Planning Commission Regular Meeting   7/11/2023

Good evening.

July the 11th, 2023.

And this is a meeting of the Albemarle County Planning Commission.

I always say that so those in the audience know with great confidence that they are in the right spot.

And if you're not, this is a perfect time to step on out the door.

There'll be no judgment.

With that we'll move into our business here.

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

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

As we look at our agenda here, we have some miscellaneous business, but the agenda is anchored by one, a presentation, which we look forward to from staff and our consultant partners here.

And then we do have a public hearing, Maple Grove Church, that's here on the docket.

So with that, I'll call the meeting to order and establish a quorum.

Mr. Missel?

Here.

Ms.

Mr. Carrazana?

Here.

Mr. Bivins?

Here.

Mr. Murray?

Here.

Here.

So that we do have a quorum.

Are there other matters not listed on the agenda that the public would like to speak to?

If so, you're welcome to come up now.

So any matters now on the agenda the public like to speak to?

Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to the next item on the agenda, which is the consent agenda.

Before us, we have the draft minutes from June 13th, 2023 as regular meeting.

Is there any commissioner that has any edits or anything they would like to add or alter to that document?

Is there a motion to approve as presented?

So moved.

Is there a second?

Second.

All right, any additional discussion?

Mr. Clayburn?

Aye.

Mr. Carrazana?

Aye.

Ms.

Mr. Missel?

Aye.

All right, so with that being covered, we'll move into our presentation tonight, which is the Community Development Department fees restructuring.

Good evening.

My name is David Shifflett.

I'm the assistant director of administration and community development.

I'm joined here with me tonight by our special projects manager, Amelia McCulley, and our esteemed counterparts with the Berkeley Group, Chris Musso and Darren Coffey.

If you may or may not be familiar with Berkeley Group, they're a Virginia based consulting firm who works with the cities and counties

and towns on local government policies and regulations.

They have examined our current fee schedule structure compared and contrasted with benchmark localities and recommended changes based on that evaluation and best practices.

For the agenda, we will begin by providing some background to lay a foundation on the fee structure changes in CDD and our goals for the project.

then the Berkeley group will share their comparative analysis and the study methodology.

They will go over best practices on fee schedule structure and the recommendations for our fee restructuring.

Lastly, we will then provide an overview of some of the more substantive proposed changes and end with next steps for the project.

We would like to make it through the presentation before we open it up for questions.

So for a little bit of background on the project, this project is going to serve several key purposes as well as being consistent with board direction from 2021.

It is also an important step towards facilitating the implementation of our new community development system, which is the permit and application tracking platform that will eventually replace County View.

The key themes in the fees restructuring project are simplifying and consolidating the fees.

The fees will move from 312 separate fees in six separate code sections into one unified code section.

With the staff's recommendation, recommended fee schedule, we will have 154 total fees.

And that's over a 50% reduction, about a 53% reduction in the number of fees currently.

The resulting unified fee schedule will be moved to a new county code section that will make it easier to revisit and amend on a regular basis.

So for the major amendments, in 2007, consultants named Public Financial Management Group completed a comprehensive study on the county costs for providing services associated with the various applications and permits in the department.

The fee ordinance amendments were adopted in 2008 and 2009.

Our current work, this work does not include a service cost study.

Then in 2008, the board established a policy to update fees based on approved changes to staff compensation.

And these updates, while intended to occur every two years, were not routinely completed.

In fact, I believe since 2008, we updated all the CDD fees together two times.

The most recent update to fees was adopted 21st April of 2021 and was effective July 1st, 2021.

This included a new technology fee, which is based on 4% of our total application fee based on Virginia code.

Make sure this thing's working.

Good evening, Albemarle Planning Commission.

Good to be with you again.

It's a pleasure as always.

In case you don't know me yet, my name is Chris Musso.

I'm here with Darren Coffey.

We're with the Berkeley Group.

And for about the last year, we've been working on helping your CDD staff update their fee structure and create a new unified fee schedule.

Now the scope of this project did not include an examination of the current fee costs.

This was strictly based on structure alone.

So we went into this project with an intention to maintain revenue neutrality within that 2% base mark.

So we didn't go higher or lower than 2% of what your current fees are.

There were chances or opportunities where we needed to combine fees together.

And in which case we tried to maintain that revenue neutrality at all times.

It was a rigorous process to maintain this, especially with the residential building fees, which we'll talk about later on in the presentation.

Major aspects of this project was benchmarking.

We chose seven localities with similar sizes and development patterns to Albemarle County, similar counties that have been used in the past, and we chose those with the help of CDD staff.

Benchmarking of these locality fee charges was avoided where possible.

We're looking only at a snapshot comparison of the structure of these benchmarks and not their actual cost of fees.

The overall goal here of the project was to simplify and streamline this and create a new schedule based on the best practices throughout Virginia.

In total, we found that Albemarle was doing a lot of things correct, especially residential and commercial building fees based on square footage.

That was a best practice.

And what we wanted to do was just kind of find the things that Albemarle could improve upon and streamline those processes.

So we can go to the next slide here.

So this is a list of the data sources that we used.

As I said, the benchmark localities fees was the key component here.

But in addition, we use readily available data sources, especially to create residential building fees based on home prices, mean and median home prices versus original income patterns.

That's to help reduce the barriers to entry into the home markets.

And most importantly, we engage with the community where possible.

We'll talk about that on the next slide here.

As far as outreach goes, we had two stakeholder groups, Blue Ridge Home Builders and Charlottesville Area Development Roundtable, or better known as CADRE.

CDD staff did meet with Blue Ridge Home Builders, and drafts throughout the process were shared with both BHRB and CADRE.

We were looking for their input via email pretty much the entire time.

In addition, we compiled a community survey for Engage Albemarle.

The draft fees were shared with over 2700 community members that have gone through the development process in the past.

They were directly shared our drafts and asked to respond via the survey.

Of those over 2,700, we got 16 survey responses, which is low.

But in my experience, when people don't have anything to say, it's usually a good thing.

So we see that as a positive.

The general feedback that we did get from those responses is positive.

People are excited that we're simplifying things, that we're reducing the complexity of the fees.

