Board of Supervisors Regular First Meeting   6/1/2022

I call to order this June 1, 2022 meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

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

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

Present at our meeting today are Supervisor Ann Mallek from the White Hall District, Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, Supervisor Jim Andrews of the Samuel Miller District, myself, Supervisor Donna Price from the Scottsville District, and in just a moment I will bring up Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley from the Rivanna District and her participation.

I would also like to mention that our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, Ms.

Cynthia Hudson, our Clerk for the Board, Ms.

Claudette Borgerson, and our Senior Deputy Clerk, Mr. Travis Morris, are also present.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley has requested to participate remotely in accordance with applicable board rules of procedure enacted pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley is unable to attend the meeting in person due to a medical condition.

So moved.

Alright, we have a motion by Supervisor Mallek and I heard two supervisors in near sequence.

Any discussion?

Ms.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

All right, thank you.

And I see Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley has joined us remotely.

It is also anticipated that there will be times during the meeting that Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley will step away.

And when she does, we simply ask that she inform us, and then when she comes back,

also inform us so that the record will reflect the portions of the meeting for which she is present and when she is absent.

and that also gave us a chance for a sound check.

I would also like to welcome and introduce our Albemarle County police officers who are here present today.

Officer Kate Kane and Officer Mason Walsh, we thank you for being here today and the service that you provide to our community 24-7, 365.

Thank you very much.

At this time, if you will rise as you are able and join in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

I would now invite you to join in a moment of silence.

Thank you and would ask that if you have not done so if you're in the room if you would silence your phones.

So the public is aware we do have some technical limitations in terms of remote participation and if Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley is on the monitor we're not able to show other images.

So moved.

All right.

We have a motion from Supervisor Mallek and a second from Supervisor McKeel.

Any discussion?

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

All right, thank you.

At this time we'll move to item number five, brief announcements by board members.

Thank you.

I guess it's Memorial Day weekend and the end of the real beginning of summer temperature-wise so I was very glad to be able to spend the weekend visiting with some of the old soldiers and they won't mind that I call them old soldiers because many of them are in their 90s over the weekend but also it's hay season and I'm very delighted to report that 80,000 pounds of beautifully dried hay is now in the barn at my house and I can now welcome the rain.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.

Supervisor Galloway?

None today, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Supervisor McKeel?

I do have a couple following up with Supervisor Mallek.

There were several Memorial Day recognitions.

We can't really call them celebrations when you're recognizing and commemorating those who gave the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our country, but there were several in our area.

I cannot let another week pass without also mentioning that the pandemic is still out there.

We're currently experiencing approximately 100,000 infections per day and 300 deaths per day across the country, which is an 18% increase over the seven-day rolling average from a week ago.

It does appear that this most recent infection wave has peaked and may be going down, but we must remain vigilant.

And finally, on really an uplifting note, after a couple of weeks of really tough experiences around the country, it's graduation season in Albemarle County and I've had the opportunity to attend two already and I've got several more to go to.

And in a time and in a world where there is so much hurt and anger and divisiveness, if you can find the time, go to a graduation.

Some of them are seating limited so you may not be able to attend.

But it will really uplift your spirits to see these young graduates, high school students, and some who are adults who are coming back.

and see that there is a positive hope for the future.

So I really would encourage people to try and get out and help celebrate the good things that we do have.

So thank you for that.

We do have a proclamation declaring the first Friday in June as National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

Thank you very much.

I move the board adopt this National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

Whereas every day, more than 110 Americans are killed by gun violence alongside more than 200 who are shot and wounded.

And on average, there are nearly 16,000 gun homicides every year.

And Americans are 26 times more likely to die by gun homicide than people in other high-income countries.

and whereas Virginia has 1,065 gun deaths every year with a rate of 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people and has the 34th highest rate of gun deaths in the United States.

And localities across the nation, including Albemarle, are working to end the senseless violence with evidence-based solutions.

and whereas protecting public safety in the communities they serve is local government's highest responsibility and support for the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens goes hand in hand with keeping guns away from people with dangerous histories.

Local officials and law enforcement officers know their communities best, are the most familiar with local criminal activity and how to address it, and are best positioned to understand how to keep their citizens safe.

and whereas gun violence prevention is more important than ever as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to exacerbate gun violence after more than two years of increased gun sales, increased calls to suicide and domestic violence hotlines and an increase in gun violence.

and whereas anyone can join this campaign by pledging to wear orange on June 3rd, the first Friday in June in 2022, to help raise awareness about gun violence.

By wearing orange, Americans will raise awareness about gun violence, honor the lives of gun violence victims and survivors, renew our commitment to gun violence, pledge to do all we can to keep firearms out of the wrong hands and encourage responsible gun ownership to help keep our children safe.

Now therefore be it proclaimed that we, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, do hereby declare the first Friday in June to be National Gun Violence Awareness Day and encourage all citizens to support their local community's efforts to prevent the tragic effects of gun violence and to honor and value human lives.

Alright, we have a motion.

All right, we have a motion by Supervisor Mallek and a second by Supervisor McKeel.

Any discussion?

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

All right, thank you.

And Mr. Fox, I understand if you would like to come up, if there are any comments that you would like to make, the podium floor is yours.

Thank you so much, Madam Chairman and fellow supervisors, especially my supervisor, Ann Mallek, for your support.

And thank you for not looking away.

I'm Mike Fox, and I'm the state legislative lead of the Virginia Chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

I live in the White Hall district, and I'm here today with a couple of our amazing volunteers.

This recognition isn't necessarily about, it's not about me and it's not necessarily about our organization.

It's about drawing strength from the memories of those who have died, those who should still be here, and lifting up the voices of survivors.

Because together we can turn grief into action.

Thank you, Mr. Fox.

And we'll check to see if any of the supervisors have any comments that they would like to make.

Thank you, yes.

And in those conversations with veterans over the weekend, several talked to me about training and how important it is that they receive proper training for all the weapons that they were taught to use and still know how.

And they are universally angry that there is no training requirement for gun purchases in our country.

And I don't know what training requirement we might be able to institute locally, maybe nothing.

But the legislature certainly can in Virginia.

and the idea would be to increase the safety for the users and others around them that the interval that training requires and passing a test would remove that last minute purchase and use that causes so many deaths.

There are so many people who couldn't pass the test and they should not have a weapon.

Just Monday on the news, a partnership of a father of Parkland victim and a leader of the gun owner's organization are going on the road promoting training and all the common sense regulations for background checks and registration and I hope that that comes to pass.

I appreciate the citizens who have for three years brought our attention to this issue and the resulting proclamation to further safety of our children, our neighbors, and visitors to Albemarle.

Thank you.

I'm in favor of that also.

So let's hope something can happen because I don't think we can continue like this.

And you know, even police officers, they want people to have the proper training.

They want responsible people to own guns.

And that's something that I back.

I'm not a fan of assault weapons because that's for mass killings and I do, but I do believe in gun rights, responsible gun rights and let's hope that something can happen, some good can come of this and people are trained because it does take a lot of training to be able to use a firearm properly and not everyone has that and that's what's scary.

Supervisor Galloway?

Thank you, Chair Price.

I struggle to even find the words of how to comment at this point on the gun violence that is happening.

So many words are said afterwards, and then those that are in Washington who need to step up to the table to take action can't find a way to do so until it will happen again and more words will be said and then further no action will happen.

How children's lives can bring these folks to find a way forward to do things to help protect them and save them is beyond my understanding.

Thank you.

Also very difficult to find the words on this one.

I want to point out, though, that as Supervisor Mallek mentioned, this is a third year, I guess, of this recognition and that this recognition was on our calendar from discussion in April to be put on our calendar.

So it's not the recent events that prompted this, but unfortunately it feels like any time we put this on our calendar,

as a date to remember that it would be something happening like this that would cause this to become timely when it shouldn't be something recurring the way it is.

And so obviously I also agree that we need to find solutions forward.

I certainly agree with everything you all have said.

We had just over the Memorial Day weekend

12 mass shootings in this country over a long holiday weekend.

Just think about that.

And the concern, just to bring up a little different point, because I agree with everything you all have said, is it's almost as if we've become numb and accustomed to hearing this news.

And that is such a dangerous place to be.

A really dangerous place for our country to be in.

You look at the polling, and I agree polls are only polls, but if you look at the polling, the vast number of Americans want something done, common sense legislation done, and there are things that can be done if our leaders in Washington would only come together and agree to do those.

And we all know what they are.

We could probably quote them in our sleep.

So I just want to say that it is just tragic, tragic when we allow our children in schools and people going to the grocery store to be slaughtered.

It is difficult to say anything without getting emotional over this loss and our national inability to take appropriate action towards gun safety, which can still support the Second Amendment.

And it is outside the jurisdiction of us as a county to be able to do very much about

But we as a nation must do something.

We are failing.

At this time, Board will move to item number seven, which is matters not listed for public hearing on the agenda or matters previously considered by the Board or matters pending before the Board.

Before reading the rules, however, I just want to make clear to our public what this part of our agenda is for and why we have procedural rules.

Organizations establish procedural rules for the purpose of ensuring the orderly transaction of business.

When a procedural rule is established, it should be followed in order to avoid allegations or appearances of arbitrariness or favoritism.

Our board meetings are open to and held before the public, but a meeting in the public, while open to the public to attend, does not necessarily create an open forum conferring a right to speak, much less the right to speak on any topic an attendee chooses without regard to the authority of the board.

