Planning Commission Work Session (4:00 PM) and Regular Meeting (6:00 PM)   3/25/2025

Does that sound good?

Good afternoon, everyone.

A call to order the work session for the Albemarle County Planning Commission.

And it is March 25, 2025.

A lot of 25s.

I'll start with establishing a quorum.

Yes.

Ms.

Firehock.

Here.

Alright, with that, we'll go into the work session for CPA 2021-2 AC44 comp plan facilities and infrastructure.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm David Benesch, Development Process Manager.

We're going to go over the community facilities chapter of the Conference of Plan today.

I can't hear too well from a person.

How's that?

And I need that.

So we're going to start off by going over some general feedback on what we heard from the Planning Commission previously on the Community Facilities Plan, some of the community input, and a very quick overview.

Since this is a pretty long chapter, I'll just hit some highlights, talk about the upcoming schedule, and then we do have a couple of focus questions for you.

that we'd like to go through with you and give a quick heads up to what those questions are as you may have read through the objectives.

Objective one is intended to be sort of an overarching objective and those actions are to apply across all facilities.

So we want to make sure that you're kind of comfortable with

What's in that or whether anything's missing as it might apply to all facilities.

And then one of the sort of subtle or not so subtle changes within this chapter is a little bit more guidance as to when public facilities can be in the rural areas.

So we want to check in and make sure we get your feedback on those two areas.

Generally, we'd like to just go through and maybe get your observations on all the objectives and actions, but if you could keep those two focus points in mind as we go through them.

The other thing I'd like to point out is that we are going to be joined by FES staff to help us answer some of these questions.

Oh, Facilities and Environmental Services.

Yeah, that's a department here in the county.

And they work with a lot of the public agencies and in developing their facilities.

So they hopefully will be here shortly.

I did also want to point out that we worked pretty closely with each agency in developing these sections.

So we did not invite them or require them to be at this meeting just for efficiency sake.

I think we'll try to field your questions and answer as best we can.

And we'll get back with those agencies as necessary for things we can't answer and certainly input from you, the commission and the public will get back to them as we fine tune this chapter.

So what did we previously hear from the Planning Commission?

One was that public water and sewer connections for housing was important for properties within the development area that aren't connected or nearby properties adjacent to the development area.

We tried to address that through some of the actions in objective two.

We also heard that there were a need for other places, sort of community center and meeting places, things that were not work or home, where communities could get together.

We tried to address that in this section and also in other sections of the chapters of the comprehensive plan.

Consider wireless service to public parks as a safety issue, and we've addressed that as an action.

Other comments that we heard have been how we've addressed those have actually been within other chapters of the plan.

Actions to address natural hazard mitigation, objectives and actions addressing solar and local food systems have wound up in our resilient communities chapter.

So we feel like those comments we had previously heard during the community facilities chapter has been addressed in that chapter.

Teams from the public, more library services, potentially more mobile services in the rural area or some type of services serving the rural area.

Concern with school capacity and transportation to schools, bus access.

More recycling options within the county and better education incentives regarding how to recycle and reuse and better treat our managers on the waste.

Improve options for access to community facilities that is addressed here with some actions but is also going to be addressed in our transportation sections and in our

development area land use section of the plan.

That's more walking, biking options and transit and options to single occupant vehicles.

Community themes continue with improved stormwater management and flood control, low impact development was heard, ensure adequate water supply and

Concerns remain with potential drought conditions and how to be prepared for those.

Concern with above ground power lines and losing power during storms and address failing septic systems, especially when they could impact public water supplies.

and that has been specifically addressed in the stewardship chapter and I believe in the rural areas land use plan chapter as well.

Definitely in the stewardship chapter.

Goal statement, I won't read through it here, but we feel like the goal statement is consistent with the county's mission as it relates to public service provision.

If you have questions or comments about that, we'll certainly welcome that goals statement.

We've got a number of objectives in this chapter, and I'm not going to read through all of them here.

There's 11 total.

As I alluded to earlier, the first one is an objective and a set of actions that's intended to be kind of overarching for all facilities.

And then the other objectives sort of address specific areas or clusters of types of facilities.

So there's an objective and actions for public

Water and Sewer for library services, for schools, emergency services, which is police, fire and communications.

We have a section on broadband as well as cell service.

We have one for communications and electric and other utilities.

These are

non-county types of utilities, public or public nonprofit type utilities for stormwater management.

And then we have three that sort of address climate action and resiliency.

So the themes

In this plan, as it relates to the 2015 plan, the themes that continue is that the objectives and actions are focused in on implementing the growth management policy and recommendations of the development area in the rural area and

Probably for all of us here, in our experience, we're aware that the provision of community facilities and infrastructure remains one of the primary implementation tools for growth management policy, where you locate those facilities or where you don't can guide growth.

So decisions and guidelines are important to implementing our growth management policy.

The plan has always had some level of flexibility to allow for a location of public health and safety services.

throughout the whole county, but not in much specificity or detail, a little bit more cryptically.

But that theme continues and is actually enhanced in this plan.

The areas of change from the prior plan is greater clarity and allowance for public health and safety facilities in the rural area.

The comments are a little bit more overt that allows them and encourages them in strategic locations.

Greater allowance for serving rural populations, again, those first two bullets.

There is a greater recognition that private central water and sewer system maintenance may be an issue or is becoming an issue in the county.

Those are private systems, but are considered kind of public because they serve more than one or two users.

They serve communities.

And those communities think of them as public

Services that serve those communities and there are emerging issues with those and that's sort of a new emphasis in this plan.

The other thing is the depth of detail in this plan.

There's fewer actions related to service standards and operational issues where previously we had officers per capita standards which are really more operational issues and those agencies deal with the Board of Supervisors more directly and then budget processes in a frequency that's a little bit quicker than a comprehensive plan or more often than a comprehensive plan.

So we've stepped back from that level of detail in this version of the community facilities chapter.

So that's the overview of this section.

What we have upcoming are, as it relates to other aspects of the comprehensive plan, is the development area land use and community design guidelines.

Continued discussion with the board is scheduled for April 2nd.

We also have the thriving economy, which you heard just recently going along with this section at the same time with the board on April 16th.

And those are the, and again, community facilities, both with Thriving Economy are going to be held at that same time.

So that's the overview of other things going on with AC 44.

We also have

the public engagement opportunities that will be taking place.

So trying to keep us on schedule here.

I'll try to wrap up.

These are the, once again, the sort of focus topics.

that I mentioned before.

I think perhaps the best approach here since the first focus question is objective one, perhaps a good way to go through this review would be to just begin with answering any questions you have generally about the format, anything you've heard here, but then maybe just stepping through each objective and action and getting your input on those, that objective one being that one is

the overarching standard.

And throughout one and some of the other sections of the chapter, there are the recommendations regarding rural areas that you can comment on.

So that would be my suggestion, Mr. Chairman.

And I'm done.

Awesome.

Thank you.

All right, that's great stuff.

So why don't we start with a typical, as you suggested also, just go through to see if there are any questions in general about any of the formats before we get into, or any of the sort of preamble before we get into the implementation section.

Did anybody have any clarifying questions?

I was wondering,

If and where it's addressed, some of the hazard mitigation you mentioned is added, although I think I lost track of exactly where that is.

Yeah, I think that was mostly addressed in the

Environmental Stewardship, and the Resilient Community Chapter.

All right.

Thanks.

And I can grab those if you want to.

Someone else can come up.

I just, yeah.

For sure.

Most of those initiatives were moved to that chapter.

Clarity on the delineation.

Great.

Commissioner Bivins?

Thank you, Chair.

Good to see you this evening.

I just have a couple of questions on sort of on page two where we go through the 11 objectives and just trying to get some clarity there if this is the time to talk about should they be mixed.

So on objective six, it kind of looks like objective six could be with 10 since you're talking about

So could you just sort of collapse those two together and put them together there?

Broadband had been separated because we had a broadband authority which had a particular directive that their directive has pretty much been achieved so you know arguably that broadband services provided by private providers it could be combined.

I was just giving that okay.

There's actually several objectives here that were brought out as objectives because there was some level of importance to them, particularly the ones I've termed resilient ones that could also be compressed.

So is that when you say that one, are we talking about objective seven, which looks like it could be combined with objective 10, because in the document that I've received, it has objective 10, blah, blah, blah, and then it has seven reduced greetings.

and then, Chair, I appreciate the having the conversation about equitable because that was running through this whole thing.

That was the underlying comment.

That was my underlying sort of equation that I was trying to balance.

How do we do, and this is not equity and what's being banned from the people up North.

This is equity.

How do we balance between sort of the rural part of the community and the development thinking about how do we do that?

Since it also seems in public hearings, often we get people who are residents of the rural part of our community

who want services that feel as if they, at another point in time, not necessarily going forward, but at another point in time, there'd been some attempt to sort of, to limit what those types of services in the rural part of our community.

That's true.

Fire and Rescue have been increased in the rural area and also even in the evenings when most of those accidents are happening.

That's exactly what I was thinking about.

I was thinking about that also.

And police too.

And I was also thinking about some of the investments that have been made in rural schools and sort of what's, you know, that's not us, that's the school system, but eventually it is the supervisors because they're the ones who

who apply a CIP to doing some of that.

And so the whole idea is where is that investment?

I know everybody's thinking, oh, I'm not trying to say that the Royal School should not have an investment.

So everybody who just got all up and down on your phones, please put it down.

But it's about how do you balance a limited amount of resources between these two jurisdictions?

Because I think that's really basically when you talk about equity.

That's what you're talking about.

Can I just make one comment since we're getting on sort of that objective six, objective seven, objective 10, objective nine combination because I was tracking with you on six and nine.

That makes sense because nine still says coordinate with providers to ensure adequate and reliable communications because I think even though we've made progress, right, we're not really done.

Broadband, we're about 97 to 98% done.

Really?

Yeah.

That's true.

Now it's sort of balancing that service is sort of the next step.

But yes, I don't remember exactly, but they're close to have met.

Is that all Firefly?

