Planning Commission Regular Meeting   7/26/2022

Yes?

You have audio ready?

Sounds like it?

Yep.

Thank you.

All right.

Good evening.

I can't even speak myself.

Good evening, everyone.

And thank you for coming to the meeting of the Albemarle County Planning Commission on July 26.

I'd like to call this meeting to order and establish a quorum.

Mr. Bivins, Mr. Murray and Mr. Clayborne.

All right, I'm going to move on to the consent agenda.

Thank you, Chair Firehock and members of the commission.

Before we begin, I would just like to say a few hours ago, we received a request from the applicant about deferring the CMA tonight in this public hearing.

Okay, so you've received that request.

Now we'll hear from the applicant on that particular request.

Good evening Vito Cheddar, I'm the developer.

We exchanged a phone call today at four o'clock with one of the county important positions and there's some confusion about some aspect of the

of the site that we couldn't get resolved in a couple hours.

So I'm sorry about that.

Okay.

Well, that's a request that's been made.

We need to have a motion to accept the deferral, but I don't know if you have any other questions for the applicant before we

Entertain that request.

Does anyone have any questions they'd like just to ask about the request to defer, not the specifics of the application itself, because we're not hearing that this evening.

OK.

I move that we accept the applicant's request to defer ZMA 2020-00012.

Is there any further discussion?

I'll just make a note for the public that I'm sorry for the fact that you came out here this evening and you're not going to be able to hear.

I'm not going to be able to hear this application tonight, but I think it's in our best interest to get all the facts straight and there is a number of questions that have been raised about this application that we need to have the answers to and we could not get them in time for this evening.

And I will also let you know that some of these questions came in response to questions you all raised.

So you asked questions of the commission, questions were asked, and we do not have yet satisfactory answers to those questions.

So rather than, I'm sure you're disappointed that you made the effort to come out here and not going to be heard this evening, but I just want to let you know that this is actually the public process working, because we did listen to you, we did ask good questions, and we're waiting to have good answers.

If we don't have the right, sir, you're not recognized to speak at this time.

So with that, is there any other comments that the commission would like to make?

It's not up to the commission.

We can either just, you know, we don't have the facts to hear tonight.

So anything else?

All right.

Ms.

Firehock?

Aye.

And Mr. Clayborne?

All right, so this motion has been deferred to an indeterminate date.

We will wait to hear from the applicant as to when they will have the answers to staff's questions and be ready to come back to us.

Back into order and want to point out that there is one other item before that I actually moved without telling you all.

We still have other matters not listed on the agenda from the public.

So if there are items that were not on tonight's agenda that you would like to discuss, please come forward and we're ready to hear from you.

So is there anyone and also there could be potentially someone online as well.

Is there anyone online on other matters?

Not at this time.

Okay.

All right, welcome.

Please state your name.

I think you know the drill, Mr. Olivier, but the green light goes on when you start and then yellow, you're running out of time and red is time to stop.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name is Tom Olivier.

I live in the Samuel Miller district.

I've come to speak about the county's growth management policy and the need for significant changes due to climate change.

In 2014, then President Barack Obama said, we're the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC,

Along the world when it declared that to escape rapidly worsening, potentially runaway climate change, humanity must reduce new greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and become carbon neutral by around 2050.

Containing climate change also will require drawing down greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and otherwise greening human societies.

Despite these dire warnings, humanity's greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson noted, we seem headed for barely mitigated doom.

What gives?

We've been insulating our homes, driving more fuel-efficient vehicles, et cetera.

The problem, as the IPCC noted back in 2014, is that most greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are driven by population and economic growth.

And politicians and business leaders tend to think growth is good, even when it isn't.

These points bring us to the county growth policy.

It calls for creating new growth areas when existing growth areas show signs of filling up, perhaps until the county reaches full build-out accommodating growth.

But the county policy enables the ongoing loss of ecosystems and their ability to sequester carbon.

It enables the new greenhouse gas emissions from new developments.

It is directly at odds with becoming carbon neutral and at odds with becoming climate resilient.

Let's face it.

We need a reimagined growth management policy, one that requires limits to our growth so that we can coexist with natural systems that are vital to our survival.

As both Obama and the IPCC noted, the time for effective climate action is short and the clock is ticking.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, apropos for our earlier conversation about the growth plan and all of that.

Good evening.

recently penned a blog post that highlighted that the growth area boundaries were drawn in 79, 1980.

About that same time, what I consider a classic movie, Airplane, came out.

