Board of Supervisors Joint Meeting with the Planning Commission   8/15/2017

So I call this July 15th Planning Commission to order.

August.

Thank you.

Let's try that again.

It's six o'clock.

We're all here.

We are going to start our August 15th, 2017 Planning Commission.

And it's the details that could get you in trouble.

Okay, and I'm gonna call the Board of Supervisors to order, please.

And if we could go around the room and introduce ourselves, and that way we can also have a mic check so that Travis and Sharon up there can make sure they can hear everybody.

So let's start which way.

Mack Lafferty, Jack Jouett, Planning Commission Bill Palmer, UVA Representative, Non-voting, Planning Commission Andrew, do you want to introduce yourself as well since you're part of the, just introduce yourself and you're going to have a mic, but Andrew Gasparay, Director of Planning, Albemarle County

With that, let me just take time to ask if we could have a moment of silence.

Moment of silence to remember and honor the victims of violence in our community this past weekend.

Thank you.

You have a real mic up there.

Yeah, that's good.

Thank you all for coming.

Rachel's bringing you one.

Yeah, that's right.

Good evening.

Thank you very much.

I'll try to be quick.

I think most of you know, but just a reminder, there is a neighborhood meeting for hydraulic 29 tomorrow evening at 6 p.m. at the Holiday Inn there right on 29.

And then next week there will be a joint planning commission meeting on the 24th at 6 p.m. down at the Water Street Center at the Hollis Jefferson Planning District Commission.

Also, we're still trying to get something confirmed from the consultant, but we're hoping the week of September 9th will be able to share the thought of the draft concept planning with planning commissions at that time before that wraps up and we have a final concept share on September 10th.

Just a plug.

The two are running pretty parallel to each other to keep up

Thank you very much.

And without further ado, I'm going to have Rachel Falkenstein who's been chief cook and bottle washer making this happen to date and have her kick this off.

All right, thank you, Andrew, and good evening, everyone.

We're excited to be here tonight to present our work so far on the small area plan.

And we're particularly excited about this project because it lies at the intersection of a lot of important goals in the county.

And I probably don't need to remind you, but I will anyway, that the redevelopment of the Rio Route 29 intersection area is the ward's top priority for the two-year strategic planning.

And as part of that,

So to that end, we felt now is an important time to pause and check in with the planning commission and the board on the work we've done so far and present a draft design concept to get your input before we move forward and hopefully thank you for meeting tonight as a joint meeting because this allows us to hopefully stay on schedule and get that to you.

So tonight we have Mike Callahan and Vlad Gorilovic from Renaissance Planning.

They're going to be walking through where we've been so far.

All right, well, thank you very much to the Board of Supervisors and the Planning Commission for having us here tonight.

We're really excited.

I also just want to say how pleased we are to be here and what an honor it is, especially with everything that's happened this week, to be here and focused on something positive and something future oriented.

So we really appreciate this opportunity.

The purpose of our meeting is to illustrate the opportunities that we see in this Rio 29 area and to bring you up to date on what we've been doing and what some of the outcomes are so far from phase two of the small area plan.

We're going to trace the evolution of this project since phase one.

As you'll recall, we were here in January in the big room presenting to you all.

We've done a lot of work since that time.

And then I'm going to hand it off to Vlad to talk about the design concept that we have collaboratively developed with the community, with staff, with some key stakeholders.

But most importantly, we want to get your direction.

That's what we're really here for tonight is to get your direction.

And I welcome any questions, any comments as we go through

and the PowerPoint.

Our presentation will get into some of the why this is important and background information, but we'll spend a big chunk of our time on the design process and the design concepts we developed so far before moving into next steps, which Andrew will walk us through.

So why this plan now?

Some of this you've seen before, but change happens.

On the left you'll see the area 60 years ago, it was farmland.

On the right you see the area in 2000, pretty much a built out retail hub of the county.

The change is inevitable and what is this area going to be in another 60 years?

This is a really important question that this plan can help answer.

Market trends are another important reason for this plan now.

We know that millennials and boomers are the two biggest demographic groups in the country and in this state and that their preferences have been changing, moving towards more walkable urban places.

We also know that retail is changing and the market is changing here a lot with bricks and mortar sales on the decline.

while online growth has been booming.

And so there's been a lot of change in the marketplace.

This is a very heavy retail area.

There's a million square feet plus of retail just in the half mile radius around Rio 29.

There's 1.7 million square feet in the whole small area.

And so this plan is an opportunity to give people some flexibility to adapt to these changes in the market.

It's also important for economic reasons.

This is a major gateway, obviously, into UVA, Charlottesville, into the county.

The 29 North corridor represents almost half of the county's sales and business tax revenue, so it's hugely important to the county's ability to provide high quality services.

And perhaps most importantly, it's a key juncture within the development area.

And it's really important in the future to the success of the development area policy that redevelopment can happen in these places, such as Rio 29.

Currently, as you know, its low density uses are separated, and so this represents this plan and opportunity for something different.

So big point is this is an opportunity plan.

We think it's opportunity for the property owners because it can increase the opportunities, the possibilities for what they do with their property, create more flexibility to respond to those changes in the market that I described.

For the community, it's a win because it supports the creation of walkable kind of urban communities and through all of our input that we've received over the last year plus, walkable communities is definitely a common theme.

And then finally, it's a win for the county because it increases the economic potential of this really critical area within a development area and supports responsible growth management and the fulfillment of the development area policy.

So a little bit on the background, how did we get to where we are today?

There's several building blocks in this transformation for the Rio 29 area.

It started with the policy of Places 29 calling for this to be a real walkable mixed-use area in the future.

The next building block is the small area plan.

Phase one was kind of 30,000 foot level.

This phase that we're in now too, we're getting into more detailed design.

And then there's going to be a third phase that's going to get into the how.

How do you implement this?

And also some recommendations for updates to the development code.

This is familiar to you all.

We presented it back in January, but just as a refresher, the key findings from phase one, which again was kind of the high-level look, is that the future vision for this area really is transformational.

This is a built-out, fully developed, just about fully developed area.

So we really focus on the future function and form of how this could evolve over a long period of time.

with the function being nodes of development connected by high quality transit.

Right now everything's kind of spread thin across the area.

Strip development along 29.

So the future function is nodes.

And the form within those nodes is 15 minute walkable communities.

So places where you can live, work, play.

You can get your basic essentials of life within a 15 minute walk.

and of course as we described during phase one, high quality transit's really the key to making this happen.

Perhaps in the short term that's some kind of express bus but evolving over time to a higher and higher quality so you eventually get to something like bus rapid transit which could have dedicated lanes and stations.