That's good because as we know, the people up north have just said, everybody should go with Starlink.

And that's just like, somebody please save me.

and then on, but the only place where I might differ a little bit is on objectives 10 and number seven.

They feel different to me more so.

But do you see the seven on 10, go to objective 10.

Yeah, I got you.

My point is that urban stormwater management drainage and flood control is still an issue, even at the standpoint of like resilience.

Yes.

and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from local government and school facilities feels different to me, but I get it.

I think it was a typo.

Leave it on top.

Got it.

All right.

That was good.

Yeah.

The only thing I agree with some of the comments that have been made, but looking at the goal statement, I noticed that we have

You know, we have resilience and we mentioned climate action plan, but there's nothing that specifically calls out sustainability.

It's sort of referenced in there, but I think it would be nice for in the goal statement for there'd be something about sustainability, because I think that is an important thing that that does occur in a lot of the objectives that you're doing, but it's not not in the goal.

So in that sense, so even though objective nine talks about utilities that are resilient to impacts of climate change and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you're suggesting that maybe there's a general climate change objective in addition to the climate change, the separate section on climate change, or how does that all, I'm just wondering how that all fits together.

You're speaking to the goal statement, correct?

I mean, I think that they, I think there can be some reorganization of the objectives to make them more clear.

Some of the comments have already been made, some consolidation.

But I mean, otherwise, I'm fine with the objectives.

Thank you.

I was curious if you could explain a little bit about maybe the agency we have, particularly around the public schools and how we're starting to frame that.

Where's our agency?

Where's that stop and start?

I would see things such as the maintenance of facilities or things like anything to do with the construction of the building.

Is that really us or is that the school system?

Well, within the time that we have, I think the school board really pretty much governs what decisions are made about those facilities.

I think there is interaction regarding the budget with the board of supervisors, but it's largely the school board

and their facilities management.

They look at land use and try to adhere to our land use and location guidance.

We have had in the past, if you look at the current comprehensive plan, there's about three pages worth of design guidelines for schools, but

there are just issues with school size security that make implementation of those difficult and generally those decisions are left with the school board and the design so we focus more on where the schools are going to be there are infrastructure recommendations again sidewalks access like you know connectivity to the schools

Okay, that's helpful.

I was looking at the objectives and actions.

I'm not sure how much we're getting to this now since we're at the preamble.

But a couple of them stood out to me as like, Oh, can we really do that?

So it might be one of those things when we get there, we can just talk through, you know, does that belong here?

Or is that what we're looking for?

Aspirational, maybe.

Yeah, just a couple of

General comments.

So in the organization, when I, so when I looked through the objectives, you know, everything is fairly clear.

I agree with the comments that have been made.

I then expected that the, the document, the body would, would somewhat follow and it does to some degree, but not all of them.

So all of these objectives are not in the body.

So I just want, maybe we'll talk a little bit, like for instance, nine, the coordination of you have the broadband,

So you talk about broadband, but you don't talk about the electrical grid.

I just wanted to... Some background information in the front doesn't correspond to some of the objectives.

I mean, a lot of them are in here, right?

So you have, you know, you have stormwater, you have

You have the wireless, you have solid waste management.

You have a lot of the components of them, but they're not organized the same way.

Some of them, the emergency services, we did combine three components into one there.

Others were objectives that were,

I think topic areas that were addressed in other chapters that maybe we didn't emphasize in the front section.

Make sure we're... Well, I do think there's some things that are missing that you don't get, for instance, the energy grid and resilience around the energy grid and power.

Sometimes we take it for granted.

There are some areas of both the rural areas and the development areas that are better served and they can be backfed.

If you lose a line, you can regain it and so forth.

So I know that you're coordinating that.

I would also say that there's a heightened, I would encourage a heightened coordination because of the demand that we're going to see on power.

in Virginia in general, but even in our county in the next five to 10 years.

So it's actually not even 20 years, but even in the next five years, we're gonna see an enormous amount of demand.

So not only looking at capacity, but then the resilience, it certainly is not equal throughout the county and where you can be backfed or not backfed and so forth.

So that's one that I saw that was missing.

And again, I was looking for it because I saw it in the objectives.

And that's one of the ones that triggered it for me, but I'm sure there may be others.

Yeah.

Or at least make sure that they're all being covered in some at least at some level in the document, the objectives that you're putting in the front.

And then just another, just for my edification.

Yeah.

If you notice in a lot of our development applications where they talk about when we do talk about stormwater, they talk about the fact that they'll be doing volume controls and doing off-site credits for water quality.

And so there's kind of two parts to answer your question.

The sort of low impact development also tries to treat water quality on site.

So for example, a rain garden that we have here at the county parking lots treating the volume and the quality of the stormwater instead of buying credits from somewhere else.

So it's kind of more fully treating the pollutant.

And then low impact development is smaller scale

Stormwater management closer to the source rather than say a large stormwater pond or dispersed treatment that relies on underground pipes that are expensive.

So in other words, a series of small rain gardens placed around a facility means you don't need to have all that piping.

You don't need to, might not even be discharged to a stream because it's all absorbed on site.

We can buy off-site credits.

I can sit here and pollute the stream right here, but I can buy credits in some

Wetland, you know, miles and miles away and wreck my local stream, in my opinion.

And this was, no one cares at this point, but years ago when they updated the Stromwater Law, the committee that wrote the law wrote this and this and this, and when it got to the legislature, somewhere in the nefarious processes they made or, or, or.

and so that's how water quality.

Yeah, and just to add something to that, the distance this credit can be traded is really huge.

I mean, you're talking, it's almost Northern Virginia or almost to Richmond.

It's two hydrological units, right?

Yeah.

So it's,

So and certainly the water management is when I read low impact development, certainly that's one, but there's also a lot of other ways.

Where are you sourcing your materials?

Where are they coming from?

So what is the impact of that development overall?

And so I'm just wondering if you guys had some specific guidelines for county buildings versus

I don't think I can speak to that directly.

Greg Harper, Chief of Environmental Services.

I just wanted to let you all know that there has been development of some draft policies that we're considering adopting within FES and other departments that would

address buildings, our fleet, and kind of like the way we manage landscapes to make all of those things more sustainable.

So we're looking at some policies and some plans to, I guess, build buildings in a more sustainable way.

Looking at LEED or green buildings, or there's a third one that's, I think, for Virginia.

I forgot what it's called, Gold Globes?

Earth, correct?

What?

Yeah, we're sort of at the consideration stage and not the adoption stage.

Yeah.

I think some of the dialogue with particularly this section of the plan is the balance between detail that needs to sustain itself in a five, 10 year, 20 year plan.

And what is,

A little bit higher level guidance that says we're doing actions that recognizes the work that other agencies are doing.

So we can certainly look at whether we can add some level of specificity.

Could I jump in on that point?

I mean, one of my comments was going to be that this is the infrastructure chapter.

And some of you will not be surprised to hear me say that.

I think we should mention green infrastructure.

All right, and we could specifically address natural infrastructure.

So for example, I'm not going to ask you to write this in the plan.

I'll just say like, for example, one large mature oak tree can soak up thousands of gallons of water per tree per year.

Multiply that by all the large mature canopy trees.

That's a lot of water that we're protecting.

And as we grow and develop and we pave, we're getting less of that, we're getting more runoff.

So, you know, talking about harnessing and utilizing natural infrastructure and, you know, talking about green infrastructure.

I owe Mariah some definitions she asked me for, for green infrastructure or something else she's working on.

Yes, I know I'm late, tardy, bad me.

But I could provide something simultaneously to you that you could put a paragraph or two in here because I think we should mention it.

Perhaps the background section that alludes to Luis.

And they're trying to keep the comp plan short, but.

to Greg's point that he was making a moment ago, and literally all around our county, and we did a better job of it in the past, to be honest, when we had a certain water manager employed here, and you know who I'm talking about, working with developers, getting them to put in rain gardens, getting them to do all this, but I just think that we're doing it, but why can't we say it and continue to say for the future?

Because if we want to be resilient,

then we should be using these natural systems as much as possible.

And I'll just also say really quick and then I'll get off my soapbox that if you were to preserve a grove of trees, that's a heck of a lot cheaper than taking them out and then building some constructed green infrastructure.

So I work with developers all the time to minimize footprint.

Yeah, that could be fine too.

Well, I think there's a convergence, crosswalk, what have you, too, in terms of, you mentioned trees, about green streets.

And I think about a good example is Crozet.

We have done a great job of including native plants and stormwater management as part of the streetscape in Crozet.

It's the infrastructure of stormwater management in the street.

And what's going on in Crozet is beautiful, but we're not necessarily routinely doing that everywhere.

Yeah, just really a follow on on Commissioner Firehock's point and the one that I was bringing up with the low impact development.

I mean, we're saying all the right things in here, right?

I mean, we're using the right terminology and saying the right things that we want to how we want to move the county forward.

I do think that it's helpful to actually have some tangible examples.

Here's how you achieve this.

An example of that would be at the new recycling center.

We have one down in

What's wrong with my brain?

Down where I live, for aisle 20.

Thank you, Keen.

I'm like, where do I live?

Anyway, and I saw that as a missed opportunity because it would have been pretty easy on that site to re-sesh that, turn around vegetation in the middle, direct all the stormwater into that, and have a beautiful native plant display.

Why not?

So when we had another facility come to us for Northern Albemarle, I brought that up and I said, could we look at that as an opportunity?

I don't know if they'll do it, but I mean, if we had a policy that said, when we have public facilities, we should do them in the greenest way possible, then why isn't there permeable pavement for parking in front of the bids?

So many things could have been done.

So there's a good first step.

We're saying we want to do this.

Right.

And I think just having the guidance on how you do it.

So in parallel, we, we don't want to spend another five years before we actually adopt the policy.

Right.

So we want to put this in, in here.

and then make sure that we're following up on having some guidance on what this means.

What are those words that we're saying here actually mean?

Yeah, can I just follow up on one thing before you do?

So I'm kind of on your soapbox with you.

I think we're all kind of grouped on there in some way or another.