And in that movie, there's a nine-second scene with Leslie Nielsen and the woman that was the actress portraying the stewardess.

And she said, he said, well, what did you guys have for dinner?

And she says, chicken or fish.

And Leslie Nielsen says, oh, I remember, I remember.

I had the lasagna.

This is the answer I think you guys need to have for the comp plan.

What if we looked at some other localities?

What if we looked at, we've got a lot of wide experiences here and we had a urban core and then we had a suburban area that had different performance standards?

and different densities and different services.

And then we had a transitional area that had different services yet again.

And that transitional area might be a little larger than today's growth area.

Not a big deal, but a little bit larger would be nice to allow for the growth that your staff is telling you the current comp plan won't adjust based upon 17 units an acre, which you're achieving now.

Not at this time.

Okay.

All right, so that will close that portion of the meeting and move on to committee reports.

Does anyone have any committee reports?

My Historic Preservation Group did not meet due to lack of quorum.

No.

No CACs.

OK.

All right, no committee reports.

Review of the Board of Supervisor meeting.

All right.

Well, we have old business and new business, which we continue to not understand what the difference is, but anyway.

Great to be back.

Well, on that note, we've talked about it earlier, and I would love to visit the topic of our work sessions and get some feedback from you all as to what might be appealing.

I think we've had a few rounds of both the zoning ordinance and the comprehensive plan, and I think we all see the need for more time.

Our consultants have asked for more time as well, and it'll allow us better dialogue.

So last time we met I mentioned the desire to slide across the hall into room 241, our larger conference room there, so we can have more of a collaborative work session, a little less of presentation-based interaction.

And I would like to increase that timeline to 90 minutes or two hours or whatever this commission might feel comfortable with.

I would suggest that we go past five and maybe go to five thirty and maybe start either at the same time or start a little bit earlier.

So I guess I would I would ask for direction from the commission.

Would like a four to five thirty work or three thirty to five thirty or what would be the preference?

If that was everybody's schedules, we could also always go back to

All right, so is that just to get that on the table, is that everyone still prefers to not have three weeknights rather than try to have a slight longer one of day?

Yeah.

OK, so that's OK.

Good.

Still, I think we all like that.

Some of us travel for work and it really makes it much easier.

So for the question of 90 minutes versus two hours.

In some respects, it depends on what the topic is.

Sometimes there's a zoning conversation.

We don't need two hours to discuss it.

I don't know if it's possible to flex the time, but for a lot of these comp planning discussions, it seems to me like

You need two hours to have a real discussion.

I feel like we're only just bringing up topics.

For further discussion sometime in the future, we should really talk about this.

That's the level of detail we're able to get to in this one hour.

So what are your thoughts?

I've already, like, my afternoon's already sacrificed once I have to come.

I live, I work in Scottsville, so it's not really that close, but I would rather come earlier.

That's just me.

Yeah, because we don't need an hour for dinner necessarily.

We're talking about jogging trails, the Webb telescope.

That's what we do in our hour.

And we spend a lot of extra energy working really hard not to talk about planning during that hour.

I would echo that suggestion.

I think two hours is helpful.

I think it does depend on the specific subject and there may be times you know you call an audible and say let's just do an hour and a half.

There's not a lot to cover.

The other thing I think is really important is sort of the preparation piece of it and as much as staff can do to help us understand specifics

Definitely.

I think you all saw a lot of information we threw at you this time as a way to prep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so we wanted to do more, but I was trying to be conscious of that hour and make sure we didn't speak for 45 minutes.

But if we had that extra half hour, that extra hour, we could really kind of go one by one or really dissect those topics.

I thought it was helpful starting broad with those broad themes.

I mean, there's a lot to dive into and really that deep dive into a number of those that certainly we can do.

I guess what I would ask in terms of scheduling is,

As far out in advance as we possibly can, particularly we're trying to schedule like a 330 or for, you know, like, I guess that's what we're talking about 330 to 530 or something like that.

Yep.

So I don't know how far out in advance, you know, can we start blocking out, uh, if we, even if we think, okay, well,

You know, in this Tuesday in August or in September, we're going to plan for a work session.

Maybe you don't have all the details yet, but at least we have that hold and we can get in our calendars.

Yeah, I would agree.

I mean, 30 minutes is something like a lot.

It's a lot for me, like getting here at 3.30.

And so I love to hear thoughts on, you know, this plan, this comprehensive plan process will take years, right?

So one thought is to do 90 minutes and see how that works, 4 to 5.30.

