Planning Commission Work Session Meeting & Planning Commission Regular Meeting   9/26/2023

Good afternoon, everyone.

It is four o'clock and I will call to order the meeting of the Planning Commission for September 26, 2023.

Um Carolyn, are you on?

Yeah.

Commissioner Carrazano?

Here.

Commissioner Bivins?

Here.

So we have a quorum.

And with that, I will open it up for the work session, ZTA 2023-6, WPTA 2023-2, and STA 2023-3, Riparian Buffer Overlay District Process.

This is, in fact, a work session about the proposed riparian buffer overlay district.

This will be a work session until about 5.30.

And just to quickly go over the process, I'll summarize the proposed district and related ordinances and a little bit about the public input.

I only have about 12 slides, so I'll just try to get through those all at once in order to save as much time as possible for the Q&A afterwards.

So we have topics of interest from the public input and of course during questions that we can go over after that brief presentation and try to answer as many questions as we can.

We have staff here from engineering county attorney's office and zoning to help answer the questions that I can't answer.

Also, to be polite, I should introduce myself.

I'm Scott Clark, the Conservation Program Manager in Community Development.

So just give a little background on where we started.

The riparian buffer ordinance that we're going to talk about today is a project that came out of the Stream Health Initiative that started back in 2017.

Phase two of that initiative focused largely on the rural areas.

and included an extensive public input process that resulted in 14 proposals for possible future county ordinances, programs, and education efforts.

The first one, Proposal 1, is a proposal to move the stream buffer protections from the water protection ordinance into a new riparian buffer overlay district in the zoning ordinance.

So to quickly review the reasons why we're interested in protecting riparian buffers, they are very important for protecting stream banks from erosion, reducing flood damage, limiting pollutant flow into our streams and rivers, and they protect habitat both on land and in the streams themselves, and they are important for carbon sequestration for our climate goals.

The question has come up, why are we moving this from the water protection ordinance to zoning?

In part, it's due to the broader enabling authority for zoning and gives us a better fit for working with land use, land management.

It's more extensive than the authority that we have for the water protection ordinance through the state water control law.

So before we get into exactly what's proposed, just wanted to review a bit of the history.

The original water protection ordinance that started back in 1998 and ran up until 2014 did have stream protections in it that regulated land cover management in the streams largely under development.

But at the time, we lacked the resources really to effectively enforce that ordinance.

Starting in 2014, the ordinance was more focused on

buffer regulations that are related to regulated land disturbing activities, so site plans and other activities that involve erosion and sediment control, stormwater control, things like that.

And that's where we are right now.

So the proposal is to return to a broader requirement requiring retention of vegetative stream buffers, whether or not there's a land disturbing activity.

while maintaining the post 2014 exemptions for agriculture and forestry.

Another frequent question has been, where would these buffers be?

They are the same as locations of the buffers in the current water protection ordinance.

There are different standards that you can see here for development areas, depending on whether they're in a water supply protection area or not.

Most of our development areas are not in those protection areas except for Crozet.

There's a separate standard for land adjacent to public water supply impoundments with a wider buffer there.

And then elsewhere in the county at the bottom is for the rural areas, mostly

areas other than those adjacent to the impoundments or the 100 foot buffer on perennial and intermittent streams or the with the flood hazard overlay district.

So again, that's exactly the same as the widths we have right now.

So permitted uses within this overlay district would include all the ones you see here, agriculture and forestry, utilities, infrastructure, basic access, trails, restoration, vegetation management.

So the next few slides will mention items that are covered in specific sections of the ordinance.

I'll try to be brief about these for now, but you can always bring up the full text for your review.

So all of these permitted uses would be subject to the performance standards and the performance standards section 30.8.6

There are other uses that are permitted only by county approval.

So these are items that would require the riparian buffer administrator's approval and a mitigation plan.

These are contained in 30.8.8.

I tried to give you a slide summarizing though, and it was either too long or too inaccurate.

So if you'll have questions about these uses, I'll be happy to go over them in more detail once we get to the Q&A.

Outside of those permitted uses in the buffers, the general buffer management standards are in 38.8.6.

And put briefly, they require the retention of existing native vegetation buffers to be maintained in a natural condition.

And where a permitted use, for example, agriculture or forestry, ceases permanently for conversion to another use, the buffers would need to be restored.

I think it's important to say here that that doesn't mean that a pause in use for an agricultural activity would require restoration.

This is when it's a change of use.

We've got a lot of good questions from the public during the public input phase about exactly what people could do or not do in the buffers that I think clarify that we need to add more clarity and more guiding language in this section.

So when this comes back for a public hearing, I expect to have more detail on this.

All right.

And finally, we had about a month long public input period where we got on the order of 80 or so responses, detailed responses from members of the public and broke them down into these 10 general areas of concern.

You've got all the

The summary of this public input has attachment E to your staff report.

We've also got all those lists here in the presentation.

So if you have a question about 3B or 5C or something, we can jump to that and put it up on the screen.

But these are the general areas of concern.

So goal for the work session for today is to answer your questions about the draft ordinances or the issues raised in the public input.

Gather your guidance on how to do the revisions at which point we will, staff will go away and take everyone's input and work on revising these ordinances and preparing them to bring them back for a more formal public hearing.

Great, thank you.

That's very helpful.

All right, well, open it up for the work session.

How do we want to handle this?

We want to go one direction.

We'll start down with Nathan.

Are you ready for comments or questions?

Let's start that direction.

OK.

Is that all right?

Okay.

Uh Julian Bivins, Planning Commissioner, Track Chair, District.

So, Chair, how do you want?

I have a bunch of questions.

I think so.

Okay, I'll do that.

So what sort of my initial question, you sort of mentioned it there is how does the how does the sort of the stream buffer overlay district, how would that work with the Chesapeake Bay Act?

Because where I'm going to come with that is why don't we just stop the Chesapeake Bay Act and wouldn't that be easier for you and everybody else?

That could be an hour and a half right there.

Would it be easier?

No, I don't think it would be.

There are a lot of additional, if we were to adopt the complete Bay Act, I think there would be a lot of additional areas we would be obligated to cover, such as septic systems that we really aren't prepared to get into with the staffing we have now.

Not an expert on that, Mr. Powell and Mr. Eric can probably answer that better than I can, but we are not in the area that's obligated to

follow the Bay Act requirements.

We can adopt it if we choose to or portions of it.

I think the scope of adopting that entire act is a much bigger topic than we're really prepared to talk about today.

So this is a narrower piece of that whole, as opposed to taking the entire broad piece, the comprehensive piece.

OK.

I think anybody want that.

So when we talk about this, and so since we're moving it from one area to another to the ordinance, have you had an opportunity or has anyone had an opportunity to sort of quantify the level of infringement and sort of where those, if we see a concentration of infringement or possible infringement, are there sort of locations that can be identified that one would want to sort of look at in an attempt to sort of have the largest mitigation impact?

And I'm saying that probably because I can't imagine we have staff in place right now.

So how would we focus our staff so that they could, in fact, say, if we end up adopting this and making it part of the ordinance, here's where we will get the most bang for someone paying attention to it.

So has there been any so both location and quantity?

Well, part of the implementation of this one is intended to include one more staff member who could actually respond to public concerns and enforce

or help with enforcement of any violations and reviewing development plans.

So part of it, part of how we would get at it would be through the development plans that come in, just like we do for all of the other overlay district requirements.

There would also be the possibility of public complaints.

And so like we do for any other zoning violation, we would take complaints that way and respond to them.

As far as where the less than ideal buffers are across the county, from the little bit I've been able to dig out from the GIS, they're pretty scattered.

There are hundreds of parcels with non forested buffers on them scattered across the county.

It's not that we have one particular watershed or one particular neighborhood or community that has

a huge bulk of the non-forested buffers.

They're really all over the place.

The complicating factor, of course, is that a lot of the land that has open buffers is agricultural land, which wouldn't be affected by this anyway.

Even if you take those out, there's still

thousands of individual parcels that have little bits of nonforested buffers all over the place.

Okay, so taking that as sort of a place that we, are you okay if I continue?

Of course you're not.

So taking that as a place to lead off, one of the things I think in reading the ordinance or the proposed ordinance is trying to put in place a law, an ordinance to protect our water system.

Okay, so if we were to look at sort of the tributaries and the sort of the

places where the water system are located, I would expect that we would have spent some time looking to see just how vulnerable

are the tributaries of the streams or the lake that flows into the, that sort of is the major catchment areas of the, for our water system.

And so I didn't do, I'm not as sophisticated as I imagine you are in looking at the GIS, but when I did do sort of a cursory look at the GIS, it looked like a lot of the land that that would be subject to flowing into the water system.

I'm just gonna use it like that.

It's agricultural land.

And it's not developments, it's agricultural land.

And so my question is, and this is a thing I'll pose to my colleagues at some point, and also put on the record so our supervisors can wrestle with this, and I know I'll get the ugly emails about, oh, he doesn't like that.

That's not it.

He doesn't like agricultural areas.

That's not what I'm saying.

If we're talking about preserving the water that people drink,

and one of the major areas for exception are the ag-forestal that I'm not quite sure what the major lift on this ordinance is going to be because it's not going to give staff, it's not going to give the supervisors the ability to come in and have some, even if it's gentle mitigation like we're going to plant trees and we're going to make the buffer

a little bit farther than a little bit nearer.

How do we do that?

Because that's keeping, I'm coming closer to that because the one thing that happened this year that was really quite disturbing to our community is that we had to close down our recreational waters because of algae blooms.

from what I could see around those areas.

Some of it is because of lawns and so the chemicals that run off the lawns, which I would hope we would deal with.

But some of it was just because it sits in the rural part of our county and it's subject to all the things that happen in sort of a bucolic place called Albemarle County.

And so one of the things I'm trying to figure out is how is this going to mitigate those types of issues?

Because while it's good code, I don't know how it's going to help advance

The kinds of issues that we see in the summer are the kinds of issues that we see that threaten our water system.

So if you wanted to go to him again, you can go to Mr. Moore.

Thank you.

We'll keep rolling.

We'll come back to you.

Thank you.

I want to clarify a couple things that you mentioned.

So the first thing that we're being asked to do is do we move it, right?

We move that part.

That's the majority of what we're talking about today.

I mean, there are other

Yeah, this is not meant to be the whole picture.

So part of it was that it was, as part of the justification, as I read through this,

that in the land use it's a better fit.