Indeed, this board has been very careful not to create an open forum

with respect to matters from the public by establishing

the board

Matters on the agenda not for a public hearing would be everything else on the agenda, or if it's something that the board has previously considered or is pending before the board.

In essence, those procedures mean that members of the public are invited to comment during this time of our meeting on matters related to county business.

We are a body of limited jurisdiction.

We deal with county business.

We do not address decisions made by the President, the Congress, or the courts.

We do not address decisions under the lawful jurisdiction of other bodies.

But we will be open to matters that affect county business.

I understand that we do have individuals who have signed up in person to speak.

Alright, thank you.

So I will now read the procedural rules for those who are in person and desire to speak on matters from the public.

During the time set aside for matters not listed for public hearing on the agenda, individuals may address the Board of Supervisors concerning matters previously considered by the Board or matters that are pending before the Board other than items listed on the agenda for a public hearing.

Individuals are allowed up to three minutes to speak and the sign-up sheet is managed by the clerk's office.

Timekeeping is conducted through a timer and a light system at the podium.

The green light will go on when you begin speaking and this begins your allotted time.

A yellow light indicates you have one minute to finish your comment, and a red light indicates your time has expired.

In order to give all speakers equal treatment and courtesy, the Board requests that speakers adhere to the following guidelines.

When called to address the Board, please state your name and, if you live in Albemarle County, your magisterial district.

Address your comments directly to the Board as a whole.

If you have written statements and other supporting material, you may give that to the clerk to be made a part of the record.

If you represent a group or organization, you may ask others present to raise their hand and be recognized.

If you exceed your allotted time, you will be asked to end your comments.

And if a speaker does not use all allocated time, the unused time may not be shared with another speaker.

Speakers are permitted one opportunity to comment during either public comment period per meeting

and back and forth debate is not permitted.

Please do not speak from your seat or out of turn.

Persons in the audience are encouraged to raise their hands to indicate their support or opposition to speakers at the podium or any item during the meeting.

Please refrain from applause and other forms of approval or disapproval as a courtesy to each speaker.

Signs are permitted in the meeting room so long as they are not attached to any stick or pole and do not obstruct the view of persons attending the meeting.

You are reminded that all comments are live streamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website.

And our first speaker is Rob McGinnis.

Good afternoon.

My name is Rob McGinnis.

I'm a resident of the City of Charlottesville.

Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board of Supervisors.

I'm Rob McGinnis, the new Albemarle County Senior Land Use Field Representative for the Piedmont Environmental Council.

As you review the county's growth management policy as a first step of the Albemarle County 2044 comprehensive planning process,

We urge you to consider the wide-ranging ramifications of this decision.

Kimley-Horn's recent draft land-use build-out analysis concluded that there is sufficient capacity to support both the future residential and non-residential growth

within Albemarle County's existing growth areas that has enough capacity to support an additional 26,000 to 30,000 residents.

And this does not factor in the city of Charlottesville setting forward with expanding the amount of residential housing within the city.

A strong growth management policy sends a market signal

that Albemarle County wants to see redevelopment, revitalization, infill and the integration and affordable housing into walkable communities and high quality communities.

Expanding growth boundaries at the fringes only incentivizes low density single family suburban development that is inconsistent with the county's commitments expressed in the vision and value section of the Albemarle County 44 process.

Discouraging the wasteful clearing and inefficient use of land, also known as sprawl, is the best way to fight climate change and promote resiliency.

Our forests and agricultural resources protect water and air quality, wildlife habitat, and food security and help to make these places healthy and enjoyable to live in.

Albemarle's transportation sector is the largest local source of greenhouse gas at 52%.

Sprawl would only make it worse.

Kimley-Horn's analysis clearly indicates that expansion of the growth area is not necessary.

PEC believes that future growth should occur within the designated growth areas and within the city of Charlottesville.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, my name is Tom Olivier from the Samuel Miller District.

By now we've all read the IPCC reports.

The world is hotter, it's getting even hotter fast, and will become disastrously hot soon unless we quickly change our ways.

Computer modeling employed in IPCC reports points to path out of our self-inflicted mess.

If we protect and restore natural systems and renounce population and economic growth, the hospitability of future climates to humans

will be much improved.

On the other hand, carrying on as we have is a recipe for expanding disasters.

To wit, the current county growth management policy aims to reduce sprawl by accommodating growth in designated development or growth areas.

Growth areas filling up?

We grab some open space for a new growth area.

Growth managed.

But new growth areas lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions and losses of open space sequestration capacities.

Thus, growth area expansions undermine our pursuit of carbon neutrality, a crucial county climate action goal.

The current growth management policy has no interest in greenhouse gas consequences.

That's hardly surprising since the current policy was formed when climate change was only an abstract possibility.

The current separation of growth policies from existentially threatening climate consequences is dangerous, unnecessary and unacceptable.

Planning for growth is the opposite of planning for climate action success.

This afternoon, at your build-out analysis work session with planning staff, I urge you to direct staff to begin developing a new growth area management policy, one that supports rather than undermines Albemarle's movement toward carbon neutrality.

Good afternoon.

Neil Williamson with the Free Enterprise Forum.

I, too, am speaking about the growth analysis conducted by Kimley-Horn, but I first want to start by saying that I love Doritos.

Recently, there are fewer Doritos in the bag.

There are four to five fewer chips in each bag.

To be fair, the manufacturer has identified there are four or five fewer chips in each bag.

The question to Albemarle, are you going to be honest about what's in your bag of chips?

When you look at the analysis, it's a maximum analysis.

Ken Lehorn did a very good job with a maximum analysis.

That maximum analysis I believe shows 6,000 units in Hollymede Town, in Hollymede neighborhood.

Is anyone on this board, a previous board or a future board, really thinking we're going to approve 6,000 units in Hollymede?

That's the maximum.

That's what your comp plan says today.

What we're doing today is defining what our baseline is going to be.

Are you going to accurately count the chips in the bag?

Are you going to say, we could put more in here?

We're not going to, but we could.

All right, Board, at this time we'll move to item number eight, the consent agenda.

I'm not aware of any items being pulled from the consent agenda.

In the absence of a motion to amend, is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented?

Alright, we have a motion from Supervisor Andrews and a second from Supervisor McKeel.

Any discussion?

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

All right, thank you board.

At this time, we can move to item number nine, which is scheduled to be a quarterly report from the Albemarle County School Board.

to the Board of Supervisors.

I do not see Chair Page.

Let's just take one moment.

All right board, it appears that Chair Page is not here, so we will move to item number 10, but this is quite a bit earlier than anticipated.

I don't see Mr. McDermott here, so why don't we take a five-minute recess and give county staff an opportunity to come up and do item number 10.

At this time, we will move to item number 10, Regional Transit Vision Plan.

Mr. McDermott, first off, I want to thank you for being so flexible to be able to jump up about a half hour earlier than scheduled.

My pleasure.

I hope we have all of our speakers available.

Thank you, Chair Price, members of the Board of Supervisors, Kevin McDermott, I'm the Transportation Planning Manager here, and my only job up here at the dais today is to introduce our consultant team for the Regional Transit Vision Plan.

So the Regional Transit Vision Plan is a collaborative effort that's being led by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission and this was jointly funded through a grant from the Department of Rail and Public Transit, Albemarle County, and the City of Charlottesville.

The project began back in the summer of 2021 and the consultant team has been working closely with the Regional Transit Partnership

and help holding virtual stakeholder meetings including with Albemarle County staff to develop this vision plan.

They have an ongoing online survey on the project website that's available and the projects proposed to wrap up in August this year.

I also want to clarify for the board that the transit vision plan is a separate effort from a

the regional transit governance study, which we are looking for funding for right now.

So the vision plan is supposed to look at that broad vision for transit in the entire region, whereas the governance plan is going to get into the details as to how that vision plan can be achieved, what governance level, and how the funding structure could work for that.

So two separate things, and today we're just talking about the vision plan.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McDermott.

Good afternoon.

Thanks, Kevin.

I'm Lucinda Shannon, a senior transportation planner with TJPDC, and I am also the project manager for the Transit Vision Plan.

We would like to thank Albemarle and the City of Charlottesville and DRPT for supporting this vision.

And today we have our consultants Tim Bruhl from AECOM and Scudderwag with Jarrett Walker and Associates to provide a project update to you.

Thank you, Lucinda and Kevin.

And thank you to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors for having our team today to present an update on the Regional Transit Vision Plan for the Charlottesville area.

I am going to share my screen.

And I

As Lucinda mentioned, I'm Tim Bruhl.

I am a transportation planner and project manager with AECOM based out of Arlington, Virginia.

And joining me today is Scudder Weg from Jared Walker and Associates.

We'll just get right into it.

So for today's update, here's an agenda.

We'll briefly go over the background.

of the project and the impetus and where we've been and where we're going.

We'll have a brief discussion on the transit vision statement, goals, and objectives.

Then the bulk of our meeting will go into our vision concepts.

And then we'll have a brief overview of our phase two engagement strategy and some brief Q&A following our presentation.

So for background, as Kevin mentioned, this is a collaborative effort to evaluate and establish a clear long-term vision for transit service in the region.

It's being led by the TJPDC and funded in part by DRPT and the local jurisdictions, including Albemarle County.

As you can see on our process graphic below, we are approaching the end of our project.

At this moment, we are at the point where we have developed our draft network concepts, and we are soliciting input and evaluating those outcomes.

Over the summer, we'll finalize our recommendations and also finalize the plan.

