Planning Commission Work Session Meeting   4/26/2022

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the April 26, 2022 meeting of the Albemarle County Planning Commission.

I'm sorry, I'm going to borrow my cheat sheet from my colleague here.

We have moved to a hybrid version so that there are opportunities for people to be able to comment remotely.

So we'll be using this going forward, which is a great innovation.

So the opportunities for the public to access and participate in the hybrid meeting are posted on the Albemarle County website, on the Planning Commission homepage, and on the Albemarle County calendar.

Participation will include the opportunity to comment on those matters for which comments from the public will be received.

I'd like to call this meeting to order.

Yes.

Present.

Ms.

Firehock?

Here.

OK, sorry.

All right, so we're going to move on to the work session.

We have a work session on setback and land uses this evening, and Bill Fritz is going to present this at the beginning.

Thank you for taking time today afternoon.

I guess it's not quite tonight.

First time back for me in two and a half years.

I thought about wearing a box so you could just see that much of me so it would look familiar.

But it was a lot of work so I didn't do it.

So what we're here tonight is this is just a

A work session for the setbacks and land uses.

I have a presentation.

I'll go through it.

It's more to help you with the things you already have in your packet.

So what are we doing?

The Board of Supervisors has tasked the Community Development Department with updating and modernizing the zoning ordinance.

As you all know, the zoning ordinance was originally adopted in 1980.

and has been amended over the years.

And when you do that, it starts getting a little disjointed and some of the things that are a little dated.

So we're trying to modernize it, trying to make it easier to use, more user-friendly.

So this is a multi-step project.

The board has graciously funded the hiring consultant to do this work.

We're starting with the setbacks, step backs, and land uses.

We've hired the Berkeley group.

We have two representatives here, Kelly Davis, Chris Musso.

I did pronounce that correct, didn't I?

Huh?

Oh, Rebecca Cobb.

Yes, I looked right at her and did the wrong name.

Sorry, Rebecca.

Yes, Rebecca and Chris.

They have experience working with a lot of localities in Virginia.

They work pretty much, I think, exclusively in Virginia.

And they've worked with a lot of our localities.

That gives them the advantage and gives us the advantage of having hired them to be working with a company that has written ordinances for a number of other localities.

So they have a lot of experience doing this.

So one of the things they did, obviously, in addition to their own

They surveyed other localities to develop, to see what the best practices were.

So the purpose tonight is to discuss the step backs, setbacks, setbacks and land uses.

This is just a work session.

All the language has not been ironed out yet.

So we're trying to get a feel, are we heading in the right direction?

And then ultimately we'll come back with a public hearing.

So what are we doing?

So first we're talking about the step backs.

And I just pulled a section from the zoning ordinance and this is what step backs are.

And what it does is it requires the upper floors to be stepped back.

This creates a weird architectural problem, engineering problem where your bearing walls are.

It has also been the number of numerous and repeated special exceptions.

I'm not aware of any special exceptions having been denied by the Board of Supervisors.

So when you're routinely granting special exceptions, it's probably time to amend your ordinance.

So we're recommending that the step back regulation just be eliminated.

So I do have slides for each of the setbacks for the districts.

I can go through each one of those with you if you want.

You have them in your packet.

Just to briefly outline what they do, one of the things that we're doing is with infill.

Just talk about infill first.

The infill regulations are,

I didn't copy them, sorry.

The infill regulations are a little bit difficult.

You have to go and figure out where the dwellings are within 500 feet in either direction.

You're trying to find what the average is and you're trying to match what the development already was.

We think we have an easier way of doing that.

And that would be to say, you can use either the setback regulations in effect at the time you apply for a building permit

or the setback regulations that were shown on the subdivision plat that approved the subdivision because that would be what the subdivision was built to largely.

So that would be an easier way we think.

If it's a development that precedes the recordation of an approved subdivision plat, they could apply for a special exception so they have relief there.

So we think that would be a much easier way of doing it and would be matching how development had already occurred.

For each of the districts, the concept is to graduate setbacks based on lot size and density.

That's how other jurisdictions have done this.

We are not proposing any changes in the rural areas, Monticello Historic District, Village Residential District, or the DCD District.

In the R1, R2, and R4 districts, there is an increase in the front, side, and rear setback that's proposed.