Can you elaborate?

Well, Mr. Paul and Mr. Eric may want to jump in, but basically the State Water Control Act and our water protectionists are really focused on just individual land disturbing activities.

So if someone is doing groundwork on a development site, we can regulate that activity in various aspects, stream buffers and otherwise through the water protection ordinance.

The difference here with the zoning ordinance is we can set an expectation for

vegetation management and other forms of buffer protection, whether or not there's a site plan going on, whether or not there's a development project going on.

So if there are, as we would expect across the rural areas, for example, thousands of parcels that don't have any activity going on in terms of new development, but they do have

buffers with native vegetation along the streams, this would help us to protect that.

OK, I'll get back.

Can I ask a follow up question to that?

Because that was a great question.

So if I understood your response,

The additional leverage in a sense that this provides you is the ability to improve water protection areas outside of the process related to development.

If I'm thinking of a scenario, there may be a property that's owned by X person and there's a degraded stream and the water protection area that 100 feet on either side is showing degradation that then it could be improved even though there isn't a site plan underway, correct?

Well, it always could be improved anyway.

We don't prevent that and we're very careful to make sure we allowed for restoration activities.

But essentially, if that same property is a property that has partially open and partially forested buffers on a stream in the rural areas, nothing is changing about the use of it.

Right now, if the landowner wanted to

DeForest, that forested section of their buffer, they can do that.

They would be required to retain that.

Foreign agricultural or forestal actual activity, yeah, you're farming just because it's zoned for agriculture doesn't mean everything is exempt.

So that would still be the case.

I think that was a good follow.

I guess I'm still struggling and my apologies.

I'm sure it's just me.

Where does the additional leverage come from on the move?

Correct, or as you said, now we have the ability of preventing areas to being deforested.

How does that now, how do you have the ability to do that now?

Right now we don't.

Well, it sets management requirements and limits permitted uses in the buffers that currently aren't really regulated as far as vegetation removal, structure placement, access.

So you don't have a way of enforcing it now?

Commissioner Carrazana, if I might interject, it is a matter of state enabling authority that the state water control law that's the enabling authority for our current water protection ordinance

is very specific and very detailed and therefore the parameters of our local water protection ordinance are likewise very specific and very detailed.

By shifting some of these regulations over to the zoning ordinance, which has much broader and more general state enabling authority, it allows us to do things that might not be specifically enabled under the state water control law.

That's the basis we can write additional

We can make reasonable land use regulations under the zoning ordinance in ways that we cannot do if we're operating strictly under the state water control law.

That's the basis for making the move is

Thanks.

Sure, thanks.

I just want to respond to Commissioner Bivins just briefly and then I'll just go into, I have questions, I'm confused on some things.

So you're not incorrect to look at things like agriculture and question why we're not doing more.

But the Chesapeake Bay Act specifically exams agriculture, utilities, railroad, stormwater management features, and so on and so forth.

So our hands are tied in that respect, although there certainly are USDA programs.

We gently encouraged our neighbors to fence their cattle out of their stream, and they did, and they got paid money for it.

So they're very happy about that.

So there's a lot to be done with education, and I think that

Just for the audience, there will be enforcement potential, but there will also be the potential for someone to go out and educate landowners.

I've had good luck with landowners saying, I know you really like seeing the whole creek, but part of the reason it's sedimenting in is because you're seeing the whole creek and you don't have any tree roots holding that bank in place.

In another landowner example, I said you're losing 10 feet of bank a year.

would you pay per acre?

Let's do the math on that on your half mile stream frontage.

That's expensive and they're like oh maybe I should plant trees.

So there is some things we can do with cajoling.

I wanted to ask a question about the slide and a couple slides back Scott and I apologize if you're going to say but that's in the vegetation management part I'm going to tell you about later.

But I was confused about permitted uses agriculture and forestry sees the impacted buffers must be restored.

You've got the right slide.

Yeah, you have it, you have it.

So agriculture and forestry don't have to have 100-foot buffer.

And they can have their best management practice of 35 feet or whatever they put in their management plan.

So first of all, I guess they wouldn't have to have a buffer.

And then secondly, I've not seen this where they have to go and replant the tree.

Let's say they don't have a buff.

I don't understand this as a short way to say that.

I'll do my best.

Okay, so we sometimes, I'm just going to say this real quick point.

We do have what I call faux forestry.

and then you and I have talked about this before where someone says like, it's a forestry project.

This happened down in my little neighborhood of Howardsville where, and I want to give Scott terrible flashbacks to this project.

It was before I was on playing fishing, so don't worry, I'm not going to go into all the details, but the landowner cut a bunch of trees.

This is when our ordinance was stronger and called it forestry.

and then cleared the buffer using that.

But the trees just lay there.

They were never harvested.

It was fake.

So that when they came forward for their request to develop the site, they were like, well, there's no the buffer's gone, man.

There's only one tree there.

And we should really get rid of those trees because they'll probably fall in and take the bank with them.

So we should get rid of all the trees.

So, you know, what would what would happen in that scenario?

Like somebody cleared it.

You would be able to say, no, you weren't supposed to clear that.

You need to put those trees back.

I'm not actually asking for a ruling on this particular case.

I'm just trying to understand.

Another example, if you want a different one, is I know hip camps are illegal in the county.

I can think of several that I know of.

And so one landowner has cleared and continues to clear some of the land for their hip camp along the river.

In that case, first of all, the use is illegal, but then they would be made to put the trees back.

Yeah, I believe so.

They would have to do a mitigation plan to get approval for how they would go about

Okay, and so under our current ordinance, like if we didn't adopt this, what would happen?

Right, so I think that's a major difference.

So in my faux forestry example, there's nothing we can do to make them put those trees back.

And in this illicit land use, there's nothing that we can do to make them put those trees back once they've gone and cleared them.

And so it kind of encourages bad behavior, like, well, I did it, and you can't make me fix it.

So I feel like this is a good tool in our toolbox.

I do have one totally minor point on Article III.

District Regulations, just a sentence.

I don't know if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it.

It's so minor.

It was on page three, and it was just the purposes of the section.

Under C, it just says the safe, you know, it's the reason why I would have this.

It says the safeguarding of the clean waters from pollution

The wording is a little awkward.

You could get rid of the.

But sometimes we are safeguarding the not too polluted waters for more pollution.

In other words, not all our waters are clean in Amarillo County.

Well, or that all waters deserve safeguarding regardless of their current state.

I'm done.

Thank you.

All finished?

Oh, yeah.

Great.

OK, first, some clarification.

Sorry to disagree with you on this, but actually, the Chesapeake Bay Act does allow for requirements for agriculture.

What it requires is that if agriculture is going to impair the buffer, like if they decide they want to convert part of the buffer into row crops or pasture,

they have to get a conservation management plan.

And so there is actually quite a bit involved with that.

So it does actually put some conditions.

In fact, in 2014, we actually had a restriction on agriculture for row crops.

We did require a buffer for row crops in Albemarle County.

It mysteriously vanished after 2014 when this rewrite happened.

My understanding with the rewrite was, is that it was under the guise of taking, a regulation had been based in the Chesapeake Bay Act previously.

And it was moving, and then when the new erosion and sediment control rules came up, staff was like, oh, well, erosion and sediment control rules have buffers.

And the Chesapeake Bayak has buffers.

We shouldn't have buffers in two places.

We should just merge this together.

When the dust cleared, the buffers only applied when development was occurring because then our buffers became glorified salt fences.

glorified silt fences.

Because after the development was finished, you know, all the permits were, you know, complete, someone could remove the buffer at will.

And then plus people could remove streams 10,000, well, 9,000 square feet at a time, which is currently the case with something you're going to hear about later.

So

So there is actually provisions for requirements for agriculture.

I know they're very contentious.

I think a lot of people would not like to go there, but those are in the Bay Act.

As it was said, the nice thing about the Chesapeake Bay Act is that we can opt into any piece of the Bay Act and opt out of any piece that we like.

So we can pick and choose what parts go in.

So that being said,

I think one of the big things here is I definitely think we need a standard operating procedure to guide enforcement of this policy, including, you know, like I realize staff is always going to be underfunded and understaffed.

So when there's not enough staff to handle all the complaints, what priority, what complaints get prioritized first?

So, and then also, I think

It seems like a lot of the language in here gives way too much power to the riparian buffer administrator, particularly related to things like ponds.

Some other localities have a committee that those go to.

I think some citizen advisory committee that could continually provide input on this policy and how it's applied would be very valuable.

And then also,

I know you're going to discuss it with the comeback in terms of vegetation management.

I'm just going to say right now, I think the way that the Bay Act works and the way that I would encourage us to apply this is that if there's not, is the language established, buffers should be established where they do not exist, should be within our code.

And what that should mean is if

if there's not that people have to go back and plant trees, if those trees aren't here at the date that this is passed, but they need to stop mowing it.

If they choose to do something more like plant native plants or do some sort of restoration activities that should be permitted, but at a minimum, people should stop mowing that 100 foot buffer.

I think that that should be our policy.

That was our policy in 2014 and that should be our policy now.

So,

I think it's time to consider a minimal buffer in the development area.

I know that people would like to push that off to some future date, but it took so long.

We knew that there were problems with this.

Shortly after this change was made in 2014, it's taken us until now to address this policy.

I think if we don't make changes, they're not going to happen for another decade.

So I think some minimal buffers should apply in the development areas on intermittent streams.

It's kind of crazy.

We go from 100-foot buffers in the rural area, suddenly hit the development area, and now you have zero-foot buffers.

And you can just remove those streams entirely.

Can I interrupt you for one second?

Sorry, just to clarify that last point, can you say that again, because I'm not sure

That's why I looked at this guy.

Is it true that there is no buffer requirement?

Oh, OK, right.

Correct.

I mean, and that inconsistency has been pointed out, too.

Why are we providing 100 foot buffers on intermittent streams in the development area for water supply areas, but not the other ones?

I think.

I think we need to reconsider that policy.

I think now is the time to do it not 20 years from now.

And I think and now a question I have is what's transportation improvements mean?

Does that include private roads or only like VDOT infrastructure projects?

Yeah, you had that up on a slide when you first started.

You said activities.

It was one of your slides when you first started.

And Morgan Butler actually pointed out, sorry, I shouldn't mention that.

