning, like to think about what alternatives might be based on what we have agreed to.

So again, if you could just, is this a, and again, for the public,

The acreage that we're talking about is the 125 acres on the third parcel on the far east side.

And as a follow up, would they

Would they at times that you were not using the facilities, wish to use the facilities?

We actually run year round.

So there's not going to be a time when we wouldn't be on that.

And that would be our base headquarters for staff to do meetings and training and stuff.

So our

Lease would be for our usage.

But it's a good question because the fact is that what's beautiful is the farm next to it could be something that our kids could have access to to go over to the farm to see the permaculture of the farming and things of that nature.

So there is a good relationship.

It's, I think, pretty miraculous that we have the opportunity we have.

Um, but yeah, we'll be utilizing it full year round.

So first right refusal to buy.

OK, so we will go to see.

Yes, we do.

We have Sally Tucker.

Sally, please unmute yourself.

You'll have three minutes to speak.

Okay, can you hear me okay?

Yes.

I'm Sally Tucker, and I'm here with my husband, William Koch.

We live at the closest property to this proposed proposal.

I want to make clear that everything that's shown, I appreciate the whole evaluation by the county and I think they came to the right conclusion that this should be denied.

But I do also want to make clear that there are people that live on this road.

The part of the road that they showed was the part where nobody is currently living.

And just slightly down the road from that is where the rest of the Pounding Creek residents live.

And it gives us impression from what's been shown so far that they're the only ones, the living arts school is going to be the only thing out there and that's farthest from the truth.

I live very close to that piece of property and I'm very close to the road.

There are many other people live on that road and this proposal that somebody, one of the commissioners came up with, Mr. Randolph, I think is

really unfair to decide you're going to for just this one property for a special use permit to make it a one way road from that driveway out, whether it's temporary or permanent, it seems extreme to me.

And I don't understand why that one property is able to have so much power over the rest of the road.

I really wish that somebody had come out.

It sounds like one of the commissioners, the woman, I'm sorry, I don't know her name, but I think she came out and looked at the property and probably also saw the road at least in one direction.

But I wish that quite a few of the other Planning Commission people had viewed the road.

I think the entire road they would get in

A great idea of how absurd this is to have 200 trips down the road by just the Living Earth School.

That's not counting everybody else that lives on the road.

And they make it sound like when they leave, they could just turn left and all go in the same direction.

That doesn't account for everybody else that lives in the road that might be coming in the opposite direction.

And that's where those pinch points become major problems, no matter what Living Earth School does.

I've been out there when they did their dry run this past spring or summer, and I just happened to be walking that day and it was pandemonium.

It was not pleasant.

Many of us in the neighborhood in the Batesville area walk on this road, walk our dogs, ride our bikes, run.

Our children do the same.

And this is going to become ridiculous as far as the level of traffic and the safety.

Next I have Sarah.

Sure.

My name is Sarah Brumfield.

I live on Miller Lake Road.

My husband and I, as well as my children, often go mountain biking down this road, which I think is, you know, says a lot whenever you have to take a mountain bike down a road.

It's very narrow, often washed out every time it rains.

I do share the concerns you know there is a neighborhood at the Miller School side of this so there's already people living on this road and so to make it one way and really just kind of ignore their needs and the rest of the community needs it seems

I guess the other thing I'm looking at is, you know, they're going to say that there's 75% busing.

Where are these people busing from?

We don't have really specific details on this.

Like, how are you going to fit a bus down these roads?

What happens if a bus encounters a car or a bicyclist?

You know, and I still have some concerns that, you know, with this special use permit going with the property and not necessarily the school, there's always that opportunity that somebody is going to pay more and end up with a special use permit and not the living with school, despite, you know, our best intentions.

I think we have a road with low visibility at both Miller School and Pounding Creek.

So even if you have their galas and their fundraising events, then you're going to have close to 200 people driving in.

It very easily can get out of control, and there's going to be a lot of opportunity for people to get hurt.

I do not have anybody else with their hand up at this time.

One final comment about the road that I do believe that

The challenge with the road is real, but if it's unsafe for us, then, you know, we're part of the general public, then it's really unsafe and it needs to be addressed at some point in time in the future.

And I think it will be addressed because it's, as we've heard, just an unsafe road, even for people that, even if we're not there, there's still bottlenecks and things.

Yeah, I'd like to say I understand the neighbors concerns and the change and the one way and I don't have all the answers for it.

I do know that like the buy right of that property and there's some other properties in the area that

are owned that potentially could be developed.

And if the buy right on this is 22 houses on the property, which can happen regardless of, I guess, from what I understand from buy rights, correct me if I'm wrong, could happen regardless without taking the road into consideration.

And that's 200 plus cars a day every day of the year where our peak times really are

over, like Scott was saying earlier, about 12 or 14 days a year that would be bringing that large amount of traffic in and the rest are like our homeschool programs during the school year have 25 kids in them and half of those kids carpool from what we've seen.

So it's not a lot of traffic the rest of the year, but if it did get developed,

I mean that regardless what the neighbors want, it's going to bring a lot of impact to the neighborhood regardless.

And so I think we're ultimately the lesser of what would be brought to the area.

And I will bring it back to us unless someone has an additional question for the

for the applicants, and then we are going to discuss this among ourselves and come to some discussion, come to some decision on this matter.

Thank you for the presentation.

Thank you for the public comment.

Commissioners?

Who?

Rick.

Tim's below you on my screen.

Yeah, I would like to address the first person who commented that my recommendation that the road basically be one way north from the exit entrance into the camp school program is not just based on the school being there, the camp being there, but given the nature of the pinch points on the road,

The road itself, especially now that it's been pointed out by Scott, that there are easements on this road, which restricts the ability of VDOT and the county to widen the road to ensure that there's safety.

Regardless of this application, that road should be looked at from that entrance and exit as a one-way road to the north.

And I think when looked at in that frame of reference, it's very easy to put signage up and indicate it's a one way road, do not enter one way.

and people should follow that and if they don't, hey, that's their problem.

If they hit somebody else head on, they're legally accountable through their insurance company and good luck on what your insurance rate will be thereafter.

The other thing I would say is, back up on the main road as this road comes out one way, there can be signage there that indicates

slow traffic entering on the right, slow traffic entering on the left, there's signage.

