Planning Commission Work Session and Regular Meeting   10/8/2024

Great.

Thank you.

Good evening, everyone, or good afternoon, I guess.

I'd like to welcome everybody to the October 8th, 2024 Planning Commission meeting.

This is the work session portion of the Planning Commission, which will last from 4 to 5.30.

And then we will reconvene at 6 o'clock for the public hearing section.

Let me read this first.

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

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

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

Yes.

Mr.

Great, thank you.

With that, I want to make one mention of the public comment section of this work session.

Typically, we don't field public comments for work sessions.

There are a lot of opportunities to have input into the conversations that we're going to have this evening.

relative to the comprehensive plan.

But with that, I do want to just take a minute and open it up for public comment on matters pending before the commission, but not listed on public hearings on this agenda.

Are there any that anyone would like to share?

All right.

Seeing none, that's great.

Thank you.

That allows the most time for us to hear from staff and to discuss.

We'll move on to the consent agenda.

Are there any

commissioners who would like to pull this item from the consent agenda or is there a motion to approve?

We have the role, please.

Thank you.

Any discussion?

All right.

All right.

Awesome.

And with that, we will move on to the work session, CPA 2021-2, AC44 growth management, flume, activity centers, policies.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Michael Barnes, Director of Planning.

Tanya and I are going to provide this presentation to you all tonight.

I'm going to start with a little bit of an overview, and then she will work with a lot of the details that we were asking for feedback.

Broadly speaking, tonight's work session, the two of us will be covering sort of the document structure.

I've been working a lot with the orientation of the document review, booth management policy, the development area of utilization review, there's a latter two you're going to see I'll refer the three different structures of the document the second two will be in the part second part of the document the comp land and then in the third one we're beginning one of the topic chapters which is

Development Area Land Use, and we're going to give you guys the tools that we're going to be talking about, especially with the general public this month.

And finally, we conclude with some upcoming steps.

So I just wanted to give you all a broad overview of what the structure of the document is.

Again, we'll get into a little bit more details of that time in this presentation.

But there are four major sections of this document.

The first one's sort of an introductory one, the context section.

So a little bit about the basic stuff of why you do a comp plan, its requirements under state code.

But importantly, sort of major trends, sort of issues that we're facing as a community.

We'll also be dealing with what the community's vision is for dealing with some of that.

And of course, that's been central to this effort the whole time.

The four guiding principles and the lens of equity and climate change will be housed in this first part.

In the second part of the document, we'll be stating clearly what the growth management policy is for the county.

talking about a development error utilization review.

Again, Ty will get more into that.

And one thing that we're not going to bring you tonight, but that we will probably bring you at the end of the process is sort of distinguishing the forest for the trees, right?

You shouldn't have to read the whole document to understand what it is the county wants to achieve.

So we're going to finish this section when we sort of go through these 10 topic chapters.

And the idea here is how is the growth management policy applied in the rural area and in the development area across these 10 topic chapters?

Part 3, this is really the meat of the plan, if you will.

We have these 10 topic chapters, and those things are broadly bespoken in two different halves.

The first one is to orient the reader to, hey, these are the major policies of the document, and the second half of it is the goals and objectives.

And within that first half, it's the idea of broadly on that topic area, what are the major challenges there?

Why are we even doing this and how is county addressing it?

What are the tools that the county has to address that topic area?

And that's really going to start to form the basis of the goal statement.

The other one is sort of identifications of specific sets of solutions to these challenges and that will be the basis for the objective and then the actions which will be how we're going to try and meet that objective and further advance that goal.

The final part of the document will be an appendix and that will where we will house a lot of policies of the county.

I think the intent is as you move through this document is to try to make it effective in the day and age we live in where people tend to

Don't have as much time to read a longer document.

So we're trying to make it a more streamlined document and we're getting to the point.

So as we move through the topic chapter areas, we may be addressing something like, I don't know, Project Able.

And in the topic area we're talking about economic development, we'll reference Project Able and we'll sort of talk about what its major things it's trying to achieve.

But there'll be a hyperlink which takes you down to the appendix when you get it down to all the

the details of what the Project Enabled plan is trying to do.

Again, trying to sort of meet the modern times for them.

I know there's been a lot of questions.

What's happened between the previous version that we had and the current version that we're working on?

And I would stress that there's a lot of similarities.

One of the major things we've done is, you see, the previous one had three sections and it had eight topic chapters.

This one has four sections and 10 topic chapters.

One of the major things we've done is to put the growth management policy sort of front and center.

It's such a foundational policy for everything we do in the county that we felt it was important to sort of put it in its own section and really highlight it and again sort of give that force for the trees, if you will.

with the topic chapter areas you can sort of see I've tried to sort of set these things up so that you can sort of see the changes.

Originally we had a rural area and development area land use with transportation because those uses are so those two topics are so closely tied together.

We have since split that apart to have a development area land use chapter and that's going to be the first one you guys are going to review and then a rural area land use chapter and have a transportation chapter sort of sits on it and it will cover both, it'll cover for the entire county.

The other major changes, we've added a tenth chapter, which is resilient communities.

It's the climate change one.

Make sure that that topic is well addressed.

And I think a basic thing in the plan is try and use these topic areas just to deal with a topic at hand.

also often you'll find that policies that we're trying to do probably lead across a couple of different topic areas but to the extent we can sort of have a deeper discussion of that in one spot as opposed to having it in a couple spots in the chat in the document will hopefully bring a little more clarity to it and avoid some sort of contradictions that can crop up when you start dealing with things separately so that was another kind of aspect

And then finally, there's some minor changes.

We went from having Chapter 6 of Parks and Recreation before, now it's Parks, Recreation and Open Space, community facilities, community facilities and services.

And those are the principal changes.

And the last thing I would just say, I think I'm new.

Tanya's a bit new.

We were here for four months.

We were wrapping up Phase II and moving to Phase III.

And there was a little bit of time that we just needed to sort of wrap our heads around and sort of talk about how the structure made sense and get into some of the details of how it would be written.

And another has been concerned about the delay that we may have installed with this change that we've been working on.

Thank you.

Can I just interrupt with two questions or one question and one thing just to get on the record?

One is, I'm curious what happened to number five, economic development,

on the previous version.

Excuse me, thank you.

I meant to mention that.

Economic development became thriving community.

That makes sense.

Then the other quick question is, and you alluded to this a little bit, but there have been questions, as you said, about the pause that we had.

I know you didn't pause as much as we probably paused, but

The community engagement process is continuing and has been ongoing.

And I think you just mentioned that all the input to date has been continued to be baked into this, right?

So there's not been work that's gone on without community involvement.

No, basically, any of the changes that have been happening here are more structural and also how we want to make sure the document flows.

It's not been structured.

It's not been changes to content.

Got it.

Thank you.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is sort of our upcoming schedule, what we're hoping to do over the next little bit here.

We have these 10 chapters.

We will be finalizing those in a

sequence process.

Hopefully we'll have those done towards the end of March, but we'll be bringing them out.

We'll have the last one done towards the end of March, but we'll be bringing out chapters to you all steadily over the next couple of months.

I almost have a final schedule as I sit here and try and work that with the review that the Planning Commission will have to do and the board and the boards

Need to attend to other matters.

It's a complicated

Dance, if you will, was trying to get a schedule put together.

And I hope to come to you all at the next meeting with a true schedule we're really trying to do.

But broadly speaking, I think I can commit to this, that we'll be working between now and April on these 10 chapters.

And we will try to get those chapters to you all well in advance of your planning commission meeting, especially as farther we move out, I can commit to getting those to you sooner.

and letting you all have time to read them and enough time to sort of digest them.

You're not getting them the week before type of thing.

It's going to be a little bit tight for this development area land use chapter we'll be doing next.

That's going to come out early next week, but we're going to do two work sessions on that.

So hopefully you'll be able to fully digest that.

And then the idea would be to wrap up with all of our work with the planning commission and the board of these 10 chapters by April.

and then, remember that these chapters are really the third section of this document.

The first section, the second section, we're gonna sort of talk to you about those tonight, but as far as the actual, as some of it will be the written text that you'll see for some of these components of those, but we'll need to go back and finish writing that and in part, again, that summation of what we've been talking about, these 10 chapters will be in that.

So our idea is to bring that to you all back in the April to June timeframe

and then to go to a public hearing for the complaining commission and the board in the July August timeframe.

I mean, obviously with this stuff, our capacity to get through the process will be largely dependent on the speed with which you all and the board are willing, you know,

You will have a lot of control and the pacing of what we move forward with the document.

I'm sorry to interrupt again.

Do you mind?

Please.

Sorry.

Just a quick question on the PC and board.

We talked a little bit about this a couple of days ago.

Just for everybody on the commission, the timing sometimes will feel tight where we'll have a meeting and the board will meet the week later or very soon thereafter.

And one of the things I know we've talked a lot about is how is our input being provided to the board?

And so I would imagine also there may be times where the board says, hey, I'd love to get the planning commissions input on this that's still an outstanding issue.

I assume it's a bit of an iterative process kind of back and forth, right, until the actual review of the final plan.

So while I know the process wants to click forward seamlessly, there may be starts and stops, hopefully as few as possible, just so that we can be coordinated with the board and they can get our input.

And I'll also underline our intent is to try and get it to you, you know, to space out the differences between the planning commission and the board as much as possible, you know, week to two weeks, there may be a meeting or two where we it's going to be extremely tight.

But that's not our intent.

And our intent is to try and build in that enough time that we can

either have the minutes or enough capacity to summarize the major points that were discussed here so that we can bring that into the board's discussion.

I know that the board treasures the input from the planning commission, so we want to respect that part of the process.

Thanks.

The last thing I want to talk about is public engagement.

We held a working group last night, AC44 working group last night and started talking to them about some of the stuff that's a lot of part of today's presentation, some of the

Development Area land use tools, land use categories, the future land use map, FLUM, for those who want to abbreviate as such, and the activity centers.

And we wanted to make sure that you all knew about this.

We're going to make sure that the board knows about this next week, because we met with the working group last night.

We're going to be meeting on all CAC meeting at the end of the month.

And then we're going to try and continue meeting with those two groups in a

on a regular basis between now and April so that they can sort of follow along.

We're going sort of, you know, A, to communicate out, but also to receive back in some input.