So the, if I'm remembering this correctly, the transportation uses that are permitted, including obviously stream crossings, bridges, culverts, driveways, roads are all in the section 30.8.8.

So that means is they're not just flat out permitted by right, they're permitted with a mitigation plan.

So I believe the answer is yes, it would be driveways, private roads and public roads.

I think that that needs a lot more clarification.

I mean, I understand if something's gonna cross perpendicular to a buffer.

And I understand if it's tied into reasonable use of the lot, as that's mentioned later.

But it seems like you wouldn't wanna create a situation where someone could just run the road parallel through the stream buffer.

Oh, okay.

Great.

Thanks.

That answers that.

So speaking of which, can you define a reasonable use of the lot?

Is that use of all the potential development rights on the lot, is that use of just the first development right, or is it somewhere in the middle?

So that language is intended to avoid a regulatory taking.

What that does is it makes sure that by the adoption of this ordinance that we're not preventing the reasonable use of the property.

If all reasonable uses of the property were prevented, someone might file a claim that that's a regulatory taking and demand compensation.

I appreciate that.

I'm not sure it answers the question, though.

So in the past, we've talked about hypothetical development rights.

And the development rights are hypothetical in the nature given that topography and natural resources may not allow for full utilization of all those development rights.

Right.

And for better or for worse, the reason that it's worded the way it is, is to allow case specific determinations by the administrator.

Unfortunately, there's not a one size fits all determination.

Obviously, every property is unique.

It would be up to the, this is one of the duties of the administrators to determine what is the reasonable use of the property and whether these regulations, in fact, would deprive all reasonable use of the property.

You see a similar analysis done, for example, with variances.

that the Board of Zoning Appeals has to hear where they have to determine would the zoning ordinance prevent reasonable use of the property in the absence of a variance.

So I'll return back to my first thing that I would strongly encourage a standard operating procedure

be developed along with some committee that goes with it.

So let's see, now another question.

How would streams be added when, so moving from, it seems to me from moving from one section of the code to another section of code, now we're applying an overlay district.

But now it seems that now we have a map.

We're basing the stream buffers based upon a map.

Often our streams are poorly documented.

So when, you know, when staff goes out to a site that often their streams discovered or neighbors will notice streams that aren't on our maps.

And so the county maps don't include those buffers.

So

How would that happen under this?

Frank Pohl, County Engineer.

So that would happen the same way it is today.

We define this overlay district as a text based on a definition, not as a map.

Thanks.

Let's see.

Okay, what happens when residential uses happen on an otherwise agricultural property?

How do the rules apply there?

And also I'm kind of wondering too, and maybe someone with

background in erosion and sediment control could say it seems like silt fences go like if you have a development up here and then there's erosion you know potential for erosion that can come and pair a stream down here you have to have silt fences down here.

So the E&S requirements would, this is Frank Poligan, the erosion sediment control requirements would only come into play if that type of permit was triggered, right?

So if you have a building permit that exceeds 10,000 square feet in the rural area for land disturbance, we would have E&S measures for those land disturbances that would be

wrap around the land is typically silt fences put at the edge of the land disturbance.

It's not necessarily contingent on a stream.

There may not even be a stream, but you'd still have silt fence.

And in this ordinance, I think we excluded ENS measures from buffers unless it's absolutely necessary.

And if it is, it's in the first 50 feet, but then it has to be restored.

Yeah, thanks.

Which is a change from the ordinance from before 2019.

Yeah, I mean, I would actually encourage because I think the temporary disturbance that happens during residential development and what this policy is, is

dealing with is the long-term impact on streams are two very different things.

I know that Steph doesn't seem to like redundancy in the ordinance, but this is a case where I think redundancy makes a lot of sense.

I think keeping a requirement for buffers under erosion and sediment control and keeping a requirement for buffers here makes a lot of sense because it covers both sides.

Okay, so it wasn't clear to me here, so there's some questions from public about culverting streams.

I know that the Bay Act deals with this by requiring the buffers even if the stream is buried.

So it's fine, you can get your permit to remove the stream, but it's still gonna require a buffer.

I mean, the thing that confused me was the part about measuring it from the bank of the stream.

No, based on the definition of perennial streams, it's a natural stream and not a pipe stream.

Well, this one is delineated.

Well, if you go through this site specific, so here's another issue that we have.

The site specific evaluation for perennial stream has those sheets, right, that you have to go through and it has all of the different characteristics of a natural stream.

So we use the Fairfax method.

Mostly we've also used the North Carolina, which all point to natural stream characteristics.

So

So I can share with you the relevant guidance from DEQ.

They have a whole document on this particular topic, and it does talk about retention of the buffers even after a stream is buried, with some exceptions.

And so I may have actually shared that document with you in the past.

I would strongly encourage that as the policy that we adopt to close this loophole.

And I think anytime we can be consistent with the language of the Chesapeake Bay Act, I think it's preferable.

I think it's more defensible.

And also, keeping in mind guidance from DEQ, anytime that they've issued a guidance document on something, I think that should be part of our standard operating procedure.

Unless it doesn't apply, whereas I know we're adopting the ag portions of the Chesapeake Bay Act.

And then speaking of agricultural things, last question for now.

How do we clarify what is or is not agriculture?

And the way we do that now is we call a representative from the USDA to help us make those determinations.

Same thing with forestry.

We call the forester to help make those determinations.

and then we work with them if they consider it to be agaric.

We need to also get DEQ involved.

So it's not just a working in our own, you know, own experience because I'm not a farmer, right?

I think that's extraordinarily helpful.

And part of the work plan for developing this ordinance, once it gets to the point of going to the public hearings and hopefully getting close to actual adoption is one of our work steps at that point is to

So just the last thing I'll say to you is I

I want to thank all the staff that worked on this.

This is a huge effort.

I know all the time and effort that you spent on this.

And it's going to be, you know, there's areas where people take a bulldozer to streams in my backyard.

And currently that's an allowed thing to do on residential properties.

And this will fix that.

Thanks, Commissioner Murray.

Just let me check in real quickly on time.

So we have 40 minutes left.

Scott, are you finished with the presentation portion, or is there another?

Yes.

You are.

Okay, so it's all purely our discussion right now.

Okay, awesome.

Sure, thanks, and thanks for starting left and sitting right.

No worries.

As I adjusted to the seat here.

First of all, applause also for just a lot of hard work going into this, and certainly an emphasis on maintaining a clean supply of water.

I mean, we can talk about everything else, but if we don't have good water, it's

It's no good, and there's plenty of other cities and counties out there that are harming their residents with tainted water supplies.

I do, though, I want to hear a little more about the decision to keep the buffer at 100 feet in the designated growth areas.

What went into making that call to sort of match the rural areas versus some of the suggestion I saw to make it 50?

You mentioned that.

I guess the short, easy answer is when the 14 proposals went before the board, the way we laid it out for them was that the extent of the buffers wouldn't change.

So that essentially, even though we're changing the character of the regulations, we're not affecting a new and different area, different landowners, different areas of land.

So we're caring for exactly the same buffer extents that we had before.

whether 100 or 50 or whatever is the best answer is a much more extensive project to propose expanding.

We haven't, but for example, somebody said, okay, go pick some wider buffer width.

And that's a much bigger project to map and analyze and justify that.

So prior to 2014, even in the development areas, we had 100 foot buffers.

Well, Frank knows better than I do, but sure.

OK, got it.

I'm curious, and this might be beyond what

nonconformative so uses that are already located in the buffers and they can remain they can be replaced if they're destroyed or something like that if there are requests to expand or change a residence or another structure that's in the buffer then that is one of those items that would require

a mitigation plan.

In most cases, existing uses, you need to look outside the buffer first.

Sure.

No, I saw the parts too about the being grandfathered in.

for existing structures.

Yeah, and the other, as we talk about

land in the development area and what we do with it, what we build on it.

I would kind of like to address that a little bit because, you know,

One of the nice things about having the University of Virginia in our backyard is they've done an excellent job in terms of the way they've managed streams.

The South Lawn Project, for example, has an intermittent stream that went through that property.

Instead of burying it, what they did was is they actually left it on the surface and they made it more engineered.

They put in baffles, they put in planted native plants, they made it an attractive feature of their development.

If you look at the South Lawn project, you can't see where any developable land was lost.

And so this myth about we have to lose developable land, I think is gonna be dispelled.

I think we just need to have standards for what happens in the development area.

If we say 35 feet in development area, maybe we also have a procedure that says, unless you can create a managed

You can have a mitigation plan, something like what UVA has done.

Then we can have attractive developments in our growth area.

No, I hear you, Lonnie.

I do.

I'm struck by that and the mitigation plans and like nice water features possibility that's out there.

And also, there's only so many tools in our quiver here.

Toolbox, arrows in our quiver, mixing metaphors.

Only so many arrows in the toolbox for housing affordability and kind of where we can build things in the places we say we're going to build things is one of them.

So that's why I brought that up.

But I also appreciate your thoughts on

If I can respond to that.

Just we looked at that in Charlottesville.

I co-authored the Charlottesville water protection ordinance and we put 100 feet on the three major streams as part of that ordinance, but we also engaged in exercise where we mapped because you know it's very tight landscape.

How much buffer could really be put there and we mapped every stream and then we said, OK, this one could take 50 feet.

on both sides without impacting any.

This one can only get 30.

It's really skinny, like with what's already built there and just practical.

So we kind of gave the city, here's a practical reality of how wide you could put buffers on the rest of your streams.

They didn't choose to adopt those additional buffers.

They just kept with what they had.

But it is a GIS exercise that you could undertake.

I mean, if I got my students to do it, I know that we could do it in our county.

So if that's something that somebody wants to look at, it's something you could play around with to get a more practical answer of like, OK, what could we really achieve?

Like this stream?

Yeah, we can go for 100 feet because it's got the room.

And, you know, maybe there's a steeper V and you couldn't develop in there anyway.

This one is already pretty tight.

So 50 feet is what's practical.

So anyway, there's different ways to slice that, but we could use some of our data.

That's me volunteering the GIS app, which I'm sure they totally appreciate.

And I'm just saying, we could figure that out.

Great.

You good?

I'm good.

All right.

Thanks.

So before we do a round two bounce back, I just want to check in on one thing in the agenda.

Staff said specifically the Planning Commission is asked to provide input regarding the issues raised by the public input to guide upcoming staff revisions to the draft ordinances.

So I just want to make sure you are getting what you need from us.