Phase one also gave us guiding principles.

We heard a lot, people in the county aren't shy about coming out and sharing their opinions online in public forums and so we

Place making, creating a real magnet for people in business, having a mix of uses in this area, having a multi-modal transportation system so you can drive here and walk but it's also very pedestrian friendly, transit friendly.

Having open space and recreation and green spaces throughout the area.

Protecting the neighborhood.

This is really critical.

People said they want the intensity away from the existing neighborhoods and cascading down with a good buffer to their neighborhoods.

An intergenerational community where you can get everything you need as you go through the different phases of life.

And then finally, a really great visitor gateway into the county and into the city.

So as far as our design process, we have been working under this second phase once again under a urban development area planning technical assistance grant from the state of Virginia.

And so we actually just started this phase in June, and we have a four-step process.

We're already into the kind of preferred design phase, and this meeting is a really critical milestone to get some feedback on the direction that we're heading in.

We've done a lot of outreach in that short period of time.

In fact, actually even predating the UDA grant, we had a charrette on May 11th.

We used that charrette to get some input from people on what they wanted to see in this area and really use that kind of broad input to create three distinct alternatives for how this area could develop over time.

Vlad's going to introduce those in a second, but those alternatives were really conversation starters.

We wanted to have some distinct

things that we could then take in June to a work group.

We have a small, about a dozen people work group we've been kind of bouncing things off of.

And then in July to the Steering Committee, which is property owners, business owners, some of you all are on that key stakeholder committee.

and then in July on the 27th we had a public charrette and we also had an online survey the county administered for about a week and an event at the First Fridays downtown Charlottesville kind of in an open house format.

So we've had a lot of different mechanisms to get input and from that we developed a preferred design concept that Vlad will be describing in just a moment.

Thanks.

Thank you again.

We're especially honored to be here.

And this is a very important, serious planning process for the county.

So it's great to see you all having this joint meeting.

As Mike said, the most important thing for us today is to get your direction and input on this preferred design alternative.

Because the next thing we want to do, according to our gratitude and our scope, is to detail this out, turn it into a plan, a future vision for this area.

So before kind of walking through the alternatives and the preferred concept, potential preferred concept, I want to talk about whenever you do this kind of process, you want to be clear about your assumptions.

What are you assuming when you're starting this process?

So one of the things you'll see is that these assumptions include a build out.

So kind of all the area, all the study area.

What it could potentially be in the future, kind of a what if.

And that's important because if the county's gonna do some policy framework on this and even some code and zoning adjustments in the future, you need to know what all the area kind of vision is, even though it might be a very slow kind of build out, might take decades to build out.

and we will show a phasing in the final plan and kind of a more near term vision as well as this very long term build out.

Secondly in transportation, we want to show for, you know, this area has obviously some traffic issues even nowadays and as you consider what this could be in the future, how you're going to handle that traffic.

assume and show and build for this internal trip capture, basically creating a network of internal roadways so that as the area redevelops, you don't have to have every trip going out onto a 29 or a aisle for convenience and for daily needs.

And then for these longer range trips, commuting trips, regional traffic, having some kind of high quality transit as Mike mentioned.

The intensity on these visions you'll see can vary.

We're not necessarily presupposing a density.

We want to hear input and we've heard a lot of good input on the intensity.

Also, when we do the transportation analysis, the economic analysis, that will influence kind of the potential intensity here.

and finally the preliminary talks with VDOT.

We're really not messing with the traffic signals right now.

There's a lot of engineering that went into those with the 29 Solutions Project.

You'll see we're potentially showing one of them could move, but generally they stay where they are and they stay with the numbers.

So that's just some starting assumptions.

The process, kind of starting with the most fixed elements, we needed to look at the road connectivity first, then that potential transit station, where could centers of activity go, and what are green connections?

Obviously, Rio and 29 are big regional connectors,

There's a lack of parallel collectors, a lack of alternate routes right now.

Secondly, the parallel connectors you do have like Berkmar and potential extension of Hillsdale right now don't line up with the traffic signal.

Berkmar doesn't line up with the southern traffic signal.

Hillsdale kind of goes, if it were to extend up here, it takes you off to residential areas along Northfield.

So we tried to envision what if you could reconnect this area to this connectivity plan here.

For example, what if Berkmar could be moved to the existing traffic signal?

and then could connect over to a potential future extension of Hildale Road and could that be pointed more to serve this node rather than kind of going off in the residential areas there so kind of a long fashion square in Albemarle Square and then connect back into

create this kind of loop system that serves this node.

So if you're gonna redevelop this area, get good connections so you can have those internal trips and you don't force everything either into residential areas or back onto 29 and Riley.

So starting with that kind of concept, big picture concept for the regional connectors, we looked at kind of the internal connectors.

And also understanding that this is meant to inspire.

This is a vision that is going to be implemented by property owners, by the private sector.

The purpose of this plan at this

conceptual level is to inspire property owners into the kind of redevelopment that they may want to see in the future much more so than to dictate obviously with a comprehensive plan it doesn't have the force of law to dictate how things should be.

Trail connections, neighborhood parks, this will be developed more as we prepare the final plan but we're thinking about that at every stage of the way even through the alternatives because we've heard from the input that's a very important part of this planning process is getting that kind of green infrastructure to work.

So what we did was create these three kind of conversation starters, as Mike said, three very broad conceptual frameworks to start from to say what could the future look like?

And we use the term Station, Streets, and Squares.

So stations here was what if the center of activity really focused around that bus rapid transit station that could someday be in place at 29 and Rio,

and create a real transit oriented development walkable network within that first quarter mile.

Streets looked at what if you took an opposite kind of view where future Berkmar and Hillsdale Extension really become the main streets for this area and you focus the centers of activity along those areas.

And then finally, squares, what if you create four independent almost neighborhoods, each centered around some kind of urban plaza or park with centers of activity in each of the four quadrants.

So there were some big picture ideas and we got some very good support for this overall connectivity framework.

This idea that serving this area with a loop, getting better connections, getting internal trips was well supported as well as bus rapid transit.

There's some kind of way that we can address these longer term, these longer range trips in the future.

but making sure that we get good pedestrian connections through that transit, so you'll please try to do that in the preferred one.

And of course, green spaces and walkability, very highly supported.

Diversity of opinions on these alternatives, general kind of support from the public on the squares option.

Stakeholders leaned more towards a combination of the station and the squares, emphasizing both areas.

As you might expect, a range of opinions on intensity and scale.

A lot of the adjacent neighborhoods were concerned about not getting too intense in this area.