The project website with the link listed here is probably the best place to find information on the study, including our intermediate work products and meeting summaries to date, as well as information on upcoming engagement efforts, including our upcoming survey and public meeting later this summer.

As I mentioned, we are anticipating finalizing the study by late summer, so around August-September 2022.

So to mention again, the Transit Vision Study does differ from the Transit Governance Study.

I think the timing of the two, the transit governance study will commence as we are finalizing this transit vision study.

And so this transit vision study really is identifying the potential improvements to the regional transit system and establishing that long-term goal and plan vision.

And the governance study is really, you know, what are the steps to get to that vision that we've defined?

One of the main intermediate work products was to develop a vision statement for transit in the region.

So the draft vision, transit vision statement goals, objectives and measures, technical memo is included in your packet for today's meeting.

This process was a public and stakeholder led effort to identify those transit priorities and goals for the region.

.

Within our conversations, three main themes bubbled up to the service, those being equity, as defined as expand opportunities for all residents and represents the needs of both the urban and rural communities.

And finally, climate change.

help protect the environment and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the transportation sector.

Our proposed vision statement is highlighted here below and as reads as follows.

Develop, design, and provide transit in the Charlottesville area in a manner that reflects collaborative, inclusive, and equitable process

representing needs in both urban and rural areas.

This transit system expands opportunities for all residents, equity, reduces reliance on automobiles, multimodality, and helps protect the environment and climate change mitigation.

So detailed comments can be passed along to our study team for consideration as we finalize the vision plan.

With that, I will pass it to Scudder,

Thank you, Tim.

It's a pleasure to be with you all today.

We have developed two vision concepts that show what an expanded transit network might achieve for your region, for Charlottesville-Albemarle urbanized area and the larger region beyond, including Greene, Louisa, Buckingham, Savannah, and Nelson Counties.

And we've developed a constrained vision, which is a vision of what's possible with some assumptions about funding levels similar to what could be funded through the same kinds of sources of funding that the Central Virginia Transportation Authority in the Richmond region is using to fund its transportation programs.

The primary thing I want to point out about that is that we have used a range, a set of assumptions here about what that budget could achieve to get a dollar figure for the purposes of sketching out this constraint scenario.

But the intention is not to specify that the precise funding mechanisms and governance that CVTA in Richmond area has would be right for you.

but it gives you a sense of what's possible with a with a regional budget of about 26 million dollars for transit assuming that most of that money is used to extend and also to replace local funding where today a lot of local funding comes from general funds from each individual jurisdiction the assumption is these this new regional funding would supplant those general fund resources coming from the localities

and of course be extended by the federal and state funding that is received through the normal formula sources.

So that constrained vision has a budget of about $35.5 million a year in current dollar terms.

And to put that in context, the pre-pandemic operating budgets for CAT and Jaunt together were about $19.5 million.

So it's a little less than double

We also developed an unconstrained vision, which basically says, what would a transit network look like that is trying to help you achieve all of the land use climate and many other policy goals you might want your transit network to help you achieve?

And based on what we have drawn in that network, that would cost about $70 million per year to operate and fund in total.

Next slide.

So I want to talk a little bit about what these networks can achieve first, before I kind of show you what they look like.

And throughout this process, I'm going to talk about the frequency of service.

Frequency being how long you have to wait for the next vehicle to arrive, which is a critical aspect of the usefulness of transit, because frequency means freedom, effectively.

The more frequent service is, the much shorter your wait is, the much likelier you are to get somewhere soon.

Because waiting time is such an enormous part of travel time in transit.

unlike everything else where driving and biking speed is the primary factor of how soon you'll get there.

Frequency, particularly for shorter trips in the urbanized area, is a critical factor.

So these bar charts I have I'm going to show you here are showing you how many residents, jobs, low-income residents, households without cars, young residents, senior residents, and residents of color are near transit service in what we call the baseline network.

Baseline network is the network of transit you will have after CAT revises its routes this year, and you have new on-demand transit zones that have been planned, implemented by next year.

And so today, about 60% of residents in the

MPO area, which is most of the urbanized area of Charlottesville and Albemarle, are near something.

But only about 15% are near service that's frequent, the red bars showing you 10 or 15 minute frequency at midday.

So that's a pretty small percentage.

Next slide.

The constrained network starts to significantly increase the percentage of people who are near more frequent services and the percentage of jobs that are near more frequent services.

So for example, under the jobs, the second bar chart, you go from less than 30% of jobs are near something that comes every 15 minutes and far fewer of those near 30 minute services to a significant increase in jobs that are near 15 minute service or 20 minute service.

Low income residents in households without cars, you see a big increase in the percent that are near 15 and 20 minute services in particular, telling you that there's much more useful service near more people and therefore far more people would be likely to use that service.

Next slide.

If we do the same kind of comparison with the unconstrained vision, you see the numbers and percentages of people near any service go up from 70% of jobs to about 80% of jobs, from about 60% of residents to 70% of residents near.

But also the percent of people near frequent and really useful service goes up dramatically.

And that makes an enormous difference in the likelihood that people would be using transit because

When we have very frequent service, every 15 minutes or better in particular, you start to see a really big increase in the likelihood of people using transit for all sorts of reasons, because it's just vastly easier to use and vastly simpler.

You can go when you want to.

We can help visualize how much this changes the opportunity by looking at what we call a diagram of the wall around your life, or where could I be soon?

Technically, this is called an isochrone.

This gray area is the area that you can reach in 60 minutes.

If you count your waiting time, your walking time, your waiting time, your writing time, the time it takes to transfer, and the time to walk once you get off the vehicle.

This is from Fashion Square Mall in the baseline network.

In the constraint network, you see the reddish areas beyond that gray bubble are the new areas you could reach in 60 minutes.

And there's a 34% increase in the jobs you could reach and a 50% increase in the residents you can reach in that 60 minute travel time.

and that tells us an enormous amount about the quantification of potential usefulness.

You think about if Fashion Square Mall redevelops and there are a bunch of new businesses there, there's 50% more potential shoppers now who could reach there or potential employees who could reach that point.

And vice versa, if there's a bunch of new apartments there, that's 34% more jobs people could reach from that location in the future.

Next slide.

Next slide.

We can take this kind of analysis and effectively do it all across the urbanized area and look at how much are things increasing.

And in the constrained network, this heat map is showing the areas that see increases or decreases.

In this case, mostly increases in green in the jobs reachable in 60 minutes.

The darker shades of green showing more and more jobs.

So you see in areas out near the community college to the south and east of outside of Charlottesville in Albemarle County.

Also just north of Pan Tops and up the 29 quarters, some really dark shades of green, meaning 10,000 or 25,000 more jobs are reachable in an hour.

Next slide.

The unconstrained vision shows really significant increases.

So really dark greens across large portions of the developed and urbanized portions of Charlottesville and Albemarle and some lighter greens even in some of the rural areas where there would be some on demand services or small town areas.

and the periphery of the urbanized area.

You see in Crozet, for example, or Earliesville, some significant improvement in job access.

We can summarize this across all people and get a sense of what's the average change for a person.

On average, at midday at noon,

and it's an important thing I'll come back to.

In the constrained network, the average person within the MPO area could reach 12% more jobs.

In that unconstrained vision, the average person could reach 57% more jobs.

So that's a vast improvement in the access to opportunity that you see across the region and across the urbanized area in particular.

The other piece of the vision that's important to note is some improvements in the demand responsive and on-demand services that exist.

And just a quick detour into explaining some differences here.

Today, Jaunt runs a number of demand responsive services in the rural areas of Albemarle County and many of the outlying jurisdictions, like in Louisa, where you can call a day ahead, book a trip to go somewhere within certain hours.

And that is an important

part of meeting a lot of need for transit service, where it's hard to reach people in rural areas that are much lower density.

It doesn't provide much spontaneity.

It doesn't provide a lot of opportunity for people to go when they want to.

And so the vision plans, unconstrained in particular, includes more on-demand service areas, meaning you can call and get a trip within 30 minutes to an hour the same day to go shopping, to go to grocery stores.

So the two vision concepts include improvements in both of these kinds of services in different areas.

There's also, just to note an important piece of this, which is ADA paratransit requirement.

Anywhere you have an extension of fixed route service to new areas,

that comes with the obligation to provide ADA paratransit service within three quarters of a mile of a route.

So that's an important piece of the puzzle thinking about the other things that come with expansion of transit fixed route services.

Next slide.

So all of that is just to help clarify a few things about what's in the constrained and unconstrained vision plans.

In the constrained vision plan, we make improvements to the existing regional circulator services, which are those day ahead reservation services.

So today, right now in Albemarle County in the

and others.

The hours of service in other areas are a little different.

In the constrained regional vision, we recommend a consistency of 13 to 14 hours a day of service seven days a week with these day ahead reservation services, which would be a dramatic improvement in the ability of people to go where they want to when they want to in the more rural parts of Albemarle and the surrounding jurisdictions.

So that's a big key in the constrained vision.

So just a quick tour of what it looks like when you look at what's in these networks.

We have maps of the existing network color-coded in that same bar chart color as I was showing you of the frequency of service.

On the left, the urbanized area where you see the red lines that are frequent primarily serving the very downtown portions of Charlottesville, the circulators around UVA being frequent, and most other things in the region in terms of fixed route being every 30 minutes or every 60 minutes, a lot of every 60 minute service, which has

A very hard frequency of service to really rely on consistently.

And on the right is the regional map showing the peak only or circulator type services that are all provided across the region.

Next slide.