No, I don't think we had any specific ones we

So you know, if you saw something in the summary of the input or the full input that you had questions about, or that you felt need to be clarified, or you had a, you know, a change in how we answered the question, we'd be glad to hear it.

Great, thank you.

I'll just take a little bit of quick time to go through some of my questions.

Some of them are related to the public input and some are not, but the conversation was really helpful.

I got a lot of answers.

So one question is related to the process.

So if I'm putting on my hat as a developer, I'm not saying I am a developer, I'm just saying if I'm putting that hat on, I think it would be very helpful to understand the process.

what this means for the development community in terms of process.

And I can't quite, I'm sure it's here.

It's clear.

I just can't quite understand that.

And I think if I were a supervisor has seen sort of an outline of what it currently is required and what the updated requirements would look like would be beneficial.

Just kind of seeing a simple chart side by side.

I guess that wasn't as much a question as a recommendation.

The point about regulatory taking resonated with me as well, but that was really an interesting comment.

If you think about land value and you think about this may reveal how I don't fully understand this yet, but if you take 200 feet

centered on a stream times roughly 220 feet or so.

That's an acre of land.

And if you're as a developer spending half a million dollars on an acre of land, that's a significant amount.

If that buffer ends up going 400 feet, you're at a million dollars.

So, land value is, I think, something we need to be thinking about.

I'm not at all against, you know, enhancing and improving our water quality.

I just, I'm trying to sort of

mentioned the other side of this as well, right?

So I think we need to be conscious of that, what kind of impacts that has to a landowner.

We talked a fair amount about perennial and intermittent streams, and I've always just wondered, and it would be important, I think, in terms of this, how often is that mapping updated?

So we do that whenever we have an application plan that doesn't show a buffer on something that could be.

So it's more done to add something than subtract something.

We might be seeing one of those tonight, I think.

Thank you.

So I remember it used to be like the old, this dates me, but the old GIS or the old USGS maps, you'd look at it and say, it's a blue line.

That's an option.

That's one of the options.

Yeah.

I was just wondering, because, you know, I mean, there is climate change and things are changing and droughts are happening.

Yeah, now DC, is it DCR or DEQ?

They have a map that they have that doesn't match ours either.

So I use that one also.

Yeah, great.

Interesting.

Thank you.

I was also curious, you know, we've talked about some of the exemptions.

And I'm curious about part of this full disclosure is that adjacent to my

personal property, there's a large farm and that farm is undergoing quite a bit of earthwork.

I mean, a lot of earthwork.

And I'm just curious, have we thought about assessing the greatest defenders?

You know, like, is it really?

Is it really the development community or is it really the agricultural and forest?

And I'm not saying we should take rights away from that.

I'd just be curious because when I look at the impacts to that one area compared to even a residential subdivision that's following the current WPO requirements, it's extremely greater.

So just, I'm curious, I'll try to put a question in that.

As I mentioned, there were 14 proposals, not just with this one.

There are a lot of options, as people have mentioned, for addressing stream protection on agricultural land that often have to do with cost share programs, voluntary programs.

which I hope we will also be pursuing.

And I know that the Southern Water District is a regulatory tool like this that largely impacts land management and land development.

It may not be the best tool.

That is an issue we can reasonably address is how do we, particularly in the reservoir watersheds, how do we deal with agricultural impacts?

It may be through others.

Got it.

That's one I would recommend we consider to continue to look at.

I had one other one, and I'm drawing a blank right now.

So why don't we go to bounce backs?

And I'll start back with Commissioner Bivins.

So I guess I would have to

sort of push a little bit against my colleague who wants to, let me back up.

Well, I appreciate the elegance of having all of the conditions apply to each one of the areas.

I'm gonna push back a little bit against having in the not within the water supply protection area, having the intermittent streams, because this is a followup on what Commissioner Moore was saying that in fact,

There's two pieces to this.

I don't know how staff would determine the size of a lot if they had to go out and sort of anticipate what might be an intermittent stream on a big or a small piece of property in the development area.

Plus, I'm not sure what the benefit would be for the intermittent stream piece of it, regulation of that.

versus what Commissioner Missel was speaking to where we're really trying to sort of have, trying to ascertain what are the big portions of our streams or our pooled water impoundments that really are having an impact on our drinking water.

because I think if we had to prioritize where funds should, in my mind, where I would like to see funds, even though I don't use the water, I would prefer to maintain and to extend our drinking water supply as opposed to

trying to try and do something very broad.

So given that we don't at this particular time have a staff person who's going to walk around and check all of those out and this is all from according to this is all going to fall on the county engineer until he delegates it to somebody else.

I'd prefer that we look at, as you mentioned, Chair, that we look at those areas where we have the least amount of imbalance and the most amount of risk.

Arizona.

Can the public comments be put back on there, the list of the 10 public comments?

So there's several, and I do think that the comments that I've heard today and some of the questions go to a lot of these, if not all of them.

So hopefully you have been getting some of that feedback.

But in particular, six, seven, I want to touch on and going back to something that Commissioner Firehock said in terms of prioritizing.

I think this is something that Commissioner Bivins was just getting at, prioritizing

You know, major streams that are obviously impacting our water quality in Chesapeake Bay and so forth.

So, so how do we prioritize them and and I love the, you know, the being real about what you can accomplish.

I think the

The overlying goal there would be or statement would be that some buffer is better than no buffer.

So I think prioritizing and looking at what can be achieved in major streams would be something that we should probably spend some time doing.

And I think that goes to six and seven.

You know, what is the extent of the stream buffer and how can mapping help us determine where do we get the most bang for our buck, right?

Which again, I think it's back to what Commissioner Bivins was saying.

So I would encourage looking at those areas.

Great, thanks.

Yeah, so I would just say that when you look at overall stream health, it is actually the headwaters that are the most important part of a stream.

Imagine if the capillaries in your blood stopped working and your body stopped working, it would be fatal.

And likewise, if you remove all the headwaters of a stream, you will automatically have a stream impairment.

So when you look at streams like Moores Creek, for example, that have a state impairment, if we've removed all the headwaters of Moores Creek, there's almost nothing you can do to fix that anymore.

The headwaters could be intermittent, they're going to be intermittent.

And so having a minimal buffer of some kind, even if it's a, it ends up being a managed stream like the South Lawn Project, you're providing a stormwater benefit, you're perhaps improving the quality of what's on the surface.

and you're saving that stream.

So I want to sort of help this conversation along.

I'm not in disagreement with you because you just did what I suggested.

You made a decision that this body of water flows into the water system and therefore there's a high value into protecting it.

as opposed to something that only flows into the water system, if at all, only when there's a, like the rains we had this week or last week.

Other than that, it's just dirt.

And so I think that while it's helpful, I think where you're going is, and I agree with you, that if we're looking at the headwaters of what flow, and we know what that, well, we don't know what that, people, Rivanna, something like that.

RWSA.

Thank you.

All those initials, it's like, you know, just don't.

But if there are groups of people who can work with our staff who say, we're going to go out and ascertain everything that flows into this, into like Morris Creek, which you've said, I think then there is an argument to be made.

We're going to look at everything that falls as a possibility to follow the flow into Morris Creek.

I'm absolutely with you.

But if there's no possibility, I don't know why we put that

barrier.

Well, I think a really great, another way I've thought about this before, I think would be a great way to apply it is to require buffers on all intermittent streams that are in an impaired watershed.

And if you did that, it would provide an automatic incentive for people to clean that watershed up because otherwise they'd be losing, you know,

Can I make a just really minor point just hydrologically?

You can have a situation where an intermittent stream becomes perennial because of all the land development that caused all the pavement.

And so you would have streams that potentially would change their class.

I remember too, I was trying to see counselor a while back in Charlottesville and she was going around talking to constituents about the things they wanted most and she was talking to one child who said, you know, what I'd want more than anything is a stream that I can play in.

And she said, well, actually, there is a stream that goes right through your backyard, but we put it in a pipe.

And so that's a good example of that sort of thing.

Thanks.

Commissioner Moore, any bounce backs?

No, not particularly.

Thank you.

All right.

Sounds good.

The one thing I was trying to remember that I forgot was, and I don't know how to fit it into this exactly, but we've talked a fair amount about education.

And, you know, what are those opportunities that are out there?

So this is obviously regulatory, right?

This feels like this is what you must do.

And this is adding, perception is that it's adding regulation or adding process to it.

Maybe it's not once you understand it, but

I think it'd be interesting to balance that a little bit with these are some opportunities that exist for you to improve stream buffers.

I know in one of the public comments, there was a recommendation to use native plantings, right, for example.

So that's kind of a no-brainer.

And I know you're going to add that back in, but I don't know, maybe there's like, I wouldn't necessarily know what opportunities there are out there that I could take advantage of.

I'll just say like, just to follow up, if you don't mind, I'm not going to list a bunch of grants now, don't worry.

But

There's more money out there for riparian buffer plantings than there's ever been in the history of the government funding such things.

There's Department of Forestry, Clean Waters for the Bay.

We're in the Bay watershed.

The US Forest Service just put out almost $1.5 billion for tree planting.

And the James River is in our watershed.

And there's a huge amount of money in the middle of James we're planting.

So just saying, it's not just like, here's a regulation.

Maybe you already have that.

There's a tool online you can go to.

Great.

Yeah, perfect.

I think it's good because that's kind of evergreen, right?

Not to expect, pun intended.

Great.

No, I don't have any more questions, because I just want to make sure you all know that the next step will be for us to go away and make revisions based on the input you all have made, plus what we've gotten from the public.

And I don't mean to always be stating the obvious, but I really hope that we really push that notion that we are trying to go back to the strong protection that we did have.

We're putting in a different part of code, yes.

But this is not like new terrible regulations.

And people have lived here a long time, as most of us or all of us have.

We lived here during the buffer period, and it was OK.

And we didn't.

Nobody closed their business, their farm didn't cease.

When we look at stream health, stream health has continued to decline.

It hasn't declined as badly in our area as it has in some, but it is continuing to decline.

If we expect stream health to actually get better, we need to do more.

Great.

Well, with that, thank you to staff for all the work associated with this.

And we will close the work session.

Good afternoon.

I will call this meeting to order.

This is a meeting of the

Albemarle County Planning Commission, and today is September the 26th.

Want to make sure you are in the right spot.

So if you were here for the Planning Commission, this is it.