If we can't get the speed limit down, and I understand the fact that people continue to drive fast regardless of the signage, but they have been so advised by VDOT to slow down.

If they didn't slow down and determined by the skid marks that they were speeding, they get it

They get ticketed accordingly, and they're responsible.

That's the best we can do on this basis.

But I do think there's room for a creative solution here to allow this program to go forward.

And the road needs to be looked at as a one-way road from the camp entrance all the way up to Dick Woods Road, and then allow two-way traffic going south.

So that would be a solution with all the conditions that then staff has provided that there would continue to be used buses and to reduce the number of single vehicles on the road.

Anyone else?

Thank you.

Thanks.

So, I mean, I've thought a lot about this site and I did as the earlier member of the public noted, I did go out to the site.

I want to say that I am a huge fan of environmental education, having taught environmental education camps myself in my career.

So, as I know, Commissioner Randolph has also been involved with environmental education.

So, I mean, the camp itself, as the applicant stated, you know, the use on the land, I have pretty good faith that they will do a good job in stewarding that resource and improving it from what they are finding there, which is, you know, a number of invasive species from past truck traffic, et cetera.

And I was glad to hear about the improvements to the bridge and that the road would be properly graded through the site.

So those concerns were addressed.

But unfortunately, I cannot come up with

in this meeting, given the facts that we've been given a good solution to the state of that road.

And I'm thinking about this not only in the context of this particular site, but I'm also thinking about other applications that we will have in the future.

And I know that our council for the Planning Commission always reminds us that nothing is a precedent for anything else, that each side is unique, yet

There are other sites with difficult roads that will come before us as we continue to try to find creative uses to use the rural area.

So I simply do not believe that the current solutions that have been proposed

are enforceable.

I do not believe that they can be monitored with respect to the traffic management, whether it's voluntarily going one way on certain days.

I'm concerned about the 150 person events.

I think that I would have felt slightly more disposed towards this site if they could have proposed that the camp itself would be buying

or leasing school buses to move those kids in and out because we all know that our Albemarle County school bus is going on all kinds of crazy roads and I personally time my drive to work to miss interfering with the school bus coming and growing because I know what time it goes by.

And so it's not that hard as a rural resident for me to avoid it.

And so if they, you know, I realized that buses are expensive.

It's easy for me to say, go buy three buses.

But, you know, you are talking about raising funds to build a commercial kitchen, you're talking about funds to do all the grading and the tent platforms and whatnot.

So I just don't think without the use of

say three buses that could come in once a day and go out once a day.

The traffic management plan as it's proposed is just not something that our county can enforce.

And the last thing I'll say is that we are approving this use that runs with the land as has already been stated.

And I really have a lot of faith in the folks with the Living Earth School that they will endeavor to do a great job and do what they said.

But unfortunately,

We have to think about scenarios where should they cease to exist or just find a much better site with a better lease or something that you know a future owner might not be as good of a steward of this site and would yet have the ability to run a camp there.

So it's really, I've learned over eight years on the Planning Commission to think not so much about the applicants themselves, but about the actual use and what's possible regardless of who might be there running that site.

So it is with a heavy heart that I say that I cannot support this in this location.

at this time.

That's where I'm coming down.

I love to hear from other commissioners.

I am well known for changing my mind on the dais, the virtual dais.

Other commissioners.

Tim.

And again, I'm on the edge and could be convinced also.

Thank you, Tim.

Corey?

I don't have anything else to add.

OK.

I love the concept of the school and I love what the school does.

And I think it's great to have a place for kids to get unconnected from their phones and tablets and like reconnect and understand what it means to be on this earth.

But you know, looking at the site and the traffic and concerns and all that, plus seeing Commissioner Firehock's side, you know, I don't

In the absence, and I appreciate the creative solutions that has been presented by Commissioner Randolph, but I don't know, you know, they're not there, they're not there now.

And there's, there's a lot of people that potentially could be impacted.

So without more community input about the redesign and the one way and the change of those traffic patterns.

Yeah, I think that's hard to understand what the impact would be without, you know, more

information and study about those alternative changes to the traffic flow that I can't, yeah, I can't wrap my head around fully in this meeting and, you know, assume that that would be a foregone conclusion to get by it.

I will add that, Karen, Karen, I will add that

While I didn't go for this particular site, I have been in that area a lot.

My time took me to that whole area around.

I've had things that have taken me for business and reasons around the Miller School and the back of the middle school, trying to figure out effective ways to get from Dick Woods Road over to Batesville.

And I've been on this road, and I will say that it is an uncomfortable road to be on.

at any speed that I will say probably about 10 or 15 miles an hour.

And for the reason that it's the visibility and trying to anticipate what you're going to see when you come over the crest of the hill, when you come around the corner is quite uncertainly.

So I will just share that.

My sense is that, again, as we've talked about, I can't get over

the access to to the site before I even get to see whether or not this is the appropriate site.

I assume it's the appropriate site.

I assume that this would take the place of what of what we what we said yes to a number of months ago and the whole property but that regardless of that we're dealing with this thing in front of us and I have to say trying to figure out how to get first responders in and out of there if something were to go wrong or if something if a parent were to become

exercise about his or her child being there and needing to come there in a flash or with some energy around their arrival there.

I don't know that there's an easy way to set up that kind of movement in and out of the property or in and off the property.

So I'm concerned about that and would hope that as this moves to a next evaluation that there's some

definite consideration about what that means on how to put in several solutions that help to mitigate some of what I think are significant risks in moving people in and off of that property, particularly during the week, not so much during a Sunday or a Friday or a Sunday.

So I would have to stand, given what I see right now with the egress on that property and the ingress of that property, I would not be supportive of what I see before me, but would encourage people to sort of think more creatively on how they can solve this.

And if it's doing what, I forget what the camp is called, but I think it's Triple C Camp that parks their buses and really bus people down Route 20.

I mean, that's a solution, and it seems that that is the

the primary way in which they move their kids into their camp.

If there was a way to do that, I would encourage the applicant to give some serious consideration to putting that in place.

So I am not in a position right now that I'm going to vote yes.

Scott, this is not a chance where you have an opportunity to come in and make the next level

of comments, but I do appreciate that.