Some of the comments were associated with helping to reduce the

helping enhance clarity and transparency with some of the fee categories, but we address most of those and they are updated in the current draft that you have.

So we'll talk about, we'll go into what we found here with the next slide and go over a couple charts really quick.

So this slide shows the comparative analysis with the benchmark localities.

On the far left side there is the current Albemarle County fees.

And what stands out the most is that they are a lot higher, a lot more categories than the other benchmark localities by a large margin in some portions.

If you look at zoning there, 141 fee categories for zoning.

The next highest there is the city of Charlottesville at 39.

So one of our big goals here was to try and reduce some of those categories.

And we achieved that on the far right hand side column.

You'll see what our proposed current draft numbers are.

It's a reduction in about 53% in fee categories overall.

And again, this helps simplify things and streamline things.

Rolling fees into one another where they made sense to do so and reduce the amount of

Redundancies throughout.

Going to the next slide here.

Again, this chart just goes to highlight how many fee categories Albemarle County really had.

These pie charts kind of break them down and show you that they are a large portion of the pie.

These are the current fees, not the proposed.

This slide also talks about all the best practices that we were keeping in mind as we created this new schedule.

And these are things that we wanted to

highlight and keep using going forward in addition to mirroring what some of the benchmark localities were doing.

A lot of these things we believe have been addressed or will be addressed, but it's always good to review them.

So again, this just shows the amount of fee categories existing versus our proposed and how much we've come down.

Overall, we think that these changes have helped reorganize, consolidate, remove redundancies, and simplify the fee categories for Albemarle County.

In addition, they're all gonna be in one place.

This will create a brand new chapter of the county code.

Very simple to go in and change that on an annual or biannual basis.

The adoption of this, we're expecting to be in simultaneously with the new CDS permitting system.

And hopefully the combination of those two will really help address these changes and make for an easier system for you and your community members.

So with that, I'll turn it back over to Dave.

Thank you, Chris.

Well, next, we'd like to go over our top five proposed changes.

And so

First of all, we'd like to go over the bundled and tiered single-family residential fee structure.

And to consolidate and simplify fees, we propose building fees for building permits for single-family residential applications into different categories or separate tiers based on the size of the home, the gross square footage.

And this effort is supported as one of the recommended best practices for the fee schedules.

Single family residential fees were chosen because they are a frequent billing permit type and more conducive to bundling fees.

Commercial permits, we looked at those while important, are fewer in number and far more complex.

Based on the Berkeley group's feedback and assessment, their current fees are quite transparent and fair.

In the current fee schedule, the single-family residential building permit fees are based on three separate calculations.

So try and follow me into this one here.

It's 58 cents per square foot for finished space plus 18 cents per square foot for unfinished space plus 5 cents per gross square foot minus the area of unfinished basement.

And this is for the plan review.

The bundled fee

applied across all types of square footages and includes the building plan review and the first two inspections per inspection type.

Determining the tiers for these bundled fees involved extensive assessment and data modeling to assure the proposal is revenue neutral and that it does not represent substantial changes from the current fees paid.

The proposed fees were tested against single-family building permit applications received since July 1, 2021 to evaluate the expected revenues with adoption of the updated fee schedule.

The proposed tiers recognize that larger homes require more extensive plan review and inspection time than smaller homes.

The increasing costs of postage and advertising in newspaper have quite exceeded our current fees.

To better address these costs, we propose the fee paid for notices be changed to the actual cost for the advertisement when an advertisement is applicable and the actual cost of the postage for mailings.

The initial application fee will include a standard administrative fee for the notice, and the actual cost for the notice will be charged following the mailings and prior to the issuance of related permits.

This approach does not allow complete predictability for the fee, but it is recommended by the staff as the best way to capture these costs.

Next, the merger of multiple fee categories for a single flat fee.

So to be consistent with best practices, fee categories have been combined and the overall number of fee categories reduced.

And we can include a couple examples here.

A, multiple tenant fees involved in a single application are combined into one fee category.

An example of this with the Virginia erosion and sediment control, where the agreement or plan review is one fee and the permit and inspection are a separate fee.

These are proposed to be combined into one fee.

And then example B, multiple separate fee categories are combined into one category.

For example, where there are 20 existing fee categories for special use permits, five fee categories are proposed.

For fee consistency, where we have found inconsistencies in existing CDD fees, we have sought to establish a common fee where relevant.

Fees for transactions relating to performance bonds and for appeals of decisions under the regulations are two examples of proposed changes to establish consistency.

And lastly, rounding to the nearest dollar.

As a result of fee increases over time, some resulting fees included dollars and cents.

For example, $118.86 for a letter of revision.

or uneven numbers such as $592 for a variance application for the Board of Zoning Appeals or $237 for an easement plat.

Now, we propose a fee schedule around fees to the nearest dollar ending in a zero or a five.

Incidentally, we've noticed there are two fees that didn't get rounded

which we caught after the fact.

We will review the schedule for rounding and other quality control as we continue.

Next steps for us is a work session with the Board of Supervisors on August 16th.

And following their input, we'll schedule public hearings with the commission and board this fall, late fall and early winter.

Staff recommends an effective date for these

Great, thank you.

Very informative and thank you for the efforts put forth in the presentation here.

I'll start to my right with Commissioner Murray.

Let's work our way around the dais.

Yes, and looking at the bundled and tiered single-family residential fee structure, it looks like the highest tier is 7,500 square feet.

Did you do an analysis of how many homes in Albemarle currently fall into the different categories?

And then also, I'm just curious how many homes are above 7,500 square feet?

And what's the largest home in Albemarle County?

How many square feet is that?

And so,

So it's kind of tough to compare because you automatically compare to current fees and the comparisons aren't quite apples to apples in that regard because the current fees are based on the three separate calculations and these are based on bands.

To your first question, the 7,500 should be 7,500 plus, so anything over 7,500, not just- Correct, correct.

How many do we have over 15,000 square feet?

How many do we have over... It just seems like there's a lot of potential homes that could be above 7,500 square feet.

And now I'm on county.

I just want to know how many of those are, and then what's the strain?