But again, a lot of what we're writing is based on several years of input to the process.

And then finally, as we get through April and we have had this discussion of the 10 topic chapters, there's a whole series of open houses.

to sort of say, hey, this is what we talked about, this is what we think we've heard, you know, make sure that the general public sort of gets that summation of what really is the meat of the plan and use that information from those open houses to really then draft the final document that we would bring back in April and June to the, again, to the Planning Commission for review and then eventually forward as well for public hearing.

But broadly speaking, that's our strategy for moving forward.

So I want to turn it over to Tanya now if you guys don't have any questions on what it just talked about.

And thank you.

Hi there, Kanya Swartz and Gerber, planning manager for the community development department here on behalf of the AC44 staff team to reveal a couple of key concepts in the COMP plan or AC44.

I'll run through this afternoon's presentation and we can take questions along the way.

My colleague Tori is also here to help work through any questions that we have.

Let's start with what you received in your packet.

A little bit of admin here.

The Attachment A was really giving you an overview.

This is the memo or executive summary, if you will, to give you an idea of what

what we'll be talking about today.

Attachment B, sorry, that's up on the screen now is really intended to give you an overview of how the parts relate.

And so you can see all the pieces.

The text that is highlighted or boxed in red is what we'll be talking about today.

The concepts will be contained within that section of the outline.

Let's see, the dates and information that is in blue is really about previous work sessions that we talked about a similar topic or a topic that could be considered underneath that heading.

I'm sorry, just a quick question.

Don't we have it as attachment A or am I missing it?

Okay.

It is attachment A. I just want to make sure we didn't miss it.

Okay, I'm sorry.

Yes, yes, that's the way it should be.

So what I was just explaining the blue on attachment A is the previous work sessions and then the text in orange on that same attachment is the upcoming work sessions just so you can start to see when we'll be coming with those.

I guess attachment B is the longer document.

This is the text document that you received in Word with the text that houses the information about the concepts we'll talk about tonight in red text, starting with the development area land use chapter.

So one of the first of the 10 chapters in part three,

You'll be getting a PDF of this where you'll be able to make your comments directly on the PDF.

But for this particular part, we just went ahead and gave you just the straight text since there wasn't a lot of graphic content to it.

By the end of this work session, we'd like your input on the two questions here regarding the concepts of the growth management policy and the monitoring of the development areas.

We'll check in on those at the end of the presentation.

The land use tools that were also included in your packet is really for your information.

Like Michael said, we will be presenting this to the public on the 30th and really wanted to start to give you some of the information and start to digest some of the meteor parts of the chapter ahead of time in an effort to give you a little more time to get through the material.

and just to be clear, just to state that our CAC meeting will be on the 30th in Lane Auditorium right here.

I believe it's six o'clock, so you may hear constituents talking about it.

So the county established a growth management policy with the adoption of the first comp plan in 1971.

It designates our growth area or development areas and the rural area.

Similar growth management policies are used throughout Virginia and across the country.

Currently, the development areas shown here in blue, and I apologize, the county outline doesn't stand out quite as well as I would have liked, but the development area is really the blue on the map, that sort of center areas, the city of Charlottesville, of course, and then the rest of it is the 95% of the county land that is within the rural area.

The purpose of the policy is to encourage vibrant, mixed-use, dense and walkable development in the development areas supported by infrastructure and amenities in order to protect the natural, historic, scenic, and cultural resources in the rural area.

Having designated growth areas helps to avoid sprawl and supports the efficient and more cost-effective provision of public infrastructure and services.

So with AC44, the growth management policy is carried forward with several updates to the policy to reflect the community input and to incorporate equity and climate action while keeping the purpose of the policy, the core purpose of the policy.

First, we went ahead and made it clear that the county is planning for current and future community members.

and then we added language to specifically list the areas of policy that the policy guides, which is land use, capital projects, or investments, and public services.

We also added language to include small businesses and limited public services in the rural area to support the existing communities that are there.

And then lastly, we added language to include distinct boundaries between the development areas and the rural area, basically eliminating, trying to get out the trans, there being little transition between the two and being distinct areas.

Here we've got the proposed language on the screen.

I'm happy to read this out if or we can take a minute just to let you all read it yourselves.

I have a lot of my comments written into the document that you gave us.

Where is this in those documents?

I'm happy to.

If you'd like to wait until the end, we can wait till the end.

Yeah, let's do it in bite-sized pieces.

So you're going to present it kind of in bite-sized pieces.

Take a pause and circulate since I'm making eye contact.

You're looking at me.

Yes, sir.

So there's some definitional issues that hopefully you'll get to when you start scratching down further.

So this whole idea of, and this is in the one, two, three, four, five, six, the sixth line goes into the seventh line.

We're still talking about historic and cultural resources.

I would hope that we would give some definition to what those are and what they mean, and that we don't fall into sort of a nebulous sort of context of what's historic, particularly in our historically conflicted area, and what is a

a cultural resource.

So to have some sense because there's that there's that counterbalance.

If you say this is going to be a welcoming place to a whole diverse group of people or a whole eclectic I'll use eclectic as opposed to diverse and eclectic group of people.

It's good.

It will be good to know what's the definition of historic and cultural in that standpoint.

And then if I might add sort of that that

There are these, again, there are definitional words in here.

So when we say we're going to be a welcoming community that will grow equitably and sustainably supporting the needs of current and future community members for housing jobs and a healthy environment, I imagine that there'll be some ways of which to define that and to be able to understand whether or not we've been successful to date.

And if not, how do we close the gap?

And if after we close the gap or other supervisors make whatever decision they're going to make about that, how we go forward to sort of craft the kind of community that you lay out in that strategic plan because it's not apparent to me

that we're there now.

In fact, I will say we're not there now.

And then how do we get to a place that will in fact be an indicator that we are there now or that we're approaching them now, whatever that is.

And then I will also say

and other people will speak more elegantly about this than I could.

I still contend that it's hard to think of different kinds of housing in the development area when we look further on and see everything as, I think it's orange, I may be wrong, some people are better.

Yeah, thank you.

But really, we still remain a yellow, I think we still remain a yellow community.

The Neighborhood Residential Thank you, which means that we're not looking at

how do we provide more opportunities for people who have more eclectic incomes or have desires not to be in the traditional suburban housing type, which is what we basically are now.

We're basically a suburban community.

And so it's that whole thing about the definitional pieces around historic and cultural.

And then the whole idea

How do we know that where we are is where we should be or where we hope to be, I should say should be, where we'd hope to be.

And then when we start future casting, whether or not that's a set of possibilities that are obtainable, given the constraints of the financial constraints, the land constraints, which I guess we'll talk about at some other point.

And just basically the fact we still in this version of the

What did you call it?

The flan?

No flan?

That's not flan, that's something you eat.

And the flam, we're still basically a suburban type community, a single family suburban type community on some X amount of land.

So this is a great little sort of snapshot here.

So as we think through comments, just to focus you back on your initial question, the question was, does the growth management policy meet the needs of the county?

Basically, right?

So this is the growth management.

If you go back a slide, I think that's the growth management policy.

So what I think I hear you saying is,

If I look at the future land use, I'm going to call it flan because that's what it feels like to me.

Um, if I look at that, it's, it doesn't, I don't see it.

And I know we, I only reason I sort of sit on that is we wrestled with that in Crozet and we each have our own battle scars from that conversation.

And then we wrestled with it when we were talking about the small area plan in Rio on Rio Road, which is another place that we sort of thought that that would be an appropriate place.

And so

We've done a lot of work and had a lot of discussion about this and other people will speak more eloquently about this, I'm sure.

But I am not seeing that when I look at the, what colors are first on here, you know, neighborhood residentials first, office flex and industrial or second, and industrial second, and then urban residential or third.

It's third when I look at the colors on this map.

Great.

So let me just say that it's interesting to hear you talk about that.

So again, hopefully, as we're going through the topic chapters, I'm going to go how, you know, jobs, one, for example, hopefully in the thriving economy, we're talking about how we're trying to create the jobs that are equitable and sustainable.

The healthy environment, environmental stewardship, we'll be talking a lot about

obviously, how we're protecting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

So I think that you, hopefully what you will, as we move through these topic chapters, that you'll be calling us out for not getting far enough into those metrics or not being detailed enough.

Again, I would just sort of say balance that against compliance or

They're not always like a laundry list of specifics.

But we do, I think, hear your point of needing to be as clear as we can about, hey, these are the issues we face, and these are the possible solutions that we have.

And when we start looking at the objectives and action statements, are those things doing that?

And maybe to your point, and this is going to be tough, do they have a way that you can put a metric to it?

I think you've hit on it, if I may, Chair.

I think you've hit on it in a very elegant way, Michael.

One of the things I think we will wrestle with as a community, having now lived here over 30 some odd years, close to 40 years, is that there is this sort of sometime violently loud resistance to increasing funding to the county.

sometimes it's a murmur, oftentimes it's violently loud.

And so in order to balance that conversation, I think in today's world, it would behoove the supervisors and county staff, including us, to be able to articulate in a manner that says, here's what we're doing for this place.

Now, there's, I mean, I will agree up front, there's always going to be a bunch of people that say, no growth is my growth here.

And you know, I want my, I'm the no growth, my growth, no growth.

The reality of that is, unless we're going to ballot off 29 and 64 and 250, that's an unreasonable place to live.

It's also an unfair place to live, even if I believe half of the stuff that comes from our founding fathers.

This is not a place that's an island unto itself.

It's a place that's integrated into both the county, the state, and then the nation, and at large.

And so this whole idea that we have to be able to do, I think, in what we would expect anybody else to do, is to be able to articulate, this is what we want,

and that's got to have a CIP behind it.

And that CIP is going to cost something.

And we're we're making that decision.

People who sit here are making that decision because they believe in certain ways with feedback and all the feedback channels that this is the county that we're called to be.

Well, I'm not going to respond to the commentary of that or the political aspects.

I'm just trying to be the vehicle for that decision to be able to happen.

Again, I think part of it is to be able to clearly say this is the kind of the problem within this topic area and to be able to say, hey, here are the

Michael Barnes

These are partnerships and cooperation that we need to try and develop.

And there's a fourth thing that's not coming to right.

But the point of it is to try to create a structure for decision makers to sort of say, these are the things that are important to us.