And you will have a chance to do that before the supervisor.

Well, unless there's anything else anyone on the commission wants to state, I'm prepared to make a motion.

Scott.

Thank you, Scott.

Yeah, so I'm sorry, I have to.

Do you see it?

Oh, go ahead.

This is a suggestion.

Yeah, sure.

Well, it's probably the same thing.

So based on the findings described in the staff report and factors identified as unfavorable, I recommend denial of SB2021-00013, Living Earth School.

Is there a second?

Second.

Seconded by Corey.

Further discussion?

Ms.

Firehock?

Aye.

So it's passed the motion for denial and in support of the staff's recommendation going to the Board of Supervisors.

has just been done with one, what I assume with one in support of the proposition.

Gentlemen, you've heard the concerns of the Planning Commission, and I know you wanted to come in and say something, and this is not the time to do that.

What I would offer to you with sincere hope that you will sit with staff and try and work to be able to respond to similar times of conversation that you may hear at the Board of Supervisors.

I would absolutely suggest that you spend some time trying to do that.

I saw one thumb up from Living Earth, but I didn't see a thumb up from the other person.

Okay, cool.

Thank you for and please sit with them and be safe in your travels to the new year.

Thank you very much for the proposal that you're hoping for us this evening.

Okay.

Well,

Who is that?

Oh, and there are two people who we haven't seen in a while.

The commissioner and I assume we're not taking a break and we're going to we're going to move through this, correct?

Moving through it.

So in that, whoops, I didn't get my dash.

Tonight, we have before us a presentation.

So remember, presentations, we hear and we comment.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And welcome, commissioners.

Thank you for having us.

And I guess I should give Mr. Benesch a chance.

No, I was just going to introduce you.

Oh, OK.

Sandy Shackelford, the Director of Planning and Transportation with the TJPDC, and she and Sharice Franklin, who's also here, Planner 2, have been spearheads on this project.

As you know, it's a joint city-county project.

So just with those introductions and thanking them in advance for all the work that they've done, I'll turn it over to Sandy.

Welcome to you both this evening.

Thank you.

And for those of you who I haven't had the pleasure of working with previously, I and earlier in my career for a large majority of my career, I worked in local government.

So this is taking me back to some of the previous work that I had done.

Let me go ahead and share my screen.

I'm going to try.

I know it's getting really late and I want to try to get through this presentation.

Let's see if I

quickly and leave a lot of opportunity for you all to ask questions and provide your feedback.

So again, as David had mentioned, this corridor plan has been a joint effort between Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville.

Originally, when this whole initiative was

conceived of it was imagined to be a three phase process.

So the first phase was completed in 2018, and that was really an assessment of the existing conditions, which resulted largely in a series of maps which showed the existing conditions, floodplains, property ownership, land use, those kinds of things for the joint area of the corridor.

And we're currently in phase two, which is the visioning phase.

So this is really looking at what the overall goals are for the River Corridor and identifying what the priorities are as far as the future use and development of the River Corridor.

We'll talk a little bit about phase three, but the original idea was that going from phase two into phase three, we would be moving into a master planning process for the urban corridor.

I think there is some question at this point whether or not we will move forward with phase three.

And so that has impacted some of the ways that we have approached this visioning phase for phase two.

So we'll talk about that a little bit more at the end.

The study area that we looked at as part of this phase was a 4.3 mile length of the corridor.

So we started at the north at Penn Park was the northern termini.

And then this went down to the southern ending point of basically I-64.

And it involves properties on both sides of the river in Albemarle and Charlottesville.

Just for your reference, the existing conditions assessment involved looking at a 13 mile span of the corridor.

So this was a much more concentrated and focused phase.

And this property boundary or small area boundary was developed by a technical committee that was made up of TJPDC, Albemarle County and City of Charlottesville staff.

Real briefly, just to review our public engagement process that we went through with this plan, we had a steering committee, which a few of you all were a part of, that consisted of two planning commissioners, two board members, and a member of the public from Albemarle as well as from Charlottesville.

We started this process in July of 2019.

We did an initial phase of public engagement in the fall of 2019.

We went to the River Flair Festival and did some high level engagement with

People who were attempting there to get an idea of the priorities for the urban corridor.

And then we came back and we started working with with the technical committee to develop an overall outreach outreach process and start developing our initial

Excuse me, our initial draft of the vision statement guiding principles.

As you all are aware, in early 2020 we were hit with a global pandemic and so that kind of paused our process for a little while.

As you recall, there was a little bit of, not a little bit, a lot of uncertainty about what exactly that global pandemic, the COVID pandemic was going to do and how long exactly we were going to have to consider strategies to be different.

So I think there was some question about, can we just wait this out for a month and go back to doing things the way that they were?

And obviously we know now that we really had to re-strategize what

Public engagement was going to look like at this time knowing that there was a lot of concern about interpersonal interactions.

So what we ended up doing is, there's a lot of discussion among the technical committee at that time about all of the activity that was occurring on the river because that tended to be a place that people were attracted to during the pandemic.

So what we ended up doing was we really worked hard to build our website and make sure that the information was up to date, that the surveys were there, that there was good and updated information.

And then we, and some of you may have seen these, we posted signs along the corridor itself.

to make sure that people were aware that we were doing a visioning process for the study.

So it had a QR code so people could scan it with their phones and save the website, have the surveys and had information about the public engagement opportunities that we had.

And through a combination of outreach efforts, we actually ended up with about 70 responses that we received through the website.

So it ended up being a

A reasonably helpful way to make sure that the public was aware and had opportunities to engage.

We also held two public webinars on October 24th and October 29th.

And in addition to posting the information along the river corridor, we also did a physical mailing to property owners within a 500 foot buffer of the project area to make sure just that everybody who would potentially be impacted by this area or had an interest to give as many people as possible the chance just to make sure that they had been contacted and notified.

And then we also developed a stakeholder list with the technical committee identifying different organizations that may have contacts that would be interested in engaging in the process.

So that included folks like the Chamber of Commerce, the Natural History

Committee, I think it is, I might have stated that wrong, but different stakeholder groups that we knew might have some sort of interest in this study to make sure that, again, at least there was an opportunity that they were notified and made aware of this project.