The opportunities for the public to assess 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, which comments from the public will be received.

With that, I'd like to establish a quorum.

Yes, Mr. Moore?

Ms.

Firehock?

Here.

All right, with that we have

established a quorum.

The next item on the agenda are other matters not listed on the agenda from the public.

So if anybody here in the audience or online would like to speak to something that is not on the agenda, this would be the time to do that.

Does anyone like to speak?

Okay, seeing no one come to the front.

Right, thank you.

Moving forward, there is no items on the consent agenda.

And so with that, we will move into public hearing.

We have two on the docket tonight.

The first is SP-2023-00007, Home Depot, outdoor and storage display.

Thank you.

Good evening, commissioners.

I'm Margaret Malyszewski.

I'm one of the managers in the planning division of community development, and I am here to present an entrance quarter related application.

It's a request for a special use permit for outdoor storage, display, and sales associated with a new Home Depot store.

The site of the proposal is the Fashion Square Mall.

I'm sure you're all familiar with it.

It's located near the intersection of Route 29 and Rio Road.

The Sears store, which is located at the north end of the mall, would be demolished for the proposal, and the new store would be constructed in more or less the same location.

Both Route 29 and Rio Road are entrance corridors, and it's the fact that the proposed display is within the entrance corridor overlay that the SP is required.

The yellow highlighting in this slide shows the areas that are proposed for product display around the building.

And just for orientation, Rio Road is at the right side of the slide and Route 29 is well off the top of the slide.

This slide shows the proposed appearance of the garden center and what some of the display areas would look like.

As I'm sure you know, most special use permits are reviewed under section 33.8 of the zoning ordinance, but SPs for outdoor storage, display, and sales are reviewed under a different section, and that section limits the factors to be considered to determining whether the outdoor storage, display, and sale is consistent with the applicable design guidelines.

Those guidelines are the entrance quarter design guidelines, and the ARB applied those guidelines in its review of this request in early August of this year.

That was a detailed review of design topics including things like visibility, scale, building forms and features, materials, colors, screening, and lighting.

All those details are found in the ARB staff report, which was attachment E in your report.

After their review, the ARB voted unanimously to recommend approval of the request with some amendments to staff's recommended conditions.

Those amended conditions are listed in the ARB action letter that was included in your report as attachment F.

Those conditions were adjusted slightly after the ARB meeting to be more consistent with standard language for SP conditions, and that resulted in this list of conditions that you see on this slide, and that's also on pages three and four of your staff report.

So staff's recommendation to you is for approval of the proposal with these conditions.

Thank you for that comprehensive staff report.

Commissioner, is there any questions?

All right.

Hearing none, I will open up the public hearing.

Good evening, Mr. Chairman, members of the commission.

I'm Valerie Long representing the applicant Home Depot.

I've got a few slides I can show.

We do have a number of members of our project team here.

We have our project architects, as well as David Ellington with Kimley-Horn Civil Engineers.

So hopefully we can address all these questions.

I'll go ahead and pull this up.

I may skip through some of this because it may be duplicative of what Ms.

Malyshefsky's already shown.

But to clarify again, the project alone is to redevelop and replace the existing Sears at Fashion Square with the retail store.

That's a buy-write use in this zoning district plan development shopping center.

But as Ms.

Malyshefsky said, because the project property fronts on the entrance corridors, we need a special use permit for the outdoor storage

display, and sales.

And that includes the garden center itself, because it's not entirely enclosed, as well as the outdoor display of products, and then a temporary staging area for some items.

I'm sure many of you or most of you are very familiar with the views.

This is obviously from Route 29.

I'm going to show you some other slides later about that explain why there's no trees along that bank in the foreground.

But there is a large amount of existing vegetation.

The mall was first constructed in 1979 or 1980, so a lot of the vegetation is quite mature.

This is a view from Rio Road.

If you were turning into the shopping center, you can see the former Sears building there and sort of in the center distance, the white building.

So that's one of the few places that you can really see, sort of you have a view in from Rio Road at this particular location.

There's a short gap in the trees and the shrubbery, and there's another view from Rio.

I'll show you in a moment.

right here, in fact.

There's this fairly steep bank to the right there of the guardrail, but you can see the existing former Sears store and the parking lot.

And you'll note there is not any parking lot landscaping, which would obviously be a requirement under the existing site plan ordinance.

Here's another view just for context.

So the garden center, we have some slides we'll show you, would be roughly in the foreground there where that vacant parking lot is now.

This is a view from the far side of Rio Road showing what it looks like now.

You can see some views of existing rooftop mechanical equipment.

And this is just from a slightly different vantage point on Rio Road.

This is an image you already saw.

The highlighted areas are where the outdoor storage and display of products.

I'm gonna zoom in for you.

This is along the front of the store.

Get my cursor working here to use as a pointer.

It's not going to work.

But anyway, the darker gray is the building itself.

The areas circled in red are where display products would be located, very similar to what you've seen if you've been to a Home Depot or similar stores, very similar types of outdoor display.

And this is in the back and on the side where there'll be some temporary staging proposed.

This is a portion of the proposed site plan showing where the parking lot landscaping would be located.

Again, very, very different from what is there now, would meet all of the standards.

And this is just different views, again, showing the garden center and the landscaping that's proposed along Rio Road.

One point of, where's my cursor working?

These trees are all new trees.

We're leaving all the vegetation in place where it is now.

And then everything you see in green is new plantings.

So this is the same plan that's been approved by the Architectural Review Board.

The one condition that they did note is that these plantings here be of a more diverse species and not just all the same.

So that'll show up on the final plans.

One of the conditions of approval or recommended conditions of approval is that we add landscaping along Route 29 where there is not any at the moment.

Originally, we were happy to do that.

There's not a lot of space between the right-of-way, which is the red dashed line, and the edge of the existing parking lot.

However, this is obviously from an ALTA survey showing all of the conflicting utility and other easements that restrict where plantings can be located in that area.

One thing to point out is that although this portion of the parking lot is not part of the current project, once the Home Depot store is approved and on its way, Home Depot will be working for what we're calling phase two of the mall redevelopment.

And among other things, this area would be torn up as part of that future redevelopment, but not at this time.

So the hope is that in the future, there'll be plenty of room sort of inside the blue line

to add more plantings.

But right now, there is not.

The only area that's available that's not in conflict with other easements is the area in green.

And even that is subject to VDOT's approval.

So we don't know that we're going to be able to plant there, but we are willing to give it our best shot.

So we may need to talk about some minor tweaks to that particular condition of approval to just make it clear that everything is subject to VDOT's approval.

This is an image from October of 2014 when those trees, this is before the Rio 29 grade separated interchange was constructed.

And there were some very mature trees in that exact location.

But as part of the widening of 29, those trees were removed.

This is an image taken from Google Earth showing

Obviously, this area here is where all those trees were.

This was during construction.

This is a retaining wall that was constructed.

I have another picture that's supposed to show where that is.

There we go.

So now you can see that retaining wall.

And this is the area in question where we would hope to be able to plant some trees.

But again, in those areas where it's permitted under the existing utility easements.

These are obviously renderings of the proposed elevations of the building.

So you can see a little bit better of where the outdoor display products are proposed to be located.

Obviously in the top left is the garden center with exhibits and plants and things like that on racks.

And then this is the sort of second half of the building, the far end with the lumber entrance, some products for display in front there.

This image here shows, again, looking from Rio Road.

This is the side of the garden center.

This is in the distance at the, let me go back one slide.

There's a element called the tool rental center that is essentially over here on the side, where it's literally a portion of the store where customers can come and rent tools that they, you know, large, very tall ladders, snowblowers, things like that.

So that is visible from the entrance corridor, but it sort of looks like it's a little closer than it is.

That's going to be in the distance, but we wanted to try and show you sort of what you might see from the entrance corridor.

and then on the bottom is the full view from Rio Road showing the garden center and the fencing that's proposed to enclose it.

Happy to go into this in more detail if you would like, but we're proposing sort of three layers of fencing, slightly different on the bottom than on the top.

On all parts of the fence on the garden center will be a vertical black metal fence and then in between will be what we

are calling this expanded metal mesh fence.

I have some pictures on the next page.

It'll help you see that better.

And then on the inside on the bottom will be this black fabric mesh without the chain.

Won't have the chain link.

We didn't have a precedent image to show you without that.

but this shows it a little bit better on the bottom along all of it will be the metal vertical metal fencing on the bottom will have the security fencing and then some chain link there and then the fabric behind it.

And this is an image showing.

There's no Home Depot store that has the fence design exactly like it's proposed here.

So that's why we don't have any actual pictures to show you.

But we have some pictures showing various elements of it.

And this is one that shows the chain link fence with the vertical metal fence.

And these are some pictures I actually took at the Home Depot in Waynesboro.

The left side is a very close up look of the chain, the small chain link, and then images.

That's what you're looking at from a distance.

So it does provide some screening and obviously some shade.

These are pictures of what that would look like.

This is the fencing in Waynesboro, but it does not include the mesh fabric that is proposed.

It would help screen those materials from the entrance corridor.

This is just an example of the types of temporary staging, you know, pallets of mulch and other materials like that.

If there's questions about the garden center roof, these are some images and I'm happy to come back to them.

These are also from the Waynesboro store.

We have some renderings showing the plantings and what they look like at full maturity and how they would screen the building once it's built from Rio.

Again, this is from Rio Road.

That is the proposed plantings as they're shown now on the plans.

Again, they would be a little bit different with the different species.

And then this view here showing how the building could be well screened from Rio.

and then some of these same pictures that we already showed.

And these are precedent images.

This is an actual store in Texas that I thought was helpful in showing exactly what the plantings might look like or the product display as well as the roof and what that might look like from an aerial view from Rio Road in terms of if you had questions about that.

There's three different level layers of fence roof.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Very comprehensive report and I think we certainly got the, that's what I'm looking for.

We got the flavor of where we're trying to go with the graphic images here.

Commission, any questions?

Not a question, but more of a comment.

We can probably guess what I'm going to say.

I strongly encourage you to use native species in there.

I believe there is one of the pictures you showed that it looks like the current does your time out retaining and it looks like a big hedge of burning bush, which is a state listed invasive species.

If it is what I think it is, I would actually encourage you to remove that or replace it with something native that's not invasive.

It's Ilanthus, I think, is one of them too.

If you go down to my neck of the woods and sugar how you see how it's invaded the woodland.