The one thing that you were heading exactly where I was thinking, in addition to examples, I would add thoughts about resources.

So if we're going to be requiring or if we're going to be, what's the word, increasing the use of environmentally sustainable management and maintenance practices in general, and we're putting those recommendations out there, we should have somewhere a way to understand the resources that are available to the development community

Well, what's really interesting is that, I mean, Dave Hirschman is who I was referring to when he used to work for the county city.

And he did all these workshops with developers and talked them how to do this and put demonstration sites out.

Our cement company in town, they didn't used to be able to make permeable pavement.

And we said, well, get that shaker machine that shakes the stuff out until it creates porosity.

and they did and they can build that.

So we, we, Luckstone makes bio, biofilter soil.

You can go get the biofiltration soil mix from Luckstone.

They make it for the Piedmont.

So it's like all these things already exist here.

And we've kind of, I don't want to be like melodramatic, but we've lost our way a little bit.

Like we used to be doing this stuff all the time here in our county.

And we've kind of slacked off a little bit.

I don't know.

If you had done a, whoever, who had done a bioswale at the recycling centers in the turnaround,

and you had made permeable parking for the people to go and park and do their recycling.

That costs less than digging a stormwater pond, putting in the pipes and then having to come with the backhoe and scoop out the dirt from the stormwater pond.

In other words, it's not more expensive, but it's harder to bid.

Yeah.

Right, or that the county demands it, so they should go get someone to help them.

Yeah, I was trying to find a bit, you know, just as an example, I believe in the current comprehensive plan, there's even a percentage goal in terms of native plants.

So we're even like when we're talking about something like native plants, there's a specific, there's very specific language and goals around that sort of thing.

So, and, you know, I think to call out that,

Yes.

It's called Sustainable Sites Initiative.

Yeah.

Great.

Okay, I'll just leave it.

I have like one minor comment on the wording of one objective.

I'll be like less lofty and more specific.

Objective three, I just in reading that says, provide high quality, modern, welcoming, comfortable, fully accessible and community oriented library services and facilities to promote accessibility for all community members.

You could literally put a period after facilities because you've already said that you wanted it to be fully accessible.

So it just seemed like it was for the building and one was for equity probably.

So, but we can get back with the, I see your point.

It's very, it does sound redundant.

I'm sure it could be wordsmith.

We can get back with the director.

I just had a couple of additional thoughts or questions, I guess.

One is, and maybe this will happen anyway, a lot of what we've been talking about, I think, especially in, we'll call it the preamble, this front end, would be helpful to have if there's a way to do it.

And I just thought of this, and maybe it applies to other sections of the comp plan, and I hadn't thought about that, but like hot links to certain areas that might give you more information.

So we're talking about things like climate resilience in some of these.

And it would be great to have sort of a direct connection to that so that if you're reading the complicated digitally, hopefully you can click on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it tends to have some hyperlinks in the document, right?

Especially the stuff that'll be in the appendix.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this would be so easy, like public water and sewer, right?

It'd be cool to have a link somehow or a hot link to the RWSA's master plan that helps to build on that or something that could be continued.

And then you start getting into the nightmare of changing when an address changes, the link doesn't work, whatever that is, but the best we can do.

I think on that slide you just had up there there was a second bullet in the first half that was to talk about extension of public services facilities in the rural area district to serve existing populations.

Is that the same as the section in the public water and sewer of the preamble which talks about the county's policy for extending the jurisdictional area also allows for service to be provided in the rural areas in limited circumstances and locations based on the existence of health and safety issues and where there are no other reasonable options?

I think that bullet also covers that.

There's a number of, a little bit more overt language about allowing certain services in the rural areas, schools adjacent to the rural area, but it would include that one as well.

That's a long, that policy actually has not changed very much.

Up to the group.

I know, I just happen to know, because I had a conversation recently about it, but

Do you guys want to talk about that at all?

The prevention of the public services to rural areas?

I mean, we have had, I know that the supervisors have had conversations about this.

There are certain places I can speak to a place that's near me that was built well before any of these ordinances were in place.

And I know by the owner, who I know whether or not it was the old owner or the new owner, they spent I don't even know how untold amounts of money

to correct both the sewage issue, because when the places were built, some of the sewage systems were built on top of each other.

So I don't even know how that even gets approved, but probably back then it did.

And then they've had some issues with water that if everything flows down to a creek, that then flows into the Rivanna River, to the reservoir.

And so I can see that there could be situations where

and it's a mile from Albemarle High School.

So there could be situations where extending just to someplace like that with 20 some odd units which are affordable right now.

that if it gets corrected, they won't be affordable.

They're gonna take them off the market and the developers, the owners has said that.

But if we could get something there, we do a couple of things.

They would preserve some affordable housing and then you would keep sewage from going into the Ivy Creek, which then eventually just goes right down the road and goes into the reservoir.

And so the whole idea is how do we do that?

How do we get those conversations in front of the supervisors?

Because they're the ones who would have to make

the decision there, so that they have sort of a decision sort of network on when those come to us, we can rationally make a decision to improve both the safety of the house and also in this case, also preserving affordable, very affordable housing.

And I think that's the kind of thing that I've been trying to figure out, that we have legacy housing,

that in our community was built at a time when it was not as well scrutinized as it is today, that has systems which are failing.

And you have individuals who, you know, this is my whole piece about, yeah, I can get you in a house, but can you afford to live there?

I can get you in a house, but if something goes wrong, where are you going to get the $6,000 for a new heat pump?

Where are you going to get, from what I understand, the work that's been looked at off of Georgetown Road, which is an area that has public water but doesn't have public sewer, that in order to connect up to a public sewer was going to cost people $20,000.

And the county's put some funding aside to try and help that.

But $20,000 is the check to write for a whole host of people.

a whole host of people.

So how do we facilitate some of those under the aegis of this is better for health and this also sort of takes some of the take some of the pressure off some of the environmental conditions.

Well, there is a process in place.

It's called a jurisdictional area amendment.

So and this is an example of actually of two places where that occurs.

Under the policy as it's written, if a property is adjacent to an existing line,

and there is a documented health or safety issue, water service can be provided.

The issue is proximity.

The purpose for that is to not continue to extend water lines out where you don't want development to take place.

This is a location in Crozet that's Beaver Hill Mobile Home Park and then a residence.

adjacent to it or close to it.

That request came in.

They had a failing septic system, a small parcel.

They were adjacent to sewer line.

They got serviced.

Beaver Hill Mobile Home Park actually got serviced 10 years previously.

So the sort of olive color there was a change in the jurisdictional area map to provide sewer service to Beaver Hill when they had failing systems.

The example that you bring up is when something is not adjacent.

The costs are borne usually by the property owner.

Sewer costs are extremely expensive.

I wouldn't be surprised if that extension of one line to that particular site would have probably been a half million dollars or more.

It's very expensive.

but this is a policy that you have in your comp plan just like all comp plans are so it's guidance for individual decisions that boards make so Key West subdivision which is about three miles from the boundary and I didn't have a map for it it had contamination of its water system the board chose to add it to the jurisdiction area to allow for public service large subdivision a lot of

potential health or safety issues with it.

Grant funding was found to help build that.

So they got water service to replace their failing central system.

So it's really a, there's a process in place.

The guidelines of this comp plan help with those decisions, but it is not a checklist, yes or no.

So the board has the ability to look at the realistic circumstances here and in any case, make those exceptions.

I know

I'm sure the county attorney would want some consistency and care about presidents that are set, but exceptions have been made.

And so I think that process works.

This is a very conservative process that says only in these circumstances, but in practice over the years that I've been applying it, there's good reason for applying what is a true health or safety situation and what exceptions can be made.

It's to continue what we're already doing.

So it isn't changing it, but wanted to make sure that you're aware since you don't, the Planning Commission doesn't deal with them.

It is not a frequent but a regular situation and it's a board determination as to how something more closely meets those criteria.

I think one factor that should be mentioned in there that's not mentioned there currently is age and possibly even putting a date in there just so that we were very clear that if someone put something new on the Azure development area and there's a failing septic system, that's not our problem.

Yeah, the way you would typically do that is set it upon, like you do in a zoning ordinance, you set it upon a certain date of adoption and then anything that's approved after that date.

As we look at the objectives and actions, is objective one, action 1.2 intended to address this issue?

or does it go over to objective?

And so I'm sorry if I missed it.

The question of extending water and sewer to rural areas.

Yeah.

Got it.

Action two gives the grounds for exceptions in a way.

It says where services to be provided in the development area, but allows for that circumstance for exception.

So World War on 2.2.

Number three of 2.2, onsite private water septic utilities or are cost prohibitive or not actually viable?

Is there any chance that there may be a developer who may say, well, private water and septic utilities just aren't the best approach here?

We'd like you to extend.

Water and Sewer to our site, and it says here, I'm telling you it's cost prohibitive, and it says here that you'll extend it in that case.

I'm just wondering, is that number three the right wording?

That actually is.

That has been added to allow for specificity by practice.

What we've tried to do is what's reasonable for a property owner is a single property owner

Drilling three or four wells to get adequate water is cost prohibitive.

Or a package plant may not be a reasonable cost given the topography and constraints on that property.

But a commercial property would be different.

A commercial property raises revenue.

So without putting one

This is all existing construction that we're talking about?

But I also think that that section specifically, 2.2, is where you should reference age, if not a specific date, systems before.

I think that would clarify.

And I think another criteria that's important to mention is that we have a lot of development area properties that don't have water and sewer.

Well, maybe not a lot, but we definitely have development area properties that don't have water and sewer.

And I think that those have to take priority before expanding the jurisdiction out to the rural area.

I think most of the things we're talking about are these exceptions from going to be mostly funded through private investments.

Oh, no, no, I was saying that there are

We've had some, I certainly remember the exact circumstance, but we had a couple of areas, applications that came before us, and it was called out that there were areas in our development area that don't currently have water and sewer, right?

So I'm just saying that where we have areas in the development area that don't have water and sewer, I think we should look at expanding those areas first.