Now, how those things ultimately get weighed or prioritized on what we work on first or not.

I think that's key, too, as the rest of us make our comments, because I had some comments that were probably two in the weeds for this level of policy.

Not that yours were, but just as I think ahead, and as I listen to you also, this is going to be discussed.

It's going to be refined.

There will be action items.

There will be how do we define high-quality public infrastructure, for example, which was one of the questions I had.

This is sort of a very general, high-level statement.

This is what this does.

It gives you an orientation of what our principal goals are of the county.

It's the growth management policy.

And the growth management policy can reflect a lot of things we've been trying to achieve in those 10 topic chapters.

And we're also going to follow this up again with this sort of a summary.

It's going to be a tough thing to write to make it short, but yet make it comprehensive enough that as you read through it, the ideas that are in this

to paragraph statement.

Our play out in the rural area and the development area across these topic areas generally speaking like this.

And then the third one, hey, welcome to the weeds.

Right.

You should title it that.

Welcome to the weeds.

to get through part of this.

I want to say I appreciate everyone's staff's work on looking to, I don't know, simplifies the right word, but I think it's much more legible.

And I can appreciate some of the languages in here.

So I think from that standpoint, when you go through it, you can absorb it and understand the process that you're laying out and you're going through it with kind of introduction guiding principles.

So it's simpler to understand somebody that picks it up and trying to put myself in different readers that might be accessing this document.

And just to go back, so by doing that, and sometimes when you simplify things, we make statements that are, they sound fine, but it's like the user example, affordable housing, right?

So we all want it, we all are trying to achieve it.

and Maximize our stock.

But we don't necessarily do a very good job of measuring how are we doing with our housing stock?

It's the same thing with some of these guiding principles that we're putting in here.

And I think to go back and reinforce what my colleague was saying is

Putting, and I don't see it right now, but as you said, going into the weeds, but I think it's important at a high level to be thinking what are the measurable outcomes that we're going to tackle here and how do we begin to incorporate that into our process?

Because we want to make sure somehow that we, if we're making mistakes now, let's not repeat them.

and if we're going to deviate from them because we think we can achieve the more equitable, sustainable communities, thriving communities, all these great principles that we have laid out.

Let's have a way to measure it.

Let's have a way to say, and I know that that's certainly how we do it is getting into the weeds, but having the overarching value that that's something that we're going to be building into this process is something that we should be thinking at a high level as well.

Mr. Moore.

Okay, we're going to move to the center.

That's cool.

Well, thank you to staff for putting it together.

I think that we're making it more legible and a fairly clear language is very much appreciated.

I do.

did like read through it for understanding.

The basic question that was on the screen, although our screen keeps going in and out, by the way, for tech support.

The basic question that was on the screen was, does the growth management policy meet the needs of the county?

You know, as much as a lot of the parts seem nice, I would say no.

And I will keep it at top level.

And for me, it's the word welcoming because we

Let me tell a little story.

I kind of came across this motto of North Carolina by accident, which was to be, not to seem.

And in this policy, there's a lot of seeming, and I'm not sure if we're actually being.

And if I think about being welcoming, I think about this parable in the book of Matthew where, you know, when I was hungry, you gave me food.

When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink.

When I was needing clothing, you clothed me.

When I was sick, you visit me, you took care of me.

It does not say, you know, when I was a stranger or needed shelter, you said that'll be half a million dollars champ, you paying cash or mortgage, you know?

And so I think the draft proposal codifies really a one-two punch that makes us not welcoming.

One is by not expanding the development area, and the other is by sort of only trimming around the edges in terms of upzoning in the development area.

and I think still predominantly neighborhood residential as Commissioner Bivins was saying.

I think those two punches together are going to guarantee that homes become less affordable, that people who work for wages are going to be pushed out, that we're going to struggle to find sites for future economic development and that our community is going to suffer for that loss.

So just to make sure we understand your comments,

Does this growth management policy meet the needs of the county in your opinion?

Sure.

No.

And it doesn't by not expanding the development area and not going far enough on densifying inside the development area.

Perfect.

Okay.

Great.

Thank you.

Well, I can agree with half of that.

I know you can.

Obviously, I disagree about the expansion of the growth area.

What I think this fails to do, and I would say no, I don't think drastic revisions need to be made, but I think what this is really clearly lacking is the why.

because it's talking about different kinds of housing types and different kinds of uses in the rural area, but it doesn't say why.

And what should really clearly articulate is that we're trying to encourage compact, high-quality, sustainable development in the growth area that provides efficient delivery of services and that seeks to limit suburbanization and sprawl into the rural area.

That's what the why is.

That's what it should be trying to do.

Great.

OK.

Great.

Thank you.

So just my comments, I don't want to repeat anything that's been said.

Generally speaking, I would say that if I have the lens, which is so hard to do in our world, that lens of stay high up, don't get into the weeds.

I think, unless I'm mistaken here, let's just take Y, for example.

I think some of the Y will be revealed.

We'll be able to get into the detail.

We'll be able to make sure that it achieves that.

as we move forward.

I think generally speaking, I think the other thing is I think one thing that we've heard from the Board of Supervisors not to discredit what you're saying regarding the growth areas.

I am not them, yeah.

We're not going to expand the growth areas.

That's been determined.

Right?

I mean, that's water under the bridge.

Just so that we all agree that that's a thing.

For this comp plan.

Yeah, for this comp plan.

Yeah, exactly.

Not for all future mankind.

And then the last thing, just to mention, the development area and rural area will have distinct boundaries without low density transition areas.

That was one thing I just, I don't know why that to use your word.

I don't know why that is.

Maybe there's a really good reason for it, but why are we saying we're not going to

I see.

Yeah, I think part of it was, I think I'm just harkening back to the neighborhood model, and it was one of the one of the 12 principle clear boundaries with the rural areas.

Yes, sir.

So I still, I wonder whatever happened to the village of Rivanna, which is one of those areas, which is a development area.

So it's one of those places that it's sort of like Atlantis.

It sort of exists on the maps of the county.

But I don't believe anything of any substance that would make it a development area is ever going to take place there.

I'm always willing to be proved incorrect.

However, I also live in a place of it ain't going to happen during my lifetime.

So maybe it will happen to you as my company.

And so there's this whole idea that we've put out from the previous, the previous comp plan, a set of ideals and probably that where we went from 48 to 28.

And then we have this, like this, you know, this appendix over there.

that is not living into its use as part of the development area, but yet we can't do anything in the areas that have started doing something to reconcile that.

Yeah, right.

It's a Virginia monopoly.

It's like we're frozen, you're not frozen, it's like the organization is frozen in this space without sort of taking into, without wrestling, wrestling hard with the fact that decisions that were made in the 2015, nothing's happened there.

You weren't here for it, Michael, but let me tell you, the Village of Rivanna, it ain't going any better.

It's just not good.

And so for us to have to reserve that,

as part of the development area as having that hat on it.

Let me just check in with staff.

So we're over halfway through our work session.

How are we doing?

We've got some good, I think a lot of this conversation will come up again when we start talking about the utilization with VU2.

I will keep going.

So there are a variety of tools that we can use to implement the growth management policy, including revising currently unused designations through area plan updates, which we'll talk more about these in a few minutes.

Secondly, we can invest in infrastructure and amenities to catalyze and support development in activity centers.

We can update our zoning ordinance to support high-quality mixed use, dense development, and a variety of housing types.

And lastly, we can expand the development area boundaries.

But first, we need to know where we stand on the actual build-out and land capacity of the development areas.

While the most recent land use build-out analysis in 2022 indicates there is sufficient capacity to accommodate productive growth over the next 10 to 20 years, this hinges on projects building at the high end of recommended density and intensity of uses.

In the past, we know that rezoning projects, for example, have been built to 58% of the maximum recommended density or the future land use category.

This makes monitoring the capacity of the development areas to accommodate projected growth and demand is a key component of long-range planning and implementing the growth management policy.

So we're proposing a development areas utilization review that happens every two to three years so we can monitor the actual build out and capacity.

This review comes in the form of our land use build out analysis and will include the factors listed on your screen and will help us determine when adjustments are needed using the tools mentioned on the previous slide.

We can go through each one of these factors before we dig into the land use tools.

In the document, there's an F, which I was glad to see.

How was the development and the development areas meeting the objectives of the comprehensive plan?

That was human error.

And for the record, I actually think F is the most important of these criteria.

F should be A. And I'll give you an example.

I mentioned this before.

When we look at the city of Charlottesville,

For a long time, there was a lot of discussion about Charlottesville being landlocked.

The whole justification for annexation was that if Charlottesville couldn't seize parts of Albemarle County, then it would stifle and decay and disappear.

And actually, the reverse was happening because Charlottesville could very easily take growth area out of

out of Albemarle's hands, the downtown mall was suffering and, you know, there was rot at the core of Charlottesville as it was continuing to expand outward instead of focusing on really quality development inside.

And so once it was clear that the resources were limited, some of the things that we didn't see before, when I was a kid, there were very few sidewalks, there were no bike lanes, there definitely wasn't underground parking garages, you know, walkability, you know, there wasn't redevelopment going on in Charlottesville.

Now that those green fields are exhausted and they've had to live within their means, you have that high quality development.

And I think that's what F gets to.

And so that's why I think F really needs to be A. We've taken.

Great.

Thanks.

My main comment here, really, and it's for sort of all of them, is that there's not any clear benchmarks.

It's not sort of a, you know, when we reach this number of, for whichever benchmark it is, that's when it's time to start identifying places.

It's just sort of, here's things we're going to monitor, but there's no action in there.

There's no, now we take the action.

And I mean, I think

voices could basically always justify never it being enough.

Like there's no goalposts set there.

They're not even moving, it's not even set up.

So that's my comment about sort of all of them.

I think it's that

I think it means that we look at those tools that we have on the previous slide.

Can we use one of those, a combination of those to encourage that growth to happen in the development areas?

So that gives me another question.

And this gets to something about the entire title of this.

It says development area utilization review and the

and the way that this conversation is very centered around the development areas, even though that is clearly a rural area objective.

I mean, it's about maintaining.

So, you know, I think there's this tendency to see the rural areas as blank space that we can just write our name on.

And I think that the thing here is that it's not blank space.

There's people that live there, there's farms,

There's historic resources, there's natural resources, and really the expansion of the development areas when it happens to be clear is going to be a reduction of the rural area.