So the other thing I'd say too is just as a comment, I'm glad to hear that a bunch of that parking lot is going to be torn up and made into something else eventually.

That makes me really happy.

But I do want to mention, too, that there are incentive programs for removal of impervious surface.

So if you ever want to take advantage of that funding, I hope you'll apply for that funding.

Thank you.

Any other questions for the applicant?

Commissioner Bivins?

I just have three questions.

And so your client is supposed to figure out a way to put a tree there when our roads group can't?

Yes, that's the challenge.

That's good for me on that one.

Yeah.

I don't believe so, correct?

No.

I'm very glad to hear that there won't be barbed wire.

And then I have another question.

I've learned this from my colleague, Madam Fishhawk there.

Well, phase two, there'll still be some vacant.

So on the islands that are there, I see that we're going to have like three and a half inch caliper plantings.

That is a rough place to put, even though they have outdoor storage, it's going to be a garden center.

Which part of the asphalt specifically do you mean?

Yes, there.

It is okay.

Oh, I'm gonna be quiet.

Into your parking lot trees, the requirement is two and a half inch caliber.

And I don't, I don't see the landscape schedule on this concept plan.

I'm just hoping for, just hoping for that area, that sense that there is a garden center, that it's going to be actually something that helps to enhance that as opposed to being the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, a handicap.

Just a quick comment.

Yeah, our tree ordinance, we don't have planning specifications that are adequate.

That reminds me of another thing, speaking of like parfait islands, that sort of thing.

If you could make them innies and not outies so that they capture stormwater as opposed to keeping stormwater out, you know, one of the things with those sorts of areas is obviously it's a harsh place for plants and trees to live.

Okay.

Thanks for translating that.

Sure.

But it's also worth noting too that we have natural habitats in Amarillo County, some of which are globally rare habitats that are granitic outcrops where plants are adapted to live in harsh conditions, including trees.

Any last words for the applicant?

Before I move to comments from the audience, I do want to read just a gentle reminder of our house rules as we move through the night.

One, when you're called to speak to the podium, just ask that you state your name clearly, and just your generic place of residence.

You want to use your full address, your generic place of residence.

You will have three minutes.

The light will start at green, and then as you're approaching the end of that three-minute time frame, it will shift to yellow, and that means to please wrap up your most pertinent points when you see that yellow light, and then that red will ask that you stop.

If you represent a group or an organization, you may ask others to present.

You may ask others present to raise their hands to be recognized.

I would say also speakers are permitted just one opportunity to comment.

These rules aren't new.

I'm just kind of doing a gentle refresher.

You're permitted one opportunity to comment during each of the public comment periods.

Please refrain from speaking from your seat or booing or anything like that.

I would ask that persons in the audience, if you agree with someone, it's okay to raise your hands to show the acknowledgement.

If you have signs, that is okay.

Just no sticks or poles associated with them.

And then lastly, I would just ask that you just please refrain from clapping, whether you hear something you agree with.

Again, just going to the gentle hand raise.

That's certainly sufficient as we try to maintain our decorum and professionalism within this body.

So, so that makes sure we go over those house rules as we have two public hearings tonight.

With that, does anyone want to speak to this public hearing?

Okay, seeing no one move up.

There's a gentleman in the back.

No?

Okay.

Seeing no one coming to the front.

I do not.

Okay, thank you.

With that, I'll go ahead and close the public hearing.

And I'll bring it back into the commission.

All right, well, sure.

Given this is sort of a consideration on item six there, where we're talking about the Route 29 frontage partial, given that, if I understand what the applicant's representative shared with us, that we could see further development in the front portion of what we now know as the Sears parking lot.

I am not passionate about there being trees on a split of land that is actually perhaps going to be disturbed during the second phase of this.

I'd prefer to say, and I know we can't do this, but I'm sure that council will give us the appropriate lens to say, within certain X amount of years, it needs to be put there.

Remove them.

Just had one thought.

I'm not sure if those trees understand logically what you're saying makes total sense.

But if they're

required or recommended by the ARB to screen, and there's not a real known timeline for the development of that frontage, I would still support installing them.

Trees as opposed to bushes or something like that.

I guess I would defer to the ARB recommendation, yeah.

Just because you don't know.

I mean, you never know how long it might take.

It might take 10, 15 years for that to develop.

And in the meantime, you have an open view

when you could have a screen.

Let me just do a little comeback on that.

So if we look across the street, you can see a car dealership.

If we go a little bit further up, we can see, well, we see the old Outback, which I don't know why that's not a restaurant, but I'm not a restaurateur, so it doesn't matter why.

So we can see into the developments.

When we look into where Staples is, just a staple, you can see into the development.

And so many have known, many have heard my sort of comments on this that I don't,

I would like, if I had my way, I prefer for them to put more mature trees in the parking lot where they will have a larger benefit.

and they probably could do some blockage from there, particularly if we do them at the NCAT, than to try and do this one piece of land which wasn't their response.

They did not cause the removal of the trees.

So that's why I'm pushing on that.

And everybody's also known that the ARB has one role, respect.

We have another role before it goes to our supervisor.

And so while I can appreciate what the IRB has recommended, I'm recommending something else as a legislative act.

I just want to tag on.

I mean, I kind of agree with Commissioner Missel on this one.

You asked like why like say bushes versus trees, trees are going to, well, you can, I mean, there are different kinds of trees you can pick.

whether they're more columnar in form and branch out higher ups, maybe you do want to see in there and like, oh, there's a garden center.

I'm not offended by the look of the garden center that much myself, but the trees will also be filtering the particulates from the exhaust from those cars driving by and also helping with stormwater management.

So they will, even if they disappear in a decade because something else gets put in and they have to re-engineer something they'll still have done,

We're trying to incrementally improve our development area after not having good standards in place.

So we do have a lot of less than desirable views.

And that parking lot is in terrible shape, as you probably saw with all the cracking pavement.

Does anyone else want to weigh in before I go to Commissioner Moore?

Commissioner Moore, as it is our custom here, we usually turn it over to the district representative.

So you heard the context of the comments.

I'm sorry, could you clarify whether or not you wish for condition six to continue?

I was clear up until that last.

I think the conversation is enough.

Let's just recommend approval of it as is.

Second.

I just had one point of discussion.

I may have missed the resolution of this, but I thought the applicant

That did come up.

But that automatically, is that a given?

That would just work out in the final site plan review process.

Okay, thank you.

It did include the conditions.

Ms.

Firehock?

Aye.

Thank you to the applicant.

Thank you to staff.

We'll move on to our second public hearing of tonight, which is ZMA 2020-00012, Montclair.

Okay, I apologize for that delay, everyone.

Good evening.

My name is Cameron Langell, and I'm a principal planner with the Community Development Department.

And I'll be giving you the staff presentation on ZMA 2020-12 Montclair.

So to begin, I'm just gonna go through the the specifics of this proposal.

The main request tonight is a rezoning application.

to change two parcels of land to the neighborhood model zoning district.

There's also a private street authorization request, and then a special exception for a sidewalk waiver and a planting strip waiver.

There's also an ACSA jurisdictional amendment application, but the PC doesn't actually have to act on that.

That is handled by the board.

So to give everyone some context of where we're located, the parcels are highlighted in yellow, and this is at the south

Eastern corner of Park Ridge Drive and Route 240 in Crozet.

So to the east, you can see is the Wickham Pond subdivision.

Further east is the Highlands neighborhood.

And then immediately south of these two properties is actually a CSX railroad right of way.

But further south than that is the Western Ridge neighborhood.

West along 240 is actually some primarily vacant land that used to be industrial areas.

So this is the current zoning map and our western parcel, which is TMP 56E-2, it's that light blue color you see, which represents the light industry zoning district.

And then TMP 56-91A is shown as white here, and that represents the rural area zoning district.

These two parcels are located in two overlay districts, and that includes the entrance corridor and managed and preserved steep slopes.

This is the future land use plan from the Crozet master plan.

Again, our parcels are highlighted in yellow and the different colors represent different future land use classifications.

And basically that's meant to say these are the types of uses that could occur if a special use permit or a rezoning application is ever proposed on these parcels.

And so both of the parcels, you'll notice at the more northern side, they've got a green color.

And I'll go into explaining what that represents later, but it's meant to be green space.

So open space areas, amenity areas.

Specifically here, the Crozet master plan calls for a landscaping buffer.

The reason for that is that across Route 240 from these parcels is actually the comprehensive plan rural area.

So that landscaping buffer is intended to sort of serve as a screening of whatever uses would occur here.

The orange color represents the middle density residential future land use classification.

And that recommends dwellings at six to 12 units an acre.

And that could be things like single-family detached townhouses.

Something unique about this future land use classification is that it does say that if you do small dwelling unit types or affordable dwelling units, it can allow up to 18 dwelling units per acre.

The yellow color, which is more on the south side of these two parcels, represents neighborhood density residential, and that allows for lower density residential dwelling unit types.

So things like single family detached.

You can do attached units, but the density range is three to six units per acre.

And then finally, you'll notice it's going kind of diagonal from the southeastern corner to the basically the property boundary between these two parcels.

There's that green systems.

And what that represents is an area where there is a water protection ordinance stream buffer on this property.

So that is an area that's meant to be protected, not developed on.

So no roads, no houses, no physical improvements aside maybe from some landscaping.

This is the application plan for Montclair.

So this is attachment four in the package that the Planning Commission has.

This is actually sheet five of attachment four, and this is the basic block layout, block network for this project.

You'll notice they've got four blocks, three of which, blocks one through three, are where the primary development would occur.

Block four, again, that is shown in green here, and that's meant to remain as open space and protected environmental feature.

It's actually called a conservation area in the application plan.

The specifics of this is that this developer would like to do a maximum of 122 dwelling units.

Dwellings are permitted as proposed in blocks one, two, and three.

For the gross density of this project, that comes out to 8.18 units per acre.

Net density is 10.9 units per acre.

They are asking for the ability to do some non-residential uses here, and that could be commercial and retail.

In attachment five is the code of development and there's a table in there that lists out specific use types.

So it is basically you know columns that have the use and then by block whether it's permitted by right or not permitted.

I can go over any questions about the code of development later once we get to the question and answer point.

One thing to note is that that Block 4 area measures 2.8 acres, but there are some other features that they are going to be protecting, which I'm going to show on a later slide.