A lot of property owners, of course, would welcome some greater intensity to be able to respond to changing market conditions.

And so what we did was take those and put together an initial design concept that we want to present to you all and get your input and feedback and answer any questions and see if this is the right way to be heading, the right direction to be heading.

Basically, as you see here in this diagram, we focused on one of these areas as

Albemarle Square, Patchett Square area, and really trying to do a little bit of combination of the stations and squares.

So we'll talk about the squares concept in that it created these self-contained neighborhoods, but it was also important to service the BRT and create this walkable transit-oriented development node, so pulling them in closer.

And you can see in the shaded area, this could maybe be replicated on the west side of 29, although that's much more long-term,

and Fuzzy at this point.

But let me show you kind of the concept of this.

So zooming in to this area and you can see the key plan here.

We've turned a little on its side.

29 is across the top, Rio over there on the left.

And so if you start here at this BRT and try to envision if there is a future bus rapid transit stop there in the future.

It would be on the upper level of 29 in this concept, kind of in the left lane of the dedicated lane.

So this would be kind of your bus traffic transit station.

You'd have escalators up to a walkway and then back down here across 29.

and then you come into this plaza and really get into this kind of linear plaza park boulevard that pulls you into this village square, this neighborhood square around which you have a series of mixed-use buildings, retail on the bottom, offices, housing, apartments on the top, really trying to get a 15-minute walkable community where you can live, work, and play as kind of your daily round of activities.

both to respond to what we heard as the desire for this area, to respond to where the market trends are going for retail and for development in general for this kind of redevelopment.

And so you would get this kind of vision within the downtown, if you will, of this area of a urban square with mixed views surrounding it.

On 29 itself, you have this reimagined, re-envisioned retail, future retail.

It might have ground floor retail, upper floor mixed uses.

And then towards the edges, you have things more compatible with the neighborhoods, still mixed use, but lower scale housing that would create a series of walkable neighborhoods.

So that's kind of the vision and then if you can picture this kind of potentially, if this is the right concept to be working on, it could be replicated elsewhere.

What do these street frontages look like?

Mixed use edge throughout a lot of the other areas and buffered edges where you have to buffer next to schools, existing neighborhoods, green spaces, things like that.

So this is a type of build-out frontage plan that could serve as a policy framework, could become a foundation for future form-based code, code changes, things like that, where you're trying to influence the view from the road but have a lot more flexibility on what happens within the individual parcels themselves.

So, in conclusion, and we really want to get your input on this, you know, the key features of this are the big picture connectivity plans, have we captured this 15 minute walkable community concept and is it replicable in concert with this BRT and this bicycle, but that's the appropriate scale development character approach for kind of the 21st century of this area of the county's future development.

and I'll turn it back to Mike to talk about some examples.

So before we conclude, just one real world example.

One thing we heard from the work group was it would be great to provide an example from someplace else that's done this kind of 15 minute walkable community.

And actually, this example came from the very first public meeting we had in September of 2016, Crocker Park, Ohio.

And I found myself there for work.

First of all, this is a mixed use community.

Outside Cleveland, it's at the junction of two major roads, so you can imagine these are kind of big arterials, at least this is, kind of like 29 and Rio to some extent.

It also has a budding low density single family residential, kind of all around, and an old strip mall there.

And within this entire development site, it's about 70 acres.

This is, in fact, the headquarters of American Greetings.

They were kind of drawn in by the quality of this development to move their headquarters here.

But the mixed use core is about 50 acres, which is, for reference, about the size of the Fashion Square Mall property.

It's a little shy of 50 acres.

And so within this development, you've got some things that we heard from people here in Albemarle County that they would like to see from future development.

A walkable main street.

Wide sidewalk, restaurants, retail ground floor, office space, and as you get further down this street, residential on the upper floors.

Typically about two to four stories along this main street.

Also, and this is important, a city-owned event space and green space.

This is a big open green space.

You can see it right here.

It's about two acres.

And this is a facility owned by Westlake, with Westlake, Ohio, which is the town in which Crocker Park is located.

And they use it for, rent it out for events, kind of a community center for this development.

Also, importantly, around the edge is kind of

Townhomes, kind of the middle range of housing.

You've got two rows of townhomes that are a buffer between the dense kind of mixed-use core and the lower density single-family housing on the edge.

A few more images.

This is actually looking the other way now.

We're looking south down kind of the main street.

and structured parking.

That's really critical if you're going to go up at all.

If you're going to build, for instance, on the surface parking that exists.

within our study area, structure parking is a real key investment.

This is the kind of central plaza area seen right here on Picometry.

They have some little pop-up kind of shops, kiosks here.

And then also, this is something I found interesting as well, this building right here facing the square, this is kind of the vantage point from this building, is mixed use, vertical mixed use, but it's a retail ground floor, but it's medical space, medical facility on the upper floors.

And as we know from our phase one work, medical uses, that's kind of the fastest growing commercial land use within this county.

and so this was definitely a key to their development coming together.

So I think the main point I just wanna leave from this example is that these types of developments are happening in other communities in the country, many other communities, there's a lot more examples from this we could pull.

There's developers that are building these types of places.

In the next phase of this project, phase three, is really about getting into that implementation of how do you make this vision happen.

So a few key takeaways before I hand over to Andrew.

Two big points we want to leave you with.

One is continuity.

This design concept we feel is really consistent with years of policy and years of planning that's been done by the county.

It illustrates the development of a walkable, mixed use place supported by transit, the kind of places you envision in your development areas and that you envisioned at a high level in place of 29.

And it promotes quality growth in a key development area.

Opportunity, we think that's the other big takeaway.

This plan is an opportunity plan.

It increases opportunity for the property owners, the county, and the citizens of the county.

and enhances flexibility to respond to those changing market conditions, increasing the value of property.

It clarifies the preferred form or it can clarify the preferred form of development for owners, for the public and for the county which is beneficial to all.

And also, last point is that it can really, it's an opportunity to catalyze private investment.

The county doesn't own the land.

This is really gonna be driven by private property owners, private decisions on private property

but with public support in partnership, we think that's really key and there's a big opportunity to do that here.

So with that said, I'll let Andrew wrap up with next steps and we'll be here.

Point of information.

What was already there?

The green space, what was on the site of that?

There was a strip shopping center but a lot of the land was not developed.

Large portions of it weren't developed and so obviously you're in a different situation here There's a few other examples that we could point to like in Chapel Hill on 54 coming into Chapel Hill There's the East 54 project which was on the site of kind of an old low-density hotel and they put a big mixed-use project there as you come into town

I'd like to take us home, dare I say.