It seems like 2.2, the first sentence, use the development area's boundaries to guide the Albemarle County Service Authority jurisdictional area for the provision of public water and sewer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Uh, any, I think about a half hour left, any shifts to implementation, um, and go through the objectives there.

Yeah, I mean, we can step through these objectives and the actions as we go through.

The first one is that overriding, overarching set of actions.

I had a question, not about something that's in there, but I've been talking about infrastructure and I was at the CAC meeting looking at the budget last week, I guess, when we're providing more police.

And so I was just wondering if there's any interest in having more substations.

You know, for police, you know, they're just they're in their car and they're going all the way from Afton Mountain down to Scottsville.

I mean, like, for example, Yancy Yancy Community Center is a county facility.

Is there any interest by the police department and have and maybe they have a substation there?

But what I understand are their biggest interest in is to have satellite facilities that are useful to the officers when they're out on their beat.

So as an example at Crozet, in the village of Crozet, there's actually a picture, I think, of that site.

There's a small office space in the village center.

And so it gives them a small space for storage to do interviews as necessary.

It's not a substation per se.

I think there has been a growing interest

At least the forces I've worked with in the past, we've been involved in giving them a substation.

It helps them have a place they can go and get paperwork done or, you know, when they're not out on a call.

There's a huge gap between, you know, like Southern Albemarle and my district in particular.

There's just

Not a lot of places to go.

I'm just suggesting that we invested in the ANSI school.

Yeah, the 5-1 speaks to the satellite offices, and I think that's where their focus is.

Also, up in the first objective, there's an action that encourages

multi-use use of public facilities with the idea that fire stations can also serve that purpose.

Right, and again I think stepping back to what the expectations are for community facilities is that that dialogue often takes place with the Board of Supervisors as needed during budget

And it's operational oriented, even though it's a physical facility, it more relates to how they operate as opposed to a specific, it's an infrastructure need, but it's also small enough in scale that it's more operational.

So I think the preference in this draft of the plan is to leave that guidance with the agencies.

We think we're going to identify public lands we own and we might identify what uses might be on that.

Yes, exactly.

Chair, if I might, I would encourage that if I could come alongside that because I'm page nine under the police where it says, you talk about giving them areas to be, this allows officers to foster and strengthen relationships within each district communities.

I would say we do not have sort of community policing here.

Maybe in Crozet, they've got community police policing, but not in the rest of the development community.

They don't have community policing.

And so anything that would allow that allow

And so I think that's just coming along there.

Yeah.

That's the one that's in the Old Trail military.

All right, so continuing with implementation, let's start with objective one, provide public facilities, infrastructure and services and a responsible, equitable and cost effective manner to serve existing and future community needs.

Mr. Chairman, I do have one I think I'd like to bring up.

I was making sure it fit here.

But it was going back to the question about rural areas as well.

For the commission, is there a moment or are there building typologies that when you look at the hierarchy of need and talking about like, if you're going to expand any kind of construction to the rural area, there's a hierarchy.

What is there?

a critical type of facility we ought to be thinking about, right?

So like I read something about libraries in one of the sections here, you know, in rural areas, libraries, like during COVID, you would get COVID testing there.

They serve for education purposes, workforce development purposes.

There's all kinds of things that a library in a rural area might serve as different than in a development area.

So I'm just wondering, are there any typologies that make sense, right?

If we're going to say,

you know, for comprehensive planning purposes that, hey, we would like to see something here if it were to be developed.

Are there any kind of building typologies that make more sense than others?

Yeah.

I mean, I'll just throw out one that we talked about, I think before, which is Crossroads communities and how that's tied to resilience and whether there's medical facilities, fire and rescue, you know, a convenience store, those kinds of things that might be an example where those could be

I don't want to use the word expanded, but they could.

Just a point of clarification, please.

On 1.7, where you say proactively rezone county-owned land that is being used for designated for public facilities, blah, blah, blah.

Are you saying like, for instance, at the Lamb's Lane campus when we just talked about

It's no longer called Center 2, but when it was called Center 2.

That was in the rural part of that land is actually zoned rural.

And so by, I don't know if we actually, did we change the zoning of that?

Yeah, generally a lot of the public facilities are on land that's zoned rural area as an example, which creates setback issues, building height issues.

So this was an action that just,

I think for us it really says when we're doing our zoning modernization, is there a way to be a little bit more reflective of what's needed for public institution facilities to make it easier for them to locate?

And would that set aside the properties such as that Rivanna Village, or not Rivanna, excuse me, I don't wanna get my guy upset here.

Rivanna Station, although I'd like to set that aside, a Rivanna Station where I think it's rural, but would we expect a request or an idea from county staff to say we should change that to institutional or to commercial or research and development?

because right now I think most of that land out there is still rural.

Rivanna Station?

Well, that we've rezoned for industrial purposes.

If there was a school facility on it, I think what we're looking at here is more broadly is perhaps is there a zoning ordinance or there's some changes in the zoning district that can make some accommodation for public facilities which have some unique location issues with it.

Any other comments on action or objective one?

Yes.

Yeah, we haven't articulated that here per se.

I think rural area, if I recall, there's guidance that you can find in both the development area land use plan and the rural area plan about scale and matching scale of the area.

But I think as a specific building typology, I'm not aware of other than what

most likely the zoning ordinance for rural areas permits.

I don't think we've gotten into that.

That probably is the closest one.

Can you expand a little bit on 1.7 where you say update zone regulations to better accommodate institutional uses?

Well, that's what we just discussed that schools, public facilities lots of times are big.

They're kind of sprawling in urban areas,

their setbacks can be an issue.

Yeah, this is just to take a closer look at whether we can better accommodate public facilities so that we don't get into that campus situation where the old previously called High School Center to build tall enough and couldn't meet setback requirements on a campus that was already developed as a campus.

All right, moving on to objective two, public water and sewer development areas.

We talked a little bit about that before as well.

Any other comments or questions on that?

Go ahead.

I was just going to ask 2.5 is kind of an odd thing to include in a thing like this, like prohibit access to this thing.

There's two aspects to that.

One, there's a history that this has been in the comp plan for a number of years.

That, um,

Crozet line goes through our water supply watershed area and rural areas.

So the intent from many years ago back to our comprehensive zoning in 1982 was to not

allow that extension to be a catalyst for growth.

But secondly, and probably almost equally important, it's what's called a force main.

In order to get the stuff to the treatment center, it requires a number of pump stations and it has to be pressurized.

And there's an engineering difficulty.

I think it can be done, but it's costly and difficult to do and creates complications to connect to force mains.

Prohibit is not language that you typically use in the conference today.

It would be discouraged, but that's the history.

Yeah, I had a question just staying on the topic of sewage.

Are we, in the text, I don't remember what page it's on, it doesn't really matter, but in the text of this chapter, it did mention that package treatment plants are not recommended by the EPA.

In fact, they detest them because they fail, because they require someone, an operator, and people don't maintain them.

And so there's sort of like automated wastewater treatment plants, little mini plants.

I feel like we should perhaps even go as far as saying we prohibit them.

I mean, we give reference.

I mean, basically, they're not a good idea.

Yeah.

Yeah, 2.3 is the one that says allow central systems only when existing public system.

We could be more specific to say it's not included.

The one complication is that

systems will ultimately fail and public is not going to be an alternative.

Maybe in the text and you could say it may use stronger language in the general text, not in the objective to talk about the fact that they have a terrible history of failure and they're not encouraged or discouraged in our county.

People are still building new ones and they're failing.

for us.

We've had to recently deal with it.

Yeah, I'd like to see stronger language.

And then the other one is I don't this might be getting more into like the territory of the Department of Health, but mounded septic systems is another rural sewage treatment method where you when you don't have soils that perk.

you pile the dirt up on top and then you make your septic system basically in a mound.

They're not very attractive looking, but the, I'm just brain dead today, the Association of Municipal Governments, whatever it's called in Virginia, they disavow them.

They say they're terrible.

The only study talking about their efficacy is done by the manufacturers.

So I'm just wondering, is that something that,

I think our health department has become accepting of more alternative systems.

I can't say whether sand mound systems are used much here or not, but I know that

They are more open to them when they used to.

They used to be an exception and not approvable.

We do have in our environmental stewardship section, I believe, a recommendation that regards improved

Yeah.

I just, it's something that's being pushed.

Um, and I get it if your system is failing, but they, you know, there there's very questionable technology that is being used across Virginia and other places.

Okay.

Yeah.

Can I jump onto 2.8 for a second on the, I guess it's the next page.

just jumped out to me, continue the RWSA board of directors current policy that biosolids produced by the RWSA should not be applied to land such as fertilizer for agriculture.

Is there, first of all, that I struggled a bit, first of all, I support that 100%, but I also struggled a bit as to why it's in the provide public water and sewer to the development areas and county consistent with the growth management policy.

It could go in other places as well, or we could move it to something more appropriate.

or is there a better place to put a general policy about biosolids that talk about considering eliminating use of it on county land?

Yeah, I can't speak to what we've been working on with biosolids within this comp plan.

We can certainly look into that.

Great.

We wanted to make sure that it's something the service authority does.

This is sort of the service authority section.

Yeah, gotcha.

Let's move down, just looking at the time, to objective CF3.

I just had one comment on 3.3, provide resources to the renovation of the main library, kind of to the question about prohibiting access to the Crozet sewer interceptor.

That just seemed like a very specific item, and I don't know if there's a

If there's a reason for it to be so specific, number one or number two, should we have a more general action item that talks about providing resources for continued or ongoing renovation of libraries as needed?

I don't know.

It just seemed very specific.

So why are we calling out the one on Market Street?

It's a jointly owned facility with the city.

I think in working with the director, there was a thought that

We're not, this recommendation doesn't recommend a new facility.

They're very costly.

And I think this is maybe an indirect way of saying supporting the existing facilities as your primary, your primary large scale library of facilities.

To your point earlier, if this is a 10 or 20 year plan, I just wonder, it feels like it might sundown once we do that.

And then it's like, well, now we need to go to another library and figure out what's that.