While we were doing this project, the MPO was also conducting a feasibility study on a bike and pedestrian crossing between woolen mills and pan tops.

So this was really a separate project that was outside of what we were doing for this corridor plan.

But because it was related and because so many of the same people really cared about both of these happening at the same time, we made sure that we were collaborating on

scheduling the public information sessions and making sure that we were cross notifying people that had expressed interest in one or the other to make sure that they had opportunities to engage on both of those.

From there we took all of this information, we refined our vision statement and guiding principles.

And then what we did was the guiding principles basically fell into six different categories of types of uses.

And so for each one of those guiding principles we scheduled a separate stakeholder meeting with different

with different folks that had some sort of technical or professional expertise in these subject areas.

So that included people that worked with historic or cultural resources, public safety personnel, economic development staff, transportation planning staff, et cetera.

And so for each of those guiding principles, we had a separate meeting to go through and bet our draft of recommendations before we completed the draft of the plan.

On August 10th, we met with the Charlottesville Planning Commission to conduct an informational meeting similar to the one that we did here.

So the plan that is updated on the website right now that you all received as part of your packet incorporates comments from that planning commission meeting.

I also presented this information to the Rivanna River Basin Commission in September.

And so some of those comments have also been incorporated at this point.

In addition to the public engagement, we also went through a benchmarking process to look at some successful planning efforts that were identified in other areas and pull out ideas and suggestions from those that we wanted to make sure were incorporated into our planning effort.

Originally, when this benchmarking effort was envisioned, it was really going to be looking at one

as well as the technical committee was having discussions about what a good peer

We realized that there wasn't really one that was doing exactly what we wanted to do with the Rivanna River.

There was a lot of focus on economic development or flood mitigation or recreation and those kinds of things.

And what we really wanted for the Rivanna River was something that was going to better balance a lot of different types of

of uses.

So we ended up deciding to really look more broadly at several different plans and look for common themes and just other things that stood out to us that would make sense to be incorporated into the Rivanna River Plan.

And so among those, we started out with Richmond and Greenville because those are very highly regarded as being very successful river planning efforts.

And then we also looked at Lynchburg and Fredericksburg.

And you can see that there are some common themes that were identified like a strong emphasis on how they develop their trail networks and access to the trail systems, incorporating local history, and then also this really strong theme of

making sure that part of their development of the corridor included fostering connections to the water.

And then there were some other considerations that may not have shown up as universally, but were still really important factors for us to consider, like the accessibility of different amenities along the river corridor for people of different ability and mobility, the importance of wayfinding and navigation to help people feel comfortable and take advantage of using

the corridor.

And then there were different levels of emphasis on the environmental considerations.

And while we didn't address it here, there was also some discussion about how the zoning ordinances and zoning regulations could support the development or the desired use of the river corridor.

So what we did was we developed a draft vision statement and then we vetted this through the public webinar and also from the steering committee.

So what we have before you is the final version of the vision statement that

We developed as part of this planning process.

So the Rivanna River flowing through Charlottesville and Albemarle County is one of the community's greatest assets.

In and near Freebridge, Woolen Mills, and the Pantops area, the River Corridor is and will be a dynamic place where people can experience a natural environment, healthy outdoor activities and venues, peaceful and serene opportunities, and important historic and cultural points of interest.

And then we developed these six guiding principles.

I'll go through this in a little bit of detail because initially when we started this planning effort and we started putting together the draft of the guiding principles, there was this desire really to say the plan that we are looking at is not a recreation plan, it's not a conservation plan, it's not an economic development plan.

This is really intended to look at all the different ways that

We want the river to be used and to balance those accordingly.

However, after we went through the public engagement and after we vetted these with the steering committee, what we heard is that, yeah, we want all of these things to be equal, except that what's really most important to us is this environmental protection and stewardship piece.

And so what ended up happening as we went through these guiding principles and developed these guiding principles is that we wanted to pull out the environmental protection stewardship as saying out of all of these priorities, the most important thing that we're doing for the river is protecting and stewarding the environmental aspects of it that make it such an important attraction to the community.

And as long as we are protecting it and stewarding it environmentally, the rest of these guiding principles are of equal importance to find the appropriate balance.

So you'll see in the language that we state that the environmental protection and stewardship shall be paramount to all activities and land uses in the river corridor.

You'll see that in some of the other guiding principles, for example, in recreational activities.

We made sure to

emphasized that this can only be done with environmental sensitivity.

And that was also one of the concerns, especially around the recreational activities and the development guiding principles.

Was there less concern from the public about how that could have some negative impacts on on the environment?

And just really briefly, I'm going to go through the high level recommendations and just give you a general overview for each of the guiding principles.

If you look in the report, basically, we have a table that shows that for a lot of these recommendations, they're actually subtasks.

I'm not going to go through the subtasks right now.

I'm just going to go through a very brief summary of the high level

recommendations that came out of this.

The environmental protection recommendations really focused around, first of all, making sure that we have the right information to know where these sensitive biological and ecological areas were.

And then we could start working to limit access and stall signage and appropriate barriers, avoiding impacts to wildlife and movement.

What you will find if you look through this document is that this covered a very broad range of topics as far as recommendations.

And so really, what would be needed for a lot of these areas is just a much more detailed and specific analysis to provide the level of information that would be needed to really inform where some of these things should actually be occurring.

So that is one common theme that you'll probably see throughout this is that there is some need for some additional planning to achieve some of these goals.

We also really wanted to emphasize opportunities to work with other groups like Rivanna Conservation Alliance, for example, that are supporting some of the efforts to do the stream bank stabilization and work with invasive species and things like that.

So we're really trying to make sure that we are continuing to build momentum where there's already been successes moving forward.

And we also got several comments that I thought was interesting and maybe potentially would help reduce some of the labor and that's looking at where there are opportunities to create naturalized grasslands that don't need maintenance and mowing and those kinds of things.

So we had some really good thoughts and suggestions from the public for the environmental protection.

Related to recreational activities, one of the big things was just about thinking about this as a regional asset, as is stated in the vision statement.

And so one of the things we wanted to think about was we want to improve trail connectivity.