I'm going to start with a couple of disclaimers.

I think this is really important.

We've had a great process.

We've engaged many different kinds of stakeholders.

We've engaged developers, we've engaged financeers, we've engaged property owners, we've engaged the public.

all with a view to how can we achieve this vision that we all want in some way or another.

And when you get down to the details, it gets a little bit harder to achieve consensus because reality gets in the way.

So we were really careful to make sure that we were trying to make this as an opportunity plan.

Much of the land that was

We were really trying to gain and engage a partnership potential to achieve these things over time.

So we were very careful to make sure we didn't

designed the exact development.

That's really not up to us.

We're trying to design the form and the indications of how this might be.

And I know it's a very difficult concept to do.

But remember, we're trying to come up with enabling legislation over a code that allows them to do something that we, it's the performance that we want.

They can't hear you, so you're gonna have to, yeah.

Is this better?

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's recording.

Sanity checks, we've done quite a few.

We've looked at financing, we're not done yet, but we're looking at possible recommendations for how can we help enable this to happen.

We've been looking at the transportation because as we all hear from public meeting to public meeting, what about the transportation?

So we've extended county contracts and they've looked at the people that have been on contract or on call for the county have looked and have not identified any huge red flags at this time.

But we wanted to look at that going forward.

We looked at the economics.

It's so easy to talk about a lot of mixed use.

Oh, we'll just put mixed use all over here and all over there, and there may not be enough mixed use to go around.

So we've had a contract that we have with Stantec look at some of the economics to say, is this nuts?

Is this crazy?

Are we doing too much?

and the preliminary feedback is it's not nuts when we scaled it back to what you're seeing.

Now it's kind of a reasonable scale.

Is it the right scale?

Is it exactly how this will look?

Probably not.

And then in the last drawing or in the last schematic that RPG showed us, that's kind of a sanity check for, okay, let's say we've got all this.

Let's say we've got all this, the traffic works perfectly, the economics works perfectly, can we code it?

So that is very much of a sanity check to say if we did a form based code using multiple Virginia examples like Arlington who did the frontage based plan,

Is it possible to do?

So at this point, that's all we've been able to accomplish is say, at least this is not evidence of our nuttiness.

There's still a long way to go, however.

So in that context, the finance implementation focus group has been looking at some of these issues.

Obviously, one of the main feedbacks that we've had is that in order for the county to encourage this, they can't dump all, not that saying that we're trying to, but they couldn't dump all this responsibility for developing this exclusively on the private sector.

They need to have some skin in the game as the expression goes.

And I think the county has been willing to look at that.

But they need to know what that is.

What are we talking about?

Are we talking about this?

Are we talking about this?

And so that is what that finance group is going to be making some recommendations.

Just recommendations.

Let's get things considered.

And that's been going on currently.

August and September we also have from very

constructed feedback from stakeholders.

And it's important to remember that if you're a property owner here, you've got long-term leases, distant stakeholders in your process as well.

Really key, they want to be potential collaborators in this process, but they've got constraints as well.

It is important that we understand the phasing because we're presenting a longer term vision and it's not going to happen tomorrow.

That's very important for

all the stakeholders to kind of communicate, which is why RBG did a great job of showing, hey, this is what it was 60 years ago, this was 15 months, we're gonna be at another 30.

So we don't want to oversell that, oh yeah, you're gonna have this next year, it's gonna be great.

So I just wanted to make sure that we had some realism in our time frame.

So in August, September, we're going to be looking and hoping to engage in a very meaningful process of step by step how life has happened.

So facing is a part of that as well.

September, we've got some more public interactions that are mentioned.

The original

to look for an endorsement of phase two with some final design after we've looked at this, done some more examination of the phasing to see how real this is.

Does this still work?

Is this final design, quote unquote, enough to move forward to look at specific transportation modeling and specific economic modeling?

Very important because we want to have something that is doable before we start designing our code to enable it to happen.

I want to make a plug from the public interaction that we need to be a little bit flexible in our time frames.

I just think that we need to keep that in the back of our mind in that it may take more time for buying it.

I think the design itself, the inspiration of the design,

We can have in a short order, but we've got to bring the community on.

This is a very different process than we've been looking at before, and I just want to encourage that we may want to not oversell the timeframes if we find that we're getting somewhere really constructive.

So I wanted to add that degree of freedom in our process, and I think that we can integrate that, but we will need to kind of keep that in mind.

I can talk about, okay, and the final bit would be, what can we get maybe by the end of the year?

Transportation modeling is done.

Evolution and valuation of the space and nature of the demands over time.

Tweets, oh yeah, we couldn't do it this way, but we could do it that way.

How does one get access to what is described as expressive commercial areas?

Excellent point.

I think that it's important to say that this was a concept of distinguishing the transitional phase.

Remember that we want to go and where we are today aren't the same.

And getting from one place to the other, we may have a transitional phase in which we, because right now we don't have high speed transit for instance,

So is there a way to accommodate a transition from the current in vogue retail and transform it over time?

How might that look?

So you could imagine that even though you might be able to see this,

from 29, so the visibility's there, the actual access would be from behind as a pedestrian.

Maybe there's an esplanade along that, but obviously VDOT and the county are very cognizant that you can't have tons of access to 29 and keep the transportation performing adequately.

Can I just add, you know, kind of the basis for this design was what we have now.

The only crossovers you have right now in 29 are at Rio, at Woodbrook, and at the Steinmar shopping center.

So we're not proposing to change that.

Presumably some of this could have write in, write out based on VDOT standards for spacing separation.

But in a nutshell,

Complicate answer to a simple question.

I guess I have a question.

On the finance implementation focus group, do we have minutes for that meeting that we can refer to and read?

I'd love to get those.

Maybe you've already sent them and I missed them.

I can get that later.

We are trying to keep that discussion, it's been mostly just discussion and mutual education at this point.

Oh, I wouldn't expect.

Let me express a couple thoughts just so you get the kinds of ideas that are there.

they have talked about, we mentioned the skin in the game, the idea that it doesn't necessarily matter what scale of investment, but the county really has to show a commitment to the area in some way.

So there's a lot of talk about what would that be, maybe it was a parking garage, maybe it was the BRT station or some express station, maybe it was just

the traffic management system in which they invested in a better traffic management system off of 29 itself because the rest of the area also is impacted by traffic.

So a lot of those ideas came forward.

Then there's also the thought that maybe there is some encouragement that could go on to incentivize certain types of

of Development that is consistent.

Right now it's a real challenge at times to finance mixed use vertical development.