So overall, it's almost three acres minimum of open space in this project.

So this is page seven of attachment four.

We're still in the application plan, and this is the circulation transportation network inside of the project.

It's a little bit difficult to see here, but if you have a paper copy, you can kind of look at it closer.

The dashed lines that you see along all the streets represent different modes of transportation, so traffic flow itself.

The darker dashed line has arrows on each end, and what that means is that

Two-way traffic is going to be allowed on those streets.

I'm going to use my laser pointer to assist with this part right here.

Everyone see my laser pointer on the screen?

So this project is going to be served by two public streets as their primary entrance and egress to the project.

This one here,

obviously would be entering or exiting onto Route 240.

It goes north through the south, and this is in block one.

The other public street is shown right here.

It would connect to Park Ridge Drive and then also Wickham Pond Way.

And then these other streets, which are a little bit, they've got a lighter gray dashed line.

Those are just internal private streets, and there's two more right here.

That is where dwellings would have their driveways and be located.

One thing to note and it's visible on several sheets of the application plan.

but this applicant is proposing to reserve almost a third of an acre of land along the frontage with Route 240.

And what they're intending to do is to dedicate that to the county so that a 10 foot wide shared use path could be built along that property frontage.

You can kind of see it's almost like an orange hatch line up there along Route 240.

That's what that is meant to represent.

So just some other quick details.

This is a different sheet from the application plan.

It basically shows that that orangish color is where building footprints could be located.

There are some architectural specifications in that code of development.

This project, again, it's in the entrance corridor, and so it was reviewed with ARB staff.

And there's some regulations pertaining to building height, which specifically this can't exceed three stories or 45 feet tall maximum.

There are some other

architectural features that the facades would have to have, so things like porches, balconies, other forms of projections.

Transitioning a little bit to a different topic, this developer is proposing to do 15% of their overall units at 80% AMI.

In this case, that would be 18 units if they develop

out to that 122 dwelling unit maximum.

Attachment 11 in the Planning Commission packet is an analysis by Stacey Pethia with our housing office that goes over this in more detail.

They've reviewed this application.

They support the affordable housing that is proposed.

I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but I'll talk about it again since I have it on the slide.

The parcel that touches Route 240, you'll notice there's a green color.

And that is a 100 foot wide in-depth landscaping buffer that this developer is proposing to plant.

There's some more details between the code of development and the application plan that talk about spacing and sizing of that landscaping.

But again, that is meant to say that that will be a landscaping buffer that is put in to serve as a screening of the actual development as you get further into this site.

There's a couple pages in the staff report that talk about another aspect of this request, and that is that there are a couple areas of preserved steep slopes on the westernmost parcel, which you see here.

I'm going to use my laser pointer again.

There's these call-outs that point to little areas.

Again, they're slightly difficult to see on a slide this size.

But the developer has asked that those be treated as part of this rezoning approval as managed steep slopes.

When a developer is requesting to go to the neighborhood model district, that can be done as part of the approval of their application plan.

So planning staff and staff from our engineering division have gone over the analysis that this developer gave us when asking for that.

And we have found that those preserved slopes, they do meet most of the criteria being defined as the managed steep slope, most notably,

Any preserved slopes is supposed to be a contiguous area of 10,000 square feet or larger, where land exceeds 25% topography.

And between these three areas, in total, they measure 3,800 square feet.

We have evidence going back to the 1990s that they were actually created by the installation of an existing stormwater pond that is on that property, as well as an existing driveway.

that comes off of Park Ridge Drive and goes down and serves this structure here.

So they're likely man-made.

They're below the size threshold of preserve slopes.

They're not associated with a floodplain or anything like that.

And so staff is supportive of that request.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a few extra things here.

One of them is that there's a private street authorization request for four of those internal private streets.

That does require Planning Commission approval.

It doesn't even need to go to the board.

Planning Commission makes the final decision on private street requests when it's going to be serving residential dwelling units.

As part of the private street, they are requesting to waive and vary the sidewalk requirement along some of these streets, specifically private roads A and B. They want to waive the sidewalk that's required on both sides.

Streets A and B are somewhat unique.

They're basically going to look and function like an alleyway.

All of these structures here would have rear loading garages that

that face this private street.

And the front doors themselves are going to look outward toward open space areas, amenity areas, or the main public streets.

So it doesn't really make a lot of sense to have sidewalks along that alleyway.

It's going to be walkable.

And on other sheets of the application plan, you can see where they're providing some sidewalks along the public streets.

And then in this centralized area, there will be a sidewalk that people can walk out to through their front door.

and overall get into that network of pedestrian transportation infrastructure that will be available here.

There is a request to waive and vary some of the planting strip requirements.

Again, in the county's development areas, we require all public or private streets to have a six-foot planting area between your sidewalk and your curb and gutter.

And they are requesting to waive that planting strip requirement entirely along those two roads that are going to function and look like alleyways.

And then these two private streets down here, they're requesting to waive that requirement just on this side.

There will still be sidewalks and planting strips along this side of these two private streets.

Staff has reviewed those requests.

Again, there's a more detailed analysis in the staff report, but we are supportive of approval of all three of those requests.

So to get to the final points here, talk about the factors favorable.

This entire proposal is consistent with the land use recommendations of the Crozet Master Plan.

It's consistent with the comprehensive plans neighborhood model principles.

This request will provide some new transportation improvements that are called for by the implementation chapter of the Crozet Master Plan, specifically that template-wide shared use path.

And then the developer is putting forward to do 15% of affordable housing units, which is consistent with our affordable housing recommendations from the comprehensive plan.

An unfavorable factor that we were able to identify relates to school enrollment.

Right now, Western Albemarle is over capacity.

And based on the dwelling unit types that are proposed in this project, it's anticipated using some figures from the school system that there would be about 14 new students at the high school level generated by this project.

So the school is already over capacity and this would further contribute to that capacity issue at Western Albemarle.

To summarize, staff recommends approval of ZMA 2020-12 because the favorable factors outweigh the unfavorable factors.

And we recommend approval of the private street authorization requests, as well as the sidewalk waiver and the planting strip request.

And we cited the specific code sections where those findings and the authority is authorized in the subdivision ordinance.

Mr. Herrick, if we need to flip back to this later, when I'm doing my motion slides, we can

All right, thank you.

Commissioners, I'll start to my right with Commissioner Moore.

Yeah, I assume, staff, you received the

media that we all received that had a bunch of concerns outlined.

One of those was the lack of a turn line on Three Notch Road.

Yes.

Anytime there's a zoning map amendment that's proposed in the county, we send a copy of the proposal to the Virginia Department of Transportation.

They're one of our partner agencies, as we call them, that reviews these development projects with us.

and after the first review or what was their first review comment letter that they gave to us to send to the applicant, they asked to be provided with turn lane warrant analysis specifically for the entrance that would go on to Park Ridge Drive as well as the entrance onto Route 240.

They gave that analysis to us.

I didn't include a copy in the staff report.

I probably will do that when this goes to the board, but their analysis found that

This project would not trigger the need for any right turn or left turn lanes into there.

And VDOT reviewed that analysis and said that they agreed.

So that's why there isn't any turn lane shown.

I think specifically the materials that were sent to us from the members of the public were asking about a right turn lane from 240 into the site.

And that is one of the turns that was analyzed by this.

Yeah.

And there's also a question that there was a roundabout suggested for a future day.

So I think that comes from the Crozet Master Plan might call that out as one of the implementation projects at the intersection of 240 and Park Ridge Drive or

I'm sorry, I didn't see that letter.

Was there a description of what the location of the roundabout was?

Is this 240, 250?

It was three notched at 250.

I think there was, I do recall that being an issue.

There is a roundabout that is fully funded at that location at this point.

We had a public hearing actually two weeks ago, or VDOT held a public hearing for the roundabout at 240, 250.

And that is, as I said, fully funded and recommended to be constructed in the 2025, 2026 timeframe.

This project has caused some confusion for the community because it actually had been funded many years ago but VDOT for some reason wasn't able to complete it for a long time.

They have now actually included it in a package that has gone out to bid to a contract contractor to be constructed.

So they are really moving forward with it at this time.

And the other question I have is we've heard recently that there's been some complications that prices increased dramatically for the Eastern Avenue connector because of the bridge.

Is there any update on that?

Yeah, understood.

We are not considering that not a viable project at this time.

What we are looking at is we need to find an alternative way to deliver that project.

And, uh, staff is working on that right now.

Uh, sometimes when working with VDOT, um, they can come up with some unreasonable, uh, price estimates.

And so we may have to work around that, that issue into that.

That's what we're doing right now.

Recently, we did talk to the board about this.

We do have money available through the county capital improvement plan, and there is also some state money available to construct this.

So we have some funding.

Thanks.

All right, I'll move to my left.

Commissioner Missel?

No, sir.

I'll defer my questions.

Mr. Bivins?

One for right now, if I might, Chair.

So Cameron, on the, and again, thank you, ship engineering for making plans which are large enough for the typical person to read.

So on page four of the context plan, can you tell me what is possible on the two pieces of property

that adjoined block one, I guess it's actually page five, that joins block one.

Yeah, wow, I apologize.

That's kind of a big thing.

I missed mentioning that.

So that property on the, I'm gonna switch back to one of these.

We'll look at this one here.

So I'm going to use my laser pointer.

I'm tracing the boundaries of the westernmost property as it stands right now.

This ZMA is only proposing to rezone this southern half of it.

This part is going to be left as a residue parcel that would remain in the light industry zoning district.

It's not going to be changed to neighborhood model district.

And then to the right of that, where I believe on page four, it says that it's Barnes Crozet LLC.

that this area where I've got the laser pointer.

So that is one of the blocks in Wickham Pond that is actually a block that's able to be developed as I think mixed use.

I know that there is non-residential square footage available in that block.

It just has not been built yet.

And that's not part of this plan either.

Actually, I do have a question for staff just for my own knowledge.

When we have public streets and private streets kind of like in this situation where they're crossing each other and things like that, is there typically like a MOU between the local government and the landowner just to kind of maintain a level of quality?

So we used to require basically a document to be recorded with a subdivision plan.

It was called a maintenance agreement that basically specified the timing and responsibilities and cost sharing

of any property owners who had joined a private street to make sure that basically the cost of maintaining it was evenly distributed.