This information's in your packet.

I have it here in case you wanted to see it, but there is a recommendation to increase those setbacks.

In the R6 district, there's an increase in the front setback.

In the R10 and the R15 districts, there is no change.

In the commercial districts, there's an increase in the front and rear.

In the industrial, there's an increase in the front, side, and rear.

Both the commercial districts and the industrial districts have currently and would maintain increased setbacks when they're adjacent to non-commercial, non-industrial properties.

In the plan districts, what we're recommending, and we haven't quite figured out how to do this yet, but in plan districts, we think it would be appropriate to have setbacks for those districts.

And if someone wanted relief from those setbacks, they could request that at the time of the rezoning of the establishment of the plan district.

What we have now is a situation where every single time we have a plan district,

Essentially writing a new zoning ordinance for it and it becomes very difficult to administer.

You have to, oh wait, is this the new section of that development or the old section of that development?

And wait, this development across the street has an altogether different setback.

So we're trying to make it more uniform.

With land use definitions,

As I said, the ordinance was originally adopted in 1980.

We've done some work to try to bring it up to date, but there's still a lot of outdated land uses that are in there.

Some of those are overlapping and confusing.

Is it this, is it that kind of thing?

And there are some uses just

aren't listed in our ordinance.

So what we're proposing to do is move to a matrix concept where we would broaden the terms, modernize the terms, and consolidate.

So there'd actually be fewer total definitions.

And there'd be a matrix.

So you'd look at the list of uses, and then it would tell you what districts it is versus how you do now, where you have to look at each district to see whether or not a use is permitted.

So you could say, my business is X, where can I go?

You would be able to look at the matrix versus my use is X. Do I need highway commercial?

Do I need C1?

Do I need, you have to go look at each one of those districts.

We think that'd be a whole lot easier to do.

There's going to have to be some work here to make sure we match up the districts and we're not expanding uses unwittingly from one district to the other.

We know we'll have to change the supplemental regulations to match those are all mechanical things.

There's no policy change there.

We just know that as we change one place, you have to catch up with it in other places in the ordinance.

We also know that there are some uses that are just so unique in character

to Albemarle County or because of

What the comprehensive plan says about that is that we just can't really do anything with them.

For example, country stores, they're very specific.

They're not small stores.

We had a lot of conversations about that.

Are they small stores?

Are they retail stores?

No, they're country stores.

They're their own special thing.

Same with some uses, retail stores, eating establishments, automobile service stations, not served by public water.

It's a very specific thing because of the comprehensive plan.

And then we also have Monticello, nobody else does.

So we can't compare that with anyone else.

So the Monticello historic district needs to just be treated as its own unique thing.

That's sort of the summary of what we're doing.

I can answer questions.

Rebecca, not Kelly, and Chris can answer questions for you also.

Questions for staff?

You mentioned, so my question kind of relates to like, when you think about what we're trying to do now Mark commie is keep a sense of Commissioner business has a lot human skill, you know, and balance our rural assets with development and

I would like to understand a little bit about these five benchmark counties because I know there's reference one about having a 12 story building and to me setbacks and step backs have to do with trying to maintain human skill and I'm struggling a little bit of understanding like and one recommendation was to we have a substantially lower setback but are the reference is that for an R6 but do we have you know is that I guess what I'm struggling is like

What's the equivalency for why they have a bigger setback in some of these other counties that maybe they don't have as much R6 and there's R6 to the maximum.

So let me answer part of the question and then I'm gonna turn over to Berkeley for part of the question.

So why the jurisdictions that were looked at?

Staff, we got together and we said,

Which jurisdictions have we used as benchmark jurisdictions previously?

Which ones are sort of known in the state for having good ordinances or things that we have been trying to emulate?

And we've done that with a wide variety of things.

from what is our healthcare program going to be to what is our land use is going to be.

So we've done benchmarks before.

And so we gave those names to the Berkeley group.

As for what each jurisdiction has, they've done more work in that and so forth.

Hello.

So to answer that part of the question, these localities have lots of districts that we had to weave through.

And what we would do would be look at those intent statements and compare them to the intent statements of our moral.

look at their lot sizes, their density for those districts and compare it to Albemarle.

And so when those lined up and meshed, we would then look at setbacks.