So what might that look like?

What kind of grants are available to the state to also act as incentives?

I'd just make the observation that I think your caveat about the time period it will take to have the public wrap their heads around the complexity of innovation and change that is implicit in this in the existing time schedule is extremely ambitious.

and I think one has to expect that adding an additional year to that process is perhaps the most realistic in that we will have at least one new member of the Board of Supervisors.

There's a startup time on that and the public getting them, it's one thing to ask them to come out with the charrettes, it's another thing for them

really grasp the full extent of what this design plan is going to mean operationally.

Conceptually it's very clear but operationally down on the ground level they have to be able to see it and I think we're going to need

quite a bit in the way of visualizations to provide them with exercises with similar communities as you cited in Ohio and other localities so that they've in all likelihood have seen this somewhere else because we have a fairly well traveled for a certain percentage of our population in the county and they will have

had some idea of it but I still think it's going to take a lot more time and I think that process is going to be the key process.

and that it's more than just public engagement.

It's really getting them to embrace this and taking on ownership for this as a new way of looking at the county.

Simultaneously, we're gonna have that decision in all likelihood rolled out by the board about locality for the county office building and potentially for the court complex.

and that will give them something as an anchor if the board does decide to move forth on that.

We're not saying that decision's been made, but I think they're going to need those kinds of anchors.

to understand what's going to be there so that they can feel a certain affinity for how this is going to take shape and what it's going to mean.

And again, that schedule is a schedule that over which, you know, it's going to take time for the public.

So I think you're being very ambitious is my bottom line in terms of the timeline.

and I'd love to see it faster than that but I think we have to be realistic and prudent because if we move too quickly we are likely to spur a reaction that is based on a lack of true understanding of what this overall design plan is designed to do for the county long term.

I have a number of comments I'll try to be uncharacteristically brief.

First off, I want to bring up concern and then I have a few recommendations.

One of my concerns, I visited places like this around the country and I visited some in Georgia last week and some today.

And I remember today walking down the street that looks a lot like that thinking, I have no idea where I am.

I really did.

Thank God I had GPS to get me out of there.

And so I am concerned that this is kind of a trend right now that we're seeing all these places are going to make these new towns, these new urbanist spaces in the middle of what were former shopping malls or green fields.

and then the chain stores come in and pretty soon you really don't know where you are and I think that this region has a lot of character and there might be some way that we could bring some of that character into the design so that it isn't that feeling that I could be in Ohio or Atlanta or you know Northern Virginia.

In terms of the some of the greens that were shown earlier and I think the site in Ohio that big empty green,

The problem with just having that empty green space, a giant lawn, is that they become kind of useless spaces when there's not a festival going on or there's not a farmer's market, so they need to be multidimensional and have other outdoor rooms created so that people feel like they can hang out there and enjoy themselves when there's otherwise they become these empty voids and I've seen many of them

Another point, I still feel like, and I know these are very conceptual designs, we have chunks that are buildings and then we have roads and we're trying to show new ways to get around, but I want to find fun, green ways to get around.

As in, I don't want it to be like a bunch of little stone fields.

I like stone fields and I go there, but

I have to get there in my car.

And if you just replicate that over and over, I don't think it becomes a destination.

Another thought is that we need a real draw to make these little places destinations, whether we have concert venues or splash parks or something.

There needs to be some reason to go there besides shopping.

We have a heck of a lot of retail.

We have more and more retail every day.

which of course I also enjoy but I'm just saying that's just not enough.

So last point is to try to mix residential and workspaces.

These types of places I've seen be successful are places where people live above these shops or they have their own businesses downstairs and they live above instead of, I mean I like the idea of the medical above the,

When I go to my doctor, there's nothing for me to spend money on.

It's very boring.

I would spend money if I went downstairs and there were some cool shops.

But honestly, I think people need to live there so that they don't become dead spaces or just auto-oriented destinations.

React.

No, no, I don't want to react because I think it was great, great feedback, thank you.

I did want to point out that maybe we cut out a little bit of the Greenway connections.

One of our focus groups was on connectivity and they did a fabulous job of making recommendations.

Let's say for Kicks and Giggles, we were going to have a small version of a pedestrian mall or bid there.

what we wanted to make sure and what was pretty popular was making sure that connected with the greater greenway network being able to get to prime destinations for recreation as well as just the center so like the boat ramp down under Berkmar Bridge and in those kinds of spaces trying to activate so that there's a greater connectivity because wouldn't it be fun

I think a lot of that same demographic group could imagine having a restaurant just downstairs but also be on their bike.

I mean I'll just point out I did see these arrows going off that you know that way to the river kind of thing but I want what I've lived in communities where I can get on my bicycle and ride through a wooded pathway to get to the next shop and so I'd really like to see a little bit more imagination put into these places and

instead of just some green squares.

And I understand, again, this is very preliminary, but I think a whole lot more could be done.

You're talking about the examples, Liz, that we see.

It's a challenging question.

I think that you look at what elements localize a place.

and they are things like the civic features.

So if it is a public park, if it is a library, if it is a rec center, something like that, it has aspects of the place.

Whereas the private development that goes on there, you know, may have some of that sameness just because they have market conditions they need to reach, but you know,

You can't control whether you have franchise retailers or local retailers.

You can encourage local retailers and there are some subtle things you can do with the design.

Probably doesn't play out at this 50,000 foot level, but it does play out at the kind of small block level.

I endorse everything that Karen said, particularly the part about having multiple uses for that large green space.

So there could be softball fields, soccer fields, something that would bring kids and their parents there and not just the occasional events.

but I need you to remind me, how is the development community involved in this process?

Yes, we have, well let me distinguish between the so-called development community, those who build projects in the county and the region.

We have those represented,

very independent, very active.

We have also the property owners being represented.

It should be pointed out that oftentimes we have management companies.

So Dunlop Properties, for instance, has provided some feedback to us.

They want to be careful because they can't

They can't say things as freely as you and I can because they represent a group of entities, but they've been participating.

They've been listening very carefully.

Both malls have been very gracious in trying to provide any guidance that they could within the limits of where they're coming from.

And they need to have some more specifics before they do that.

But they've been participating in the process, very much so.

Other property owners in the area have been a part of this process.

Now let me go very quickly to say that we have a public process in which we invite everybody.

We also have a group of steering committee.

Now the steering committee are people that have different stakes.

So you might find architects who have been sensitive to design issues in the area.

You might have the developers in the area

We've had a lot of people participate in this process either through the Steering Committee

or through an actual focus group.

All the members of the focus groups of work groups are actually the heart of the steering committee.