We don't require that maintenance agreement anymore, but every private street that I've seen get approved since the maintenance agreements have gone away, the covenants that the developers write up before they sell any of the lots off contain that information in it because as you can imagine, it would become sort of a

Big problem if there isn't something put in writing and recordation that identifies how that gets taken care of.

All right.

Thank you.

Any other questions for staff?

All right.

I'm just going to bring it up into the whole screen really quick.

My name is Vito Cetta.

I'm an architect and developer.

Albemarle County increases in population 1,500 people a year.

And it requires about 800 new residences to be built to accommodate them.

And the comp plan is what is used to absorb those uses.

has been incredibly successful.

The comp plan was started in 71 and over 60% of the homes built in the county were in the rural areas.

Now that number has come down about 16%.

It very much focuses growth in the building in the growth area and for the public, again,

That map up there shows three areas where the comp plan applies.

It's Glenmore to the right, around the city in the middle, and Crozet to the left.

And if you look north, our site is literally on the edge of that growth area.

Our site is on the north side, nothing but farms beyond that.

We are very fortunate that there are counties being developed to that comp plan.

Here's an example.

This is Garth Road.

Now, this is very, very close to the city.

It looked like this 30 or 40 years ago.

It's because of the comp plan.

Again, open spaces, pastures, grasses.

The system works.

I mean, even take 29 South, past 64.

That all is undeveloped.

It is because of the comp plan.

This is a graphic picture of what you've seen.

Three or four different housing types.

I want to come back to this.

I want to show you Wiccan Pond to the right.

Well, this, by the way, is the area's

around Montclair.

All the areas south and all the areas east have been processed through the county exactly like this project.

They've all been approved in that manner.

These are fine communities.

Our property is the wet and white.

And again, beyond that, it's all rural areas.

Now this is Wickham Pond.

We've developed 12 projects through the

and the zoning process like this one.

And this is one of our projects is 165 units as 28 affordable units of the parcel to the top left.

Yeah, we didn't.

We process that, but we don't own that and that is intended to be a mixed use project.

High density residential and commercial.

But we don't own it.

Eventually that will be developed

Wickham Way, well, you'll see a picture of that in a minute.

And there's a variety of housing types here that this, by the way, will be Wickham Way running into the project.

This is all part of Wickham Pond, picket fences, front porches, they're required, green strips.

Again, I can't tell you how successful that idea of the green strip and the sidewalk.

Again, picket fence, front porches, nice texture to these.

These are the townhouses at Wickham Pond.

These are front loaded.

Front loaded means the garage and the front doors on the same side.

We've improved that on Montclair where we put the garage to the rear, getting two parking spaces there.

These work well.

We planted all these trees, as you can see.

This is part of Wickham Pond.

These are Habitat for Humanity.

These are for sale, very successful.

These are, again, affordable units.

The county refers to them as bungalows.

It's a townhouse.

It's a townhouse over one bedroom and a den.

That's what we have here.

Now, again, these were built 15 years ago.

They were affordable then.

As far as I know, they're still affordable.

Just by their nature, they're affordable.

This is the 100-foot green strip.

There's a 10-foot walkway.

Here we are again.

The units at the bottom are villas, 32 foot wide, two car garage, an apron in the front.

Again, they're facing onto that 200 foot open space.

The units to the top are one of two things.

They are either 22 foot wide townhouse, I'll show you pictures of them in a moment, or they can become the bungalow units.

It could be three or four units in the building.

To the left on this site is the Habitat for Humanity.

12 homes gonna be built there.

And to the bottom left is a daycare center.

they're gonna buy that parcel to the right to change their parking and perhaps expand their facilities.

And again, we have some common areas, playgrounds, court.

Here's the site.

It hasn't really been lived in for about 40 years.

Those are a series of cedar trees.

We're gonna attempt to keep those.

So the villas are like these, 32 foot wide, two car garage, two cars on the apron.

These are the townhouses, 22 feet wide.

Now the same, the 22 foot wide by about 40 feet deep will accommodate one townhouse, or they can accommodate up to four small units, and I'll show you those plans in a moment.

Here they are again, they're facing a green strip.

By the way, this issue and the slight variance we asked is exactly the same.

People park as a guest, you park at the end of this and you walk up and so they're not on a regular street.

And this is what the alley looks like.

Two car garage, two cars as guest spaces behind those.

So the landscaping has really made this an attractive place.

So this doesn't have an official sidewalk.

And it's not this.

This is gross.

That's totally unacceptable.

Again, here we are.

Again, there's some parks in this space.

You can see a gathering place near the villas.

This is what that bungalow looks like.

On the right side is an example that can be two efficiencies on the bottom, two bedrooms above, four units.

This is the side, the bottom level would be two efficiencies.

Same size footprint as the townhouse.

You look to the right, those are 440 square foot efficiencies.

Then there's one bedroom, there's two bedrooms.

There's a townhouse.

Again, this is looking north.

Beyond the site is farms.

We also developed Liberty Hall, which is near Harris Teeter on 250.

The county had requested a live-work building, and that's what this is.

These are commercial spaces on the lower level, townhouses above.

Townhouses above.

across the townhouse we built of 10 affordable 16-foot-wide townhouses.

Again, it was an affordable requirement.

The result was affordable units.

Is that me?

You still have a few minutes.

This is the last slide I have.

The first project we did in Crozet was Parkside Village.

That's what this is, again, a white picket fence, front porches, interesting landscape.

I'm very proud of this one.

Again, all the trees are, of course, we planted those.

All right, don't go too far.

I'm sure the commission has some questions for you.

Good evening, sir.

So if you, you mentioned that

I'm going to the

to seven o'clock on the plan.

So it's next to the Bright Beginnings area.

So did I understand you that you're saying immediately to their right, there would be perhaps, oh, thank you.

You're doing this for me, right there.

So the building that's there in block two there, would that be part of their, would that be part of the Bright Beginnings or let me retract.

This was drawn before we talked about it at the beginning.

We're talking to them at length.

We're talking about doing a variety of things.

One is they need more open space.

And two is we've introduced a trail, a loop trail that goes through that open space.

And that really would be our use, but also the bright beginnings use.

And their parking is awkward.

Yes, you know I should know this but there's always a question about what is the height of the building.

I believe it's the average height of the roof

to the ground here?

Even in fact, what you saw on those townhouses that we built, which is

out of bounds, is they actually have a fourth floor.

It's called a mezzanine by definition.

They have a deck, a very interesting space, and they do not exceed that height either.

There, I'm fine for the moment.

Thank you, sir.

I should call a couple of follow-ups on Commissioner Bivins' question.

Yeah, seven o'clock.

That's what I have.

Let's see here.

Is it referred to this?

Could you go back to your plan that you had?

We're proposing to build something.

We show a commercial space.

Well, just look to the right of this.

It's a big hunk of land that was zoned 16 years ago.

And the commercial industry doesn't step forward and say, we want to use it.

And the last thing you want to do is build something that won't work.

Eventually, I would think that site

to the right will become, there's enough density in this area with housing that somebody will step up and say, let's build some commercial.

Now that's what we want.

We want people to walk there and go to dinner and get a shave and get a haircut, buy a dress.

Yeah.

Okay, well, part of the answer is that we've been on this project for over three and a half years.

And before we can

build a building that's going to be two and a half more years.

So it is marketed and it is you're looking for somebody to come forward and say we want to build a small restaurant or what it might be.

So the other question is, can you go to your building elevation that you were showing a little while ago?

Well, the townhouses and the bungalows are three stories high.

Yeah.

And so you're confident that this will stay below the 45?

Yeah.

Yes, well, it's how the county measures the height.

I should know it, but I don't know it.

Hi everybody.

I'm just going to go ahead and preface this by saying it's not my area of expertise, but what Mr. Chetta is saying is correct.

The height of your structure is entirely dependent on the roof type.

So if you have a hip roof, a gable roof, a flat roof, the technical definition and way to measure it differs.

I think with this type of roof here, it's like from the ground floor elevation at the bottom up to the midpoint of the ridge.

We do have some staff members here in zoning.

If they need to come up and clarify this, if the commission still has questions, they can.

But what I can say is with three story structures like this,

45 feet is definitely enough.

I mean, most of the three-story townhouse developments that we're getting nowadays, they also have a similar limitation.

Thank you for the clarification.

So what questions do I have?

Yes, thanks.

Thanks for your presentation.

And as always, this code of development is very clear.

I just want to clarify one thing that I think Commissioner Carrazano was talking to, and I want to make sure I understand it too.

So related to the blocks, block two has got that little weird panhandle that comes down, right?

That's adjacent to block four.

This piece is part of block two.

The red, I'm looking at the code of development.

and I think this is right.

I'm just triple checking and maybe this helps because I was wondering the same thing.

In there on block two, in the entire area that's red, you could build office, you could build a retail sales and service, barber, beauty shops, health spas, et cetera, et cetera.

To your point, that's open and flexible.

You also could build a minimum

So you could put those both together and that would be 16,500 square feet of non-residential plus a minimum of eight residential or a maximum of 16 residential.

Yes, that's correct.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure I understood that.

I think that's all I have.

Thank you.

I was wondering if you could go back to the picture of the back of the buildings where they're parking their cars.

You showed a picture.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And I also appreciate you showing the one that you said, that's terrible.

Yeah, not that one, so the one before that.

So I might understand, because you were asking for a sidewalk waiver there, but there's kind of like little pathway.

We're proposing exactly this.

I'm sorry?

You know, it's really a drainage.

Yeah, I know it's not as wide as county code.

It's not raised up, but it gives that feeling of like, okay, you get out of your car, you walk over to say hello to your neighbor.

You have some vegetation back there, so it's not that stark, ugly second picture you showed us.

Right.

By the way, one thing that happens back here too is practically everybody has a porch.

Yeah.

Either it's a deck or a porch, and it sure does get used.

Yeah.

And for people to walk to that end unit, which is essentially 13 units deep, I happen to live in this place, people don't complain at all.

They kind of like it.

They overlook the green space when they're going through it.

I know I understand it's functioning more like an alley.

That's right.

And doesn't that look terrific?

It really works.

It's a nice place to park a car.

Thank you.

That's it.

Thank you.

Yeah, so right now where you're proposing a road going through over to Park Ridge, there's a stormwater pond there right now, right?

So how is stormwater going to be managed after that?

I assume that stormwater pond was put there to handle the construction that was already there.

So how are you going to be managing stormwater?

Yes, yes.