What's the mean there?

Amelia McCulley, Special Projects Manager.

So we ran the numbers many different ways and the percentage of homes that fall into the over 7,500 square feet is a very small number.

In terms of like how large the houses get, I can't tell you off the top of my head, we worked with lots of different data sets.

to try to get the most accurate numbers we could for revenue projections, and to also compare to the existing fees.

So we weren't really tuned into how big the house gets, we were really looking at existing costs versus proposed costs.

And I would have to search for that data set.

Thanks.

Anything else, Commissioner Murray?

No?

Yeah, thanks for the presentation.

That was really helpful.

Really, really well done.

A couple of questions.

One under, this is an example under agricultural and forestal districts, we talk about recommending eliminating the fee to create or to add to the district and maintaining the fee for withdrawal from the district.

So that's a little bit of a value judgment there, kind of like it's better to add than

Did you consider any discounts, and maybe it's in here and I missed it, or any incentives for affordable housing?

You ask a really important question because it's on everybody's mind and it's so important for us to have it on our mind.

And as we spoke with Jody about it, we talked about the fact that that is something sort of in the

future toolkit for the affordable housing work.

And they I don't think they had gotten to the point where they were ready to recommend developers incentives or because it might go along the lines of what you're talking about, which is some kind of a credit basis.

Got it.

Okay, thank you.

I know there's a workshop tomorrow on that actually up at North Fork on

The value judgment.

No, no, no.

It's okay.

I was kind of, well, perfect.

Awesome.

And clearly this is going to need to be a board policy driven decision and we'll bring it up with a work session next month.

As we went through this work and we looked at the fact that we're charging both to establish a district or add to a district, which is something that we want to encourage, as well as to withdraw from a district.

And Berkeley Group may want to speak to it.

I think they raised the question of why don't we consider dropping the fee for

what we're trying to promote.

Not really.

I mean, it's a comprehensive plan says you're trying to preserve, you know, the rural character of the county.

You're not talking about massive exodus of AFDs anyway.

So it just seemed like

with all of these philosophically, it's like, how can we remove barriers unintended or otherwise?

And so, if you want to remove it, then there's a process.

If you want to add it, then come at it and you don't have to pay it even though it's not really a barrier.

And if I could just with the categories, that is such an important part of this project.

We say it's a best practice, but honestly, I think we've created a model

that you don't see anywhere else that I'm aware of.

It's an idea that we had and that Jody had and Dave and Amelia and we hashed it out together.

Started out with four categories.

I ended up with six.

There aren't a ton over 7,500.

There are some that are very big, 10 plus, but not a lot.

What we were looking at and the reason we ended up with six is because

How many buckets do you need to make this fair and you're not overburdening any one category?

And what is revenue neutral and how do you achieve that revenue neutrality within each category?

and what does that fee look like once it's rounded.

And so CDD staff, I'll just say they spent hours and hours and hours fighting with the system to extract the data to be able to do that.

And they did an excellent job.

And when you look at that, it looks very simple.

What I like to tell people is simple is very complex.

Simple is not easy.

And so when it looks simple, it looks like you just pick numbers out of the sky is all data driven.

And with those six categories,

where we lowered barriers to housing was below 2,500 square feet and below 1,500 square feet.

Those fees are less than they were, I believe, initially.

And then where the bulk of housing is, which is 2,500 and up, we mitigated that as well.

So it was really an art that I think was well done by county staff, not by us.

So I just wanted to mention that.

Sure.

Could you say your name one more time?

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

Darren Coffey with the Berkeley Group.

Thank you.

Thanks.

One, you mentioned preserving revenue neutrality, I think.

and I'm curious and the dollar figures were not benchmarked as part of this, it was more about the number.

So that is something that does need to be done.

We have not planned that yet, but that'll probably be another iteration of a fee study.

And if I could just add on to that, there are going to be some changes coming down the pike that may make us more efficient and reduce process, therefore reduce the cost of the service.

Yeah, the reason I asked was you referred to under building inspections proposing a new fee for unique inspections.

And so that's sort of tied to the fact that bridges and other structures will take a lot longer than something else.

So therefore, there's got to be.

So that does impact dollar amounts.

And I was curious if that was somehow envisioned in the future.

And then just one clarification and the reason for my question about

the agriculture and forest districts and the affordable housing was you mentioned in your statement that we want to continue to preserve the rural character of Albemarle County.

And so that translated into a an agricultural and forest district approach.

We also want to enhance affordable housing in Albemarle County and that doesn't seem to translate into the fee categories for residential.

So that's where I was just seeing a disconnect.

But I understand, Ms.

McCauley, what you're saying there too.

So just wanted to make that point.

That's it.

Very concise and to the point.

Could you go to the benchmarking slides where you had the pie charts and actually the benchmark where you had the multiple?

So obviously we were significantly outside the norm, right, in the number of, if I'm reading this correct, huge improvement, right, you cut it in half.

But I'm wondering, I mean, I'm still looking, we're still on the high end, right, of most of these.

So I'm wondering if there's still opportunities.

I think you're talking about further simplifications, maybe next steps.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think this is just kind of the start of continual improvement along with the community development system implementation, which will hopefully drive additional process improvement.

And so when you're benchmarking, I mean, there's some of these that have, you know, in RICO in 93 and

had over 63, really growing 66.

So this is a very interesting project for a lot of different reasons.

But one of the reasons is because when you start looking for commonalities among these communities, which have a lot of commonalities, there aren't any few categories or very few.

I mean, there is a Rorschach test here all over the place.

It's crazy.

You really have to suss out what is going on and what is not going on.

Some of these localities, they're not sophisticated enough.

They're not as sophisticated as they should be, in my opinion.

and others, there's just a massive amount of complexity that doesn't have to be there.

The trick with Albemarle was consolidating without losing anything, right?

And so we feel like we've done all we can do with this iteration, but this also sets the foundation so that the next iteration of this exercise isn't going to be nearly as difficult.

There's so much going on within those 1200, there's like 1200, there's 312 fees that it's hard to uncross your eyes when you stared it for long enough and say, okay, have we missed anything?

Have we left anything out?