And then two, in terms of looking at all the benchmarks together, because in some of the districts, the intent statements of course might be

slightly different or density might be slightly different.

But then when you look at the setbacks compared to the others that we were also looking at, we could see, yeah, these all kind of match together and they stand apart from what Albemarle has.

So how do we need to adjust?

Thanks.

I appreciate it so far.

I guess the thing I'm left with trying to get a picture of recommendation sizes is

And the question is, is an R6 the same in land use planning as a larger metropolitan area as R6 in the sense of a step down of massing, you know, as R6 for Charlottesville and Albemarle County area, Charlottesville is even different from Albemarle County, but Albemarle County, what we're doing with this is R6 really the higher density.

And so should we be thinking about setbacks differently for that size of a structure versus the bigger.

And so that's where I'm left trying to

So that's part of it as well.

You mentioned the 12-story building.

That was pulled out of a different district than like R6 or any of those.

It was a separate district and actually that relates to an overlay that that particular community have and that's where they use those step backs.

So that was why that was pulled out as an example is

Hey, this is 12 story building.

This is, you know, along a specific corridor to protect it, and that's why they're using this.

I just wanted to put that in there to explain, yes, some localities do have this, but here's the scenario which doesn't really match Albemarle.

I think that's, and maybe I missed it, but even just knowing what

I'm gonna look to my colleague over here.

I'm just registering it.

We don't have to detail, but it's just registering the things that go into the work section of

trying to make sense of these numbers.

And to me, a setback and a step back is to maintain a certain fill and a human scale.

And that's very important, I think, to us as a planning commission.

And so when we have these reference, which I get why we pick them as reference counties, because they're usually larger, they have more staff, they're better funded, so they have better ordinances and they lead the way.

and that's great.

We should do that.

It's just trying to do that kind of standardization.

I'm a data scientist.

I'm not a land planner by so I think on data it's like how do we how do we create apples to apples comparison that the the max height is allowed to be this for this designation in this county, which is why that setback was kind of felt so that when you're walking down the street, you don't feel like you're it's caving in on top of you.

And so that's what I think we're trying to achieve here is we think through this and weed through this.

These recommendations of

What's the right setback to achieve something?

And granted, I think we're all for making it easier to understand and simplify it.

But I don't know that I have enough information right now from what I read to be like, oh yeah, that sounds like the right setback for that based on what we're trying to achieve.

So that's just where I'm at with it.

No need to respond.

I think this is great work and I appreciate it.

Well, if I may, our role tonight is to, this is sort of a first pass, if you will.

And if there are things that strike you as like you need more information to understand how to judge that element, this is the time to say that.

But it's also fine to say, you know, I don't think that that's the right approach for this particular element.

because they need our guidance so they can move on to complete it.

So I know I had a couple of concerns that I found in here, so it's not to just like understand and then they move forward.

Other, I mean I can go later.

I have a couple of quick comments.

Thanks for your work.

This is really well done.

Just a few thoughts.

One is thoughts and questions, I guess, and I'll just piggyback on, I think, a little bit of what Daniel was saying relative to step backs.

So I'm just curious.

I know step backs in the past have also been used to sort of help with sun angles so you don't shade the street.

And I'm wondering if this is a little bit forward thinking, I guess, when density starts to get greater or maybe in a town center.

But have you looked at

Maybe I should rephrase it.

I would encourage you to look at impacts on shading of streets if you haven't already done that.

I also noticed that you had mitigating in there.

I think it was one foot step back or additional setback for every one foot of additional building height.

And if you think like a developer, building height translates into more capacity, more density.

So I would just look at if you're thinking about, I'm just making these numbers up, but if you're looking at a four story building,

and you have zero step backs and you decide to go up another 15 feet to add another floor, you then have to step back five stories 15 feet.

And so that's more of an impact to the potential capacity of that building that the developer might be willing or might be interested in looking at.

So you may have already compared all of those things, but I just check on it.

Other quick comment is relative to the benchmarks, I think they were pretty appropriate.

I guess I would be interested to know if, first of all, and you don't have to answer this now, but

Were you directly involved with any of the ordinances for any of those localities?

And if so, or if not, when you were doing your research, did you uncover anything they wish they had done differently?

So rather than just taking it rote that this is where they are and this is what we would decipher, were there any things that stood out as, gosh, I wish we really hadn't done that and we can learn from that?