It's a big group, and so it's kind of hard to get very specific.

You get a lot of comments, but getting it channeled.

So that's why we broke down into different groups.

We have a work group that works in design.

We have work group on the connectivity, one on the financing.

It does.

Rick's concern about public buy-in is important, but I think the developers' buy-in and the private capital, that is key to it.

And so when you say you got good feedback, I hope it was positive feedback and not, no, we're not going to do any of this.

Or that they don't see any potential there.

Before they would invest.

As well as collaboration, I've heard that message over and over again.

It's one thing to do this process, produce a nice plan to tell them what to do, and then go away.

So it was important that they communicated something all in those lines, saying, give us some time to work with you, and we may be able to come to something workable that will achieve your goals and our goals, because we have constraints.

So if, and I'm just being very contrasting in example, if you said, oh, we only want two stories because we don't want anything

It's really hard to change your property in an economically viable way if you don't have enough intensity as a developer if you're trying to redo your property.

It's a big cost investment just like it is for the county to spend a whole lot of money on infrastructure to serve one thing with a lot of infrastructure but you're only getting one thing served.

Similarly for them, they've got their constraints that they have to respect their bottom line to make sure that they can afford to do the changes that they're offering.

So they've been very helpful in educating us, and they want to participate in some meaningful way collaboratively.

I'm curious about the view from the working group about the relative importance of the or viability of the west side of 29 versus the east side.

It seems like on the one hand it's easy to imagine that Simon and Dumbarton are going to want to jump in and that could be a great path, but it also seems like if they don't cooperate then it's pretty quickly a dead end and so the west side seems like it might have more potential

Wonderful point, and I want to, first of all, since you do have a work group member or two in the audience, I want them to hopefully say something about that, but one of the reasons why we changed the orientation here of 29 and Rio

versus the other ones is we wanted to communicate that this is just a concept and really could be on any corner.

We just happened to pick that corner because it was easier for people to get their arms around the vision for it.

but if the West Side said, no, hey, we're ready to go now, we've got this coalition, we would embrace that greedily and in the sense of let's work on that.

We don't want to dictate this but we do need to know what's likely, what's not likely, we need to be able to convey this.

Typically, one of the biggest remarks that we always had is, oh, well, that'll never happen and we can't do that so we were trying to avoid,

The question will be about Crocker Park.

I think the analysis is very helpful.

I think you really have synthesized a lot of different kinds of input and the diagrams are very helpful as conversation starters and you're hearing some of that in conversation.

About Crocker Park, I'm trying to look at that and picture it in our location and I guess a couple of questions occur.

Was that local landowners, local developers or did it require a large national or at least regional developer to come in to handle a project of that scale?

Related to that,

It looked like the diagram was of a completed project.

So sort of what's the time frame from beginning to end at Crocker Park.

And then lastly, you described the location as being near Cleveland, I believe.

Yeah, sure.

I actually spent time there back in April, spent a couple days staying at the highest.

So a lot of my experience is just from being on the ground and then doing some research afterwards because someone in the public pointed out as a good example of what we should look at.

So I haven't written a case study on it.

I've used it to kind of illustrate points of form.

But that said, I did go back and I read a few stories from the Cleveland newspaper about it and I'm not sure what the build-out time frame was, but I think it was completed in 2004.

It may have been five years or so.

I don't quote these facts.

This is just something I read as I was kind of preparing these slides.

You're right, it's a much bigger market.

The Cleveland metropolitan area is many times bigger than Charlottesville, Albemarle County.

But I think this kind of form is scalable.

It may not be as big.

You know, another thing about it is when we were putting together these three kind of high level conversation starter alternatives, we wanted to pull some real life examples of places that could illustrate.

And we thought of this one as being kind of the streets concept.

Because what's interesting about it is it is a main street essentially that's been built off of the arterial.

And the development doesn't face the arterial.

You can't really tell what stores are even in there, and there isn't some huge marquee that says, we got a Wegmans and we've got a, you know, whatever.

It's really that they've created this place that has a buzz that people know.

It's like the downtown mall.

You can't see what's down there, but people know about it and they're drawn into it.

And so this is an example of building kind of a Main Street parallel to a major arterial and how that could potentially work with the structure parking and kind of the access points they've built.

When you bring up about the downtown mall, it's important to be mindful versus this project in Cleveland that that is a historic community with buildings that have been converted several times since they were first built.

So it's gone through iterations of life.

And one of the things that concerns me, and I think Karen is spot on on this, is about the need to have in this project something unique, something about a special character about this area that's going to be attractive

because otherwise it's just Tweedle Dee being replicated with Tweedle Dum in Albemarle County.

And the challenge is that with time, is this going to stand the test of time being a design that is really viable and attractive?

There are plenty of designs out there

Pecanal and Dismont in Paris, and it remains attractive because of the combination of history, quirkiness, and distinctiveness, and this just strikes me as very planned, very Euclidean in terms of forms there, and I think one of the things that this is gonna be successful

It really has to be something that's going to have a unique footprint to it.

I was struck by the article in the Washington Post two weeks ago about La Ave in France that was bombed into smithereens during the second world war.

They completely rebuilt it.

primarily with concrete, which is, let's hope that is not our preferred construction modality.

But they build it in such a way that it has a quirkiness to it, it has a personality, it has a character, it's distinctive.

I think we really have to, in pursuing this design, look for something that's going to have a similar distinctiveness and a unique character to it that differentiates this from anywhere else in the country, especially

from anything in the Richmond area, anything in Stanton, et cetera.

It has to be unique and then it will build itself out because of that uniqueness.

But if it's the same old, same old, which is over on the right there, then I really, really with the pictures that are there.

Then I really worry about the viability of this kind of project because the bottom picture, that looks like something that's in Renallen in the office park there outside of Richmond.

So that would be another cautionary note for me as we go forward on this.

I would just say I think that's an excellent point of the uniqueness of places and keep in mind these photos are to illustrate kind of scale and character and yeah and then also when you take a something at this elevation and this kind of diagrammatic quality even the downtown mall if you're up several hundred feet above you don't know that it is a truly unique place because you get that from the free speech wall and the trees and things like that at ground level

but I think one of the things that this type of mixed-use vision allows you to do is it allows you to have that diversity a lot more than a single-use surface parking you know one-story kind of single-use retail or something like that nothing wrong with that but if you want places to evolve their special character over time and it does take time you at least have that flexibility that framework with mixed-use small blocks, grids, things like that

There was one, to Bruce's point too, just to add to one other example we showed in phase one, Belmar, Colorado.