The improvements in the unconstrained vision include a dramatic increase in improvement in frequency of service in the urbanized areas and some improvements in the availability of some of the on-demand services.

So you see in the left, most of the fixed route services in the urbanized area would be at a minimum every 30 minutes, that dark blue color.

Whereas in the existing network, you saw that light blue color meaning every 60 minutes across most area.

And then a number of corridors having every 15 minute service, which is very useful, including every 10 minute service up US 29 on the Route 7 in a BRT service recommendation.

every 15 minute service on Avon, every 15 minute service on Fifth Street, every 10 minute service out High Street to Pantops shopping center, and then branching into 30 minute services.

So a significant improvement in the frequency of service and connectivity through and across the region.

On the right, the regional map showing the new on-demand services in a number of communities including Crozet and Earliesville and Esmont and Scottsville, as well as some fixed route service extensions so that there would be all-day services to Zion's Crossroads in Louisa, for example, and Lake Monticello, amongst others.

Next slide.

The constrained vision

where we have a much smaller budget to work with, a budget of what might be possible under a one potential scenario of funding shows not as much improvement in the frequency of service.

So on the left, you'll see things like the Route 7 that is serving the Route 29 corridor, US 29 corridor at up to Fashions Square Mall is every 20 minutes instead of every 30 minutes as it is today.

You see the Avon corridor is every 15 minutes.

I see High Street going to Pantops is every 15 minutes splitting into every 30 minutes in Pantops.

So there are some very valuable improvements.

There are also some other corridors where service is turned up to every 30 minutes instead of every hour as it is today.

But the improvement is not as dramatic in the urbanized area with, as you see under the unconstrained vision, obviously because of the significant difference in the budget.

Now again, these maps I'm showing you are focused on what's the frequency of service at midday on weekdays.

One thing that is in the constrained network that is not as obvious from these maps in the access analysis I've shown you is the improvements in evening and weekends.

Next slide.

This chart is a chart that shows the frequency of service by hour of the day and days of the week.

Again, color-coded by those same frequency colors I've been showing you.

Red every 15 minutes, dark blue every 30, light blue every 60.

And the big takeaway here, I would say, is there's not much evening service.

Most routes don't go past 9 p.m.

on weekdays.

On Saturdays, very few routes go past 9 p.m.

And there are very few routes running on Sundays.

Next slide.

In the constrained vision, one of the significant improvements that's made across the fixed route network serving the urbanized area is consistent seven day a week service service later into the evenings, which is one of the key things that is likely to significantly improve

access to opportunity, particularly for people who work in retail service and hospital jobs, where many people have to work evenings, many people have to work Sundays.

And those types of jobs are the jobs where people, if you aren't there for them on Sunday, they have to have a car and therefore have to incur the very high cost of owning a car.

And many of them are working in jobs where the wages are

Thank you.

And yes, so we have commenced our phase two of the engagement.

So really, our goals for this phase is to confirm our draft vision and goals that we've presented here, explore the long-term transit alternatives for the region, and collect preferences on scenarios and future needs, both from the stakeholders and the public.

So June is a pretty busy month for us.

So we are presenting to local elected bodies, such as right now, today.

We'll also be launching our survey on June 9th.

And that will be available online and for hard copy distribution at the Transit Center with a date to be determined.

We'll also be providing a major update to the project website where we'll have a lot of information regarding our scenarios for public consumption.

We will also be having focus group discussions with community leaders and other interest groups.

and at the end of the

July will be completing our local presentations, again, with the local jurisdictions, including Albemarle, Charlotte, the city of Charlottesville, and the surrounding rural counties and jurisdictions.

We will update the project website with the summary of our phase two engagements.

And August, we will be holding our final meeting with RTP to present our completed plan.

And with that, we would be happy to entertain some questions with the remaining time we have.

Thank you.

Board, we'll go through our order.

Thank you.

I did write down a couple of things.

So you mentioned, or the other person mentioned funding similar to what the Richmond Authority is using.

And we are a tiny population compared to them.

So what I mean by that is using the same tax sources that they use, sales tax and fuels tax, applied to the taxable sales levels that you will have in your region.

So I don't mean the same funding dollar amounts that they raise, because they raise

much more money than you all would with the same tax levels.

I mean the same funding sources.

Yes, and I've been trying since 2002 to get local authority to be able to have those other sources, which we have not succeeded in so far.

So I just want to make sure you're aware of that.

This money doesn't just appear when we can't, we don't have the authority to raise it.

Regarding John, you mentioned, the other presenter mentioned that John was only called as a regional circulator 10 to 2, but they also take workers to work from the district I represent on regular commuter hours and I expect in the other districts of the county as well.

There are a number of

special areas of the county where Jaunt runs connect services or certain specialized demand responsive services to just certain segments at Albemarle County.

And I didn't want to get too deep in the weeds of the hours of service provided in each of those different parts of the community.

Okay, and just to clarify, you mentioned, or someone mentioned, Earliesville several times.

We don't have any big employers.

We have some warehousing, but I don't know where your, the map looked more like Forest Lakes than Earliesville, so I just would ask you to clarify that as you go forward in your planning.

And where will the riders who don't ever go to the transit center be able to get access to your surveys?

I would suggest that the many people who would benefit the most from transit would pick up a paper copy at the grocery store because they may not even have access to anything online.

And to our great failure, I think our whole community in all sorts of different efforts have not broadened the ability of different people to participate.

Go to the website doesn't help if you don't have service.

it's especially infuriating in the communications line when your internet is all down and your telephone company says go look on the internet so I don't want you to fall in that same trap and I do hope that you will get

some true riders input for people who would really benefit and I hope that we have something concrete that we can go forward with on this because it's been stewing for a long time.

Alright, thank you.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

This may be where we have a little bit of a technical issue with someone already visible on screen.

All right, thank you.

So it might be helpful for one of my questions to put slide 24 back up.

It just had one of your maps that was representing.

This is great.

There's a lot of excellent information in here.

While you're pulling that up, I guess one overarching question in terms of land use decisions and economic development decisions that have already been made.

So thinking pipeline, pipeline of

units coming online, employers coming online.

Yeah, no, we are looking into the future for this plan, and we have coordinated with city and county staff on their land use plans and the significant growth areas.

And I think we have planned our network around those priority areas.

As part of the

As part of our analysis, we will be undertaking a travel demand forecast model.

And our forecast year is 2040.

So we are looking out into the future.

And I'll just add to what Tim said to say if you go to the website, all of these maps are not there yet, but there is some of the background analysis that was done leading up to this work, including that transit propensity analysis, which looked at the

and so on.

And then we looked at factors that are likely to drive transit ridership based on existing conditions and then also a land use assessment that looked at existing and projected land use plans and growth areas to consider those in this process.

And not just where growth is going, but in what form.

Yeah.

So in this, and I'll just ask the question because I don't know, the places on this map that show the on-demand zones don't seem to encompass the same area as the pilot study area.

Is that just, this is what you're envisioning and it's, you know, the concept?

Do you even know about the pilot study and their zones?

These on this constrained vision network were intended to mirror what's in the pilot zone.

We have been coordinating with that team and aware of the work that they've been doing.

And I don't need to get into this detail right now, but I'll just put, for example, you can see on the Rio Road East where the number 11 is, that little offshoot of the main line off Rio Road East goes to the senior center.

The senior center, I thought, was in the on-demand zone service area.

So the yellow is way far away from that.

So we just want to make sure that that on-demand zone is representative.

On the other demand zone, I thought it went over to the PVCC

Monicello area for some reason, but I could be mistaken.

So I'm just asking for that to be clarified and that those two areas exist.

Yeah, it looks like it does cover the proposed microtransit areas from the other study.

There might be some confusion with the maps because the service area does go down.

OK, not the service area.

The area that was studied for 29 North, those go down quite further and over to the south

East, South, yeah, more.

But the area that was proposed to be actual, like a microtransit service study, is that area.

It might go

It might fade out a little bit over there.

But generally, both of these areas look to be the proposed microtransit service area.

The Monticello service area was studied, and it was recommended to have service as a long-term solution.

So that would happen in the future.

Understood so I know this is not locking in any of the geographic zones That pilot study is going to tell us what the area is that it should be best represented So I would imagine that after we learn from the pilot study what the best zone parameters are that that would lock in and be able to align with this The reason why that's important to me you know under your I guess even I forget what slide it was

To have those on-demand zones hit either routes with more frequent, like a 10, 15, or 20-minute service, I think is vital to making the whole system work with those on-demand components.

If Rio East is not included in an on-demand zone and holds at a 60-minute pickup, in that same area where that 11 is in the center is, we just had a development Rio Point

where the folks in favor of that development were talking about how it sits on a transit line, you could walk downtown before you could get downtown via the bus.

So if we're going to, and that whole area still has, including that particular development, not counting the center, not counting a school facility there,

Not counting the soccer stuff that's going on, but over a thousand units, 1300, 1400 units that are going to build out there.

And if they're sitting on a 60 minute transit line, that doesn't work.

That just doesn't work.

So if the fixed line isn't going to be a 10, 15 or a 20 minute line, then they need to have that access to the on-demand zone to get them to the hub or to the line that would work.

So I'm just throwing that out as I don't know if this is the right time to even suggest that but that's what popped into my brain as I was looking at all of this stuff.

But for all of those units coming online I appreciate that this is going to help us figure out how to make that service in the urban ring functional for people because you can't sit on a 60-minute line in my opinion and think that that's going to work for somebody to get to a job.

and make that be a daily routine that works.