That'd be interesting to know.

Thank you.

Julian did you have a comment?

I did.

You know that part of the scribbles is that it's just how I get through stuff.

So I want to just make one sort of broad statement about Monticello is unique to Albemarle County and people know my drill on this.

Each one of these districts has a historic home.

They have historic properties in them.

Several of them have

Even a greater inventory of historic property.

So let's segregate out the fact that Jefferson built that one to the fact that to ask this sort of a question that I hopefully will get to at some point.

What is the

How are we allowing the county's development efforts to be curtailed because we give an extra or what it feels like a governmental oversight to a piece of property?

I'm not hiding anything here.

I've been asking for a long time, why do we allow a non-governmental entity to control how we develop our land?

So that's myself.

So my piece about saying to us that Montello is unique, I'm going to challenge you that every single one of these counties here

has historic properties, some of them that actually are older than the property on the hill.

So I would expect for you to go sort of just do your homework on that one.

The other thing that I struggled with, our supervisors are not want to increase our development area.

They've got us at 5%, at 5%, at 5%.

And so by increasing these setbacks and the development area, the R1 through sixes, you basically reduce the amount of land that can be developed.

I personally cannot support that.

Now, my colleagues who live in the rural, I actually do live in the rural part of the county, but my colleagues who truly live in the rural part of the county,

There's very little, if any, impact on the areas in which that's around them.

But in the developed area, which is where you're going to see the future for R1s, R2s, R3s, all the way up to

I'm going to struggle mightily with reducing and changing that dramatically.

Now, perhaps there's a way to make that sort of more unified to get to the piece that you're talking about of not having that and not having that be a difficult piece and say these here will be this and these will be that and then you sort of do it as a binary solution if that's possible and then use the commercial light industry differently.

I can understand that but sort of separating out the one through six I have a problem with.

The other thing before we get to, I have a question we're going to take on page 2424.

You have a line.

I think this is just an edited thing.

This use is proposed dwelling common townhouse.

This use is proposed to consolidate attached single family dwellings and semi-detached and attached semi-family dwellings.

I think either we need to drop the third attached or we need to give me a different housing type.

Because in reading that, it feels like we're talking about the same thing.

Since this is a draft, I'll let you do that.

Then my other question comes to, what do you want us to do with the proposed uses and definition?

That could be a work session all into itself.

I remember, oh, she always looks at me sternly.

Ms.

Bloomfield, because I always get her first name wrong.

Because I want to say it's Leah, but it's Leah and I, you know, that's just my own sort of blockheadedness.

When she came to us a couple of years ago, we spent, it felt like weeks on definitions.

So I would be one that would say, yes, I think there's some value in sitting with that.

It very quickly got a lot of tentacles going, and it became even more difficult to understand.

So we sort of tried to...

We tried to consolidate just like with the definitions of focusing down.

Commissioner Bivins, if I could, well, before we get too far along on the setback issue, one of the things we can do is we can go back and look and see what the densities have been with the different setbacks that the county has had.

One of the things that we're also concerned about is the concept that reduced setbacks are not changing the density

we're still getting the same density you're simply getting larger structures and greater floor area ratios and that this increased setbacks may not reduce the density but they do provide it may provide for smaller houses because the density is still going to be maintained you still have four units per acre for example but you can't have the same amount of building coverage in that four acres

because you have to build it within a smaller setback.

So let me give you some pushback on that immediately then.

So I don't know necessarily, and this is something that I would ask you to wrestle with the supervisors, but certainly if you're going to wrestle with me on this, I don't necessarily notice that the code should be the thing that determines how a house is built.

So I don't know that the code should be the place where we say you can have a 1,600 square foot or a 4,000 square foot.

I think that's a market decision, personally.

I've also noticed, there was an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was yesterday, that people are making very specific decisions on how they want their houses to be.

because many of them aren't going back to offices and they're having to accommodate a different lifestyle and the thing that used to be only the place that they went at the end of the day, where everybody sort of gathered at the end of the day.

And we also know that Albemarle is one of those places that people are wanting to gather to.

So before I would sort of say, let's shrink the, or let's increase, I guess, let's use the proper term, let's increase the setbacks.

I would actually say, let's let the market make that decision.