And that might be looking at how we can enhance connections to nearby neighborhoods and potentially enhance that based on creating access for neighborhoods that might be underserved.

paying attention to issues of equity.

But more broadly than that, it also means really looking at how people can access the river corridor and how we can create as many different options for access as possible.

So that's also looking at things like, can we provide better transit service to access the trails and that kind of thing.

So that's something else that we tried to focus on a little bit, especially considering that

There's some concern about some constraints regarding parking.

We definitely think that parking should be considered if needed, but that we need to be much more broad and robust in our thinking about how we can enhance actual access to the corridor area.

And then there were other items that came up like

Like the accumulation of loose trash was a pretty common theme that came up over and over.

So there were several strategies that could be considered for that and the different ways that we can promote different types of recreational activities through the corridor that may not be as widely thought about things like wildlife watching or bird watching or things like that.

The multi-purpose trails and bridges was also an interesting one.

Again, part of this relates to the recreational access and making sure that we are improving access to the trail, but also thinking about how this trail system through the corridor fits in with our larger transportation network.

So to make sure that whenever we are thinking about how we can expand access to the trail, also thinking about what are other ways that these facilities could be useful or beneficial to people who are traveling through the area.

So, for example, promoting trails and bridges for commuting traffic and not just for recreational use and thinking about how we can solve multiple goals with careful planning.

We are, as I mentioned before, we're already pursuing a bicycle and pedestrian crossing connection over the Rivanna River between Willam Mills and Pan Tops.

And then the other sites that were identified as potentially being interested, that there was interest in

Additional crossings are between Penn Park and Darden Tow Park and then at Free Bridge.

So that's already on our radar and we're already in the process of pursuing at least one of those crossings.

The other thing related to the multi-purpose trails and bridges is the importance of wayfinding systems.

to help direct users through the trail system, which can really make this a more attractive and more hospitable way for people to travel through the area and feel comfort and knowing that maybe I'm not familiar with this and I want to go explore it, but making sure that there's information that's available for them if they need it to help them be confident in navigating through the trail system and getting to where they want to go.

The public safety, health and welfare section was really interesting because when we started this discussion initially there was really this push to emphasize making sure that the corridor users really felt comfortable and safe within the corridor.

And as we had these conversations with the public safety personnel, this really turned less into providing the sense of comfort and safety and more about providing a sense of empowerment that people felt like they had the information they needed to respond to emergencies or

circumstances that may arise.

So for example, you know, as we were thinking through the implications of the homeless encampments that were near the corridor, it became less about

not letting people be in camp there and more about what are the ways that we can provide greater service to meet the needs of the people that are a part of that community.

And then how can we make people that are on the trail feel confident in knowing what to do if they come across this and how they can provide support or get more information if they need help in resolving a problem.

So that one was a really interesting one to work through and I think it was really helpful especially for this section to spend that time with the public safety personnel and thinking through that.

And then a lot of it was just about providing information, so making sure people had access to the right phone numbers that they needed and knew what to do in the case of common emergencies and had the information they needed to be able to communicate their location to emergency response personnel if needed.

Development and redevelopment was the other topic that had a lot of concern from the public.

And again, the concern was really focused around not wanting to further take away from the natural feel of the corridor.

So they didn't want this to be overdeveloped.

And they wanted to make sure that this was all done with a really high sensitivity to the environmental concerns.

So what I want to emphasize here for this section is that we aren't proposing any land use that's different from what has already been adopted in the comprehensive plans.

We were not revisiting that.

What we were trying to inform in this section isn't where development should occur, but for development that could already occur, what are some ways that we can do this that makes it more cohesive to the environment that it's setting in?

So looking at things like

promoting the development of service-oriented businesses that provide or enhance enjoyment of the river.

So things that might have a little patio that overlooks the river or providing some sort of recreational service that people could enjoy along the river like bike rentals or something like that.

So really thinking about how can we better create a connection between the types of

economic development that goes in the river and make that an opportunity to enhance users' enjoyment of the river itself.

And then also looking at opportunities for how visually development within the corridor could potentially integrate with the feel and the characteristic of being within this very natural corridor area.

and also working with existing businesses to determine how we can enhance visual impacts of people traveling through the corridor.

So there are some places, for example, that are more industrial in use that might not be as visually appealing.

So we could work with, we could create some opportunities to work with some of those property owners to do voluntary landscaping programs or

encourage industrial art or something like that that adds some visual interest to that property to make it a little bit more appealing for people who might be traveling through the corridor.

And then we get to historic places and cultural features.

And this is another one where we really could benefit from doing some upfront planning to make sure that we have a really robust inventory of where all of these historic and cultural resources exist.

There are some places that are sensitive that will require limiting public access to those resources to make sure they're preserved.

Then there are other places where we could better promote those resources and further enhance the public's awareness and appreciation of some of those resources that exist through the corridor.

Then a lot of these recommendations are also focused around collaborating with other groups or

or cultural centers to do programming and again help develop a greater sense of awareness of the rich history that has occurred throughout the corridor.

The recommendations when you look in the plan, I know this slide is a little bit busy.

But you'll see the high level recommendations.

So the ones that were on the slide that I went through, those are all in the colored rows.

And then the white rows are the subtasks that are associated with those higher level recommendations.

Some of them have subtests, some of them don't.

What we did, again, because we're not necessarily sure that we're going to move towards a master planning process, so we wanted to make sure that there were really clear implementable recommendations as part of this plan, is that we picked out a couple of these that felt like they were either already high priority or had some momentum behind them that would be really helpful to pursue, or else they were pretty low cost.

and could deliver really big benefits without necessarily a lot of additional resources that were needed and so we identified those as short-term solutions in the time frame and those were really the ones that we identified as saying these are where our opportunities are to start implementing the recommendations in the plan and these are the ones to start focusing on.

All right, next steps.

I know the slide is really busy.

Again, because we're not really sure where we are as far as the master plan, there are some intermediary steps that we identified that could be helpful either to inform a master planning process if that's moved forward or also identified as additional things that could be done right now that would be beneficial regardless of a master plan.

So starting out with planning priorities, as I mentioned, this was really broad in scope.

And so there were some places where some additional information and a better focus on some of these areas could be really beneficial to starting to meet some of those goals.

those include comprehensive inventories of biological and ecological areas.