There's at least three or four examples I know in Virginia, Chesterfield County, Norfolk, and Peninsula Town Center in Newport News that have redone malls, or are in the process of redoing malls.

But one of the best examples is Belmar, Colorado,

started in about 2006, bottom of the recession, within seven years built out 21 urban blocks, totally redeveloped the downtown mall, is now bringing in four times the tax revenue of the mall, but more importantly it's a series of urban blocks and a true neighborhood, gotten kind of rave reviews not just from the

City officials, but from the public too.

Somehow they managed to create that kind of sense of place within this area.

So it is being done.

There's good examples.

Maybe the next phase we'll get into some more of these examples.

You can kind of kick the tires on.

You all have done that work.

I mean, what you're describing is something that you all feel comfortable with doing that type of work, that really unique.

I mean, I'm just asking the question because this really worries me.

It looks so blah.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, but it does.

Yeah.

I think this is really early and I'm going to crank back history about two years to the CCAC, Crozet Community Advisory Council, when the developer for the J.B. Barnes 30 Acres began to discuss with them and he knew very smartly that getting community interest and involvement and support was going to be very important to the success of this project and everybody came full of excitement and

It was so difficult because all of us right away realized we didn't know how to describe what we wanted and so then became the element of pictures everywhere and yes I like that, no I don't like that but over the time it has really worked through a process

that I'm sure has been very painful for the owner, but he's been a very good sport and not given up on us in any way and has come up now with a plan that is very well supported.

But it takes time, as somebody said, that we have to give it time.

If we all had torpedo factories that could be renovated, man, we would have been done by now.

It's when you have an empty slate and the bank unfortunately tore down all the old buildings and sold them to get as much money as they could off the property.

So those elements are all

I see these pictures as ideas that people can react to one way or the other.

The B in the picture

is cool because it brings to mind the discussions about the community space.

It's very small in comparison.

Of course, the J.B. Barnes project is like a microcosm of what this is.

But still, there was a lot of discussion about not having it too big, because then you feel like you're in a football stadium, and having the ability that this bee picture does to have different units.

There's a little grass place for somebody to play bocce and a sub-place else over here for a different group to do something that would allow lots of people to use it all at once.

And we're nowhere near finished either, but I'm saying we shouldn't give up now because this is just the beginning.

And it is, I don't expect these folks to have done the design.

I'm just going to ask you to talk a little bit more about the importance of the BRT and there hasn't been a lot of discussion about how essential this transit-oriented development is to this concept, but you did say earlier that the stakeholders provided you feedback that they wanted to see a combination of the station and of the squares.

And again, you know, what kind of population

You go ahead.

That's a parallel discussion because BRT's the probably in the same sense that we did

What would be the maximum build-out?

What kind of things would we consider?

But we do conceivably have the density, eventually, for BRT.

And that would be of those kinds of

developments and transit capacities, that would be the most invasive in the sense of the largest scale.

It requires a dedicated lane or at least a portion of a lane, et cetera.

So we didn't want to come up with something that would shoot ourself in the foot later on, so we wanted to make sure that we could handle such a thing.

But it is unlikely in any near term that we'd be able to get a BRT running

in say a year or so that would be highly highly unlikely.

But we are looking at how we can do a better job with headways and getting express and serving our biggest destinations so like the university and the hospital there's a lot of demand that way.

So what is the right scale of

Transportation that serves that.

Keep in mind though, we always say good TOD is good community design.

You get to park once, which is huge.

Even if you get somebody, they can stop once.

get contact to all of these, their businesses, their retail.

You live, work, and play with just one parking.

That's also huge, and a better design and better efficiency for everything, because then you're eliminating many trips.

There are about, on average, 10 vehicle trips per day in this country, and only two are the commute.

So if you're able to park once and do a lot, you're saving people getting back out onto the aisle, back out onto the line.

I think Vlad is not showing his resume enough on the topic of BRT.

His firm actually has been involved in Richmond's BRT land use analysis and design for the last five years running, including all the community meetings and everything that went into that.

So it's an interesting history of where that started, and it started with that kind of question of

Broad Street Village

Yeah, but the, starts with a W, the shopping center.

Willa Lawn.

Willa Lawn.

Willa Lawn.

Willa Lawn, yeah.

From suburban Willa Lawn all the way to downtown Richmond, so the lane use dynamics are very different along the way, so.

Yeah, and that's the second, you know, Crystal City is the first BRT in Virginia, and this is the second one that'll be built, and

A lot of it, honestly, is the federal New Start, Small Starts guidelines that will get BRT funded.

So you've got to do the analysis to see if you can get the density to get the funding.

But we think this has pretty good bones.

And if you go in this direction, you can get BRT in a phased approach over time.

You don't hang your whole hat on the form of transit.

There were other people that had questions.

Liz was next.

Liz, quick one on, I asked before how you end up with such homogeneous developments, but I think I'd like to ask it a different way.

In the form-based code, this is a naive question, I guess, but I don't know much about it.

When you do the form-based code, can you put in there that you want a more heterogeneous

Development.

I mean, you go to places that don't have very strong ARBs, you know, and you see sometimes things that a lot of people complain about.

You know, there's this horrible house in the middle of all these houses.

I'm just wondering if you can just put that into the design concept that you want those

Can you define what you mean by heterogeneous?

Right, right, I'm sorry.

Yes, I was not talking about the population at all.

Form-based code is just a tool.

It can go from a huge range in which Nashville tends to look

then you have other places that go all the way down to female design

and the nature of the architecture specifically.

So there's a huge range of forms that you can define in a given form-based code and part of this process is why we want to kind of get to a final, what do we want to get so we back design

then the process that gets us there as opposed to coming up with a one-size-fits and we get sort of what that railroad, that's sort of how we got into the designs first of all that we have now is that we had one-size-fits all.

So to your point, there can be nuances based on sector or neighborhood of that, so if you

A complete place is Rio 29.

There are little sub-neighborhoods or neighborhoods that you might want to emulate in a form-based code as you extend this plan outwards.

There are lots of ways to do that.

Form-based is as form-based does.

It does not solve all the problems, but in terms of form, it's one of the best ways to define and capture form, and it can be a great way, for instance, to add a little bit more

Communication between the development community

and say our ARB in terms of sort of some ground rules of how we work together by being very concrete with this is what we mean and here's the kinds of things you can do and can't do.

So it can also be used in that method as sort of a toolkit for development to understand, oh, this is how you might do a good quality parking lot for your structure in this context.