And because I think we're also seeing something here as we become a community that people may age out in,

They might want to have a garden but have a 1,600 square foot house or have an 800 square foot house.

Thank you.

I gave her some foolishness because she was saying they were going to be inexpensive and all of us who have stayed in any kind of

upscale hotels now that you can make a 300 square foot hotel room as expensive as some of our homes to live in.

So that was, you know, we always pre-assume some of these things.

But what I'm saying here is that I think, and Echo Village is another one where there is an Echo Village,

where Echo Village is another place where I think lifestyles are changing.

And so I may not want a big house, but I do want a big piece of property that I can wander around on.

So I would just caution us, which I think you're right, in making that decision that a setback helps to sort of send signals to the development community that this is the number of square feet here.

And my sense is the development community and mortgage rates make that decision as opposed to our ordinances.

But let me, I don't know if you want to respond to that.

You don't necessarily need to, but since we only have this one hour work session, so we don't sort of have to me, have enough time to go through all of the things and then summarize whether we all agree.

Sorry, that got loud.

I would suggest that if you disagree with something another commissioner says, or you want to put a finer point on it, that you speak up and that way we won't have to have a summary that yes, we agree with what Julian said, or yes, we agree with what you said, if that's okay.

Thank you.

And I want to thank staff and the Berkeley group.

So I found it pretty easy to go through this document, which is great.

And so I do appreciate the way you put it together.

I have a lot of the same concerns.

So I'm not going to reiterate that.

I'm going to try to hit on some new ones and then maybe highlight some of the ones that I think are

are pretty critical, at least in my view.

Of which document?

I'm sorry, of your phase one diagnostic report.

And structure is mentioned, and I would agree, there is some challenges with our current structure.

The way that it's mentioned is that it's not part of their initial phase, but that it is important.

I'm assuming that it is being addressed.

And I just, so that was just a question that you are addressing the structure along with it.

And I think that is, that alone, I think is a real positive because there are some challenges when you go through there and try to find your way, particularly if somebody is not,

You know, just kind of do it.

So I think it's very user-friendly.

We may not be able to get to it.

So towards the end, but yes, we are with an eye towards doing that.

I'm going to try not to be repetitive Chair.

It's okay.

So we talked about a minimum of maximums and removing the maximum, which I agree with.

I think it goes back to the point that Commissioner Bivins was raising in terms of

increasing our setbacks.

So once you increase those setbacks for the lower R1 through R6, well, I guess R6 is a 15, but once you increase those setbacks and you don't have any maximum, you are limiting to some degree, right?

And so I guess the question I have is what were you seeing as the benefit?

for that increase.

We have, there are a couple of things there and I'm gonna try to do this quickly.

There are a couple of things there.

One thing we're looking at is we're looking at the location of the driveway overhangs.

We have a great deal of trouble with that interfering with sidewalks.

That's been a problem for us.

We have the reduction, which is bringing everything closer to the street and losing some of that street scale that we were looking at.

Also looking at what the climate action plan talks about in terms of heat island effect and the stormwater impacts of having that large floor area ratio.

And by having these increased setbacks, you're going to have that benefit also of more green area within your development area.

So I think some of that would be important in here.

Some of that context of why.

This was given without context and we should have given that.

And to the same point, I had a similar question about the counties that we were using as our benchmark.

And again, I think what I'm missing there is

is the context.

I think Commissioner Bailey was alluding to that.

And when we look at it, ours is, you know, we're different than a lot of these counties in many ways, but it's hard for us to understand why that is without understanding all the other parameters that are involved in those counties.

And so that would be very important in how we look at this and understand it.

The step back issue is another one that I agree with Commissioner Missel on.

So there are some challenges with that.

I don't quite follow the code or architectural structure issue.

I mean, post and beam construction, there is no bearing walls when you're going up.

So that goes away.

I think it's,

It is an architectural issue if you have all your buildings looking like a ziggurat, right?

So at some point you want to minimize that.

However, it is one strategy that we can use to minimize scale and to provide that more human scale to some of these areas.

That's been said, I'm not going to dwell on that, but I do think that's something that we need to take a look at that.

And I do not understand the trade-off in setback.

The one for one, that could be a, I think the

The result of that would not be a pleasant streetscape.