Have we done all we can do to get it down as simple as we can without losing the nuances?

What is the difference between these fees?

Why are the fees different?

They shouldn't be different, they should be different.

all of those value judgments that went into this.

So, yeah.

Once this is adopted, I can confidently say that Albemarle County will have the best fee schedule that I've seen as a professional working with land use and community development departments in over 28 years.

Thank you.

So the pie charts represent, so looking at building, let's say, Albemarle County is three

And so you're aggregating, so the whole pie represents the totality of all the counties.

Yeah, that's just a combination of the last chart that we were on.

It's just adding up all of those fees together into one pie and then who's got the majority of those section.

So if the pie is a totality of all your fees, so that's how I first started reading this.

Right.

So all the building fees of the benchmark localities add up to the pie.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

One more question.

So when you talk about this being revenue neutral, is it going to be revenue neutral for each of those categories?

Or is it going to be just revenue neutral in terms of the whole budget?

For example, in terms of the WPO, is the anticipated revenue for WPO fees going to stay the same?

Or is that going to be, or overall the budget, is that going to be revenue neutral?

Okay.

I don't want to speak for Dave or anything like that, but yes, basically everything should maintain a 2% revenue neutrality across the board in an ideal world.

Again, we encourage you to reevaluate in a year after adoption to make sure that that stays true and to make sure that this is doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Um, but that was the intent going forward.

I'll just add that there was no social engineering going on with this.

We didn't lessen building for more in zoning or any of that.

Just a quick, before you sit down, just a quick follow up question on the charts.

And thank you, by the way.

So you've clarified quite a bit for me.

So this is all current data?

Correct.

So do you have what, sorry, the proposed is, right, it's not on this chart.

Do you have a proposed?

Right.

So that's going to be in your report in page 14.

It's not actually in a chart form, unfortunately, but the actual rankings are there.

No, it's not.

Page 14 is just a conclusion.

Oh, is it page 13 then?

My PDF numbers might be off.

It's page 13.

Yes, sir.

So if you see in that chart, it's that left-hand second column there.

Thank you.

Sure.

Yeah, I'll stand up here, too, if you need anything else.

So one of the first things I would do is I would suggest that you label those so that the supervisors

see that easily.

So if we've got some individuals here, I should be up there.

So if you have, cause when it says best practices, one sort of assumes that that's after your work, as opposed to it being the state today.

And I do think it's sort of, it would be helpful to have the state today versus what we're suggesting you go to and that kind of visual because you've got

several professionals up here who this is what they do and if they're asking you those kinds of questions you just should be prepared for that.

Sure, absolutely.

And so let me just ask a couple things.

So in page three where you're talking about the bundling and you say we're proposing six tiers of bundled fees I agree it's good that it's down but I would I will be putting onto the record here that I think they should be even fewer.

And I think, and I'm going to add to on addition to this, and to follow up with what my colleague Fred has said.

So I think if we're really trying to say that

or trying to make this a community that has a diversity of housing types in it, then we really still are pitching to, and if we look at some of the data that comes out on a weekly basis from our real estate people, we really see that the basic house around here is about a 3,000 square foot house that's being built today.

And so that's still pitching us to about a $465,000 house, which pitches us to a whole group of people, good, bad or indifferent.

I'm making no value judgment.

And so I think that when we talk to the supervisors, the supervisors say, what's the barrier to entry to things?

Okay.

Everyone has heard me say, I think there should be a different kind of examination about who gets to put their land into ag forest.

I think that should be a decision that the county makes because the county is making an implicit decision on its revenues.

when they allow someone to opt into that without some consideration by the county.

And so I have an issue with that.

I shouldn't be able to purposely put myself in a lower tax basis just because I have X amount of land.

I would like to also see us do something about land trust that may not be here, but land trust also is an indicator and it's a signal by the county that it's trying to create a parcel of land that will be forever affordable.

That may come up in our comp plan, but what I'm trying to say is that fees push business responses.

and if this is something that we're sort of gathering ourselves to do, then let's be intentional and broad and be diverse in how we do that.

One of the things I wanted to ask here is under one is, is this for new or is this also for renovation?

So if I build a house at 3,500 square, 35 to 4,500 and pay 2,000, but I take an existing 3,500 square foot house

and put another 3,000 on it, which is a lot of what we see going on in this community.

All you have to look and see is the builders here, there's a certain group of builders here that specialize renovating up.

You can quote me on that.

That's a new term of our renovating up.

And so if I go from a 3,000 square foot house, so I'm now to go to my colleague at the end, I've now got something that's over 7,500.

What am I being charged for?

It would be based on what it is today.

Usually what people are doing is they're buying older houses and then converting them.

So that's a piece there that sort of puzzled me that I get a free ride to a larger house even though it's now

I'm not going to build a new house because I like the property I'm on.

I'm just going to build a bigger house on that piece of property.

Mr. Bivins, can I just ask a question?

But wouldn't they have already paid the fee the first time for the first $3,000?

It would have been built into their purchase price.

Right.

But somebody got the permit to build that house and they paid some fee for the first 3000.

I agree.

And then someone else comes along and they're paying for the next.

I'm just being explicit and trying to get.

It's going to be clear it got paid some.

It got paid when you first did the first.

Right.

So I'm just trying to figure this out here.

The other thing that I would that I would ask is.

So the Commonwealth of Virginia is an unusual place in the way its jurisdictions sit, much like Massachusetts, where I guess Kentucky is in this thing, the Commonwealth.

We're one of the few places that has sort of these cities and that are surrounded by counties and they have different ways in which they can go about doing things.

And so while I appreciate that the benchmark cities you used were all in the Commonwealth of Virginia, at some point I might suggest

that you give a broader look at the kind of cities that we're looking at, because people are, there's just not, there's not this sort of ad hoc, let's move to Charlottesville Albemarle anymore.

People are being drawn here for sort of a character or a sort of quality of life or characteristics that they like here.

And so, you know, I'd want to know what happens in Ann Arbor.

I want to know what happens in Boulder.

I'd want to know what happens in Ithaca, New York, places that look similar to this community and how people come back to it as opposed to I'm not really concerned about the Hanover or what was the other one I was looking at?