Now, some of this was part of the biodiversity action plan that Albemarle developed, but what is really needed in order to inform actual planning processes is really more of a fine tuned ecological survey of some of these areas.

So that would be something that could be pursued on its own that would provide a lot of benefit regardless of whether or not there is a master plan to follow it.

Similarly, as I mentioned, creating a comprehensive inventory of the historic and cultural resources.

I believe it was Mr. Keller who has been advocating for a viewshed analysis.

And again, that really just couldn't be part of the scope at this time.

But we think that that could be really helpful for understanding, especially informing the development and redevelopment decisions that need to be made about how developments could impact the river corridor.

and making sure that we're identifying and protecting those really important viewsheds that enhance a user's enjoyment of the corridor.

And then similarly to that, conducting an architectural analysis or design charrette or something like that to help identify, you know, if you do want to move forward with better informing what kind of visual impacts development would have throughout this corridor, this would be a really good step to help you determine what those guidelines should be.

So those were the planning priorities we identified.

As far as implementation, there are a couple of grant opportunities that make a lot of sense to support the initiatives that were identified in this plan.

So we're already looking at transportation system improvements through things like VDOT's programs for smart scale and revenue sharing.

Those are good opportunities to implement a number of these programs.

Environmental conservation and mitigation.

So again, this is already happening and this provides additional support to continue to work with organizations like the Rivanna Conservation Alliance.

They look for opportunities within the corridor to conduct their studies.

There's also a really

a pretty new funding source that focuses a lot on flood prevention and flood mitigation that could provide some research funding for projects within the corridor.

And then also focusing on historic preservation.

So once we identify those historic and cultural resources, this could be a really good opportunity to restore and rehabilitate and enhance some of those historic features.

And then finally, we identified a couple of priority projects that, again, these are pretty low cost, high impact projects that we think would provide really good opportunities to just start building momentum towards implementation of this plan.

So some of those include flood proofing any sorts of facilities or equipment within the corridor.

As flooding becomes more and more likely, I know there were some concerns about steps getting loose and railings and benches and things like that.

So focusing on how can we secure those types of

facilities within the corridor.

Looking at zoning ordinances, especially related to events and what's allowed for events could be a really good opportunity to see, are we creating barriers to support some of these recommendations or not?

And then a lot of this is really information sharing.

So how can we empower users and inform users so that when they go to the trails or when they go to the corridor, they know where they're going and they feel confident in being able to navigate it and get there.

So those are the types of things that we identified as the project priorities for immediate next steps.

So I'll just mention briefly that if there is a master planning process, this would really look at on the ground improvements for things like preservation, capital investment, where there might be opportunities for private investment or private partnerships to initiate some of these recommendations.

and then also River Restoration.

And this would involve a funding commitment from Charlottesville and Albemarle and developing a scope of work and hiring a consultant with a goal to have very specific priorities and implementation schedules for some of these projects.

So again, I think there's a little bit of a question mark right now whether this is a priority at this time, but hopefully any of the work that is done to fulfill this plan would start working towards the overall goals to implement the vision for the River Corridor and could feed into the development of a master plan if there is interest in moving that forward.

Yeah, and just real quickly, Julian, you touched on it.

This is a presentation of this document.

Our anticipated approach to this is to get your comments and feedback.

We will consider that Sandy and I and Missy Creasy from the city will kind of debrief on your comments.

But the idea is to get your input

complete the document with any comments that you might, suggestions you might have and then we will forward that on to the Board of Supervisors that we will review and we hope endorse the plan and then forward it to our comprehensive plan update process for it to be finally vetted, incorporated and adopted into our comp plan through that larger process.

So that's it.

There you go.

Commissioners?

So I appreciate all the great work that went into this, and I know how hard it is to do public engagement in a pandemic.

So I'm just going to make a couple of comments.

I'm not going to go through your report line by line, and I don't think you want me to.

So with that, I just want to note

One comment and then a suggestion.

So the comment is that I think in a number of places, and I don't know that this is the time to do this or perhaps in a later round of planning for the Rivanna, but there's a lot of the recommendations that talk about encourage native species and increase trail access, but they're not very specific.

And so, you know, when I look at objectives, I always like to see if they're measurable.

You know, so like, where would these native species be encouraged?

Is this in site plans?

Would residents be encouraged to plant them in their yards, so extension?

I like to get into the details.

I always say a good objective is when you can tell if you did it or not.

You know, like if you say plant more trees, like how many is more, two?

Or is it 200?

So that's just a sort of a small comment on just how I would like to see some of the recommendations be more specific.

But I do want maybe to ask, and maybe this is in the report, I really tried to read every line, but maybe I missed something because I actually love this stuff.

I'm a nerd for river stuff.

What's really hurting the Rivanna River is the tremendous volume of untreated stormwater management that is pouring through our stormwater pipes.

And I'm very proud of Albemarle and Charlottesville for having a water protection ordinance.

And I took a role in authoring some of the city's ordinance when I was a planning commissioner in the city years ago.

So, so I think that's really great, but we are both Charlottesville especially mostly developed before Clean Water Act standards for stormwater treatment so most of the runoff from the impervious services in the city is going untreated to the Rivanna.

the storm pipes go right under our beautiful wooded buffers and discharge all of the metals, oil, grease, grit, animal waste, metal filings from cars, toluene and benzene from tailpipes, etc.

All the yucky stuff from our streets right into the rivers and as Albemarle is continuing to develop we're seeing a lot more storm water problems even though we require volume controls on our development sites

So ultimately, to get the river cleaner, we're going to have to do a lot of work in the watershed.

And so I'm wondering if as you write this up, you can draw some attention to the fact that, you know, what someone does in their backyard in the middle of Charlottesville or, you know, way up up Ivy Creek far away from the Rivanna's Banks affects the health of that river.

And so I think we need a much bigger focus on retrofitting, adding permeable surfaces into our developments, and also actually redesigning our urban landscape.

So as we redevelop malls, that we start adding the stormwater management that wasn't there when it was built or as we redevelop sites.

So it takes a long time to do it that way, but we've got to start.

I know that some work is being done on that, but without that incredible attention to the volume of stormwater runoff that's hitting our rivers untreated, we're not going to have a clean, beautiful river that we feel confident letting our citizens enjoy, splash around, and explore.