If every building is off by two or three or four feet in height, they're going to be off two or three or four feet in their setbacks.

So I think about that a little bit more, what the ramifications might be.

My last point, which is a new one, is

having to do with special districts.

I was trying to reconcile and think about our form-based code or form-based planning approach, Ryle 29.

So how does something like that work with these setbacks?

Are we then creating, like Crozet, you point that out as a separate.

We're still experimenting with form-based code like a lot of jurisdictions.

So I guess that's something that I would wonder is how that then, what are the implications of that to what we're doing here now?

Yeah, we're going to have to pull it in.

I don't have much.

Louie just stole my thunder.

I jotted down for IO29 form-based code and just how those things coordinate.

Just to say the DCD is kind of, it was a start at a form-based code many years ago.

So we learned some things there.

So I think the form-based code is going to have to kind of go the same route as the DCD.

Sure, and I'll just plus one on the step back piece.

As I think about, you know, I jotted down some of the setbacks.

C1 was 10 foot, HC was 10 foot.

And I think about walking down West Main Street in Charlottesville, where you have hotels and larger buildings running up against the street with similar setbacks.

taking away that step back to me doesn't feel good, you know, initially.

So give us some more thought with those tighter setbacks that you have.

I feel like that might not be the best approach is to eliminate the step back altogether.

OK, well, and I will tag on to that.

That was one of my comments as well.

You mentioned the fact that we had four

I always get step backs.

There would be a number of them that we had recently granted a waiver for.

And I recall the last three.

And it was particularly, well, in one or more cases, it was because it was a hotel.

And so they would kind of lose the whole side of the rooms on one side.

But it was also because of the context of where they sat.

None of those were sitting right up against a pedestrian sidewalk where you would get that cavernous feeling.

None of them were challenged by

the problems of light and air and sun and you know so that's why and so I feel like there I know it's hard but that's why I have these excellent consultants is to figure out in which cases we want to retain those step backs because I do agree that we're trying to look for a more urban form in our development area and in reading this just you know I'm not going to go page by page because there was a lot here but

it felt like we were kind of going back a little bit to more of a suburban model at the same time we're trying to do this urban ring and you mentioned that you know we have the form-based code at Rio and we've got Crozet and I've felt ever since I joined this commission

I don't know five years ago whatever it was that there's a lot lacking because in our code because we're building a city around a city that's what we're trying to do essentially but we're a county so there are some things we can't do as a county that cities can do but you know I think that there's a lot more that needs to be done to

to recognize that we're trying to create more of an urban forum.

And so I'm actually not for some of those expanded setbacks from the road.

I grew up in a front porch community where the porches were just close enough, but not too close.

You couldn't see what somebody was drinking out of their glass, but you could say, hello, Mrs. So-and-so, and how are you?

And you kids get out of that yard.

I just think, well, you know, that sort of community spirit.

And you can see if you can be part of your neighborhood, whereas some of those neighborhoods where the house is way back there and you don't talk to your neighbors when you're walking the dog because you can't even tell who it is walking the dog.

If somebody wants to live in that type of a neighborhood, wonderful, good for them.

But I think that for what we're trying to build in the urban ring, I didn't find that the comparisons of the counties that we're looking at necessarily provide the best model.

and I'll use an example from a recent webinar that was being hosted yesterday about rural roads and how great they were and I was invited to join this webinar and I said well I could join that webinar but I feel like Albemarle is already a leader in rural roads and in fact the convener of that talked to the people who are going to be teaching the course and they said yeah we use Albemarle as our go-to

And so in this case, in this case tonight, I think that we might want to be a bit more out of the box and do a few things that aren't being done by some of these more suburban counties and actually look to some cities and towns for some of that informing.

I also say that when you have a neighborhood that has all the same setbacks, it can look kind of boring.

It's actually nice to not only vary the road curvature, but also to vary the distances that you have for those yards.

So I guess I'm actually not an outlier.

I'm an outlier of this memo a little bit, but not so much, I think, on this commission.

I wanted to bring up another quick point that has kind of been touched on a bit in terms of floor area ratio and thinking about lot coverage.

instead of being as concerned with how far back a structure is from its sidewalk in a residential district or even a commercial one for that matter we could think about for residential maximum lot coverage because we do see that happening a lot you know up in Fairfax County where people are just going

There's like nothing left of the yard.