It's like, well, that's really nice, but that's their economy is not built by cars.

And so as we're looking at

People are really liberal in the places that they can go to build houses.

I would want us to have some sense of what are we competing with, you know, what kinds of communities that we're competing.

So my question, I started looking at your

at your forum and said, are these really competing markets?

So am I really going to go, what I really think about if I'm going to move to Albemarle, what I really think about going to Hanover County?

Well, I don't necessarily think I would.

First of all, it's off of 95, and even though I like tomatoes, that's not a reason for me to go to a truck farming community.

When I really go, I might go to James County because Williamsburg is a really, is an interesting kind of place.

And there's some interesting things I think that do kind of follow how they've developed out, how we're developing out.

And so I would just sort of ask that as you refine this, that you look at communities that sort of compete on a profile basis.

So this is a good slide to just address that.

The best practices, you know, I was actually in charge of that part of the project and I look nationwide at what I felt were best practices in communities, you know, all around the country, larger, smaller, whatever, just whatever those bullets were derived from what I saw that I liked that I thought were best practices based on my experience and based on good land use planning practices.

But

Nobody in Virginia, in my experience, no localities care what another community in Colorado or California are doing.

The question they ask is always, what are other Virginia localities similar to us doing?

And so for the feet categories, for that critical analysis, it needs to be an apples to apples.

And when you start doing other states, and there are numerous commonwealths in the country, there's only one that has independent cities, and that's us.

It's apples to apples.

It has to be apples to apples and not apples and oranges and bananas.

and that's what you would get with a category comparison outside of Virginia.

But best practices, you betcha.

We don't have rights to it and we don't necessarily do it that well.

Here's where I'm going to gently push back on you on this.

When we look at the individuals who are relocating to our county, they are in fact making national and sometimes international decisions.

And when we have people here who are building

and some of the more refined building that takes place here, they're making decisions to come here and to build from often the Northeast where we all know what some of the building practices and the building expenses are there.

So I think even if it's at a footnote that you looked at places across the nation, I think it would help me to articulate to my supervisor that it's just not that collection of counties

which some of them are not comparable.

to Albemarle County.

This as far as the housing stock, the income profiles, the things that I looked up to see, where do these counties range as far as medium housing and what is sort of the medium household income in some of those places.

Yeah, I'd say in addition, I think it'd be impossible to find anywhere that's like Albemarle, really, to come up with a comparison.

You mentioned Ithaca, New York.

I'm from the Finger Lakes.

I grew up in the Finger Lakes.

Ithaca is beautiful, and I think there are a lot of the same values.

But if I wanted to, I could go buy a house in Ithaca, New York right now.

I don't think I could afford a house in Albemarle County.

So it's really difficult to find an exact match.

And we certainly did the best.

I believe had some of the best comparisons in the state for similar development growth patterns and more thinking to what Albemarle might look like in the future.

We don't want to just focus on what Albemarle is now.

I would suggest you amplify that in your introduction.

Excellent.

Thank you.

That's a good note.

Just a quick follow up because I got some clarity as well when we were talking about the best practices and your benchmarks for those versus the, so the qualitative benchmarks versus the quantitative benchmarks.

I think this actually is two slides.

I don't think this is one slide.

But anyway, I'll leave that up to you.

I agree.

I agree.

I do have a clarifying question based off what I've heard.

Oh, you're getting into building stuff now.

And I'm not a building official.

I was a zoning official on a previous life.

We didn't change, correct.

We did not change the fees for alterations.

Not a teardown though.

I'm sorry.

Okay.

I just thought I heard something different earlier.

No, no, no, no.

There's nothing that's free.

That would not be within a 2% tolerance.

And I think the new CDS system isn't going to be a panacea by any stretch of the imagination, but you are going to be to do a data analysis a whole heck of a lot easier than what these guys were able to do with this.

And so I think, you know, once you have that system put in place in 2024, and you can get to like 2026,

and look at two years of that data and go, OK, can we consolidate these six categories into four?

Yes, probably.

But you've got proffers and you've got there's so many different nuances that in order to just get it better and to to help cater to the residential housing market, which is so vital and important to this community and simplifying that and doing it in a way that's fair.

And it lowers barriers to entry for smaller houses.

That's what we were really going for.

So this is not perfect.

Nothing ever is.

It's more perfect and it will it will lay the foundation

for a much easier process down the road to make it even more fine-tuned and perfect.

Well said.

I do have one more question.

I don't do the notepad.

I take notes.

Absolutely.

You're fine.

I do have one question, a couple of comments.

Understanding that the fee schedule is based off of home size as well, I think that's certainly appropriate.

But does it, bless you, does it take into consideration like complexity in terms of like types of space and materials?

Because I could, just because it's a big house doesn't mean it's more complex, right?

I could do a, you could have a geothermal system, for example, which might require more inspections and so forth.

No, there are building fees that are based off the price of the actual house itself and we opted to go in for this this simpler approach because that can get very complex as the example that Dave showed you your current

building fees.

There's like a lot of equations in this.

It makes a lot of work for staff.

And it makes for a lot of not a lot of transparency for developers, which is again goes to that reduction of barriers and trying to make things a bit simpler and streamlined.

That was our objective in this.

I'm just flagging that because we know that climate action, for example, is really vital in our comprehensive planning and everything that we're working towards.

And so you can see more complex systems come our way.

And the way it's written, it kind of ignores that.

And so you might just want to at least acknowledge that, hey, we realize that.

And I guess another question would be maybe this is for staff.

A lot of the training for building inspectors is free through the state, through the state's surcharge.

They don't pay a penny for it.

But as far as new energy code and new this, that, and the other, you know, there are increasing demands on any building inspector for training and certification to meet today's needs with the building construction.

It's hard enough to hire and we're trying to find ways, you know, to

Hire them, keep them, and keep them trained.

So I don't know how to answer that.

Well, a couple of things.

First, your other point.

I had Dave put this comparative analysis back up.

You'll see on building, it goes from 78 to 58.

That's the least amount of reduction by category.

And the reason is because there are so many different specialty fees or things that you mentioned.

that are complex.