So I mean, if we just flipped it on its head for a moment and the rural area, you know, someone came to us and farmer stood up here and said, hey, listen, we're running out of farmland in Albemarle County.

Can we expand the rural area to accommodate more farms?

How would we think about that discussion?

Yeah.

I know.

I know.

One just just one thing.

I'll you roll a second.

Just to focus everyone there.

The question that was posed to us at the beginning are the draft factors for monitoring development areas appropriate.

So I think that's a question is, are there areas missing?

With the addition of the F or A. Apologies for that.

No, I think in general they are.

I mean, there's a couple things.

How are you actually going back to my measure?

How are you actually, you know, measure some of this?

I mean, I remember early on in the conversation of the AC44, we were talking about why were we leaving so much density on the table, you know, not being able to actually get there.

And, you know, we've got several good

Good reasons why.

I mean, some of the economy wasn't there.

Can you build taller buildings?

And we just saw that recently where we were saying, hey, why don't you go taller from an economic standpoint?

I didn't feel

that it was there.

And so how do we incentivize some of that?

So maybe that's something I'm not seeing here.

There's one thing I would say is, how can we do better to incentivize density in infill properties or properties that are in the development area that have the infrastructure around, even within the development area, all parcels are not equal, right?

I mean, there are some that could really take more density because they have the infrastructure and there are some that are still already lacking infrastructure.

It will be difficult to try to put a very high dense community of development.

Can I riff off of that for Secretary?

Because I had the same thought.

So thinking about that reactive versus proactive approach, right?

There's the assessment, there's the, what are we doing or how are we doing?

and then there's the reaction, right?

Like, okay, well, we're not doing great in this areas, but we're doing great in this area.

So then there's the, what now do we do with that information?

And I don't know if that gets baked into here in any way, but whether it's incentives to use your point, whether it's, you know, I don't know, whatever it would be that would help to achieve a better density ratio in the residential areas based on zoning,

patterns that we've seen, you know, just having heard so many times, can't you guys go higher?

Can't you go taller?

Can't, you know, all of those things.

So I think just thinking about that, what if, what do we do if these don't meet this?

And then the second thing is, you know, as we look at this, to ask ourselves, why aren't we meeting the density requirements?

And there's an element of

Is there something the county should be doing to be tied to the development realities of this world, right?

So if a developer is coming to the table and they're like, ah, we can get 1,400 units of housing in this.

and we did a conceptual plan and it looks like it's going to be great and we want that kind of capacity.

They're going to try to push the envelope as much as possible because they want to create as much flexibility in their ability to bring housing units to the market.

So they're going to create as much capacity, as much flexibility as possible when in reality they may be like, gosh, if we get half that, we'll be in great shape.

So I think that's where we gotta be toned zero in a little bit.

So we'll say, and I don't know if we're going to get this later on, I don't think we do.

But looking at gross versus net in terms of the buildable area, I think that's an important step that we can take towards maximizing.

But I would say that what we're leaving on the table, my recollection is that it's a significant percentage of what we could be doing.

And so I do think that we got to find out, find a way and

And I believe that there's a piece here.

I don't know where it is, but you talked, you did this interesting equation.

Somebody did this intuition equation.

that the land plus the existing structures are less than the potential market price or market opportunity than, you know, how do you convince people to do that?

And you know, the reality is we have to say if this is really a functioning market and people have said my land plus the building on it is not pushing me to do that.

It's not pushing me to convert.

So if we have an open, free market, then the question then for me became,

Okay, as we use sort of the ag forestal stuff to keep that land in a particular posture, and we give up taxes there to keep it in a posture, why isn't there a compliment for encouraging property which is underdeveloped

to develop more, because if that's the opposite of what we're doing in the forest or thing, when we're saying, we'll give you a tax break if you leave it like this, or they come to us and we say, yeah, we'll give you a tax break.

Why isn't the county then trying to rebalance that?

Because that's a net reduction in income to the county when that happens.

Wise in the county, just also then coming in and saying, you know, you got this piece of property here with a really, really kind of crummy, that's not crummy, that's Julian saying, it's crummy.

We're a really underperforming building over here.

How about if we come alongside of you and help you to maximize that and help the county over some extra amount of time?

And I think there's another piece of this, too, which is, I mean, maybe this is another metric that should be on here is the amount of unused surface parking, or if that matter, buildings that are not at the height they could be.

And it didn't look like the analysis the way it was done adequately took that into place.

And I

The example that I'd like to use is Ryder Hill Shopping Center, because if we look at the formula that was provided there, the land value is less than the improvement value.

So that would have been excluded from redevelopment, if I understood that correctly or I was reading that.

But if you look at that from space, it's mostly empty parking.

You could very easily, if we had an incentive, for example, to build structured parking, parking, we could drop a parking garage in there and you'd open up

area for development that we now have excluded in our analysis of this potential for redevelopment.

So I'd like to see explicit ways that we can look at using TIFF or other strategies to unlock redevelopment.

Yeah, I think that gets to, so your example of parking is one of many that you could look at, right?

And then asking that question as part of what the county can do, asking that question, what is it that's limiting development?

What are those areas?

Is it restrictions on wetlands?

Okay, well, that's okay.

Or is it, you know, too much of a, I mean, asking for too much parking related to something that doesn't necessarily provide those kinds of things.

What's taking up property that otherwise could be developed?

like extra parking requirements, like four per thousand.

This is an example.

Even, Chair, I wouldn't even say they're working from home.

Yeah, there you go.

It's changed.

Thank you.

Okay, Tanya.

Great.

Great discussion.

Let's talk about land use tools.

Our two major land use tools that influence the effectiveness of the growth management policy are the future land use categories and how they're applied to the future land use map or plumb and the activity centers.

Other tools will be included in the COMP plan recommendations such as updates to the zoning ordinance for development in the development areas and encouraging the use of conservation easements in the rural area.

We brought these to you as concepts last fall.

Tonight we'd like to preview the consolidated land use categories, how they're applied to the map and the activity centers.

These are the same materials that will be presented at the public meeting Wednesday, October 30th, as well as to the board on the 6th.

We'll review these in more depth in two weeks.

We are coming back to you on the 22nd, I believe, is the date.

So we'll talk about these in more depth.

Just really wanted to preview these and get your initial questions.

The Future Land Use Categories and Map and the Activity Centers support the objectives of their growth management policy.

They're also intended to foster the desired features of the development areas, which are based on best practices and community input and include housing, transportation choices, a variety of land uses, walkable neighborhoods, parks, and amenities.

Future land use categories provide recommendations for future land uses and the general form and scale of future development.

They are used during the review process for rezoning and special use permits, as you're well aware, as part of the consistency with the comprehensive plan review.

Future land use categories are applied to a future land use map.

or Flum with different colors for each category.

These uses are recommendations for development.

They are different than zoning districts and the zoning ordinance, which has requirements for development that must be followed.

The current comprehensive plan has over 20 land use categories across five area plans.

Those plans are places 29 Southern and Western, Pantops, Crozet and the village of Rivanna.

Many of the categories are similar with slightly different names and recommendations.

They overlap and the number of categories can make administration and clarity challenging.

So one of the anticipated outcomes of AC44 is having a consolidated and updated set of standard, future land use categories that are applied across the development areas in a matching approach.

This is intended to standardize the designation of categories on the future land use map and provide needed clarity.

The 11 future land use categories can be organized into the following general sections, primarily residential, mixed use, commercial and employment, and institutional and public uses.

The future land use map shows how those proposed categories, 11 plus three legacy categories, are applied across the development areas.

For example, the matching approach was applied to currently designated urban residential properties will still be urban residential.

More significant changes such as changing a property from urban residential to community mixed use would typically be done as part of an area plan update.

This is our first draft we've shared of an updated flum.

And in phase two, we shared these draft future land use categories.

Your packet includes detailed descriptions for each land use category and how the current master plan designations translate and apply to the proposed future land use map.

We'll talk about these more in our next session in two weeks.

and I'll move on to Activity Centers unless I can pause.

I can't help myself with maps.

Yeah, careful.

This is the proposed map.

You can see what we're trying to do here.

You've got all these different districts that were created before.

So we're trying to match up as much as we can.

We've got a couple of residue ones.

You see the three at the bottom of the slide.

Downtown Crozet was kind of hard to put into a new category.

It was very specific.

We had these

very low ones that were in Village Rivanna and one little portion of Cosay and then Village Center at Rivanna against some more downtown Cosay.

Yeah.

And I think one thing we recognize is that, you know, as we come back and do small area plans,

We may continue to tweak these things a little bit more, but this hopefully is a reflection of what was in the previous plan to now.

Our intent has not been to massively change some of the previous stuff that people are accustomed to now.

I was going to say, I'm assuming you've taken the airplane like, you know, Pantops, you've taken those master plants and airplanes and then that's what makes this up.

So it's the land use that was developed through those, through those processes.

Again, it's not our intent to sort of change what was done in previous small area plans.

And we sort of view this step we're in right now as a consolidation.

And if you want to change what the colors are on the map, our recommendation is to do that on a small area plan, not at this scale.

Oh, not at this scale.

So so let me just help me intellectually understand when we talk about overlays, how do we get to sort of those broad overlays?

because it would seem that at some point, perhaps not now, and I appreciate that, at some point there may be space for broad overlays to come into places that would then give a potential developer the opportunity to think if I do this year, I might get some credits for doing a mixed, a middle residential in what is basically now a single family, was basically most of a single family.

So while we wouldn't necessarily wholesale change the map, but we might say this is an area that could possibly be considered if a developer were to come in and to purchase.

You know, for instance, like Home Depot did for Fashion Square.

Suppose for Home Depot came into Fashion Square and said, you know what?

We're going to put our thing there, but we really would like to put some housing here, particularly in the back, so it's not on 29.

Could we have, what would it take for the county to say, yes, you can do an instrumental there?

I just would say, remember, your comp plan, land use designations on the map are not the same thing as the zoning map.

I understand that.

And so we do allow for, as you read through these categories, there is flexibility to maybe achieve something you're talking about, but if you want to change a certain area to a

Dimford, mixed use zone or something like that.

That's what we're sort of recommending that we think it's best to deal with that in the context of a small area plan.