They are building these 5,000, 6,000 square foot homes in neighborhoods and they're just domineering over their neighbors and maybe even more importantly than that social dominance feeling is the fact that we are trying to deal with stormwater.

And so, you know, if you have a residential lot and you're just improving the size of your house, we don't have a stormwater utility fee that didn't go forward.

But we're trying to deal with all this stormwater runoff.

And so we might want to be thinking about trying to preserve some green space.

So maybe, you know, maximum lot coverage, to your earlier point about, you know, people want to build different houses for the reason somebody wants a small house and a big garden, so anyone wants a larger house so they can put their kid, you know, after college in there in their home office and grandma and whatnot.

So I don't want to ramble on too much, but I guess, yeah, I would like to not get rid of step backs.

I would like it to be contextual to where the building is.

The other thing is that I understand from staff that as we move through a rewrite of our zoning ordinance, we're going to be looking at requiring massing from the development community when we have certain applications, whereas right now we just have block blobs.

And so it makes it hard for us to make judgments on the arrangement of those structures.

So just something to think about.

But that's mostly what I had.

I did have the same reaction you did to all the definitions.

I do believe they should be condensed.

I don't want to be the source of confusion for anyone.

Yeah and there are even in our county there are something I only learned this from my younger brother some hip camps you know about those it's like airbnb except for camping and there's a number of them where people are renting out their the side of their river on a public road and people are paying to camp there and you know come in with their trailer and live there for

three days, two weeks, a month and I think those are kind of going under the radar too.

I will go on a camping exploration and find, no I'm just kidding, but I do think there are, there's definitely a need for addressing some of those because they're sort of operating campsites with no zoning and no tax collection as well.

Can I get my reserve bounce back?

Yes.

Just a couple of things just to, again, not restate what's already been stated, but one is under the heading of increasing the setbacks.

I went to light industrial and heavy industrial just thinking about the capacity that the county has and how careful we are to watch over that capacity because it's relatively limited and the changes in the setbacks were pretty drastic to go from 10 to 30 and 0 to 20 and so on.

So just thinking about

Maybe the introduction there of the light industrial and the rationale behind why those setbacks changed didn't really fully make a lot of sense to me.

Because if you're concentrating your light industrial or heavy industrial in a certain area, you probably wanna make it as dense as possible with an understanding of proximities, I guess.

So this will be part of the zoning ordinance.

That's where the zoning ordinance is.

This will ultimately be a zoning text minute.

So this will be regulation, right?

So, um, well, go ahead, go ahead.

Obviously, I'll tell you what the next steps are.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking about sort of the forward thinking piece of this, right?

I mean, this is sort of now a snapshot in time in a sense, and we're looking at why, and I'm, I'm sure you're thinking,

10, 15, 20 years down the road.

But I'd be curious to know how these patterns of development that are being influenced with these setbacks are forward thinking and how that ties in.

And then one last just curious question.

If you have an adjacent landowner that is the same, so you have two adjoining landowners or the same landowner, has there been any thought given to any change to setbacks

Historically, no, and that question has come up.

And so treat them, and if you wanna combine them or do a boundary line adjustment, combine them or do a boundary line adjustment to alter where the buildings can go.

I want to harken back to a conversation the Planning Commission had several years ago talking about crossroads communities and thinking about the number of sort of former general stores that are still sitting out there, but they're not stores anymore.

Maybe someone's living in them, you know, they've been, they're grandfathered out of there, they can't go back.

And I actually think that there is, perhaps on this Planning Commission, some interest in looking into opportunities for those to be re-optive.

We have that book that lists all the country stores that existed prior to and it's a pretty large book and we have the Class A and the Class B and while we're talking about going to a combined definition, we'll tweak the

Dr.

We wrote it in such a way, I know we're getting off topic, but it's such a way that to minimize the impact of VDOT regulations and parking regulations so that they can reopen without having to completely destroy the property or knock down or acquire additional property or knock down things.

We also changed the religious assembly area based on our loop of regulations and the agricultural limits for farm wineries.

People don't think they're related, but in fact, they are.

If you allow assembly of 200 people at a winery, you have to allow assembly of 200 people for religious.

And if you're not regulating the winery assembly, you can't regulate the religious assembly.