Entertainment and the pleasure things that we do to move around are a little different in terms of schedule, but jobs it's a very specific time set that has to be met and the transit has to meet the ability for the employees to be able to make that schedule work for their job and for themselves.

So I just hope that's food for thought that as we move forward

Those on-demand zones I'm hoping will cover areas where there is density going in right now.

And like I said, if it doesn't get them to a fixed route, then the fixed route has to be more frequent in service.

If I'm not mistaken, that Route 7 along Rio Road East, I didn't see any in any of the lists where the fixed service moved away from 60 minutes.

Maybe one moved to 30 minutes, which would be helpful.

But I'll let that rest, knowing I'll probably have another chance to get input in.

The other thing I would ask is that I appreciate that Fashion Square Mall remains this hub.

And I appreciate it because our Rio small area plan is in place with a vision that should make that a hub down the road.

But in the meantime, having a place that is not as once a draw as it used to be, that just has to be taken into account if that's the proper place for that hub until that area becomes a draw in and of itself again.

So I'm just throwing that out there for food for thought as well.

Thank you.

All right.

Yes, I'm still digesting a lot of this and apologize.

Okay, so 23 then, is it?

Okay, 22.

And I'm looking at some of the things that Supervisor Galloway was just discussing to see if they're impacted by the difference between these.

I am still struggling with constrained unconstrained, constrained unconstrained terminology, thank you.

I'm looking at the screen and turned away, I apologize.

And the allocation of funding, I understand the service better, and I really appreciate that, but I would like to learn more about what is in the allocations for funding for these two.

Thank you.

And let me just, well, first of all, thank you very much for the presentation.

And I will just let everybody know that the Regional Transit Partnership has already received this presentation.

So Bea saw this at our Regional Transit Partnership meeting, just to make sure folks understand.

And I appreciate seeing the second time, because when I watch something the second time, I really do see things I didn't see the first time.

Let me just jump right into the funding piece.

So, and maybe Kevin might want to speak to that, but remember, and Kevin, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but we are currently studying the ability to have an authority, to look at an authority.

So when we're talking about the constrained and the unconstrained and paying for something like this,

Certainly it would tie into our ability to fund it under a transportation authority.

Kevin, if you want to speak to me.

That is absolutely correct, Professor McKeel.

One of the things, the alternatives being looked at through the governance study is this idea of being able to establish an authority and have that be the source of some of the funding.

And many of you know that we've already been to the General Assembly years ago to get permission.

I think Kevin has addressed to us

before that that permission came is pretty old and we might need to go back to the General Assembly to tweak it slightly.

That is correct.

My understanding is the authority, the ability to establish the authority was made.

However, the allowing them to fund, to raise funding was not established in that previous regulation, so the state regulation.

So we know the struggles with the General Assembly sometime and sometimes it takes more than one session.

So we would want to remember to put that in our legislative packet is what I'm suggesting, right, for this upcoming legislative session.

So what we're looking at is the governance structure that would be needed for that authority and who's at the table, right, and that work will happen over the next year.

I believe that's correct, Kevin.

because I think this is critical for us understanding when we're looking at those numbers.

And one quick question I do have related to money is we have the two pots of money that are being described and I understand it's sort of improvement and then really what would really be transit for our community in the best possible way.

My thought is that there's probably some flexibility in between there somewhere, but I'm really not sure about that.

Kevin, can you just address that or do you want Scudder or Tim to address that?

So I think I understand your question.

Your question is related to is there flexibility in terms of how much it would, how

How much it would cost or how much you could fund, it's not just one or the other here, I think is the question you're asking.

And I think the answer to that is definitely yes, it is not just one or the other.

These concepts are here to help you imagine and understand what kind of outcomes are available at kind of two different levels of investment.

And therefore you can

Imagine if you were halfway between the two, what you might be able to achieve.

Right.

And then in the future, we could go back to the drawing board and add to it as we needed to.

Yes.

And for example, the CVTA, which 15% of its funding goes to GRTC to support transit service, included in its authority requirements is an annual transit plan to identify the things that are being funded through the regional authority.

So the authority, just to be clear for the public, so the authority is made up of more than just Albemarle County and even the city, possibly.

The authority could be made up of surrounding counties who would help

kick in some dollars for this.

Precisely.

This is about the regional conversation of who wants to potentially be a part of this.

And these concepts show what you could potentially gain from being a part of that regional authority and what the regional funding could support.

So it is possible to have an authority that is just Charlottesville and Albemarle.

It is possible to have an authority with a network that covers all of these jurisdictions that we've outlined or somewhere in between.

Right, right.

Yes, that's exactly right.

And just moving on, I had a couple of other notes from my watching it the second time.

And I will just want to comment that we had two speakers today who were talking about climate change and growth management, and I'm really sorry that they left before this presentation.

because this ties in to their concerns about climate change and carbon footprint and what we're doing to address climate change as well as growth management.

And I understand it's really hard to engage people, but I would encourage anyone that's listening now

and coming to us about climate change and growth management to start paying attention to what we're looking at through these transit vision planning options.

I do have a clarification.

Help me understand a little bit better.

I understand ADA service.

happens anytime we expand service.

And ADA, I guess everybody knows what ADA service is for the most part.

Just say what it is.

I'm trying to remember that.

Americans with Disabilities Act.

Okay, it's ACT is the last one.

Okay.

So that kicks in three quarters of a mile around any transit expansion that we have.

And our boards talked about that often because with Jaunt,

If we expanded Jaunt, remember, it cost us more money, right, just because of that ADA service, which is a great thing, but you have to recognize the cost.

Help me understand a little bit better the ADA expansion.

We have estimated that, of course, ADA paratransit cost is one of the harder things to estimate accurately, to be frank, because the level of certainty about where and when people who might qualify for that service would want to travel

just varies dramatically from place to place.

And so it is a thing that is challenging to estimate accurately.

And just to clarify what is required

is by the ADA para-transit service within three quarters of a mile of that route.

to and from three quarters of a mile around that route to anywhere else that you run fixed route service within three quarters of a mile.

There are exceptions for commuter oriented services that run only at peak times and primarily in the peak direction.

So that is a reason why the connect services that Jaunt runs to and from Crozet do not

I'm still a little fuzzy.

But you did try and they are sort of included.

Okay, that's great.

Thank you.

I would like another clarification about UVA because we tend to think about UVA as doing their own thing, right?

That's what they've done for years with their students and faculty and staff.

Having said that, I know they're really working hard with us at the Regional Transit Partnership about coming together on transit in this community.

And we see UVA listed.

So UVA is being included as a partner that would be serving the community and not just staff and students in these vision plans.

So we've included them in the conversation.

And in the unconstrained network in particular, there is a lot of opportunity to look at trading resources.

So universities in places like Charlottesville, Chapel Hill is another place that has similarities.

there is obvious, enormous transit demand within and around a university.

And the grounds at UVA needs really high frequency service within a pretty limited space.

So it's understandable that they run their own service.

In a place like Chapel Hill, they have gone to the point of the city and the town run it together, basically.

That's not the case for you right now, in part because you're a little bigger than Chapel Hill is, I'd say, overall.

In the unconstrained vision, we have laid out an idea of trading resources where the

the regionally oriented services like the BRT Route 7 that's coming down Emmett, the improved more frequent service on the Route 16 that we've drawn, the improved Route 1 that's kind of like today's trolley that goes to Fontaine, all of those are things that are more regionally oriented and would be run by CAT or a regional transit provider.

can take over for some of the circulator services that UTS runs today, like the green and orange and gold mines.

And then the university could run a more community-oriented service that serves the grounds as a primary focus, but also serves the community at large.

And that's the U route that you see on the unconstrained vision.

So that is a basic statement of here's a reasonable way to trade some resources around where what the university is spending now on the orange, green, and gold could be put to use for the university and the community at large alongside the things that the community is doing that serves both the community's interests and the university's interests.

So that's an idea in the unconstrained plan.

There is some, you know,

potential changes that might happen.

The university's in the middle of a master plan that might affect exact routings in the future.

So in order to get our best bang for the buck and provide the best service for our entire community at the most reasonable price, UVA being at the table and a part of the authority could make a big difference.

Okay.

All right.

So one other quick question.

Maybe, and I think somebody mentioned it already, and I'd just like for everybody while we're talking about this to connect the timing and how our Albemarle transit pilot marries with this program.

Because our pilot doesn't start for a year, right?

So I just think the public needs to understand because we, the board, has supported an Albemarle County pilot that is going to be starting a year from now.

Work on it will be starting sooner, but the actual pilot I think is, because I was corrected on this the other day at the Regional Transit Partnership meeting.

Yes, the pilot service isn't going to start until early 2023, likely.

So these next six months of calendar year 2022 is going to be preparation.

But you all are marrying these two plans together.

There's work that's gone together with them.

OK, that's great.

And then I just have a couple of comments.

I know I've taken a long time.

I really appreciate the evening Saturday and Sunday services, which are really critical for people with jobs and to get places.

So thank you for that.

Looking at that is great.

And my only other comment is that Emily might be able to help

with outreach to our community, which is what Ann was talking about with the survey connecting.

Emily is shaking her head yes, because she knows our community so well.

Scudder, you all have probably already reached out to Emily, but she would be a great connect to that survey in our community.

All right, thank you.

I am bored.

We found a way, even though one topic was not presented, to fall behind.

So we're going to wrap this up real quickly.

I only have a couple of comments.

I appreciate those by all the other members and also your presentations.