Something in our plan that we can measure if we did.

Yes, I was going to go on with the quantification.

If we can put something in there around, you know, we expect to see this many more visitors or increase in visitors.

If we do these things with libraries, we expect it to be used this much more.

Just something to kind of quantify some of the results.

I was actually trying to look on my phone.

I just judged a competition for AIA Iowa Action and I saw a really good write up about some of the things that

Yeah, thank you.

This is one of those areas where I was trying to figure out about the equity piece and about facilities, because when I looked at the library map, I noticed there was this glaring place in the county where it would probably take you a good 30, 40 minutes to get to the library, and that's the Northside Library, and so we seem to have no library resources up.

around the airport road, sort of either east or west of 29 there.

And so when I'm thinking about equity, I'm thinking about, and I know they're expensive, but there's probably some developments up there or some developments that could designate a library.

I'm not quite sure where that development is, but I'm sure there's a developer in the room that could put a library up there.

But in any event, not to push that point.

But that's what I'm talking about equity.

because so we're pushing all of this development up 29 to be our new mainstream, but yet there's just basic things that aren't up there.

You know, like there isn't really sort of a community green space.

Yeah, you can go to this park up there, but I'm trying.

I've got the boss in the room right now.

I have to try and behave, at least for seven more months.

Because that's the kind of equity thing that I'm trying to sort of figure out.

We're encouraging development, but at the same time, are we encouraging county resources up there to be able to support the people who are going to be living there?

You don't have to answer, but that was my point about the equity.

I was just going to point out, we actually have a proffered site in the North Point site for a library.

So that is a site that's subject to a rezoning request where that might change.

But we had previously approved a site for a future library.

Because there's a school up there, right?

It's a school site and a library site.

So again, that's a rezoning that's come in.

There's some discussion about changing zoning.

But that's one of those things that would be depicted on the map so you could see what potential future Crawford sites are.

But again, I'll caution you that that might change based on that rezoning request that we see.

Libraries are, like all public facilities, are very expensive to operate.

And so the commitment to make sure that they're operating in an efficient way comes into play.

and users from other localities that use those facilities also factor into their decision making.

Sure.

First of all, thank you for all this and for the attention to their spaces.

I saw that scattered throughout, including here and libraries serving that function for sure.

I wanted to, I was reminded of how

10, maybe 11 years ago Albemarle reduced funding for libraries and now we don't have any Sunday hours and that's been a real personal you know thing for me and like on Sundays I want to schedule a meeting room and I can't because they're all closed and I don't know how to sort of

put into this something like, consider seven day a week access or like study, investigate, something like that.

I realize it's strictly a budget issue and planning documents don't typically speak directly to budgets.

Cool.

All right.

We're down to six minutes.

I don't want to rush us, but keep your comments consulted, if you would.

public schools, high quality, equitable, and inclusive educational assistance for students.

I'll just throw out something I noticed in terms of the way the preamble is written under the school system, and this gets back to something Commissioner Clayborne, I think, mentioned.

That's on page 7.

AC44 has recommendations for school buildings, including their location, form, and recreational amenities.

Let's see.

Recommendations include that new schools be located in development areas or directly adjacent to development areas, while noting that schools can be constructed in a rural area with physical constraints

land area availability in the development areas where existing service considerations may necessitate it.

So it feels like that's pretty restrictive on rural area schools, which I get, but then it says about half of the county schools are in the rural areas.

And so I just don't wanna shortchange the schools that are there, that there's enough that talks about and supports rural area school

Maybe not so much growth, but we're not going to have that much growth in the rural areas, but just want to make sure they're not short-changed.

So you don't need to make any comments on that, but wanted to call that out.

Yeah, my understanding is they meet annually but

Just to reiterate, agency 4.3 stood out to me as we actually controlled that.

But CF5, provide high quality and responsible emergency services, police, et cetera.

That's five.

I'll just kind of speak to this a little bit, six and seven both, which both start with reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Yeah, I know we've got a climate action lens on this whole process.

Sometimes I feel like things like this are lenses.

It's like dad's glasses when we need like a new set of glasses to look at the climate crisis more accurately in this era.

I do understand the desire to reduce emissions.

I feel like even if we got down to zero emissions tomorrow, it's not going to change a thing globally.

So I do want us to not take up all the air in the room with emissions.

And I think looking instead at things like, how do we thrive and support one another?

And actually things like what Commissioner Firehock was describing is cost effective bioswales and things like that, that actually both save money and address the climate crisis in smart ways.

But also even at the household level, getting people so that we have like safety backups feels

who are important to me.

And I was leaving at that.

Awesome.

OK, how about eight?

Hearing none, I'm just moving through.

How about any of the rest of them?

Yeah, I have one for nine, for a 9.2.

You know, we talk about

I realize that when we talk about electric providers, we don't do that as power companies, but we have a long-standing policy of discouraging herbicide use and right-of-ways.

And it's been a very successful thing.

I don't know if anyone notices when you leave Albemarle County and then you go into an adjoining county, you notice that their right-of-ways are all brown.

I think this would be a place that the broadband should have thrown in there, too, because it is.

I didn't see it in here, or the 9 section that you're talking about communications and things like that.

And since we're seeing that it's at the end of its install, it'll then become a place that's going to be for maintenance.

And this should be a place that you're talking about maintenance.

Mr. Carrazana?

Yes, it's continuing in 9.2.

So this is where it picks up a little bit more when we were talking about the distribution of electric and the electric grid.

And so this is what I didn't see in the body, but obviously you have it here in the objectives.

What I don't see is a mention of capacity.

And I want to stress that because I think there's an urgency.

I believe there is an urgency.

particularly here in Virginia how we think about capacity and that has to do obviously with resilience as well and so I echo Commissioner Moore's comment I think we get over fixated on emissions and the source of our electric for instance in 9.3 you talk about eliminating gas facilities

So, you know, gas-fired boilers is probably going to be one of your largest energy users.

Gas-fired boilers are extremely efficient.

In fact, you're going to pay a lot less for a gas-fired boiler than you're going to pay for an electric boiler.

They don't last as long, electric boilers, and they cost a lot more money.

So weigh all that and then consider where is the electricity coming from that's feeding that boiler?

So what are you actually doing, right?

I think sometimes we need to take a little bit about, take the emotion out a little bit about it in this conversation and, and, and think about what we're actually achieving.

So I would just, and so capacity is something for what, with the electric grid resilience that we need to think about, because if we're, if our demand is exponentially growing in the next five years and

The priorities are going to go to things that are not your home.

So is this sort of a following up on this piece where we sort of did the first read on data centers and part of I think in that whole thing is that in that potential

Ordinances that data centers have to be able to sort of generate or they have to sort of be able to sort of manufacture their own energy in some shape or form or be able to claim it because if they don't then in fact we're gonna get there a lot faster than what you're suggesting.

So there's only one county that is currently considering a provision for

One gigabyte centers or larger.

That's an enormous amount of energy.

So for instance, I understand the data center that's going in at Fontaine, I think it's going to take off of the

No.

No?

Not exactly.

So there's a geothermal central energy plan in Fontaine.

The geothermal will provide a source to provide cooling.

So it's basically cooling and heating.

In that facility, it's cooling.

So that will reduce the energy cost, but it's still being fed by- It still needs to be driven.

Yeah.

Okay.

I thought, you know, so that's right.

Right.

It is, but you still have to run the servers.

I mean, you still got to run a server farm.

Hugely expensive.

And so, I mean, I am asking that question.

In the draft that we saw, not the draft, I mean, the piece that we saw that Bill Fritz brought to us, was there a piece in there about being able to supply power to data centers?

I just don't remember it.

And if not, there wasn't.

There's a size limitation that we put on

before special use permits, which would allow us to evaluate the impacts.

Perhaps Andy might want to speak to this.

I know that there is some limitations on what we can do in terms of controlling and improving based solely on power.

We also have limited abilities to influence overall regional capacity issues.

So I think that's things we have to be aware of

We certainly can in our recommendations address our ability to approve uses that generate certain capacities.

Jodi Filardo, Community Development Director.

Just wanted to let you all know it's our understanding that we cannot regulate these data centers that are possibilities for the county based on power.

We have a lot of other options that we can use, but not power.

So we can eat water, the use of water, we can regulate setbacks, we can regulate setbacks to keep data centers away from adjoining properties so that the low frequency hum from a data center doesn't impact the neighbors.

So there are an array of things we're looking at on data centers.

We've got a two-step process in mind.

First, we're coming forward with a zoning text amendment, which will have a phase one approach on data centers which establish a couple different thresholds for sizing and places in which we would allow data centers to go.

And the expectation is we will do the evaluation of those and then come back with a phase two following outreach to stakeholders and

experience with what we find as data centers come forward to Mohawk County.

Awesome.

All right, we are about five, six minutes over.

Yeah, I just have one real quick.

We mentioned native plants several places in here.

I think it's also important to mention management of invasive species.

I know that we call that out in some other chapters, but we do have some big problems with invasive species at some of our county schools and other county problems, other county properties.

And so that would be a good thing to call out here.

Mr. Benesch, staff, everybody, thank you so much.

Really helpful.

Great job.

And we will go into recess until 6 PM.

Good evening, everyone.

I will reconvene the March 25, 2025 meeting of the Planning Commission.

We have all returned to the dais.

Glad everybody's back.

So I don't think I need to call the roll.

Good to go.

We'll move on to public comment on matters pending before the commission, but not listed for a public hearing on the agenda.

No.

OK.

No.

We're all here.

Thank you.

I've been schooled on that before.

Is there anybody in the audience who would like to speak to matters not on the agenda?

OK.

Seeing none, we'll move on to the consent agenda.

Is there a commissioner who would like to pull an item, or is there a motion to approve the draft meeting minutes from March 11, 2025?

So moved.

Second.

Great.

Any discussion?

All right.

All right.

Ms.

Firehock?

Aye.

Thank you.

With that, we will move on to the public hearing items, beginning with ZMA 2023-18 Albemarle Business Campus Amendment and the last of the staff report.