Yeah, no, I think the best way to maybe talk about

Good design is to look at examples and you need to be careful that you're not just saying I don't like new development and I like old development because when things age you know they develop character and diversity and things like that but looking at concrete examples of new development and there are heterogeneity which you'd like in design it can be put into new development too

ARB's help.

Having, as I can't overemphasize, this flexible mixed use, mixed density gridded plan is as much as you can do at this level to encourage that.

You don't own the land.

You're not working with a developer saying, can you put a cornice line here and put more windows there?

So you're just trying to inspire.

And things like guidelines, examples,

This goes back to the public buy and public participation.

I was at several of the charrettes and workstations and I don't remember seeing that many African-Americans.

I think it would behoove us to make a special outreach to African Americans through the Jefferson School, through the churches, what have you.

And, you know, it's a little late in the process now, but I think it would still be legitimate.

And when we all talk about how to make Charlottesville stand out and what makes it

Special we think of TJ and Monticello and UVA and I think for at least the next five years if not longer than that we're going to be known for the events that happened this past weekend and I'm always on a personal campaign to try to find monuments that are not about war and not soldiers or generals or whatever and one of the things that could happen in this place would be to

create a competition to come up with some memorial or recognition of important people in Charlottesville, either in relation to this last weekend or just, you know, Georgia O'Keeffe taught here at one point.

I mean, why can't we come up with other objects to memorialize?

I have one, and that is that we talked about this being a sort of full, continuous community, and that there would be a significant workplace.

And it seems to me that

I'll answer some of it.

What has been discussed and actually had a lot of public interaction, we've not focused on it because of the phase where we are, but talked about the tech zone.

and Co-Work Spaces.

And there have been a lot of things that we want to do.

That's obviously a little bit of fine grain for what we've done.

We've also been one of the drivers for this, quite frankly, with our economic development work.

That's not my department, but they've been driving and saying, you know, we have businesses that want to come to Albemarle,

and would love to have that lifestyle.

We have employees who want that lifestyle of being in this complete place where they can live, work, and play.

And they would like to locate.

They really don't want to come until that kind of place is available for them in an affordable way for them.

And they've been kind of informing us as well.

And that will be a part of some of the economic modeling

trying to understand where our strengths are and we're trying to dovetail with the county's strategic plan as we go forward.

Yeah, and just one other point on that.

The example we showed of Crocker Park, as I mentioned, American Greetings headquarters, Anchors, one end of that development.

The biggest building, I think it was six stories.

I'd have to go and look again on Street View.

But there's been a lot in the news recently, in the Post and the Times and elsewhere, about companies moving

Hilton for instance, or Marriott, which was in Marriott moving back into Bethesda.

Yeah, that's a great question, and you've got to make room for it.

But the footprint there of American Greetings wasn't very big.

As you could see on the aerial, it's pretty small.

It's called the place dividend.

I just think that when we're having this discussion, it so quickly goes to mixed use, which implies residential and small commercial.

And I think that there are other agendas here and that needs to be included in this kind of summary discussion.

Yeah, I just wanted to agree with that.

I mean, I was thinking about factories that actually fit into tight urban spaces.

So one that came to mind was Anchor Steam Brewing, which is down the street from my family in San Francisco.

There's a factory that has tours of beer brewing and weddings and all kinds of things go on there and it creates a vibrancy.

but yet it's an urban building in a four or five story building that fits within that landscape.

One comes and one goes.

And so we need to find it some anchors to bring that desire to move into that space and to live and work there.

And it can't just be

people working out of their houses.

And it is amazing how many times you go to other cities and see exactly what you're describing in that urban environment.

It could be some sort of a factory or something that's really unique.

Andrew, you've had a, you mentioned a few minutes ago, working with folks out here and having some of them address.

Let's make them stand up.

to inspire private community in public-private partnership to transform that part of town.

And so worrying about specific images now, which are the province of an architect working for a developer some years in the future, most likely, is not really the main focus.

The key is to get

The framework in place and the flexibility in place to encourage and inspire the private sector to respond and that can be done in public-private partnerships in part but it's partly the vision and the vision should be a very flexible one.

I, as an artist, get very nervous when you try to prescribe great design.

So there's a delicate balance there.

This is my soapbox, if you will.

Some places try to get it so detailed that it stifles creativity.

On the other hand, there are ways that you can encourage variety and richness.

And I think uniqueness is key.

Absolutely.

Could you introduce yourself, Phil?

I'm Greg Pao.

Next to you.

I think the key to getting where we are now is the thoroughness and the amount of work that's gone into it since we started.

The small groups, then everybody getting together, having a group discussion here and a group discussion there, and then bringing us all together.

The interesting part of that is in one of those sessions we had three different groups in the same room working, maybe 10 of us in a group.

Then when we all got together in the three groups, we all came up with about the same thing that we wanted for this area.

So the commonality of what the community wants and what's being presented shows in this plant.

And we've many, many times, as has been mentioned tonight here, what we don't know is the time element.

and a lot of us in this room don't have as much time as others.

But I'd love to be around to see this develop in 50 years if you know what I'm talking about.

But the connectivity has been thoroughly discussed and out of that has come the kind of circular movement around 29 so that you don't have

constant entrances and egresses off of 29, but you still have the connectivity around it and goes into connectivity into the neighborhoods that are going to bring the people into the walkable, livable type of community.

So the effort has gone into this and is really the best I've seen in my few years.

I'm L.F. Wood.

And former supervisor, I want you all to know.

And those are really good points.

When I talk to people about redevelopment, a lot of them don't really realize that.

That's kind of creeping up on the county at this point.

I want to remind the board that

Just north of Greenbrier, do you all remember the hotel?

The Planning Commission, of course, had a review of that.

But the hotel that went in there, remember we struggled about trying to get that developer to even consider having a solid pedestrian connection to all the activity?

This is setting that up so that those potential developers coming in know what the expectations are.

So instead of getting caught up in design is one thing, but remembering that it's setting expectations for those future investors is really what makes our life a lot easier down the road.

If we had had something like this in that area, we would have had a better product.

Probably still been a hotel, but I think it would have been a better product.

At least it would have been filling in that urban fabric that we're looking for.

Right, we have at our place as supervisors a resolution confirming the declaration of a local emergency and declaring the local emergency ended.

and you have a copy of it.

I just need from you all a motion to adopt the resolution confirming the declaration of a local emergency and declaring the local emergency ended.

And I'll have, I guess, a roll call.

Yes.

Okay.

I need to, because we haven't done this short circuit that you have, I need a motion to adjourn the Planning Commission.

All right and hearing no objections I'm going to adjourn us to August 16th to TJPDC Water Street at 1 30.