Most of what has been presented is going to be of greatest benefit to those in the urban ring.

and I recognize that because you have to have a sufficient demand in order to be able to afford the supply of public transportation.

I do question, in our written materials the information was that about 20 members of the public participated in a public forum on November 18th and 673 people filled out the surveys, but when you look at the respondent characteristics

Almost 50% of those 673 make 100,000 or more a year and more than 50% have two or more cars available.

So I really have to say I question a bit the validity or if not the validity at least the utility of the information provided by

survey respondents who by that information strikes me as less likely to actually be using public transportation and wonder if there may not be a more viable and accurate way of actually identifying who the readers, the writers are, where they come from and where they go.

in order to have a better sense of what really should be provided rather than what strikes me as a limited number of people at a meeting and half or more of the surveys from people who just on the surface would not strike me as those most likely to use public transportation.

But other than that, I appreciate the information.

Just one follow-on to that good idea.

In the past, maybe five or eight years ago, there were questionnaires that were talked to people on the buses.

And you really do face-to-face talk to them, get their answers, or hand out the pieces of paper, and then somebody collects it the next time they get on.

A couple of thoughts I just note is one, we actually have a good deal of data on existing patterns of what riders are doing from the counts we have of where riders are getting on and off buses, as well as previous surveys of where people are going who ride today from what's called origin destination surveys that have been done in the past.

Of course, that only tells us about what people are doing today with the existing system, which, of course, is very limited in its usefulness.

So we looked to both some of the survey data that we received, and we're very cognizant that it's not necessarily representative of existing riders.

So we have looked at, are there differences in how people responded based on whether they said they ride today or if they said their income is low or they have no cars?

and also importantly, we know very well from the reality of

transit usefulness and transit geometry and land use patterns and how those interact pretty much universally across the country and across the world of what makes transit more useful to more people in guiding the overall construct of these network concepts.

And a lot of that reality is a very universal thing about the geometry of places, their walkability, their density,

and what we know about where

I think that data probably is more helpful than the surveys.

And Mr. McDermott, thank you very much.

Absolutely we did.

Thank you.

Well board, we've already had a break so I think we're just going to move on to our next item because we are at 2.45 and we'll move to the

comprehensive plan land use build out analysis.

I expect we will need all of our time and more for that.

Good afternoon.

Hopefully my slides will be pulling up soon, but I'll introduce myself.

I'm Rachel Falkenstein, Planning Manager in Community Development.

I'm joined today by my colleague Tori Kanalopoulos, and we'll have a virtual presenter as well, Jessica Rossi, who is with Kimley-Horn and Associates.

So I'm going to kick us off today, but the bulk of the presentation will be from our consultant team who we contracted with to do the land use build-out analysis.

Our agenda for today.

Are you all seeing my slides?

OK.

Now we're seeing them.

OK.

So our agenda for today will be focused on an overview of a build-out analysis that we did.

We'll talk about the purpose, the methodology, and then the findings.

And then we'll talk about some constraints to apply the build-out analysis as we think about growth management and some considerations that we might want to keep in mind as we move forward and look at growth management in the county.

And then we have a question for you all to consider, but today we're not asking for an action by the board.

This is just an informational presentation and to start the discussion with you all about our growth management policy and how we should think about the capacity of our development areas.

So I'm going to start us off with just some high level purpose of this analysis.

We are in phase one of the AC44 process, which is our comprehensive plan update.

And the first phase is an analysis of our growth management policy.

We're calling it Plan for Growth.

And we're trying to understand the theoretical maximum build out of the county's development areas.

And this would be based on the future land use plan that comes from the 2015 comprehensive plan.

and the county's master plans.

And we want to consider if that theoretical maximum build out would be sufficient to accommodate 20 years of population growth in the county based on our population projections.

And the reason we choose 20 years is because the state requires us to do a 20 year visioning plan with our comprehensive plan.

So that's where the 20 year number comes from.

So we'll be using the analysis, as I mentioned, to analyze the county's growth management policy and consider if we have room to grow with the expected 20-year growth.

But there can be other uses as well.

Our economic development team will be doing some further analysis, starting with this baseline data and going into more detail to think about their economic development goals.

We'll also receive a dynamic data set that will help us through future phases of the comprehensive plan update as we might consider adjustments to our land use.

And that data set will allow us to make those adjustments and then see what the build out would be based on possible scenarios of land use changes.

There are some limitations of this analysis that I want to point out.

The forecasting for future growth and the build-out is based on a set of assumptions that are applied to the county's entire development areas.

So we did not do a parcel by parcel analysis of build-out possibilities, but we applied assumptions across the entire development areas.

That's just based on the nature of how big our development area is and the ability to do that work.

We applied some what we think are pretty reasonable assumptions based on environmental factors and needs for infrastructure and roads and things like that as the development areas build out.

Jessica will talk a little bit more about the methodology for that.

But there are things we can't predict.

We can't predict property owner preferences and how developers might choose to develop a property.

Some developers might choose lower densities than what the comp plan calls for.

We can't predict that.

What we did was look at the maximum build out of the property.

And lastly, I just want to mention we've last did this analysis in 2019.

We've been doing it about every two to three years as time permits.

We did the last analysis in-house, and we used a different set of assumptions.

So you can't do a direct comparison, though looking at the numbers, they're relatively similar.

But the main difference is that in 2019, we did not look at non-residential uses.

In this 2022 analysis, we looked at commercial retail, office, industrial, and hotel.

in addition to residential.

Good afternoon everybody.

I am going to hopefully share my screen.

Okay, thank you so much.

I just wanted to make sure.

So we're going to get going and I'll start by walking through a little bit of the methodology.

So like Rachel mentioned, this was a process that we didn't entirely start from scratch.

We did pay attention to what was done in the 2019 analysis because we wanted to just make sure that we could kind of understand the changes between 2019 and 2022.

So what we did is we used a four-step process and we focused very explicitly on the county's development areas.

I have a map of the development areas in a couple slides that I'll just kind of walk through just for some context.

But we really did focus on the development areas versus the rural areas.

The process was designed to be applied in the same manner across all development areas as much as possible.

We did not complete a parcel by parcel assessment of the entire county.

and part of that is just based on the sheer number of parcels and land that the county has.

So our first step in the methodology started with a high level assumption that allowed us to identify parcels in the development areas that may have development or redevelopment potential.

The way that we did this is we very simply kind of focused on those parcels that were either vacant, so they didn't have a structure on them, or parcels where the land value was higher than the improvement value.

And from a property tax perspective, improvement value simply means structures or developments.

The secondary identification suggested a property could have redevelopment potential.

So perhaps the structure that's on that property has lived its life and is ready for the next use.

For steps two and three, we started by refining that initial high level assumption.

When we reviewed the results of step one, it became clear that the assumptions required some additional looks to make sure that we were better ground truthing properties that identified for future development opportunities.

I'll be honest, a large part of the refinement was focused on properties that had existing buildings on them, and we were wanting to make sure that we were

providing a clear assumption for why some properties that had a building on it were included and some properties were not.

We also refined the results based on the location of the property, the size of the property, ownership, so if it was owned by the county or another public agency, we generally excluded it from the model, environmental constraints, and then we looked at current and future land use.

Our next step incorporated the residential pipeline.

So instead of making assumptions for properties that either are already approved for future development or are in the review process, what we wanted to do was simply use those unit counts to incorporate into the model.

And so what we did is we removed properties that were either approved or under review

from the model to avoid double counting.

And it really kind of shirred up our analysis for those properties because we know what those approval numbers are.

And then finally our last step, applied land use build out assumptions were across all of the opportunity parcels.

So any property that was identified for future opportunity,

were applied a similar land use build-out.

They were standardized so that they could be evenly applied across all parcels in the development areas.

Initially, the acreage of each developable property was decreased to account for environmental constraints as well as needed space for infrastructure and the required amount of open space.

Build-out assumptions were created for mixture of uses

In addition to doing the theoretical maximum build-out, which we just outlined in the methodology steps, we also looked at

Market demand forecasts for a more refined 20-year period.

And we prepared market forecasts for housing, commercial retail, office, industrial, and hotel uses over the next 20 years.

Forecasts took into consideration the past 10 years of development activity in the county and also took into account recent real estate performance, including vacancy rates, sales data,

and expected population growth.

It's important to note that demand can be constrained due to factors such as land availability, cost to develop, access to infrastructure and environmental factors.

And so those constraints were not necessarily taken into account into the demand forecasts.

Essentially what we wanted to do is create a maximum theoretical build out of the development areas

and then compare that to an unconstrained demand forecast so that we can kind of understand what and compare how much capacity there could be in the future.

One of the sources that really helped to inform our demand forecast is population growth projections for Albemarle County

What we did is we utilized three sources that provided projections for both 2030 and 2040.

One thing I did want to note is while these findings are focused on a build out to the year 2040, they can also be extrapolated to further project to 2044, which would allow the forecast to better align with the planning horizon for AC44.

So as you can see in the chart, the three sources that we used were Weld and Cooper, Woods and Poole, which is a third party data, socioeconomic data forecasting source, as well as Environmental Systems Research Institute business analyst online platform.

And what I thought was really interesting is among those three sources, the forecasts were relatively consistent.

and they resulted in an estimated 2040 population in Albemarle County ranging from about 138,200, 138,200 residents to just over 142,700 residents by 2040.

And so there's a 4,000 roughly resident difference between the low and the high, but over a 20-year period,

It still is a relatively tight forecast.