So I leave you with that.

No, thank you.

I think we did address the stormwater, but not to that same

Maybe it's not strong enough necessarily for what you're talking about.

So we can certainly go back and look at that.

Anyone else?

Well, as one of our representatives, I've seen this process.

And even before I was on that committee, watched the first phase, which was the larger area to the north as well.

It's come a long way.

I think there's been a realization that there are peoples that we don't talk about in our history that were very important along the river, not just free blacks, but people who were enslaved who seem to have migrated to the river and had small operations of different sorts going on there.

So there's a wealth

of knowledge beginning to surface that could tell a much richer and more diverse story than just the natural systems part of it.

And I think that that's where another phase because of the interest that the history community has shown in this that will emerge.

Also, I think from an urban design standpoint,

The views in as well as the views out are important.

And this isn't to create buffers.

I mean, we all know river tours like the famous River Tours of Architecture in Chicago that are focusing on what you see in the built environment.

So the interesting thing about the Rivanna River and the focus for this study on the more urban portion is that

It complements the other two parts.

And they're really three sets of stories, three sets of uses and focus that can happen all the way up to the headwaters of the Rivanna and Albemarle County.

The various headwaters might not be the right term, but the number of tributaries that there are that come into it and the potential blue ways and green ways along that portion through this portion and then work that's been

ongoing a lot of pieces that have been put in place that aren't quite there yet, but that the Pantops Master Plan encourages all to think about, which would be continuing this to the county line.

Down to Flubana, of course, which has a tremendous amount of work that they've done for trails along the river.

So it's certainly an important part.

And I think there's a lot here to be borrowed from for the comprehensive plan.

if there is a subset on the Rivanna River, and I think there should be in the upcoming comprehensive plan.

So thanks to the group that's been working on this.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

The only one thing I would give from my reading is just be intentional how you use the word urbanized water right.

Okay, because when I read that, it sort of pushed a bunch of buttons for me because I said that's the last, we don't have an urbanized river.

Having, that's not, we don't have one and we're not set up to have one unless someone with more money than I can imagine buys the river road properties

and then you might have something that starts there.

But, and I can't even imagine what it would cost to assemble those properties.

So just to be intentional how you use that term, because I think that's going to invoke a number of images for people who may either wrestle with it or want to accept it.

So just offer that to you.

And I think...

I think you're seeing people who are basically appreciative of what you're presenting.

I would suggest when you push this up to the supervisors that you give more visuals because they ingest, as one of them is sitting here with us tonight, they ingest a lot of text.

And I think you want to be able to sort of give them something that they can visually engage with as you're speaking.

And I see perhaps he's going to,

mute himself.

You unmuted yourself.

I did.

But just reminding you, I'm not one of the supervisors.

My one suggestion, Sandy, would be to

to pick out two major things for each of your areas to share with the supervisors.

And they will have read the whole piece, which is extensive, comprehensive, outstanding, very well done.

But two highlights on each section will be good.

And of course, when you do that, be aware that they're going to say, but you didn't cover this.

And you will say, in the interest of time and your full agenda, I tried to be sensitive to get this presented to you in under 15 minutes with questions.

And they will then be appreciative.

But very thorough presentation.

Very well done.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Again, we're going to debrief on your comments as we did with the city's comments.

We'll take those into consideration and move those forward to the city council and board of supervisors.

Thank you very much.

And it's good to see you all again and have a safe next few weeks and a prosperous new year.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We're going to move on.

Are there committee reports for this evening?

Tim, you just had a big committee report, didn't you?

Kim and Daniel, you just had a big committee report.

Does anyone else have a committee report that they'd like to share?

OK.

We have one thing that we need to do before we do several other things.

And we're not meeting next week, apparently, because we have nothing on our agenda.

Commission needs to sort of say we're not meeting next week.

So I would certainly entertain a motion that we cancel next week's meeting.

Oh, I see that's been moved by Commissioner Keller.

Oh, and I see it's been seconded by Commissioner Randolph.

How nice of you.

Is there any further discussion?

Madam, would you call the roll on this, please?

Yes.

Aye.

Ms.

Firehock?

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

Counselor, Mr. Rapp?

I wonder if Mr. Rapp could remind us when the first meeting of the new year is at this point?

Our next meeting will officially be on January 11th, and I will have the pleasure of getting us started off in the new year with the election of officers, adoption of our 2022 meeting dates,

and I would say this is probably a good time to just say, since this will, unless elections go a different way than expected, will be our last meeting with our excellent chair, Mr. Bivins and vice chair, Karen Firehock.

It has been an incredible two year journey that we've had.

You know, I went from seeing y'all once in person to a virtual transition through COVID.

and I think a lot of people don't realize the number of meetings that me and Mr. Bivins have had over the past year to try, two years to try and navigate this, figure out how to do a Zoom meeting.

It's incredible how comfortable it's gotten.

That goes out to him for all the hard work he's put in and efforts to coordinate this with us.

That's kind, that's kind, that's kind, that's kind, but I want to give us an opportunity.

Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Director, or our new Deputy Director.

But I think we have a moment here that our two close and dear commissioners might want to leave us with just some comments or some remarks before we move in and give them some comments.

So I'm not going to say who's going to get to go first because that's not for me to do.

But I'm going to let either Tim or Rick decide who would like to leave us with some remarks first, realizing that there's always time for somebody to come back after they say what they need to say, what they feel like they need to share with us as they move to their next heavy schedule.

So of course, the two of you raised your hands together.

You know what?

Okay, I've never heard a loss for words.

Although this time, if you guys will indulge me one last time, I'm going to read something that I prepared so that I can get the points in that I wish.

But I promise that this has been tested and it stays within Carolyn's three minute limit, okay?

Okay, thank you.

Chair Bivins and fellow commissioners,

As I reflect on the eight years I've served the residents of Albemarle as the at-large planning commissioner, including four years as chair, I first wish to thank the Board of Supervisors for their trust and support.

To past and present commissioners, thank you for your thoughtful and collegial approach in land use and planning decision-making.

It's been my honor to serve with you.

To planning commission and planning department staff, past and present,

you're a special group who've worked tirelessly to face the challenges of planning in these times.