I was just thinking about what Fred said that he's got and what Luisa said that they read this thinking.

And this is going to be the thing that I think is going to get a first pass before somebody goes into our zoning.

This is going to be the thing that says, oh, look, yeah, you know, you might be able to do something like this here.

So my comment was just to make sure that I was understanding it.

I mean, you guys didn't make this up now as you were doing the updates.

This came from all of these area plans and master plans.

And moreover, there's a table in your packet where we try to sort of like say, hey, these other ones, we sort of like, because they don't be very nuanced, but the nuances are not significant.

So we were trying to respect that.

And I want to just emphasize too, I do appreciate how you've taken and really just, this is more of like a, here's reflecting present reality in one coherent way.

And that's, that's legit.

And I appreciate the effort in doing that.

You know, some of the densifying conversation we were having is sort of like, we're like, forward looking, we're like, how do we do more?

How do we do more?

You know, and so I think that's where some of the pushback has been coming from.

It's like, this is really reflecting, let's pull together this really wild patchwork of things into a document.

Well, some of this, I think, already has some of that forward-looking because it is a little bit aeroplanes looking at well.

And I sort of appreciate that mentality, too.

Lotta Yellow on this map that I wish wasn't there.

You know, which cycles back to a previous thing, you know, we talk about, you know, redevelopment of underutilized spaces.

And I see those the yellow areas as areas that are, you know, right for redevelopment to particularly older neighborhoods.

And I wonder how we do those small area plans, if we can find ways to bring that conversation home and set that as a goal

because I know some of those areas lack infrastructure that newer neighborhoods have.

They may not have sidewalks, they may not have other things that newer neighborhoods have.

find a way to characterize that conversation in a way that this is infrastructure that if someone was to provide mixed juice in this area, that we could provide this infrastructure as part of that.

That could be a condition of that redevelopment of that area.

And I think that would make it a lot more appealing to the people in those areas to say, ah, you know, if someone puts an apartment building here, then maybe we get sidewalks finally.

We've been looking for sidewalks for years.

And I think that that's

That's what I really like to see out of this kind of process.

And also mentioned, too, that one of our eagle-eyed residents of Crozet noticed that the Montclair stream buffer is still on this map.

Thank you.

Welcome, Commissioner Firehock.

Good to see you.

All right.

Any other quick comments before we keep rolling?

So, activity centers are places that have a variety of businesses, services, and housing options, either now or in the future.

They help identify core areas of higher intensity mixed use development, which also helps to prioritize infrastructure projects and investments.

There are four center place types.

Each acts like a land use overlay, providing additional guidance for development along with the underlying future land use categories.

There are 30 draft centers proposed with a C-44.

This is a consolidation of the 50 centers currently in the five area plans.

Many of these centers are small and not currently or anticipated to be mixed use.

This consolidated set of centers helps focus development and public projects.

Centers were identified based on existing development patterns, known plan development projects, recommendations in the area plans and estimates for current and future job housing totals.

There are four types of the centers in the development areas, the regional, employment, community, and local.

Those are all in, I've listed those from higher intensity and density to lower.

On the right, you can see how the different land use tools fit together to implement the objectives of the growth management policy.

You see the activity centers are overlaid on land use, and that's the Pantops area.

The land use categories and map create a base for recommendations.

Then in key locations, activity centers are applied as an overlay, as I mentioned.

In your packets is a center's quick guide that gets into the details of the expected features of each type, along with the map on the left that shows the total of 30 centers across the development areas.

And you really get to start to see the distribution of those different types.

wanted to close with the upcoming events and one will be back in front of you to talk about several different topics.

So we're here tonight talking about growth management policy and development area utilization review, give you a little preview of the

Land Use Tools, we're going to the board on the 16th to discuss the same topic, and then we'll be back to talk in more depth about the land use tools with you on the 22nd and the board on the 6th.

We're doing the community info session on the 30th and we will be going, we will be coming back to you in November to talk about the development area land use goals, objectives and actions part of the chapter, the board as well.

And then in early November, December, we'll be talking and focusing about on the rural area land use policies.

both have a community session probably early to mid November and coming back to y'all in December.

With that, I think that's it.

We're still, we are working on the November dates.

I'll just say that because there's going to be so much going on over the next several months between the planning commission and the board,

related to this.

From a communication standpoint, it would be helpful when we talk, I don't know, maybe it's item eight or item nine on our current agenda, which is AC 44 update, just getting a little bit more insight into what the board said specifically on the last chapter that we reviewed as a work session, just so we can kind of keep it tight and understand those feedback loop.

Yeah, that'd be really helpful, I think.

Any other comments, questions, or requests to go backwards?

Where's River Bend's shopping center?

Oh, sorry.

That is the Pantops.

That's where you have it.

That's River Bend.

The airport is an interesting thing.

It has its own management plan and that's something we're going to like.

You'll see the community facilities.

Russell with that one.

Do we call it out as its own land use as airport or do we sort of speak to its underlying industrial?

I see.

It's just grouped with North Fork Research Park.

I just was curious as to why that was the case.

I just had a quick question.

On the employment centers, just in the forum site and design guidance where it says two to four stories up to six by additional consideration, I guess my comment would be why are we limiting it to four and only up to six by additional consideration.

I feel like we definitely have places we could go taller and if we want our centers to be successful then people need to be able to work.

So good question and maybe a good thing to do.

Let me just ask that we're going to come back with this whole chapter.

Part of what we were trying to do here, Karen, was this stuff's going out with the public right now and we wanted to make sure that you knew that these were some major concepts that are going out to the public so that you and the board

No, if a constituent comes up to talk to you, but what are they talking about with employment centers?

You at least know what we're saying when we say employment center.

Okay, and I'm happy to do that.

I mean, I would say that that's an overarching comment I had with a number of

The story should not be as high as what this commission talked about.

And then also the density that we want to get to make it easy as possible for the development community to build to the density that we want, because as we've reported over and over again, we're not, we have our little density range, but we're not getting, we're getting half of that.

Yeah, that's right as we're here for you.

No, I was just going to say, just remember though that this is kind of important because one of the things we're hoping to do is to use this as a basis for a new zoning ordinance.

So as we talk about these things, it does, you know, right.

I think we talked about this in different areas, but we were talking about it at high level, right?

We're leaving a lot of density behind.

This is a specific way of how do we look at maximizing that density, right?

So how do we go from the high level goals to then

very tangible ways of achieving it to then the measurable ways that we can look at.

Yeah, just one thing on that.

And I know Mr. Murray has also a point on page seven at the bottom.

These metrics should be reported to the Board of Supervisors for their review and consideration every two years or as requested beginning in 26.

Pretty specific.

I just would

I think what you're hearing is that the metrics themselves, the measurements, the metrics should be, I think should have some discussion, right?

Just so that we can think through that.

Chris Murray?

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.

I second that.

The other thing I'll point out too is, as we look at this as rural area land use policy, I would hope to see when we get to that point, this future land use key, that we have a similar sort of chart for that, for the rural areas.

Some of these things in here, for example, industrial exists in the rural area, but they should be characterized very differently.

Great, so now with three minutes left, I'll ask staff, did we answer your two questions?

I believe so.

Okay.

Great.

All right.

Well, thank you.

With that, I will send us to recess until six o'clock.

which time I'll see everybody back here.

Thank you.

Good evening again.

Ms.

Firehock.

Here.

Great.

Thank you.

We have already addressed the consent agenda.

Thank you.

So I will move us on to entertaining any public comment on matters pending before the commission, but not listed for public hearing on the agenda.

Are there any comments that would like to be shared?

Yes, ma'am.

Come on up.

You think Janie Holbrook, Whitehall?

Are we good?

Yep.

I spoke in June about Eastern Avenue and Project Heron in Crozet.

As of August, Eastern has a new incarnation under the Public Private Transportation Act.

And I really hope that a P3 will be successful.

But there are many risks along the critical path from a finding of public interest to completion of the bridge.

My first concern is a roughly $5 million gap between $17.3 million in county funding

and the $23 million cost estimate Lance Stewart mentioned at a Springtown Hall.

Will credible bids even be received?

Secondly, the Kimley-Horn Evaluation or regulatory risk was based on their own bridge design.

The Collins Engineering design for Project Heron was not evaluated, but shortened the bridge by contributing 33,000 cubic feet of dirt.

Cost go down when the bridge is lower and shorter, but will VDOT approve a thrill ride descent from preserved slopes to the bridge?

Will FEMA approve that much fill to support a roadway?

What other issues will arise with an unknown design?

When you are soon asked to approve Oak Bluff, isn't it reasonable to either wait until Eastern is actually a reality or to recommend three units per acre to reduce the impact on safety and traffic in the community?

Crozet has seen plans for infrastructure vanish before, and let me present a case study.

Ms.

Shaffer has distributed some visuals, and I'll go through them very quickly.

Exhibit one.

Eastern Avenue has been in county plans for decades.

Developers were to fund the construction.

East Crozet covers a large geography and a lot of people.

The eastern extension north to three-notched would provide an alternative to Crozet Avenue for many, many trips.

Exhibit 2 shows a possible route for eastern along the edge of what is now Glenbrook.

Instead of granting an easement, the site plan stubbed out eastern into a known hazardous waste site.

The road became impractical to quote Mr. McDermott.

Exhibit 3.

Several years after Eastern to Three Notched became impractical, the county commissioned the Crozet Transportation Study, and consultants seemed to believe that Eastern to Three Notched was still an essential part of the plan.

Signs still announced the future road.

Exhibit 4 Before the ink was dry on the transportation study, the Crozet Master Plan was published without Eastern to Three Notched.

The traffic study has not been corrected, and it is still used to guide decisions for Crozet.

This Eastern to Three Notched example illustrates why my neighbors and I are concerned about the extension south to 250.

A finding of public interest is not tantamount to completion of the road and bridge.

Only when the critical steps in the process are complete, bids and regulatory approvals are received, funding is assured and the bridge is well underway.

Then and only then will the built potential of Oak Bluff at maximum density be reasonable.

Thank you for those thoughtful comments.

Look forward to studying this.

Are there any other comments?

Good evening.

Good evening.

Thanks for the opportunity.

My name is Mike Parisi.

I'm a former Whitehall and Greenwood resident right now.

I'm a city resident.

I'm here to speak on behalf of Livable Seville.