We didn't mess with those fees other than the rounding part.

Those categories aren't easily collapsed and perhaps they could be upon further examination, but that's above my pay grade in a lot of ways on a land use planner.

while they're respecting the world for building inspectors and building officials.

So that is preserved.

So you have a fancy house with a lot of different upgrades and inspections.

You're paying for each of those inspections above and beyond the base fee.

Look at those six categories as the base building permit fee.

Anything else is still going to be above and beyond.

For example, it includes two inspections.

Past those two base inspections, you're paying per inspection.

So do it right once, and you can just pay the base fee.

Otherwise, you're going to get tagged for the time.

The county board in its previous work basically authorized adjustments to the fees to help cover costs due to things like salary adjustments.

And I would say training costs should play a part of that as well.

Albemarle County's Community Development Department does not recover.

a lot of their expenses based on their fees.

It is lower than in my experience in the industry.

And so that's work that probably needs to be done down the road as well.

But again, get a new system in place, get a new fee schedule in place.

Let things settle out just a little bit and then start talking about, you know, how do we do a better job with revenue recovery?

You drive those costs down that Amelia mentioned earlier.

That's part of the equation as becoming more efficient and effective.

But then you get into the conversation down the road of who should be paying for this, the taxpayer or the applicant.

Yeah, I have one more question.

Looking at page, sorry, my eyes can't read this moment.

Anyway, the water protection fees and it looks like there's a fee that was rolled into the overall fee for VSMP for review of mitigation plan pertaining to land disturbing activity in a stream buffer.

I'm curious as to why that was rolled up into a general fee when it's something we're trying to discourage, but construction record drawings review was not.

So I will say that this has gone through a lot of iterations.

And this most recent draft has been seen by county staff and been revised by the county engineer who directly deals with stormwater management.

And I think that change was based upon his recommendation, his or her recommendation.

I can certainly look into that and find out why that recommendation was made and we can

change it if it needs to be changed or get that question answered for you.

Yeah, that's above my pay grade as well.

You know, environmental engineering, God bless them and kudos.

We the county engineer was asked to help us look at it.

So we didn't muck it up and to simplify it as much as it made sense, but not to oversimplify it so that it messed up what he or she is doing.

I think it's it's a he.

But

And if I could just answer that, and Frank can certainly pipe in if there's more to say on a technical basis than what I'm going to explain here.

This is a case where under VESCP, erosion sediment control, there's $170 fee for review of a mitigation plan.

Under Virginia's stormwater management program, there's $170 fee for review of a mitigation plan.

So we just combine them into one fee category.

Correct, but I see other VSNP items that were not rolled into a single fee.

For example, the construction record drawings review, which seems like something that would always have to be done, whereas the review of a mitigation plan pertaining to land disturbance

activity within a stream buffer was rolled in.

So it seems like out of those two, if I was to find something that I would roll up, it would be the first one, not the second one.

This is where Frank knows.

Frank and Bart both know far more than me, so Frank's going to get up and speak to that.

Thank you.

Frank Pohl, County Engineer.

So I don't have it in front of me, but from my recollection,

Can you point out what you're... I'm going back to this document here.

Yeah, attachment B. That everyone can see.

Attachment B, it's like the last page, actually, of attachment B.

Mr. Murray, do you know what page that is on the attachment?

We can look at it, but I think the answer was, and I agree with Amelia, that we, for both BESCP and VSMP, that fee is the same.

So if there is a mitigation plan, it's just the mitigation plan, which is a general fee, which isn't specific to a VSMP or BESCP.

The last page, should be the last page.

There it is.

The third item from the bottom, review of mitigation plan pertaining to land disturbing activity in a stream buffer.

There was a fee of $170 to be proposed to be rolled up into the general review, whereas construction record drawings review was not rolled up.

So I was just curious, it seems more like

Sure we can look at that.

because one of the best practices that we're trying to do here is to reduce the number of separate categories.

Well, but in that case, it is a different activity.

Oh, not me, a duplicate of the mitigation of land disturbing activities in a stream buffer.

So I didn't see where that was a duplicate thing.

I was rolling it up into a single duplicate item.

Mr. Murray, are you talking about number five that is crossed out, that is review of a mitigation plan under VSMP?

Actually, can you highlight that?

I guess not.

I do see that.

OK.

All right.

My bad.

All right.

Thank you.

So I think we have two more questions.

This is Commissioner Missel and then Commissioner Bivins.

Yeah, I'm sorry if I'm getting in the weeds here, but I'll make it quick.

On the proposed unified fee schedule, just thinking about how board of supervisor members might view this, you have the proposed unified fee schedule and you have the fee schedule crosswalk.

I love that term crosswalk, but I never heard that an actual crosswalk.

It's hard to pick out what stays and what goes and what's, you know, and I know you wrestled with this probably from a clarity standpoint, but I was looking as a hypothetical applicant, for example, on a special use permit and I saw that there's a special use permit

for each resubmittal after the first of $590.

But I didn't see that in the fee schedule crosswalk.

So I don't want to get into too much detail here.

And it's just that it seems to me resubmittals, and there's a few in there.

There's the zoning map amendment resubmittal of $1,480.

There's the special use permit resubmittal.

There's a signage ARB resubmittal.

I don't remember seeing those.

Maybe they were there, and I just missed them.

but the resubmittal piece, again, thinking as a hypothetical applicant doesn't necessarily result in always because the applicant wasn't complete in their submission.

Sometimes it's out of the applicant's control.

And so you're paying as an applicant for a resubmittal that may or may not actually result in changes to that plan.

I appreciate your point and I think we have really struggled with the proposed unified schedule in the crosswalk to make it clear to follow and it's still not easy to follow.

So we'll keep looking at that.

Yeah, it just feels a little subjective but I get it and maybe there's a way to highlight those in the proposed unified fee schedule that makes it clear that they're different and new.

I don't know.

This is an idea as you're

The incentives for affordable housing.

So we know we have seen projects come before us that don't use the intended density for a project in the development area.

They come woefully short.

I think your colleagues have said something in the 50s area that they're below that.