Thank you, Chair Missel and members of the Planning Commission.

My name is Kevin McDermott.

I'll be presenting on this rezoning tonight in lieu of Sid Shoaf, who did the review.

He's not in tonight.

So as you said, this is a public hearing for the rezoning ZMA 2023-18 Albemarle Business Campus Neighborhood Model Development Amendment 2.

Generally, the location is off Old Lynchburg, just south of I-64.

You can see those parcels highlighted in yellow on the map.

This is directly across from the county office building and adjacent to the Region 10 offices.

You can see the location.

There were two areas actually of development included with this.

This is a screenshot of the overall development plan.

The original rezoning was approved in 2020, and it created five blocks.

Block one is this one in pink.

That is located on the south side of Old Lynchburg Road, adjacent to Country Green Road.

And that block is already developed with 128 multifamily units.

Block five, which is this one yellow,

is already developed with the self storage and office building.

Additionally, Vision Lane, which you can see lightly that cuts through the property here is also already fully constructed.

Currently blocks two, three and four are vacant.

This amendment really pertains primarily to blocks two through five.

It's approximately eight and a half acres and as I said, zoned neighborhood model development

through the rezoning in 2020.

Blocks 2 through 4 are vacant, as I already mentioned.

This once again shows the existing zoning of neighborhood model.

You can see that we also have C1 commercial and residential adjacent to that and another highway commercial or I'm sorry C1 commercial and commercial office.

That's what the dark pink is.

The light pink is the C1 commercial.

Apologies.

The comp plan recommends community mixed use.

That's the brown that you see there.

The primary uses for that are residential, community scale retail, service, and office uses.

Additionally, places of worship, schools, and public and institutional uses are allowed.

The applicant is proposing to amend the code of development application plan and proffers for the previously approved rezoning.

I'll just start walking through some of the elements of these proposed changes.

The first elements in his code of development are the uses in table A. This adds drive-through windows is permitted by special use permit and also parking structures is a by right use is

They are relegated to the side of the associated structures, so those would be accessory uses only.

As I said, they have to be relegated to the side to minimize visibility.

That's the only change to the uses in the code of development.

Now the types of the square footage and amounts of use density.

You can see here, this is showing you the non-residential square footage.

The top table you see here is what was approved in the 2021 rezoning.

And then the bottom below that is what is being

being suggested for this rezoning.

What you can see here is that blocks two through four are all going from 20,000, 25,000, and 4,000

non-residential square footage respectively to zero in block two, zero in block three, and 10,000 in block four.

So that reduces the overall total from 94,000 down to 55,000.

That's the minimum square footage.

Regarding the residential uses, previously there was only residential uses proposed in block one.

You can see those are the ones that are already developed with zero minimum residential units in blocks two through five.

So the change to that is to go from zero, or I'm sorry, a maximum of 85, 56 and 38 in the previous rezoning to a maximum of 240.

The note that I have to make here is that the total residential units previously were not to exceed 128.

So that's really the main change here is that the 128 were entirely filled by block one.

And so in order to get any additional residential, it needs to be, that note needs to be amended and which is happening here.

So it's not to exceed 368 total.

And those would all be found in blocks two through four.

Building regulations.

This rezoning also increases the maximum stories in block four from three to four stories and the maximum height from 50 to 60 decreases the primary front minimum setback from five to zero.

And this was due to sidewalk construction that in the field was identified as requiring that minimum setback change.

There's also a note that would allow covered porches, balconies, eaves, and other architectural features to project not more than four feet into any required yard.

The proposed changes to the application plan, I don't need to walk through all these.

They're shown on the application plan.

The highlights really are the updates to the residential use types that you see in blocks two through four, and then updating just general things like the instrument numbers for previous dedications that have already occurred.

And one thing I do want to note is that they did remove a note for existing transit stop that needed to be improved.

We may want to hear from the applicant on that.

There is some confusion there because, as we talk about in the proffers on the next page, they do have references to

A development agreement that also requires that existing transit stop.

So the fact that it's removed from the application plan may not necessarily mean that it's removed from the requirements.

Finally, the last bullets are all about updating the roundabout and shared use path exhibits.

These exhibits were developed during the original rezoning.

Since then, the County and VDOT project to upgrade the roundabout has moved further along and additional or more exact designs for those have occurred.

So this updates what is going on with the amount of land needed and what the design of that roundabout looks like.

So as I mentioned, the proposed changes to the proffer statement.

Proffer 1A decreases the amount of the cash proffer to the Albemarle County CIP from $500,000 down to $250,000.

That cash proffer was triggered when the site plan or the certificates of occupancy were approved for the 187 residential units.

So that's when they tripped that

487 vehicles per day number.

So as I said, that proffer has already been tripped and the proffer funds have been requested by the county.

We have not received those proffers at this time.

They were requested back in May 2024.

One important thing to note with that proffer is that staff would like to see some additional information on which that reduction was based on.

So some of the reasons that we have heard from the applicant are that

Previously built infrastructure is being impacted by the change in the VDOT designs.

We have not seen what previously built infrastructure has been impacted or what the cost of replacing it may be.

We have not seen an estimation of the potential cost of the additional right of way that the applicant proposes to dedicate.

And no change in the amount of traffic generated by this development is included with this application.

Also, as I mentioned, also the

other proffer.

The proffer for the roundabout exhibit really just references the new update and provides a new exhibit with the amount of right away.

I'll show you that in the next slide.

But I also wanted to highlight again that proffer three still contains language for a performance agreement.

And then the county requirements for that performance agreement.

This was enacted prior to the previous rezoning.

It was a performance agreement that was entered into by the county EDA and the applicant.

It required, among other things, a reservation of class A, of space for class A office space on the site.

And that was timed.

It was a period of, I believe, I can't remember the exact number of months, but the point is that that proffer is no longer required.

During the time that he was required to hold that, no

residents, no tenants were found for that site.

And so he is no longer required to hold the property anymore.

The county has provided the one hundred thousand in TIF funds to the applicant at this point.

But I will, as I mentioned, point out that there were other elements to that performance agreement, things regarding transit accessibility, the proposed transit stop that I mentioned, other elements like pedestrian and bike facilities through the through the application.

So staff would like to make sure that those are being carried through whether or not the performance agreement is still in there.

And there's still some questions about whether or not that's happening.

This is that document which shows the updated

Right-of-way for the design of the roundabout.

You can see that this light pink area here was previously dedicated.

That was what was offered during the first rezoning.

And now the applicant is offering to also dedicate additional right-of-way

.08 acres for the shared use path that would be constructed along the frontage as part of that project.

The applicant would be actually constructing a portion of that across this section of the property.

VDOT would be constructing this portion, and that's what that additional right of way is required for.

So overall, the positive aspects of this are that the request could result in up to 36 additional affordable units within the development in keeping with the previous affordable housing policy of 15%, highlighting that this application actually came in before we moved on to the new housing policy.

So that's why the 15% is what was requested with that.

and that the request is mostly consistent with the neighborhood model principles of the comprehensive plan and master plan.

The primary areas where we found it wasn't were related to mixture of uses.

As I mentioned, the comp plan does set an expectation for more of a community mixed use area down there.

We have very little mixed use available in that area.

It's growing heavily with residential, so while staff really does support additional residential, we also want to see that in a mix of uses.

That information is both included in the

previous comp plan and it's what you all have seen in the recommendation for our update to the comp plan.

So that's going to stay consistent.

The concerns are that it's inconsistent with the Southern Western Urban Neighborhoods Master Plan and the comp plan and the NMD principles for mixed use in neighborhood centers.

The reduction in the minimum non-residential square footage requirement removes a significant amount of required non-residential area.

Additionally, Mountain View Elementary and Albemarle High Schools are currently over capacity.

The number of students would be generated by this development would tribute further overcrowding at these schools and the reduction in the proffered mitigation and transportation impacts.

Great, thanks.

Very helpful.

Any questions for the staff?

Yeah, a couple questions.

One, in the concerns you mentioned that it's inconsistent with the Southern and Western urban neighborhoods master plan.

Well, the primary recommendation for community mixed use is for that residential serving retail office space and other non-residential uses.

I was wondering if we have any figures on how many hundreds of thousands of square feet of empty commercial space we have in this county.

I do not have that information.

Okay.

We are.

And I'd be happy to talk about other other non-residential uses, but I think part of that issue is that non-residential was really location specific and our, our

problem is really that in this part of town, all we are seeing right now is really development of residential.

And we want to make sure that there is services that provide the needs for all that residential.

So really, it's the fact that it's location specific.

If you go down there on that south side of town, all throughout that development area, you have the county office building,

I was there a few days ago.

I think, yeah, that part of town, the folks I know there often go to that whole Wegmans zone, which is just a quarter mile up the road.

The other question I had about the school capacity, which I always kind of wonder about school capacity as a thing.

We don't use that for any other demographic group when we're assessing proposals, but that's beside the point.

I've said that before.

Also, it says that Albemarle High is currently over capacity.

Is this in the Albemarle High district?

I'm sorry, I'd have to verify.

It's not.

Okay.

I was picking this up from someone else and it was something I didn't catch.

You are right.

It is in the Monticello High School District.

Apologies.

How over under capacity is Monticello High School?

I'm sorry.

I think I read somewhere that basically it's

I may be wrong on this, so check me, but it's expanding.

Even when it expands, it's still going to be at capacity.

Monticello?

No?

Okay, so Monticello's got room.

Monticello has room.

I'll back up on that, and also in the other school system, remember we're going to get a new elementary school down there in that same feeder district, and so unless this project, if it goes forward, is going to be done in two years, there's going to be plenty of seats in that area for

for certainly K through middle school.

So I would like to just have that noted that A, the high school has capacity, and B, the elementary school has capacity down there.

But what I would like to have some sense about, and so I'm sort of telegraphing this to the applicant, is this piece of property still under the opportunities zone, the opportunities zone, which sort of launched this project in the first place?

Is it still in place there, since I know that there's been

Yeah, correct.