Keep up the good work.

If I may, I would like to share three thoughts as the county enters the comprehensive planning process.

First, we must remember that social justice and environmental quality go hand in hand.

They are not mutually exclusive.

Second, we must also not lose sight that it's the combination of the development areas and the rural areas

each with its own qualities and contributions that makes Albemarle County unique.

I hope the commission and the board can keep these issues in mind when our county attempts to address systemic racism, wealth inequality, and climate change as they relate to future land use and future planning policies.

And third, Albemarle will benefit from both a historic preservation ordinance and a strengthened site plan policy that lessens the impact of the manipulation

of our existing landforms, topography, and hydrology.

It is our duty to protect our environment on ecological grounds as well as to recognize our county's previously excluded, ignored, and misrepresented populations.

And we should be especially concerned about land use policy and decisions regarding areas associated with the legacies of Albemarle's indigenous, enslaved, and free Black communities.

So I look forward to our paths crossing in other ways in the future.

I value all of you as colleagues, and I wish you well as you progress through the comprehensive planning and various planning initiatives.

Thank you.

Gosh.

We'll get a copy of that, will you?

Of course.

Carolyn will have it for the minutes.

For the minutes, thank you.

Well, the only thing I can think of is what Roy Rogers used to sing at the end of his show, which was Happy Trails to You Until We Meet Again.

And I'm looking forward to meeting you all again in my post-Planning Commission, post-Albemarle County roles.

I do want to say that I feel very good about leaving at this point because I think the future of the planning commission is in outstanding hands with Corey and Daniel as young members.

And I see real leadership capabilities there and I look forward to following your work on the commission.

It's exciting as a new era begins for me, but I know the two of you will continue

to be valuable voices on planning for this county.

The staff of course is outstanding.

There's no question about that.

And I've learned so much in the course of 10 years of being involved with the planning staff in a variety of different

veins and issues.

I will miss that association, as I will miss the association with all of you in the Planning Commission, but I'm always eager to be in touch with each and every one of you as we go forward.

These are exciting days for Albemarle County.

As we

that come through COVID and we look at very large sums of money that are still in the pipeline coming the county's direction.

I hope that some of that money goes into planning on the infrastructure that is so desperately needed in the county.

We've talked about schools repeatedly with capacity and

that is but one aspect of where the needs are, that they cannot be slighted, they cannot be ignored.

I'm pleased that the governor and also the president have really prioritized funds for internet connectivity in rural areas.

So we're gonna see more broadband in the county coming into the rural areas where currently there either is only dial up

or people have to rely on satellites, which is hardly the way to go given the state in pre-Musk contributions and pre-Vizos contributions with more satellites in space.

The real estate of the satellite industry right now for internet is pretty poor.

So there are opportunities for optimism going forward, but

I think one of the issues that really has to get addressed by the county is the issue of what is appropriate to ask for in applications where the county will give additional density

to an applicant for a special use permit zoning map amendment.

And we have an opportunity to ask for something in turn to cover the impacts.

Now, I know impacts are not legal in Virginia.

Currently, it's all proffered.

but I'm using it in a broader sense in a non-legal definition.

And really to make the request that those impacts be addressed and insist that they be addressed is really the role of the board but they need as a board to support the planning commission so that conversation occurs at this level which is really where the rubber meets the road about planning.

So that's something I'm hopeful for as we go forward.

All I can say is I'm looking forward to new blood being on the planning commission.

I hope you treat your new members with the humor and the indulgence and the patience that they will deserve as they have so much to learn.

There's so many terms.

You think back the terms that Corey and Daniel have learned

in two years and where they were when they started.

You don't believe when you come on the planning commission that you're gonna be able to learn all this stuff and yet you do in very short order.

So new members will be good.

I think there are a couple of people who may have something to add to those comments.

I'll be really brief, guys, because I know the hour's late.

I just want to thank both Tim and Rick for your service.

And I will just call out a couple of things that I'm going to miss.

First of all, both of you, I've always sort of felt like I could count on actually everyone on this screen tonight to be sort of on the side of the green people.

I always know that you're thinking of the environment and community health.

But I do and I will miss Rick's very thoughtful and reasoned arguments.

He often comes up with something I hadn't thought of or some angle of analysis that he had to dig really deep to get to.

So I will miss that.

So Rick, if you are ever being a planning commissioner junkie and watching us and think we're not getting something, please

Please enlighten us because I do enjoy that.

And to Tim.

It's been really fun, many, many ways it's been fun.

I also served as your vice chair at one point but

Calling for good design and continually pushing our development community to go farther has been greatly appreciated and also you bringing the knowledge of all the other places that you have worked and experienced in trying to push Albemarle County kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Rick, I'll also miss your various French comments.

It's the only committee I serve on where people randomly break out into French.

So that's been fun for me as well.

But I will miss you guys.

And don't be shy.

I can tell you, Rick, that your predecessor, Pam, does communicate with me and let me know what I should be paying attention to in addition to yourself.

So send me your thoughts.

Send off your thoughts, and we will

Respond in kind, but I'm just grateful for your service.

And I know all too well the toll this takes on your personal life and even your professional life sometimes.

So I'm grateful to all our members and just wanting to, again, thank you both for all the time you have put in, even when not everyone appreciates what we do.

So gentlemen,

I see Daniel and Corey.

I don't know if they feel have a need to speak, but I will.

If they do, they can.

Yeah, I'd just be remiss if I say if I didn't give a big thank you to both of you in the time.

Mr. Keller, I sincerely appreciate all the phone calls that you have fielded from me and helping me understand what

All these terms and things met from a planning commission as I got started.

Mr. Randolph, I sincerely appreciate the inspiration you gave as I learned from you just from observing and watching and hearing the history and through these, we haven't spoken as much, but as one of the youngest, if not the youngest, I remember who came last with Corey, but in a non

You know, land planning.

I'm a software head.

You know, I'm a data scientist.

I'm a geospatial person, but I'm not a different.

And I didn't have the advantage in the COVID era of going to the great training that apparently VCU gives and all that.

So I've been learning through a fire hose and you all have made it immensely easier for me to absorb that fire hose and make sense of it through our interactions.

And I appreciate that.

So thank you.