So those small places out there, they can reestablish, they can even expand in a lot of cases and all they need is a building permit.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, just really a general comment.

I mean, this could apply to the setback versus step back or some other factors that we've talked about.

And that is thinking about providing mitigation options.

So instead of just switching one, so I think one of the options for the setback was get rid of the

with a step back and then create more setback.

So instead of switching one for one is provide mitigation options where they can do potentially several things to mitigate the issue.

But first we've got to address what the issue is, right?

And that's why I think the context is important.

What is it that we're trying to address with some of these changes?

And then are there ways that you can build in flexibility?

So if someone wanted to, instead of the step back,

they wanted to create more setbacks or perhaps they could provide landscape that mitigates the height.

So there's some things in it.

And I think, Chair Firehock, my recollection is the same that those exceptions were all because one, some of them had significant setbacks and we didn't think it was an issue with the height.

So

So perhaps thinking about those terms instead of just switching one regulation for another, they all have some significant unintended consequences.

That's helpful.

If I could just turn to my team and make sure that we're getting everything that they need.

Are you going to tell me what those three words are?

Just wanted to make sure they didn't have any questions also.

Just before you sort of move on, you can just whisper what those three new replacement words were at the end of when we have a break.

So like know what the editorial piece on there.

But I will recall when we were doing the form-based code and we were particularly looking at the opportunity that was going to occur perhaps up 29 where the idle, idle, idle, whatever the

Thank you for that is that we had a lot of discussion about about how to create

place with both, I remember Rachel taking us through both setbacks and step backs.

And looking at how, I know one of our previous commissioners was trying to get a sense of what would the view from up there and not being able to sort of both have that interesting place, but also have a place that took that

that took advantage of our topography.

And so that's just to go, I think what Luis is saying is that as we're doing this, while many of the communities that you reference here are sort of what I call flat land, flat land places.

There's a couple that have some sort of rolling hills on them.

Very few of them

of these have the sort of backdrop of those western mountains or even the eastern mountains over there by coming as you come down 20 come up 20 and they were there and so thinking about what is what is sort of the the set

sort of the visual set that we're trying to sort of create this new place of being or to continue.

And then that would be, I think, helpful for me.

You know, that's the question like we have so much

You go up to Rio in 29, it naturally sits higher.

And so you can see a lot of things and being able to make a sense of something's a little bit lower and I don't have to give quite the big setback, but then trade off to have a step back that gives a view of the mountains now from a different elevation place.

That'd be a good trade off to have to maintain our view sheds.

If we eliminate step backs and max, you know, increase the setbacks, we lose some of that flexibility, but those are, and then in general, I think that's, we've already said it and not to beat it.

You've said it in what I was trying to get to much more eloquently is that we are creating this urban ring.

And so, but our, we're distinctively Albemarle urban ring.

We're not a 12 story or whatever.

And so what does that mean to us and how should that be provided for in this so that we can facilitate the realm based form-based code and Crozet and stuff like that, which is a different, a different feel.

Thank you, that's very helpful.

And I would just add, I know the art of writing code, you have to be very precise, as precise as you possibly can be.

But again, one of the exceptions that we granted was due to the fact that a building was actually slightly downslope so that the view from the street was not of a four-story building, it was more of a three-story building.

So taking topography into context, I think there is an artful way you could put into code

All right.

So I think it's not illegal for us to end two minutes early of our meeting unless anyone else would like to make a final closing comment.

I will say that one of the reasons there's lots of ink is because I can read it.

And so I will actually spend time with the document if I can sort of move through it.

And so any document on my desk that has one or two marks, it's because I said, I'm not going to invest in this because this is too painful.

I think I launched into questions earlier.

I do want to say thank you to Seth.

This is a hard problem and all that.

No, we understand this is hard and we sit on the side of the dice that gets confused often.

I would say that

When we get this back, when you've had time to wrestle with all of this, I would like to ask that we could have at least two weeks to go through it because I personally have been out of town on business and reading this on the airplane, reading this in the airport lounge.

These are very helpful.

I don't know how I'm going to answer some of these questions, but they're helpful.

Well, we didn't quite get to the meaning of life, but almost.

Thank you, Mr. Fritz.

And thank you guys for all of your hard work.

I'm going to call this meeting of the Albemarle County Planning Commission to a close.