If you're not familiar, Livable Seville is an active all volunteer group of city and county residents that advocates for land use, housing and transportation policies in Charlottesville and Albemarle.

We believe that vibrant communities provide all kinds of housing for all kinds of people in all kinds of places.

In the spirit of the county's mission to enhance the well-being and quality of life for all community members, we hope you'll consider these five high-level recommendations for this next phase of the AC44 process.

First, we hope you'll make changes to permit and promote much more housing to be built in the development areas, especially in the urban ring so more people can live closer to their jobs, their schools, and amenities.

This can be accomplished through making missing middle housing easier to build in existing residential neighborhoods while also increasing allowed densities on the few remaining green fields and other areas with potential for mixed use redevelopment.

Second, please allow much more housing to be built by right and limit the scope and instances of discretionary review as much as possible.

requiring onerous discretionary review processes, especially for the very projects that can produce the most units.

It doesn't just create uncertainty for developers, it drives prices up while driving down the actual number of units produced.

Third, we hope you'll develop a comp plan that will help residents reduce their dependence on automobiles.

The success of the county's investments in public transit, pedestrian, bicycle, and ADA infrastructure depends on allowing denser land use patterns in the areas closest to job schools and amenities.

Fourth, please consider recommending limited, targeted expansion of the development areas specifically with the aim to avoid more sprawling growth.

When the need for expansion comes, it will be possible to both protect rural areas and promote more housing close to existing activity centers.

For just one example, in the vicinity of Barracks West, a 20 unit per acre development in this currently rural area would be less than a 10 minute bike, bus, or car ride from Barracks Road Shopping Center.

Finally, an essential part of achieving Albemarle's housing goals is expanding affordable housing options.

That's one thing I wish I'd heard a little bit more of earlier.

We hope the county will increase affordable housing funding to a minimum of $10 million a year, just like the city of Charlottesville is doing, to help the thousands of current and displaced county residents who cannot afford market-rate housing.

Possible uses for this fund include preserving existing affordable housing, like Cavalier Crossings, small-sized apartments, other developments that are leaving LITECH, increasing levels of rental assistance and creating new affordable housing units.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you.

Perfect timing, by the way.

Great.

With that, is there anyone else who would like to speak in the audience?

Not think so?

Great.

Thank you.

We will now then move to items requesting deferral to a new date, and that is SP 2024-12 City Church.

I will need a motion.

It looks like the item is being requested for deferral to December 10, 2024, the date specific.

Second.

And again, I'm assuming that's a motion to defer to December 10.

Great.

And we have a second.

Any discussion?

All right.

Okay.

Mr. Bivins.

Aye.

Ms.

Firehock.

Aye.

Mr. Carrazana.

Aye.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.

My name is Kevin McDermott.

I'm the deputy director of planning.

Appreciate the opportunity to present on this project.

This is SP 2024-19, UVA Community Credit Union Tower Relocation.

So this is an application to replace an existing 156 foot tower with a new 160 foot tower.

Just to bear in mind that the height of the tower above sea level actually will remain the same.

The only difference is that there's an elevation difference on the land it's going to be built on.

The existing tower was approved by special use permit in the mid 1980s.

The map you see here shows the location of both the existing and proposed tower.

The relocation is proposed because the property is being redeveloped where the existing office building will be demolished and a new office building is going to be built.

The project is located in an entrance corridor.

A balloon test was conducted and the highlighted areas in the map show where that tower would be visible from those entrance corridors, Fifth Street and I-64, both entrance corridors.

This project is unusual because there is an existing tower already there.

We can easily verify the visibility impacts.

Overall, it is the opinion of staff that the proposed tower

has essentially the same impacts as the existing tower.

The ARB did concur with this opinion and they have issued a certificate of appropriateness.

As you can sort of see in this photo, there will be locations where the proposed tower is visible, but the existing tower is not.

Staff did note that there are just as many instances where the existing tower is visible, but the proposed tower will not be visible.

You can barely see the balloons over the trees where that red arrow is.

This is on Fifth Street going right in front of the county office building heading north.

So you can kind of see where those balloons show up above the trees.

In this photo, you can see both the existing tower and the balloons showing the height of the proposed tower.

Just highlight that so I make sure you can see it.

These are this is the balloon right here.

So you can see the balloon there.

Here is the existing tower.

This is coming off the off ramp of Fifth Street and I-64.

So the proposed tower is replacing one that is 40 years old.

It was actually not originally designed for personal wireless services.

And the new tower will not have any impacts greater than the existing tower, but it will be designed to meet the current and future telecommunication needs.

Staff has reviewed this request for compliance with the zoning ordinance.

And our opinion is that it's consistent with the requirements for approval of the special use permit.

And therefore we are recommending approval.

Thank you, Mr. McDermott.

Yeah, I mean, I only have sort of an observation.

It seems that a lot of energy is being put into a five foot difference.

That is no difference because no different actual different because of the slope of the land, the elevation.

Yeah.

Thanks.

I apologize for missing something obvious if I did.

So that's where you're capturing the extra.

Okay, 10-4.

That's right.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission.

I'm Valerie Long with Williams Mullen.

We are representing the applicant, the UVA Community Credit Union.

Thank you.

I'm going to maybe skip through a lot of my slides because they're duplicative of some of the ones that Mr. McDermott shared.

Feel free to ask me questions about any that I may run through too quickly.

I think you're all familiar with this location.

both the existing tower location and the area we're proposing to relocate it to.

It's an existing area of parking lot that won't be needed.

The credit union, as you may know, is proposing, purchased this property several years ago and is relocating their corporate headquarters to this location.

So they're going to demolish the existing building and build a new one, generally as shown on that rendering.

This is a marked upset of our plans to just demonstrate the relative location of the existing building from the new building.

And as you can see the existing tower and its distances from various property lines.

And then the new tower would be located in this area over here.

and this shows the distances to the property lines from the new location and generally they are larger.

The tower will be farther away from just about every corner.

The only one that is not the case is the northern boundary.

It's closer but it still would be 315 feet away from the northern boundary.

The parcel itself is quite large.

Much of it is not developable because of floodplain, critical slopes and a street.

This is just an enlargement of the proposed lease area.

There's only two wireless providers right now, but we wanted to accommodate future carriers who might want to co-locate on the site so we don't have to come back and amend the SP again.

We are preserving the existing, there's kind of a footpath that leads from the corner of the parking lot down to the playfields.

So we intentionally did not want to block that area.

We're also proposing some new trees around the base.

of the ground equipment, which will also be enclosed by a wooden fence.

You all discussed this already, but the existing height is 155.

It was approved at 160.

And as noted, the importance for the wireless providers is that their antennas remain at the same elevation above ground level.

Because the new site is 10 feet lower, we're proposing a tower at 165 feet.

But again, it will be essentially the same height at the top.

and some of these are repetitive from the balloon test to show you this is the existing tower looking north just before the bridge on Fifth Street.

This is closer to the site, but this is the location the balloon tested in a photo simulation and the next slide I have kind of a side by side.

So again, the left side is the existing tower and the right is a photo simulation of the proposed tower in its new location.

And likewise, this is similar to one Mr. McDermott showed you may actually be from their photos coming off the interstate heading towards Fifth Street.

Obviously it's visible from quite a distance down the ramp.

The new location is also visible, but not not as far of a distance on the ramp because it's really a straight visual shot like the existing tower is.

And then again, the side by side, you can see the relative similarity and levels of visibility at the two locations.

This is existing as you are getting on the north, excuse me, on the ramp heading west.

You can see the existing building in the sort of in the back and then the tower behind it.

and then this is the proposed tower and photo simulation in the new location.

And likewise, side by side to demonstrate the consistency and visual visibility.

This is driving south on Fifth Street towards the interstate.

You can see the existing tower and then the photo simulation demonstrates that the new one is visible.

The existing one is just from this particular vantage point hidden by that tree.

and so you can tell there again very similar visibility and then finally from the interstate the existing tower and then the proposed tower and then side by side.

So that's everything we have.

We do ask, I know there was a question about the height, as Mr. McDermott indicated, under federal regulations after approval it could be increased by 20 feet, but the existing SUP allows for 160 feet.

We're proposing to build it at 165 feet.

We would prefer for clarity and record keeping purposes that the tower be approved at the requested height of 165 so that it's clear for the record

were happy to indicate that it would not be raised in the future if that would help.

But given that it's existing, already approved at 160, I think it would be inconsistent to require it to limit its height to 145.

Got it.

Thank you.

I see with your existing building that part of your parking lot actually goes into the hundred foot buffer of the stream.

I don't know if any of it's in the stream buffer now.

I think the buffer was delineated around it.

I can check that the parking lot obviously predates the adoption of the, let me go back to the imaging question, predates the adoption of the, certainly the preserved steep slopes, which you see there in green and the yellow areas are managed steep slopes.

Did you just, I know you probably said this, but can you remind us how old the existing towers, when was that put in?

And I believe installed that same year, maybe early 97, but it was approved in 1996.

And then I'm sure you know this because you've memorized our regulations.

When was our cell tower policy adopted?

How old is that?

The policy, the comprehensive plan component, was adopted in December of 2000.

Okay, so the pull was before that policy?

Correct.

The ordinance was first adopted in 2004.

Okay.

Thank you.

That's helpful.

Great.

Thanks.

Any other questions?

Okay, applicant.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'll open it up to the public.

Are there any members of the public interested in speaking to this topic?

Okay.

Great.

So with that, I will close the public hearing and open it up for discussion.

We would like to start this off.

Anybody?

Doesn't seem like there's any.

I mean, I don't have any interest in discussing, but I'm trying to figure out, sort of, we went through this whole season of the reevaluation, the reimagining of the communication towers for the county.

and I would have hoped, I'm not going to say what I would have expected, but I would have hoped that this kind of what feels very modest.

But I had a question about that as well.

But my understanding is because it's in the entry quarter, right?

Well, actually, no, the entrance corridor is not what kicked it into this.

The reason is just because it was not entirely clear if the previous special use permits still would apply to this.

Thank you, Mr. Bivins.

The original special use permit was approved for a tower at no taller than 160 feet, and we're proposing the height to be 165 feet, which then is obviously different than requires amendment of the special use permit.

All right, so I thought that if it was in the entry, in the entry quarter, it would still be reviewed.