And then if we find that that's not working, like we did with 60 minutes, extend it then.

But, um, if we, if we say it's 3.30, I'll make it work.

But,

And just the challenge of just getting it on the calendar so that we can hold it and prioritize it and not have

Well, I can, I can guarantee that the fourth Tuesday of every month for the next few years, we would like to have a work session.

Responding to Commissioner Clayborne, let's shoot maybe for starting at 4 and going to 5.30 for this next one in August, if that feels good.

If we decide we feel rushed still, then maybe we'll adjust after that.

I think one way to achieve that too is you

you gave us all the materials ahead for tonight's session.

We all read them and then the staff represented them.

And I know there's other elucidations that happen when you're saying this point and this point, but you can give us a lot of background reading and not present that.

And the other point I would make is that being really specific on what you want from us, because a lot of times I feel like it's like, so what do you think?

Like, what do you broadly think about these eight massive topics?

And it's really hard to like, okay, so what should I pick?

Like, affordability, climate, housing, like, you know, like growth, air expansion, growth, air contraction, density, and that, that was just a lot.

I think that's a really good point.

So I guess the assumption is assume that we read it.

Well, we tried to do in this one, I guess I'm curious if y'all feel like it worked, was it have that in the memo?

Yeah.

So the memo is pretty specific with what we hope to hear from y'all today.

Yeah.

And what kind of maybe so you would dump a lot of info at you.

Yeah, that was helpful.

And if you saw today was we really tried to take a step back at the beginning and show you this flow chart of where we started, where we're going to go, what the different steps are.

We're going to try and do that each time so that we kind of y'all are coming along with us on this journey.

And we'll do the same thing with our zoning ordinance in August.

I'm taking a step back, kind of resetting a little bit.

We've had a few work sessions.

I think we all agree that it needs a little bit of a reset and a different approach.

And we're going to start taking a look at our administrative sections and the way we formulate our ordinance from a table of contents.

And then we can start taking a look at the different pieces that we're going to touch and how we're going to address them all rather than diving right into the topics that we have dove into.

I think we need a little bit of

Yeah.

And then I think you, as you intimated to me a few weeks ago, you then do want to schedule like in this month, we're going to do this and this.

So he's going to have that, okay, this is a zoning ordinance conversation.

It's about this and it's quick.

This is actually really complicated.

And then maybe these come into two sessions.

I don't want to push this to three years, but I'd rather do a good job

than cramming things and having these cursory conversations that we don't even have time.

There could be something, I didn't hear it tonight, but there could be something that we need to come to resolution on.

You're like, you said this and you said that and I said that and I don't agree with you, but we don't have time to have a dialogue because all we have time to do is give reactions and around Robin and then we're done.

And we didn't really actually decide anything in order to give you a unified or at least mostly unified direction.

So that's why we need that deliberation time, not just popcorning quick reactions.

Anyway.

All right, so anything else anyone wants to add?

So we'll try the 4 to 5.30 model for a bit, and then we'll work on some master scheduling so we can plug in what those things are.

And I think then that could help with questions like, when are we going to discuss the rural area in more depth?

Because I think all of us want to talk about

Even just that idea, like, as our speaker just said, you know, this notion of, is it just like all suburban areas become cities?

I think we've all agreed that there are definitely areas that

would benefit from more density.

But it's nuanced.

It's not like, right.

It would help with the housing issue, right?

If you get more density, perhaps you could actually do something more meaningful with.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I think all of us want to get away from that notion of this is the urban area and then that's just all that urban stuff goes in there.

And then this is the rural area and it's kind of like fantasy Nirvana land where people ride tractors and horses and it's all very bucolic and they don't ever need to get their oil changed.

I agree with all that.

A lot has changed and changing.

And so if we're doing this for the next 20 years, we have to consider that.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So I think we have resolved that question.

Is there any other new business to bring up besides our schedule meeting of life or anything?

Yes.

There is a new thing.

Each day, this particular day is a significant new day for one of our members.

One of our members who happens to have a sport jacket on.

Stop.

That's right.

He's 29.

Again.

It's his groundhog 29 day.

Thank you.

Happy birthday.

Thank you.

Feels good to be 29.

On that note, any other items for any other items for follow up?

All right, well, with that, then, and again, apologies to anyone who may be listening in cyber land, we're sorry that we had to defer that hearing, but

It is what it is.

I want to have a good process.

So with that, thank you all for coming.

And we will adjourn to the next meeting of the commission, which is August 9th.