And so if we look at the package of fees that we sort of incentivize someone to, A, build to density and to also stay within the development area using our fee package, using the various levers that we may have before us, that also may be something that I recommend you give some consideration to so that we are, in fact, encouraging developers

Very good.

Well, I hope the comments and discussion were helpful.

First and foremost, great job on the presentation and know that we understand it's an iterative process.

That's what design is, right?

And so each time it gets better as it comes before us.

So with that, thank you and look forward to seeing you.

I guess it was in the fall or early winter.

For this project, we're looking for fall public hearings with you guys and then winter for the board.

Yeah.

So thank you again very much.

Thank you for your time.

Good evening, everyone.

My name is Sid Shoaf.

I'm a senior planner with the planning division of Albemarle County's Community Development Department.

Sitting next to me is Rebecca Ragsdale, planning manager.

Tonight, I'll be giving staff's presentation on zoning map amendment application ZMA 2023-3 Maple Grove Church residential zoning map amendment.

This is a proposed rezoning of a 0.32 acre lot from R1 residential to R4 residential.

The subject property of this rezoning application is located north of the city of Charlottesville, near the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport.

It is located off of Prophet Road, east of US 29 North.

There are three addresses associated with this parcel.

They are 3208, 3210, and 3212 Prophet Road.

The tax map parcel is 32-29D and the entire parcel is approximately 6.86 acres.

It contains an existing one-story single-family dwelling unit and an existing 18,000 square foot church that is used by Maple Grove Christian Church.

Additionally, there are two playgrounds, a basketball court, a youth center building in the rear, and existing parking areas.

The specific area I'll be discussing today is highlighted in red, and that is 3208 Prophet Road, which is 0.32 acres.

And this area contains the existing one-story single-family dwelling unit.

As I mentioned before, this property is R1 residential and is shown as light green on this map.

A majority of the surrounding properties are single-family residential uses.

To the west is Lighthouse Christian Church and Preschool, Bright Beginnings Preschool, and a variety of commercial uses along 29 North.

To the east is mostly residential with some rural areas uses to the northeast.

The applicant's request is to rezone the highlighted red 0.32 acres of this property from R1 residential to R4 residential.

The applicant is requesting to rezone 0.32 acres of the property from R1 residential to R4 residential to allow a creation of a new 0.32 acre lot, which would contain the existing single family dwelling unit.

The church building, the parking areas, playgrounds, basketball court, and the youth center will all remain outside of the proposed rezoning area and on its own parcel.

The minimum lot size for conventional development in the R1 zoning district is 45,000 square feet, so rezoning to a higher density zoning district is necessary to allow the creation of the proposed residential lot.

The minimum lot size for conventional development in the R4 zoning district

is 10,890 square feet.

Given the proposed lot size of 13,932 square feet, only one dwelling unit would be permitted on this proposed lot.

The illustration shows a proposed subdivision plat if the rezoning were to be approved.

The subdivision would be reviewed by staff to ensure that it follows all of Albemarle County's zoning regulations.

Now moving on to the comprehensive plan.

This subject property is located within the community of Hollymede in the Places 29 master plan.

The future land use is designated as urban density residential, which calls for residential uses at a density of 6.01 to 34 dwelling units per acre.

Although the proposed rezoning suggests a density of one dwelling unit per acre, staff believes this is appropriate given the existing density of the surrounding neighborhood area.

So in sum, there are two factors that are favorable.

One, the request will have no impacts on neighboring properties, public facilities and services.

The second, the request is consistent with the county's growth management policy and the recommendations in the Places 29 master plan.

For factors unfavorable, we found none.

The staff recommends approval of zoning map amendment request ZMA 2023-3 Maple Grove Church residential rezoning.

Thank you.

That was very efficient.

Thank you.

Looking to my left, starting with Commissioner Bivins and I work my way around the horn.

Thank you, Chair.

That's a good confirming question.

Yeah, just again, just for confirming, so the highlighted area was

0.32 acres.

I didn't get the, you mentioned 0.13 for the new development.

No, it's 0.32 acres.

So they're requesting to rezone 0.32 acres of the subject parcel.

And then they would submit an application, a subdivision plat application if the rezoning were to be approved.

And that would be that 0.32 acres to subdivide that land to construct one dwelling unit.

And the minimum for R4 would be 0.32 acres.

Go back to my notes here.

10,890 is the actual 10,000 square footage.

The minimum lot size for conventional development in the R4 zoning district is 10,890 square feet.

For R1 zoning district, it's 45,000 square feet.

So this parcel that they're proposing to rezone, yes, it's 13,932 square feet.

Thank you.

No, sir, no questions.

Just a quick question.

I'm just curious about the history of this site.

That's fine.

All of that.

Yeah, I think what you would anticipate seeing our evaluation of our facilities

Just like anyone would do business or government is just.

Not a priority to maintain that facility, but we do believe it would be a good residence for the community.

So it's reallocation of resources and that does match with our mission.

We were recently approved for a daycare special use permit.

Sir, I'll be coming to you very soon for the, I'm sorry, I'll be coming to you very soon after we wrap up here.

I'll be coming your way for the presentation so we can open a public hearing.

It's okay.

Commissioner Murray.

All right.

With that, I will go ahead and open the public hearing.

It was just a split second too soon.

That's all.

That's all.

So there's no presentation, but applicant.

This slide on the screen is what the applicant provided to me.

So if you would like to speak.

Jeffrey Ainge, Maple Grove Christian Church.

Yep.

So we're here to hopefully present a quality application for a Zoning Map Amendment.

And we do appreciate the committee's help.

From the very beginning in the pre-app stages, we felt like we received a lot of good advice, as was the case in our daycare center application.

So we felt like the whole goal of our committee

your committee was to present a quality solution and a quality product.

So we feel like we had that here.

We addressed early that we should look at setbacks.

We should look at public walks.

We should look at things that would just properly accommodate the residents, but also the playgrounds and adjacent housing

and that's where the whole recommendation to go to a R4 zoning came about because the squeezing in a larger lot was just going to crowd the lot up on top of everything else.

Other than that, that's how we got to where we are today and

All right, thank you.

I'll see if there's any questions for you, sir.