The ARB could still review that, but I don't believe it would have to go through the special use permit.

But in the other case, I think the confusion there between the special use permit, though, is because of the federal regulations that allow it to go the 20 feet over.

So the applicant has asked that we amend number one to the maximum height of the tower being 165 feet above ground.

Mr. Chair, I'd recommend that we, for the time being, stick with the conditions as proposed.

Again, there's the one-time increase to 265.

I can certainly work with Ms.

Long between now and when this goes to the Board of Supervisors, if she has specific language that she'd like to propose that would make it clear that they're going to go higher than 165.

My concern is that if the Commission were to approve it right now and just substitute 165 for 145, then there'd be a bump up from 165 to 185.

So my suggestion to the commission is if the commission is inclined to recommend approval, let it do so with the conditions in the staff report.

And then if Ms.

Thank you.

I feel like that came up at another one.

We had the same issue.

OK, thank you, counsel.

All right.

Would anybody like to make a motion?

That's his district.

My district, but I'm happy for someone else to do it.

All right.

So I move to recommend approval of SP 2024-19 with the conditions included in the staff report.

All right.

Ms.

Firehock.

Hi.

Great.

Thank you.

Thanks.

All right.

With that, we'll move on to the next public hearing, SP 2024-2, Midway Martin Store Power Line Upgrade.

All right, thank you.

Once again, Kevin McDermott with the Deputy Director of Planning.

This is SP 2024-2, Midway to Martin Store, Transmission Line Phase 2.

So this is an application to upgrade approximately 2.8 miles of the existing transmission line from Thunder Ridge Road in Southwest Albemarle County

to the Martin Store substation in Nelson County.

This is phase two of the project.

The first phase went northwards, northeastward from Thunder Ridge Road to the Midway substation, which is located near the intersection of Midway Road and Millish School Road.

The existing 60 to 70 foot wooden age poles are proposed to be replaced with 58 to 82.5 steel monopoles within the existing right of way.

I want to highlight that

We recently learned that there was a mistake in the applicants' narrative that had a different proposed height for those.

This height is actually different.

It initially said 65 to 95 feet, I believe.

That's what's in your staff report.

They confirmed that it is actually

The new poles will be 58 to 82.5 feet.

So really substantially similar to the existing H poles.

So the steel monopoles will be replaced within the existing right of way.

And this map shows the location of the transmission line, which does continue into Nelson County to approximately Route 151.

The upgrade is occurring because of the existing wooden poles are over 40 years old and showing signs of deterioration.

This line serves almost 6,750 customers and the replacement will improve reliability of the system.

The petition is for energy and communication transmission facilities under section 10.2.26 of the zoning ordinance.

It affects 41 parcels of land totaling approximately 587.9 acres.

No dwelling units are proposed.

The zoning is rural area and the comprehensive plan recommends this area is rural area.

As I said, the proposal is for replacement of existing poles within the existing right of way and construction impacts will be limited and temporary.

Staff believes there will be no substantial detriment to the adjacent lots.

The character of the nearby area will remain unchanged as the new poles are not substantially different from the existing poles.

No grading is proposed and vegetation impacts will be limited.

The zoning ordinance does provide for public requirements such as reliable electrical service.

Public utilities are in harmony and supportive of the agriculture and residential uses throughout the district and the proposal was evaluated against the applicable regulations found in Section 5 as they relate to public utility structures and staff believes that they are in harmony.

Staff Opinion is that the request is consistent with the requirements in the Zodan Ordinance for approval, and you can see the recommended action and conditions on this slide.

Great.

Thank you.

Any questions for Mr. McDermott?

No.

Pretty straightforward.

All right.

Thank you.

With that, I will open the public hearing and ask for the applicant's report.

Welcome.

Calvin, just give it a second.

Not earlier.

Nicole's on her way.

I'm sure you can just say enable content down below.

My name is Charles Ward.

I'm the Vice President of Engineering Services at Central Virginia Electric Co-op.

And it is my responsibility and my team's responsibility to oversee substation and transmission projects within our service area.

Okay, so this is, I think as you said, special permit 2024-0002.

This is the vicinity map that shows, as Mr. McDermott put up earlier, from Thunder Ridge Road down to the county line.

It is all within the existing easement.

There's no other easement needed.

Our easement is 150 feet wide.

At one time, probably some 40 years ago, there were two transmission lines in this easement.

And so one was removed, and it left structures that are narrow, which are eighth frame structures, similar to this picture here.

And this line hugs down the right side of our easement as you move south.

So it leaves the very good opportunity for us to move a new line to the center of the easement.

So when we get completed with the project, the new line will be in the center of the easement pretty close, and then we'll go back and we'll remove all these age frame structures.

It is a radial feed, and if you don't know what a radial feed is, it has no backup.

So when the line goes down, we lose 6,750 customers until we can get it repaired.

And we've had several of those problems over the past few years.

The wood poles are deteriorating.

The crossarms are deteriorating.

The crossarms actually are rotting from the inside out.

So we don't know that they're bad until they're broken.

And then, you know, we have an outage.

As was mentioned, the existing pole range is 45 to 70 feet.

Phase 2 consists of approximately 2.8 miles from Thunder Ridge Road down to the county line.

Phase 1, which was completed in 2023, it started a little bit over two years ago.

and it was replacing 3.4 miles from Midway substation, which is just north of the Miller School down to Thunder Ridge Road.

We had to divide the project up into two phases due to financial men power restraints.

And then, as I said, the line will be constructed within our 150 foot easement.

No other easement will be required.

Our easements are maintained and we won't require any cutting of any trees or anything.

They may be some trimming of some of the trees, but nothing outside of the easement.

Nothing that we wouldn't do ordinarily to maintain service.

The transmission line is an upgrade to the poles only.

We are replacing the conductor

but it's the same size.

So we're not increasing the conductor size, we're just putting up new conductor.

What that does, because it is a radio line, it allows us to build in the new line and then at some point cut it over and make it energized and then tear out the other line.

So we are replacing the conductor but it's the same size but the poles are being upgraded from wood to ductile iron.

and they'll range in height from 58 to 82 and a half feet.

That's mainly due because they are going to be a single pole construction as opposed to the 8th frame that you see on the right.

The pole construction looks a whole lot nicer.

It does require just a little bit of additional height, but it looks very good if you

We'll go out there and take a look at the existing line, the 3.2 miles that we've done.

It's a nice looking room.

So the pole line is a little bit over 40 years of age.

And like I said, it's just deteriorating and it serves 6,750 members through four other substations, including the winter green,

Resort Area, and the pumping station which pumps water up for all of their fire safety and everything on the mountain.

So it's a very important line to them and to CVEC.

So the upgrade will increase the reliability to our customers and to the CVEC system.

The ductile iron poles are resistant to woodpeckers, insects, rot, and weathered.

And they weather natural finish, which is a bare iron.

So it looks just like a tree.

I mean, when you're looking at it, you can't tell a whole lot of difference from the road.

So we understand that you're working on a new comprehensive plan.

We're not sure if you got it all

in place yet.

So it's AC 44 and your other one was 2015.

So we've addressed both of them here.

The transmission line falls within the rural area three and it aligns with the goals and objectives of the comprehensive plan, both of them.

So this is, I won't read this, but it's consistent with the 2015 Comprehensive Plan.

So it supports private, electric, telephone and so forth service to the customers and, you know, being able to provide that service to customers in the community.

and then it's also consistent with the comprehensive plan and I think this is a draft.

I'm not sure if it's been approved yet, but that's all I could find online.

Goal three and objective 3.6, which is pretty much in line the same thing as 2015.

So the impacts to the public facilities and the public infrastructure, it's in a rural area.

It's a mix of vacant residential farmland,

Hunting Property.

All right-of-ways cleared with a mix of maintained fields.

And again, this is just a one-line diagram of the poles.

You have your H-frame on the right, and you have your single monopole on the left.

No impacts are expected from the proposed project due to all of them performed inside the right-of-way.

The majority of the truck traffic that we'll have will be up and down the right of way.

There will be access points along and we work with the landowners and to get the access into the right of way.

The design will abort all sensitive areas and all the work will be performed with rubber cracked vehicles.

We put a lot of design and effort into the design

A lot of effort, a lot of time.

This is just a typical drawing that shows the effort and design that we put in.

You know, it's very detailed.

So we take, you know, we even show trees there that might be impacted.

So it's a lot of work goes into the project.

Got a few slides here that shows any streams and ponds.

along the ways, no major waterways, just mainly small streams and some ponds.

Vegetation management, we perform extensive work each year to cut and maintain our right of ways.

We have a 4,500 mile system of lines that we maintain.

CVEC invests more than $2.5 million a year on its vegetation management.

And we're proud to be the caretaker of the environment.

This is a certificate of habitat partner certificate awarded to CVEC recognition.

Great.

Now you were perfect.

Where's the red?

You're over.

Thank you.

That was really helpful.

I learned a lot.

I just have a comment.

So first of all, thank you.

I used to live in a house.

It was along the route of that, where that power line is going to, the upgrade is going to occur over in the baseball area.

And so first, I have to comment on my

The reliability of my power under the co-op was so much better than where I am with Dominion over in Sugar Hall.

So thank you all for all you do.

The other thing that I'll say too is I really appreciate that you're taking efforts to minimize herbicide.

My wife and I are botanists.

A lot of people don't know, but some of the most critically important species of rare plants live in those power line right-of-ways.

So, minimizing herbicides is also important.

Something that Dominion doesn't do.

I've seen a lot of areas with very rare plant communities hit with herbicide that are maintained by Dominion.

So, I appreciate.

Thank you very much.

I had a question.

Okay.

Yes, so this is in my district.

You mentioned the 6,750 customers you did mention, you know, obviously it's going over to Nelson County and helping with critical needs like making sure the pumps at Wintergreen don't fail to put that water up the mountain.

Can you just sort of describe the service area of this line?

Is it for Admiral?

The service area, the geography of the service area.

Yeah, I'm just trying to get like, are they in Southern Albemarle?

Yeah, they're in the southern part of Albemarle.

There's customers all along the line that we serve with our distribution line.

Now, the transmission line serves substations.

They don't serve any particular customer.

So they carry the power to the substations and then the substations distribute the power back out to the customers.

So this line carries power.

It comes from Midway, which brings power down the distribution line to customers all in Albemarle County.