It is still within that opportunity zone.

The other thing is, so you mentioned early on, just so that I have an understanding so that the applicant understands some of these questions, you mentioned early on that they were looking to be able to put a drive-up window in this, something that had a drive-up window, and so

It would be any drive-up, whether or not it's for food, or it's for cash, for other kind of dough.

OK.

Then can I have a, and this is I think you were saying, so we're adding more people onto blocks, whatever that is, one, two, three, and four, on the south two, once across the street.

Yes, sorry.

So two, three, and four.

Two is the God forbid, you have too much stuff in your house and you have to stick it in a storage place.

No, that's five.

That's five.

Well, of course it would be the biggest one.

Okay.

And so we're going to go from having just sort of daytime traffic there

if it had been in commercial building to now having given the people work, basically traffic all day long.

So they come in, they go to work, or they don't go to work.

And so if I'm understanding correctly, we have not received a traffic study or any kind of revised numbers on what traffic looked like coming out of the community?

We have not.

And with sort of nothing that you've seen yet, and perhaps the applicant has something in their portfolio, nothing that you've seen that says, and this is why.

I'm sorry, it's not connected to the fact that they're providing the right-of-way?

There were multiple reasons given.

One was the additional right-of-way that the applicant's going to dedicate.

And the other one is that

I guess I'm sort of struggling with why infrastructure equals flow of traffic.

Yeah, thank you.

Old Lynchburg Road.

That's not really sort of enhancing Old Lynchburg Road there.

Or maybe you'll go to that photo and

and help me there.

I don't understand how the improvement in infrastructure is helping the flow of traffic there.

I understood that.

Yes, the applicant dedicated a piece of right-of-way that allowed for the previous design of the roundabout.

And in addition to that, they proffered half a million dollars to the county's CIP that could be used for the infrastructure improvements.

The county's intent for that $500,000 was to use as a local match for the roundabout overall.

And that local match has already moved forward.

with the anticipation that we'd get the $500,000 or how we'd be adjusting.

Can I, I'm sorry, just one bounce back to the school conversation real quickly before we get too far past Commissioner Moore.

Oh, I'm sorry, I was looking at the concerns block over here.

And then in the under schools on page 12 it says, both Mountain View Elementary School and Monticello High School are currently over capacity.

Right, but the elementary school's got, we said yes to a new school there.

Yeah.

I'll see if I can find my notes.

I was just in a meeting about that and it had the timing of that new school coming on.

Was it called Mountainside or something?

No, it's not Mountainside.

Is that what they're calling it?

I was at a meeting within the last week and they had

Center 2, and that school coming on by 27.

OK, that just makes me confused.

It'd be good to find out what this really does to the adjacent schools.

Thanks.

Yes, could you tell me a little bit more about the parking structures and the statement here?

That would be part of the neighborhood model zoning, so it would have to be identified in the previous, because that neighborhood model, as you recall, is you build your own code of development for that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I have a question.

It's more tactical around the policy.

So if you submit a proposal and it's approved under an old policy, and you want to open it up and re-litigate it, you don't have to now be in compliance with the new policy that's in effect?

This seems kind of odd to me.

It seems like the way it's written, you don't.

I'm sorry, can you provide a reference?

Sure.

So if a proposal such as this, which was approved under the old affordable housing 15% policy, approved, ship has sailed, left the dock.

Now we want to open it back up and relitigate it.

Yeah, I apologize.

I didn't understand exactly what you're asking, but we had set a date for when we would start enforcing that new policy and it didn't come when the new policy was first introduced.

The board had initially said,

They wanted to do additional work and create their incentive program before we started actually enforcing that new policy.

The application was submitted right before we started enforcing that new policy.

So that's why it was still under 50%.

If it had come in after that date, which I think was probably just a few months after this, I can't remember the exact, actually this is probably six to eight months after, but that's when we actually started enforcing the new policy.

Okay, so let's make sure I'm tracking.

So this was reopened prior to the enforcement date?

Correct.

Thank you, Mr. McDermott, for the presentation.

I just have a quick question.

Okay, that was a line out in the, yeah, because I didn't see one in either

There are bus stops in the area.

There's actually one in front of this location.

Thank you.

Yes, thanks.

My questions are primarily financial in nature.

So the first thing I want to ask about, I just have two questions.

First thing is the $100,000 sort of incentive grant for being, I guess, for being in the opportunity zone and trying to spur development there.

So the applicants received that, but they didn't build it to, sorry, they didn't build it to what they originally proposed.

They were only required to reserve the area for that.

So following their due diligence, they can't find that biotech tenant, then they get to keep the funding.

Is that right?

That's correct.

Yeah.

And just as a timing note, I will

to point out that that incentive occurred right before, I think it was January before COVID started.

Terrible time to go out for looking for in-office commercial tenants.

All right.

And the second question has to do, this was talked about in the staff report.

So the applicant is asking to reduce their proffer from 500,000 to 250,000.

And if I read the application correctly, I understood the rationale being, well, they were giving some land for the roundabout.

All right.

Would it not also be true, just in your opinion as a person with a background in transportation planning, that the applicant is getting some benefit from the roundabout improving the traffic flow and circulation at this difficult intersection.

So they're getting a benefit.

They're not merely giving up land and that's it.

It's not a zero sum total.

They're getting a benefit from having done that.

And they went into this development understanding that the roundabout was coming.

and that they would probably, since it's a circle, have to give up some land, right?

Okay.

So, all right.

I think I have the understanding of everything now.

That's it.

I had a couple of questions kind of related to the

I guess planning aspects of this.

A lot of my questions have been answered, which is great.

And that is, I don't know if this is a fair question, but I'll ask anyway.

If this application had come in as a neighborhood model district, the way it is now being proposed, I guess, based on the feedback that you all have provided in the staff report, it would not be an acceptable neighborhood model district design.

So let's talk a little bit about questions that Commissioner Moore was asking.

It's still a plan.

We sought funding through SmartScale to construct or to improve that bridge that goes over 64 that included a shared use path.

So for now, the one that's shown on here, the reserved right of way for the shared use path would be a path to nowhere.

Yes, except there is existing pedestrian facilities, if you call it that, there's a minor, a narrow asphalt path that does connect through this entire area.

So this is really upgrading one segment of it.

And I will add that we have applied for funding twice, actually, once for the bridge and once to go south from here all the way down to

South Mary.

And just to add a little bit more detail to that, I think with the previous application that looks like it's not going to be funded, a lot of that was the bridge as they were trying to get that shared use path on it had to rebuild the deck and on and on.

So I think what the VDOT sort of realizing is probably cheaper even to build parallel pedestrian structure there.

And there's going to be another, VDOT is already planning for another

I see on page, what is this?

There's no page numbers.

Yeah, it's the code of development, page 11.

It just has some graphics that show two of the blocks, but I don't see any graphic representation of what happens in other blocks due to the redesign or potential addition of residential.

That's correct.

Got it.

OK, great.

Thank you.

All right.

And Chair Missel, can I just add, I did want to make sure I was correct.

And with the transportation numbers, we did receive a estimate of the number of trips that 240 units would generate.

So that was 1,098.

and the old proffer or the new proffer does still include a maximum number of total vehicular trips not to exceed 3200 daily trips or 509 peak hour trips.

It's hard to say exactly where within that range this might fall because we don't know the exact mix of residential units but just wanted to highlight that they did provide some numbers and those are in the applicants

Great.

Thank you.

All right.

All right.

And I did want to echo your correction.

Monticello High's enrollment capacity, expected capacity, does have it slightly over capacity right now.

That one person.

Well, you know who it is.

And I confirm that it is two years.

And I sent both of you the document in schools.

Awesome.

Great.

Cool.

All right.

Good evening, Chair Missel, members of the Planning Commission.

My name is Kelsey Schlein.

I'm a planner with Shimp Engineering.

I'm here tonight representing 5th Street Forest LLC, who's the owner and developer of this project.

Here with me tonight is Kyle Redinger.

He is the developer of Albemarle Business Campus.

I'm just going to go over a few details of the proposal and then I'm going to turn it over to Kyle to kind of hop into some of the details and to answer some of the questions and the items that were discussed.

earlier.

So just going over the project history, some of you have sat here and seen this project through every single one of its iterations from the first time where we came before you in 2019 when the planned unit development and then modified that to a neighborhood model district.

And then many of you were here as well when we came before you for an amendment to that NMD 2

permit biotechnology tenant space to permit some larger building footprint sizes and taller height.

That was, as was mentioned earlier by staff, that was right, I think, excuse me, that one I think was right after COVID, but everything else within for the first approval was obtained right before COVID.

So a lot changed with, you know, the financials and the reality of this project.

And so this before you is just kind of showing the history and the various approvals and revisions to this plan over time.

Kevin gave a great staff report, so thank you for that.

So this is just kind of going over the development.

five blocks in total.

The amendment before you tonight is focused specifically on blocks two through four.

Blocks five is currently built out as office and self storage space.

Blocks one is built out with 128 residential units.

That is the maximum number of residential units currently permitted in ABC.

And so the entire development is currently maxed out for residential units.

A summary of a few of the revisions here.

The main for being for residential density increasing blocks two, three, four to 34 DUA, revising the minimum non-residential square footage in block four, which is our kind of corner most

If Kyle had some more commercial tenants interested, this would be the most desirable block for them to be located.

Previously that minimum in block four was at 4,000 square feet.

So we increased it to 10, but as Kevin noted, reduced the overall minimum non-residential requirements throughout blocks two through five or two through four, excuse me.

and an additional component of this application.

And I know that Kyle has some additional information to offer on this as well as regarding the justification for the reduction in the proffered amount.

So the proffer amendment is a part of this application proposing to reduce the proffer to 250,000, but then also provide additional right of way

that is in the additional right-of-way area that you see here is currently is per the most recent VDOT plan and I think Kyle will speak to this that there's been quite a few iterations over time and he's worked through VDOT with those but this is kind of showing the most recent proposal that we have in front of us.

Just kind of the main justification for this is that flexibility is key to continued project success.