So all sources were kind of moving the county in the same direction.

So we promised that we were going to share the development area map with you to give you a little bit of context before we move into some of the other findings.

Albemarle County has 11 distinct development areas.

The areas have maintained the same naming convention since the 1982 comprehensive plan.

And what's helpful about that is that these consistent names have been useful in the ability for the county to track development trends and land use patterns over time.

Essentially, neighborhoods one through seven represent the urban ring around Charlottesville.

Holly Mead and Piney Mountain are located further north along 29.

The village of Rivanna is to the east and Crozet is to the west.

So I mentioned earlier that as part of our methodology, we did take a quick look at the development pipeline to make sure that we understood the growth that had already been approved or was in the process of approval.

Your current residential pipeline results in more than 14,800 residential units across the 11 development areas.

The number of new potential new units vary across the development areas.

You can see that neighborhood 6 actually has nothing in the pipeline.

Up to Hollymeade, which has over 6,300

residential units in the pipeline accounting for almost 43% of the total across all the development areas.

It's important to note, and you saw in the map, that the different development areas really do range in size, both in terms of total acreage and also range in the recommended land use pattern and the future land use designations.

So our residential market demand forecast, the next series of slides are going to look relatively similar.

So starting here, we're going to step quickly through the 20-year demand forecast by each real estate sector.

The residential demand forecast looked at historic deliveries, residential sales, for sale closing prices, rental leasing rates, and rental occupancies.

Population forecasts were really important in this particular land use because population, people, households generate demand for new housing units.

For closing, price points, rental rates, and occupancy, the general trajectory has been positive, indicating strong demand for housing in Albemarle.

However, housing costs are also rising extremely quickly, which could impact affordability.

The average since 2010 is about 650 units added in the county per year.

But in recent years, that's often been higher.

2019 saw 665 new units added, more than 1100 units were added in 2020, and about 960 units were added last year.

You can also see from the chart with the blue and the yellow and the gray,

that in the last several years multifamily residential units have become more prominent with new construction in recent years.

So our residential build-out findings, or excuse me, our residential market demand findings showed that over 20 years we expect demand for between 11,500 and 13,500 new units in the county.

When we go back to the theoretical maximum build-out for residential, this is going to both incorporate the development pipeline as well as the build-out of the properties that are able to receive growth.

The maximum build-out for the development areas could exceed 24,000 units, which does, of course, exceed the demand forecast of 11,500 to 13,500 units.

It should be noted that the 2019 build-out analysis also found that capacity based on future land use designation maximums exceeded demand, but found that capacity based on lower ends of land use recommendations and by-right zoning capacity may not be sufficient to meet demand.

And Tori is going to talk about that here in a little while.

It's also important to note that this analysis does assume that some limited residential growth will occur in the rural areas, but the real focus of this analysis was on the development areas.

Shifting over to non-residential uses, the number of new retail space completions or construction over time has generally decreased.

Retail occupancy rates have also decreased.

You know, retail is no secret that has been shifting and changing over time even before the pandemic.

The pandemic certainly accelerated previous trends as the influence of online shopping has increased.

So we have seen a decrease overall in the amount of square footage that has been added year over year.

Our forecast

suggest that in a 20 year period you could have demand for between 1 million and 1.3 million square feet of retail space.

Office follows a fairly similar trajectory where we have seen on a longer term pattern the amount of office space completed year over year declining.

However, it varies very significantly where we had

Completions in 2010 and 2011, a very quiet six year period in between and have had actually some of the higher deliveries in 2020 with almost 140,000 square feet.

Occupancy rates have been falling as companies consider how their employees are going to work.

The pandemic has also significantly impacted the office industry.

and the ability to work remotely or have a hybrid work schedule is going to continue to influence the amount of space a company needs in the future.

Office lease rates have gone up and so we do see that as a positive.

And so for office space we see demand for between 750,000 and 1 million square feet over the next 20 years.

Industrial completions and a longer term trend have also fallen.

However, occupancy rates are very, very high.

There's almost no available space for industrial in existing buildings and lease rates accordingly have also been on the rise.

This analysis found demand for between 950,000 and 1.1 million square feet of new industrial space

and then finally hotel.

The number of completions for hotel rooms has been in a longer term pattern on the rise.

Hotel occupancy rates and daily rates have been down.

A lot of that is a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I will make a quick note that the data that we used for this analysis was pulled in February and what we have seen in the information since then

both in our own data pools as well as information that's come from tourist groups is that the numbers are improving and so I would actually suggest that the occupancy rates are much more similar to where they were pre-pandemic than they were when we pulled the data.

We are forecasting between 700 and 900 rooms in demand over the next 20 years.

So just a really quick summary of the non-residential findings.

Again, the market demand forecasts are less than the theoretical maximum build-outs similar to what we saw in residential.

Again, a quick summary of the high and low demand forecasts compared to

The maximum build-out estimates for the non-residential uses.

So this gives you kind of a quick snapshot that allows easy comparison.

And here is the 20-year forecast for residential, the forecast between 11,500 units and 13,500 units compared to a theoretical maximum build-out

plus the development pipeline of over 24,000 units.

And we don't expect you to be able to read all of these on the screen today.

However, hopefully you got to spend some time in your packet looking at this.

This compares each of the development areas with the summary of the build-out findings

for both residential as well as all the different non-residential uses.

Similar to the pipeline, the distribution of non-residential build-out varies significantly by development area.

For example, there are some development areas that appear to have no capacity for industrial uses and others that are really taking up the lion's share.

So with that, we're going to start to transition into the other perspective that you can take here.

As I mentioned previously, the maximum theoretical build-out is very focused on what the capacity is, and the market demand forecasts are very much unconstrained by the realities of land availability and what developers are actually putting on the ground.

And so there's a few additional

The land use build out analysis focused on the maximum theoretical capacity of the development areas, which is based on the future land use designations, and that's important.

Many other considers and variables will limit and affect the actual build out of the development areas.

Some of these factors are accounted for in the assumptions, like how we would

We've made reductions for infrastructure requirements or environmental constraints, the need to add open space.

Some factors will affect build out as well, but we're not as easily accounted for or captured in the development area-wide model.

And some of these things could be a misalignment between existing zoning and future land use.

the rezoning process itself and the final build out decisions, site location, accessibility to existing infrastructure, physical site constraints, local and state ordinances and what they require from a development perspective, the cost of land, the cost of housing.

Thank you, Jessica, and good afternoon, everyone.

I'm going to jump ahead and get back to where we should be in our presentation.

So as mentioned, the theoretical maximum build-out is focused on future land use designations, meaning that rezonings would be needed for most properties to meet that potential maximum.

Come closer.

Thank you.

Sure.

As with the 2019 analysis, the estimated residential build-out by current by-right zoning compared to future land use designations is much lower.

This zoning build-out estimate uses the parcels identified as development opportunity in the land use build-out analysis and then applies assumptions based on each parcel's current zoning district.

This does not include any parcels in the pipeline.

An estimated 2,505 to 4,361 units could be built in the development areas on properties with potential for development or redevelopment that are not in the pipeline based on current zoning, compared with about 9,265 units based on future land use designation.

Across the development areas, future land use designations in existing zoning districts do not always align.

For example, this section of Hollymede has over 160 acres designated as light industrial for future land use.

However, this land is currently zoned rural area and would need to be rezoned to allow for industrial development.

The rezoning process is uncertain and can be time consuming, with some rezonings taking over two years from initial submittal to approval.

Proposed and approved densities are often lower than maximum densities recommended in the comp plan.

Looking at rezonings approved from 2016 through 2021, the total density approved was about 58% of the maximum recommended density per future land use designations.

Even when projects are approved at higher densities, the sites often do not build out to the maximum approved density.

For example, the Rio Point rezoning in Neighborhood 2 was approved for 328 units, while the comp plan recommended a maximum of 624 units and the previous by-ride zoning allowed up to 110 units.

And this rezoning took about two and a half years from initial submittal to approval.

The Old Trail Village development in Crozet was approved for a minimum of 1,600 units and a maximum of 2,200 units in 2005.

In 2015, the applicant requested a reduction of the minimum required units down to 1,000 units.

The expected final build-out of the development is 1,200 units, which is 1,000 units less than the approved maximum.

It should be noted that in the development pipeline that was used for this project, all of the approved and under review projects that are currently unadjusted, meaning that developments that are expected to build out lower than their maximum approvals are still fully counted.

Where a parcel is located and what it is surrounded by can affect potential build-out.

For example, adjacent residential uses may be helpful for certain businesses, such as restaurants, but may be less desirable for others, such as heavy industry.

Some businesses need access to major highways, which limits where they can locate.

Available public infrastructure and the ability to connect to it are important factors as well.

While assumptions for environmental constraints were applied across the development areas, each parcel will vary individually.

For example, two parcels may have designated steep slopes.

However, one parcel may be more difficult to develop than the other due to the location of the slopes on the site.

Generally, the easier to develop sites are developed first, meaning that remaining sites may become increasingly challenging and more expensive to develop.

Local and state ordinance requirements regulate how a property can be developed.

The county zoning ordinance is an especially important set of regulations and zoning requirements affect the form and density of development.

Zoning requirements include minimum lot sizes, setbacks, building height, and requirements for parking, landscaping, and open space.

Resoning to planned districts generally allows more flexibility compared with developing by right under general residential or commercial districts.

However, rezoning adds more time to the development process.

Kim Lee Horn gathered feedback from local stakeholders and found that the cost of land in the county has increased rapidly in recent years.