And then we go to Martin Store, which there's a distribution line that comes back.

and ties with the midway distribution line.

So it serves customers from Albemarle County also.

There was a big outage recently a few weeks ago that was Nelson and Albemarle.

Everything was out.

Gas stations, even the brewery was down.

We couldn't even console ourselves in the parameters like we have done in the past.

All right.

Well, I mean, it is very reliable service.

It's gotten much better in the last decade.

Even when my power did go out when I was in Batesville, it was up like that.

I mean, it was, I mean, it goes out when I'm in Sugar Hollow, when it goes out, it'll be out for like a week.

And I don't understand why.

But I mean, these guys are up and down the road constantly.

Move.

Is that a quick question?

So this is essentially, it's a potential for backfeeding that line.

Yeah, there's no backfading for this particular line.

We've, we've looked at some backfading from other areas.

It's very expensive and, and, you know, just because of the train, you're kind of right up for the mountains.

We'd have to come from Colleen.

and tie back into a Martin store.

That's probably 10 or 12 miles across the hills.

I just had one question.

I'm curious.

I don't know if you can answer this, but the vegetation management plan, how often do you look at that and assess and determine whether it's still appropriate or needs to be changed?

Is there a yearly?

And I think I'm not sure the cycle

I want to say it's a 10-year cycle for the whole system.

So 4,500 miles.

So we do like 450 miles a year.

And we use a lot of different methods.

will have tree trimming go in.

We also use the helicopter.

Oh, yeah, right.

Yeah.

That's scary.

It is.

It's very scary.

Great.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Are there any, doesn't look like there are any audience members that are here to speak to this right now?

All right, with that, I'll close the public hearing.

Bring it back to the commission.

I think we're all generally supportive of safe power and reliable power.

I'm prepared to make a motion.

I move to recommend approval of SP202402 with the conditions included in the staff report.

Any further discussion?

Okay.

Ms.

Firehock.

Aye.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McDermott.

Welcome to hang out for the rest of the agenda.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Awesome.

You too.

Thanks very much.

Take care.

We'll move on to committee reports.

Any committee reports from commissioners?

Yes.

So, so there was a CCAC meeting about capital projects with Albemarle County Schools.

And so that was very interesting to see all the different projects that they're engaged.

And they talked about the, the new Western Albemarle parking lot they just put in for

They've been out there to see that.

They talked about some of the things we've heard about about some of the expansions of the high schools, adding new units and so forth.

I've actually got two reports because we didn't have a meeting last time.

So the place is 29 Rio CAC met toward the end of September.

There is a proposal, presumably, that'll come our way at some point in Belvedere.

They are looking for a zoning map amendment to the original proffer in Belvedere, included a 100-foot

Buffer kind of running out or yeah, Buffer running along the railroad tracks for a future road to connect from Rio up to rather from the Belvedere neighborhood up to Polo Grounds.

This would remove that and then basically ask for the space to build homes, townhouses.

The developer, who's also the head of the HOA there, has offered to proffer

you know the 20% affordable units in the homes that they build in that section also to kind of build a connector road kind of behind in there to be sort of internal traffic flow facilitation.

and then also to build a greenway that would connect in blue with a road road to put a greenway to connect the trails up in still Meadow and no longer Rivanna.

Either to be maintained by the HOA or maintained by the county, however you want to play that out.

There's a lot of commentary, a lot of folks from Belvedere showed up, some were sort of confused and still thought this was proposing a new road to connect and it's actually the opposite.

So staff and the, you know, billboard will figure that one out.

Also, on the transportation front, the CTECH met, the Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee.

This was just one, and probably could come from several other committees too, but basically the smart scale proposal cost estimates have come in.

So one thing of interest, there's only $500 million available statewide for these larger high priority projects.

Statewide $2.3 billion was proposed.

So our chances are not awesome on all these.

But the other thing too is that in some cases, so it's a new scoring system, so we don't really know exactly how it's going to play out.

One thing that was kind of interesting is how some of these larger districts can bring money to the table.

and so then that makes them more attractive.

So you got some NOVA projects that are bringing $150 million for the table.

So they're only asked for 70 and so that ranks them much higher.

But the other thing that was kind of wild to me is that the estimates we submitted are 35% higher than today's dollars to account for the inflation of how long these things can take at current inflation rates.

Anyway, long and short, the one that made me sort of sad was that, given the price point of the Rio and Hillsdale peanut, that sort of double, it may not be such a strong contender, but a few others could still be strong contenders.

Mr. Bivins?

At the places I'm reading it now, so I know where we are, where I was.

Places 29 hydraulic CAC, not the Jack Jewett CAC, which you know is my, she was my own personal bias there.

But we had something that hopefully, I mentioned it the last time, but I think it would be actually, if we could do it.

We heard from the Office of Housing and, it's interesting, the Office of Housing and Housing Albemarle,

which I think would be really interesting for us to see because it laid out, Stacy laid out sort of a lot of data that we probably have not seen.

So we saw, we were engaged in the early parts in talking about what should the, perhaps should the process be for affordable housing, but I don't believe we've seen how the cow has been actually implemented in the county.

And so I would suggest I was,

Pleased with what I saw because I didn't know anything.

And so it was actually quite refreshing to see that information.

But I think it might be helpful as we wrestle with, you know, what are we saying in the comp plan to see how it's actually being being lived out on a day to day basis.

And then that's all that was like the major thing for that.

And when I have the significant question, are we really expected at the all CAC meeting next week?

Is that something we're expected to be at?

I mean, I don't know.

I might have that incorrectly in my calendar.

Can somebody update me on where and when that is?

It will be on 30th.

And it'll be quite honest.

If you're there.

My question is that because I'm looking over the monitor.

I think that's perhaps a function of those of us.

Pretend not to know you.

Apparently, it's almost time that... Any other reports?

Yes, ma'am.

All right.

My report is just that we had a community meeting for a new proposal for the Living Earth School.

The location is essentially

behind Walnut Creek Park, if I'm not mistaken.

It's hard to, like I'm looking on the map and I'm remembering where it was.

It seemed like a much better property for that location.

And it was a very well attended meeting.

And I think the applicant did a good job of describing kind of how they planned to use the property, have a relatively light footprint.

Anyway, so that will be coming to us at some point to be determined.

It was that road that was really skinny, where barely two cars could, two cars did not really pass.

Yes, it was.

It was really hard to reach.

And there was a lot of concern.

by the neighbors about the disturbance of having bands going up and down that all at once dropping off a bunch of kids.

So this seems to be a much better proposal from what I saw in that community, like I said, was not not so alarmed as the past proposal.

So I think that they've thought through a lot of that.

They listened.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Any more committee reports?

Great.

How about we'll send it back to Mr. Barnes?

Yes, sir.

There were two Board of Supervisors meeting since we last met.

On September 18th, Board reviewed the Piedmont Grounds Management Landscape Business.

As you recall, that was 250 web.

Blank on the name of the store out there at Beaver Dam, maybe it was the name of the store.

It's point seven at one point.

Okay.

Thank you.

Anyhow, it's closed now.

But the board reviewed that one and approved that application.

Interestingly, on the subsequent meeting of October 2nd, the applicant, two things happened.

And we probably should share that with you all for your information.

I'll make sure we get that out this week.

These are the transportation improvements?

At this point, the studies occurred, and they're basically, along the short of it, we kind of looked at it as a multivariable calculus problem.

Each of these little small intersections running from the city line all the way out to the board's head.

He was like multiple different things you might do at each intersection.

And we worked through that and tried to come up with the best fit for the ones really from the entrance into the Birdward Golf Course or the complex there at, I guess that's now Boardshead Drive, coming back into the city.

And the staff, you know, in consultation with the VDOT working, it came sort of like this is the preferred alignment that staff VDOT and

We also have the ID corridor group, a collection of citizens along that corridor would endorse that.

The other thing that was very interesting at this meeting was we had a deferral.

1193 Seminole Trail, which was the, it started off as a Texas doughnut, and we reviewed it a little bit ago.

The place right at the city county of Boundary, where the Chinese grocery store is right next to, and the city has a, on the joining property of the Lachey Grill.

Looking at that being redeveloped.

The applicant came in and deferred that.

The reasons for the deferral weren't completely clear, but I think that was their sort of assessing other options.

And I think they had mentioned that we might be pleased with what they may come back in.

I think they're looking at different investments and interest rates are falling and that may change some of their investment calculation on that property.

So I would just say stay tuned.

It may not come back to you all.

I'll just give you the forewarning if it's

Substantially similar to what the initial project was that you all approved, which made you go straight back to the board.

Yeah, it's not right by my hot pot sauce a little longer.

You don't mind, Mr. Chair, I'll just go into the next item quickly.

Obviously, we had a pretty lengthy discussion about that tonight.

And one of the things I want to try and do is I'm working on a, again, sort of suggested a schedule, trying to bring that back to you all.

But I do want to say, just a reminder, that we do have three meetings this month and three meetings next month.

The meetings this month, obviously, will be our standard one coming up on the 22nd.

And we will be holding a special joint City County meeting on the Resilient Together initiative on October 29th.

One thing I'll note on that is there's three and a half hours held on our calendars.

I just want to make sure.

I have the 29th on my calendar.

What were you saying about three weeks?

Let me start again.

That one I had as far as this one I didn't, but I was out of town.

And in November, we will again have three meetings.

They will be November 12th, 19th, and 22nd.

Sorry, can you say that again?

12th, the 19th, and the 26th, they will all have 4 p.m.

work sessions.

The first two, we will be talking about AC 44.

The third on the 26th, we'll be talking about form-based code.

Those were all work sessions.

We're also, just because I know you'll be interested, aside from the normal private sector reviews, we hope to bring you the commercial solar ordinance for public hearing on November 19th.

And the Repair and Buffer Protection Standards will be brought as a work session on the 26th at 6 p.m.

Well, Mr. Barnes, I know you talked about setting around a calendar.

Will those be on it?

We sent you this calendar.

I thought so, yeah.

And I just wanted to reiterate it.

Okay.

I think what I may need to do is give you an AC44 calendar and then just refresh the meetings we have for the rest of the year.

Yeah, okay.

Thank you.

That'd be great.

Thank you.

Awesome.

That's what all I have.

Thank you.

Yeah, great.