And I'm just going to go through a few examples, which I think you all may be familiar with throughout the county.

I think

One thing with these planned developments, we, you know, try to try to get it right the first time.

But market factors change.

What can be built and can't, you know, what's viable changes over time.

I think Covid was obviously something none of us saw coming and that didn't bode well for a project called Albemarle Business Campus.

And so I'm just kind of bringing up a few examples in the county that of planned development districts over time.

and how large commercial developments were planned, but there really just wasn't the demand for it and there weren't the rooftops for it.

So this is an example, HTC Area C. This was first rezoned back in 2001, I believe.

And I wanted to call attention to Blocks 2 and 7, which remained vacant for

20 years basically until the code of development was modified to permit residential uses.

Block two is now built out with townhomes.

Those are constructed.

That project is completed.

People live in Hollymede towns, more rooftops in Hollymede town center.

in these locations.

And then I also just wanted to call up the fact that Block 9 is still currently vacant and Block 7 is nearing submission for a final site plan.

It currently has initial site plan approval for residential units.

What built out first in the Hollymeade Town Center was a few commercial blocks.

The hotel is more recent.

The townhomes were built earlier on and that was because there was demand for it at the time.

Kind of another example, just of, you know, Belvedere and one of the commercial blocks there that permits up to 30,000 square feet of commercial.

Ever since that project was first approved in 2005, I believe Block 2 has built 2,000 square feet of commercial and the rest of Block 2 is currently being built out as 8 residential or 9, excuse me, residential units in that area.

Another example is Wickham Pond, which has a mixed use and commercial component.

Everything Wickham Pond has built out with the exception of block one.

And so I think I just call your attention to these examples, just to bring some light to the fact that flexibility is key.

And Kyle is really trying to make something happen here.

And

So we feel that this allowing for broader zoning flexibility kind of gives him the opportunity to move forward with that and also to have some activity going on in this pretty key area of the development areas.

Kyle, I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you, Kelsey.

I'm Kyle Redinger.

been developing in the community for the last 12 years or so.

I've seen a couple of you all for the whole time period.

But just want to thank you, Kevin, for your presentation.

Just want to give you a little more background on a couple of key facts that were associated with the project that were not discussed, particularly related to the roundabout in VDOT.

So when we first rezoned this years ago,

The thinking was the county wanted to do some sort of transportation improvement.

This was a challenging intersection.

We recommend a stoplight because it's a lot cheaper, a lot faster to get done.

The county wanted to do a roundabout.

We said, OK, sure.

In exchange for that, we'll do a cash proffer in addition to land dedication.

I don't remember the exact timing, but at some point when we were under construction with the apartments, we saw the initial plan for the new read a beat out roundabout design.

The prominent and I couldn't unfortunately find the prominent piece of that was a store more upon was, you know, predominantly on our property taking up pretty much that entire

and subsequently that design has been reduced and changed over the last few years.

So we've been dealing a little bit with a moving target in terms of what VDOT wants from us now.

But I think, you know, whether or not there's a stormwater facility on there, it's not clear.

It appears that's gone away in the most recent plan.

But VDOT has not, to be clear, has not finalized their exact plans yet for the site.

So it's a little bit of a moving target in terms of what they want on here.

So the thinking was on the profit reduction was that the county and VDOT and us don't want to go through a fight and a condemnation process for this land, that rather we'd make a change to our plans.

We had other market factors that are demanding more apartments there, at least down the road.

So the thinking was that we could put a deal together that would revise our proffers down in exchange for this new land dedication without a fight where everyone would be friendly.

Kevin, can you put back up the roundabout exhibit or Kelsey?

Oh, this is on Kelsey.

Thank you.

So I know the orange area looks relatively small.

But it's not entirely clear to us how that's going to impact our site design.

So we've spent, you've seen renderings right at the front of the site.

We spent a lot of money on renderings, on site plan design, on putting infrastructure in.

It's not clear to us, you know, I mean, there are plans floating around here and at some point they'll be finalized.

But it's not clear exactly how that's going to roll out.

We have some pretty substantially challenging braid on this side.

If you've walked it, you know, the corner close to Cavalier Crossing, now a cane, I think is about 10 foot.

below street grade.

And that corner, at least of it right now, is several feet below grade.

So presumably, we're going to be left with a pretty large slope walking path that we're going to have to connect to, presumably some stormwater infrastructure sampling.

So it's not, I can't honestly sit here and say, oh, here are the dozen plan changes we're going to have to make.

and we did renderings, we did some site plan, but we didn't have anything finalized because this VDOT plan was floating out there.

Now on the business side, the other thing that was happening is like, well, how can you show a tenant a potential building or commercial space, or how can you go to a bank and ask for financing when you don't know if you're gonna own the land in one or two years?

So that's been additional challenge, in addition to COVID and all the marketing challenges, we've sort of said,

The hope was that this plan would be totally done by this meeting.

It's not.

So I can't sit here and say, oh, here's my direct impacts.

Obviously we can take a, you know, a standard market calculation of the value of land and calculate that and do the profit reduction.

that way but the harder parts are hey we had to wait an additional four years while VDOT and the county figured out what they wanted here for the roundabout and furthermore we couldn't do anything regardless because no bank's going to finance an asset that potentially could be condemned through VDOT's process and then you know that if anyone's been through that that's you know

It's a 10-year legal battle that no one really wins in.

So it was really a lose-lose, I think, without some sort of amendment to our proffer situation.

I'm not saying that our current plan is ideal or perfect.

Obviously, the staff didn't support it.

Great.

I think maybe we could leave it there in two times, well over, and we can ask you questions though.

So we can continue if we want to.

Who would like to start with questions?

I guess maybe you could go into a little more detail about all that VDOT complication.

So are you saying that because of the uncertainty,

that you don't know exactly what land they're taking and what the impacts would be or whether they'd be creating new steep slopes or whatever challenges that you anticipate having additional expenses.

And that's why you want to reduce your proffer from 500 to 250.

So we, you know, we rendered a whole site with an office pad, for instance, that didn't assume there was this, you know, 10 foot strip taken out adjacent to where we were going to put a graded

Sidewalk and you know, we don't know at this point, we don't know how, how the plan is going to have to change it.

It doesn't look like a lot on that, but it, it may be it's just, it's hard to say.

Okay.

Can I ask just one clarifying question on the same line?

Yeah, we've made it we've made a prior dedication as part of our original proffer package that's already been completed.

And that was in terms of the 250 to 250,000.

Right, so the first plans that we saw when we started this application were for a stormwater pond that took up that whole corner essentially, and that's been reduced.

There were additional stormwater outflows that were planned potentially on our property.

Those are not shown in this exhibit.

I don't know where those stand now.

Presumably they've been engineered away, but again, I haven't seen

the final plan.

So I think generally VDOT's been amenable to being more friendly to our site situation.

But like I said, we've sort of been shooting at a moving target in terms of that reduction.

But had it been the pond for sure, that would have been, you know, an adequate number.

Yes, thank you for your presentation.

Can you shed some light on the bus shelter situation?

Is it in?

Again, this is a VDOT issue.

So when VDOT came to us with one of the early plans, they said, we're going to put a bus stop on the other side of the street from your property.

And we said, well, we have this proffered plan that says we have to put one here.

But it doesn't, you know, I think Kevin was in the meeting or some other VDOT representatives said, I mean, it doesn't make sense for us to build a bus stop that's never going to be used right next to another bus stop.

So that was the thinking that we were just... I thought the authorized proper had said that if the bus stop had been built on the adjacent site, we were no longer obligated to do it.

So it just wasn't us building a bus stop for no reason.

But then the intent is not to remove ourselves from that obligation.

But there's no bus shelter on your side of the street, right?

Except for that small... Right.

It's saying there?

Yes.

Kevin, can you know what the status is on that bus stop?

I do not know.

OK, so the most recent meeting that we had with VDOT, with Admiral County in the room, there was a bus stop right where my little cursor is.

There.

Oh, I can actually pull that up.

I have a copy of that.

This is the previous design, but I don't see a bus stop.

I just need to look at the card.

This is the most recent design that we've received from VDOT.

I believe it's what the applicant used to come up with their new right-of-way dedication.

You can see that the stormwater pond has moved, but I do not see a bus stop shown on this

The current plan, the previous application plan required an enhanced bus stop with a shelter and a bench.

And so if there were going to be a change to that, I think what the county would ask for would be that

Thank you.

Okay.

What's the target market or the target audience for that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, believe me, if we had,

you know, office stand there.

We would have built it years ago and you wouldn't see me here today, which would be great for everyone.

But we, so we, we started, we did, we do actually have one commercial tenant on our PS fertility.

It's a startup that got spun out of UVA that's received some funding.

They, they have a lab space in there and we were able to subsidize a lot of that construction through the storage building.

Also, I know people think storage is only for people who have too much stuff.

That's not true.

About a third of our tenants are small businesses in town and people storing stuff seasonally, you know, makers and stuff like that.

So there is certainly that use that does have a small business benefit, although it is not very sexy.

It appeared to be a lot of money flowing into biotech for biotech manufacturing and we felt like with the Biotech Institute at UVA that the timing was very ripe for providing a site that was shovel-ready for biotech tenants.

We worked with Thalhammer Commercial Broker for years on that.

I just hired another commercial brokerage team to also market that site.

So the hope is still that we can get a larger credit worthy tenant in one of those spaces.

I think it is true, particularly there's a lot of demand for light industrial flex for small tenants.

But unfortunately, by the time you underwrite a new construction on a smaller building,

The rents don't don't work for the smaller tenants.

So you really need, you know, a large hospital system or out of town biotech manufacturer or, you know, Fortune 1000 type tenant that has the credibility and the resources to afford that that kind of rent.

You know, I talked to

the school department about putting a school there.

You know, I don't know why the kind of office building is in Charlottesville, but you know, we've got a great site down Fifth Street.

One day they could take over.

So we've sort of explored all commercial avenues that were reasonable, and just felt like a higher and better use might be to add, you know, an apartment usage on the site going forward.