Commissioner Murray, any questions for applicants?

You had yours.

Commissioner Missel?

No, sir.

So as something to give consideration for, and I know the church is going to do this, but having had

decades of work in this area.

One of the things that faith communities are finding difficult today is that if they bring someone who's a new minister in this particular area, they can't afford to buy a house or rent a house.

It is a consideration, and it has been a consideration.

I think just for us, it's been the history of our usage.

Yeah, so it's just time to change gears.

Of course.

No, thank you.

All right.

Thank you, sir.

Anyone here who would like to speak who did not sign up?

All right.

Mr. Clerk, is there anyone online who would like to speak?

All right.

Commission.

I'll bring it in to us and I'll start with Commissioner Bivins.

No, thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

The only thing that I had a consideration was but I think it's I think they'll work that out when they have to come and work with staff more is that that entrance, how do you manage an entrance that's both a secular and a sacred instance on a road that if you have not been on that road recently,

I would encourage all of you to look at the community that's right next to it and the density that's there, which is good, doesn't have me complaining, and the community across the street from it, which has got density, and the community right next to the older church that's out there.

So it's not like it was when people were wondering what was going to happen in that portion of Prophet Road there.

Very fair statement.

Commissioner Carrazano?

Commissioner Missel?

No, sir.

All set.

All right.

No, I don't have questions.

Very good.

Commissioner?

All right.

Are we prepared to make a motion?

So moved.

All right.

Second.

Second.

Any further discussion?

Ms.

Mr. Carrazana?

Aye.

Mr. Bivins?

Aye.

Mr. Clayborne?

Aye.

All right, so the motion passes unanimously.

And you now will be preparing, armed with what you hear today, preparing for a presentation with the Board of Supervisors at the date to be determined.

All right, pulling up my agenda.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Committee reports.

Does anyone have any?

No, no reports, but there will be a meeting, the CREZ ACAC, but plus also other ones will be talking about the comprehensive plan.

They'll have a virtual meeting, so that will be very interesting.

I'll participate in that.

Right, that's right.

Keep us posted on how that goes.

Yep, I registered for that meeting as well so I'll just be listening.

And that whole area around there was the

Ryo Mills, well, the Albemarle Training School was there.

Yeah, they kind of got a greenish background.

Yeah, they look distinct from the white and black old timey state markers.

Right, so we can do it.

All right, thank you.

Commissioner Missel, do you have a report?

No, sir, I do not.

All right, Commissioner Carrazana, do not.

I have a question for Commissioner Carrazana.

So I saw a quote by one of your colleagues from the MPO Tech

that the roundabout at District Avenue, which was interesting since it was a person from the city of Charlottesville who is being quoted, I will reserve comment on that, that the roundabout at District Avenue has made the smart scale, has made smart scale, that's not how it's said, has been accepted by smart scale or whatever that you do to get a smart scale acceptance.

I do not recall we reviewed the smart scale projects.

I don't remember seeing that one.

Yes, I can respond to that.

Thank you, Kevin McDermott, the acting planning director.

The Commonwealth Transportation Board in reviewing the submitted projects decided to change the award from the

from the staff recommended scenario, which had Albemarle County essentially had three projects that were recommended for funding through SmartScale this year.

They were the intersection improvements at Belvedere and Rio.

They were pedestrian and bike improvements on Avon that actually crossed from the, was in the city and the county on Avon, including a new bridge over Moore's Creek pedestrian bridge.

And the third project that was initially recommended was improvements at Peter Jefferson Parkway in 250.

which would have included a park and ride lot.

But when the CTB reviewed that, they decided to pull that project and move that money from there over to District Avenue and fund the roundabout.

were the three that were initially submitted.

And then my understanding is, and I actually hadn't heard that confirmation until

Commissioner Bivins said it, but I knew that the CTB was going to recommend that change.

It's dependent.

It's four years before the funding starts.

And then once that funding starts, it'll go through the phases, which could last three, usually about three years.

Okay.

I'm going to keep this brief this time.

for a couple reasons.

One, we gave a fairly robust updated last meeting and not much has happened since then.

We are preparing for this meeting that Commissioner Murray mentioned, an online public virtual meeting, and I encourage you all to listen in.

I think it's going to be really informative.

and then that'll be our final public engagement effort for this part two of phase two where we're going over the growth management and planning toolkits.

We will be coming back to you not for one meeting but two including one at our next meeting in July.

We will give a small update on the process

and talk more about the timeline from here going forward.

And then we will be back at the August 8th meeting with a full update on all of our planning toolkits.

And that's going to be the full meeting, nothing else on the agenda that night, so we'll be taking a few hours

to go over that with the consultants and have a really thorough in-depth work session with you all.

Sounds good.

And food on the 8th, right?

I'm working on that.

All right, all right, all right.

Just going to put it out there for the record.

That's going to be a follow-up because our calendar invitations still say four o'clock.

Yes.

We'll work on that.

I apologize.

Our clerk, our regular clerk had sent those out and we've had trouble getting those changed.

Can I make my point of the third?

So for whatever reason, not only do I still have the four o'clocks on my calendar, I think most of us do, but I also like for this meeting, I have a cancellation on my calendar.

So, and it may just be my calendars, but I wonder if it just can make sure that they can align my calendar with a new schedule.

It doesn't seem to be right now, both of four o'clock meetings, and I have some cancellations, which, never mind.

Thanks.

Thank you.

And lastly, on the doc, any items for follow up?

Sure.

And I'm so glad that the director of zoning is here.

So in our ordinances, we have nothing that sort of states that there are any uses of any particular houses which have to be protected.

I believe I've been told that number of times.

And so if that is an accurate statement, then I would request that there be some consideration

that when they look at view sheds that it says that the Monticello view shed is not impacted since there's no Monticello view shed in our ordinance.

What there is is a suggestion that developers speak to Monticello and have a discussion with Monticello, but there is no way that Monticello can enforce the building or the not building

of a particular project if somehow or another they can see it from that hill.

With that, is there a motion to adjourn until July 25th, 2023 at six o'clock?

Now let's just hang out some more.

All right.

Second.

All right.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

No?