They found the sales price per acre of vacant properties increased about 38% from 2018 to 2021.

Increased land costs are usually passed on to home buyers and renters for residential developments, while it is more difficult for many non-residential uses to absorb those costs, especially industrial uses.

The high cost of housing in this area reflects the cost of land, among other factors, including supply and demand and the cost of materials and labor.

Compared to Charlottesville and surrounding counties, Albemarle County had the highest median for sale home price in the last quarter of 2021.

The high cost of housing could also constrain the ability of local employers to find employees who may be priced out of Albemarle County.

So based on the land use analysis, there appears to be sufficient land available for residential and non-residential growth in the existing development areas.

However, that is predicated on a number of assumptions, including development at the higher end of recommended ranges based on future land use, significant redevelopment and infill, updates to zoning to match future land use, incentives for affordable housing, and economic development.

The lower ends of recommended densities and uses are not sufficient to accommodate future growth,

and development under current buy rate zoning may not be sufficient to accommodate future growth.

The Planning Commission reviewed the draft land use build out at its meeting on May 24th and this slide is a summary of the feedback heard from commissioners.

The commission expressed interest in the effects of Albemarle County's development decisions on adjacent and nearby localities, especially the demand for housing in other localities for people employed in Albemarle County who are unable to afford housing locally.

The commission mentioned a need to get more comfortable with density to effectively use the development areas.

The Commission provided feedback on the rezoning process, including that it can be lengthy and uncertain, which could deter potential development, and also that infrastructure needs and concerns are often an impediment to approving rezonings.

The Commission said there is a need to consider the availability and accessibility of existing infrastructure, as some parts of the development areas may not have existing adequate facilities.

and the commission said to consider local demographics and the potential needs of different groups such as an aging population and the desire to age in place.

We have one question for the Board of Supervisors to consider, which is does our current growth management policy provide opportunities to meet housing and non-residential needs for growth over the next 20 years?

And we're happy to take questions as well.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you all for your parts of the presentation.

We'll go through our order.

Zoom back here.

Thank you.

Well,

There was something, so Jessica's presentation will be available in the after meetings because there were several things she had that weren't in our packet that I will appreciate studying more of the maps and things like that.

But I will just, I guess, as a history comment,

and I don't know that it changes anything, but from 2004 to 2008, there were five huge rezonings.

All came in a very short period of time.

They were all approved with massive amounts, especially of a commercial and retail space, hundreds of thousands of new square feet, even when the county's data at the time said we had a 30-year supply.

So this has made me a little concerned when we're thinking about massive changes to our approach

based upon these kinds of projections.

I will just add that you mentioned the Old Trail zoning.

That went into the public hearing at 800 units and came out three hours later at 2200.

and it was a major disaster politically and sort of for the credibility of the county.

So please be very careful about relying on that without the full data.

There was a huge change in what has happened and all the series of developers, just as that one example, have said in order to meet the 2200 the whole entire property would have had to be apartment buildings.

and that was certainly not the owner's intention.

And it certainly right now is a very, very high demand and appreciated place to live with all the growing pains that it does have.

And I guess the only other voice in my head

that I hope we will figure out how to respect as we go forward as the presentation said we just need to get used to more density because we're going to be Arlington in 50 years.

I don't think there's anybody in Albemarle County today who wants to be Arlington in 50 years and that is the hard, hard decision that board members made way after me.

have to keep in mind because we have residents now who definitely need better places to live.

There is no connection between loosening our regulations and getting more of the kinds of housing that we need for sure.

but there also are 110,000 people or 50,000 families or something who have already made the greatest investment they will ever make in their home and they have rights too so balancing all of those rights of current people versus the future people who are going to come is a real challenge and also

understanding that we may not have space for absolutely everybody and we have to deal with that too as we look forward into the future.

So I can only represent the people who are my constituents and many of them are still completely reeling from just the high speed of growth that's happened in the last twenty years.

Not having to do necessarily with zoning but just the

How their world has changed, our world has changed.

So many of the changes have been beneficial.

It's much more fun to live here now than it was in the 50s when I was little.

But there are some challenges too.

So I look forward to lots more detail as we go forward.

And I think it's going to be an interesting discussion.

Thank you.

Not very well.

Just a second.

We've got technical assistance here.

Okay.

Would you like me to stay?

Yes.

Very good.

Thank you.

You don't want me to sing.

OK, thank you very much, Ms.

Rossi, for your presentation.

I appreciate everything that's been said.

This is no surprise.

I think we all knew that this was coming.

We do hear from the people that are in their neighborhoods.

They don't want any more growth.

I've heard from my constituents saying, can't you just stop people from coming in?

I don't think that's very, that's not going to happen because people are going to continue to come here.

And I've always told my constituents that in the development areas we will be going higher and denser and I can especially see it along where we have a six-lane highway along 29 where we do have the infrastructure, where we do have the transportation corridors,

of going higher and denser along that corridor in order to, frankly, not go out into the rural areas.

I think it's a delicate balance.

Because there are people also in the border rural areas, next to the development areas, they want to develop their property.

They want to be able to build

Oh, a lot more housing there.

I don't know, at the end of their career or whatever, and they want to sell the land and make a lot of money.

That's something I'd like to avoid.

I would like it to be more, like I said, along 29 along, you know,

and the area where we have services for that.

This is a very, very interesting report.

And it is the fact that we have not built out the capacity that has been on us as supervisors, but it's also due to political reasons.

So we have to decide what we're going to do.

We have to decide how we're going to address our constituents.

involved them and saying, do you want to go into the rural areas?

Do you want to go higher and denser in the development areas?

Do you want to go into the rural areas?

That's going to be a question for many of us to answer.

I think eventually we probably will be going into the rural areas.

That will probably be, but that could be in 40, 50 years, maybe longer.

You certainly don't want to lose the charm of Albemarle.

but it's a tough decision but it's something that we're gonna have to grapple with.

Thank you, let me ask a few questions to understand the information.

Can somebody, I think it was slide 25, which is the build out pipeline.

I don't know.

There's been use of build-out pipeline and approved.

All right.

So this is, if the vacant parcels were to build out in each of these neighborhoods, what the number of units and square footage of non-residential would be.

and then I believe you're referring to the pipeline.

This one.

This is the pipeline.

So these are proposed developments that are either already approved or under review right now.

We tallied all of those up and broke them down by neighborhoods.

OK, I'm going to have to, and can you go to the neighborhood?

Yes, so this was a late edition of requests from Supervisor Mallek.

All right, so again, just so I understand, now that I see, I was thinking it was neighborhood two, so go to 15.

This is the pipeline.

And the pipeline are those units that have either already been approved for development or are under review in the process right now where staff is reviewing them.

So the approved units, so neighborhood two, if you go to the map, includes

But it looks like it will include Rio Road, East Rio Road.

That's correct.

So just help me understand there's more than 254 units

that have already, that 254 is not jiving with what I thought my knowledge is.

All right, so Belvedere is in there.

Tory, are you able to speak to this?

I'm just trying to understand the columns and the rows.

And since this was as of, I believe, February of this year, I think some of the rezonings that have now been approved weren't included.

But the 961 is still accurate.

You're just adding those two together.

So the 961 in neighborhood 2 is all the units that are approved.

The under review I think must be what is throwing me off.

I'm trying to get between the approved and the under review and that's the 254 and the 707 is not making sense to me.

I'll leave that for a makeup session perhaps at a different time.

But the neighborhood maps, is that not pulled?

Is that just created for this?

I thought that was something that existed somewhere else.

I couldn't find it and I thought that was in the comp plan.

But I couldn't find it trying to look through the comp plan quickly to get it in front of me.

I'm hoping we can get a link for that.

That's helpful to be able to see this.

Let me make a couple of questions.

I think the 58% of approved by the Board of Supervisors since 2016.

I think that's useful information and we should probably look back further than just 2016 to see what a five-year, 10-year, 15-year, maybe even a 20-year trend is.

then you incorporate different board philosophies and decisions but also probably gets at what a true max is going to be.

I think we could learn from that because that takes in your political dynamic, that takes in decisions around communities when they're dealing with these rezonings coming in front of them.

So I appreciate having that 58%.

That was my big glaring question I wanted to ask, so that was answered.

but I would, if you have it, I'd love it to be sent to us, like what is the, here's the five year mark, here's the 10 year, the 15 year, the 20 year.

As we continue to work on this, I think that's going to be useful.

Because I think the minimum shouldn't be the buy right, the minimum should be the something that's realistic, but to Neil's point about, it's good to know he's a Dorito guy, the

the maximum build-out.

We can't keep setting ourselves up to put this max in the comp plan if we really don't mean it and actions over the last 20 years haven't got at it.

At least that's in my opinion.

Now, this development versus rural areas.

I get it.

I understand why we focused on the development area.

But if we think that's the only place where growth is going to go, we are setting ourselves up for additional problems.

So I was looking at the third quarter building report.

And when you look at single-family detached homes, there's been about as many single-family homes gone into the rural areas that have the development area.

The development area is seeing all the density in units that go from single-family attached

to apartment units and everything in between.

You barely see any of that going into the rural area.

But single-family detached homes, there still seems to be an almost equal spread happening in both zones.

But what that says to me is that we're only putting folks who want to live in single-family detached into the rural area and nothing else in terms of housing mix.

I don't know what that means.

I don't know how I feel about that yet, but that stands out.

So the growth management policy, while I appreciate there's going to be a focus on the development area, needs to also understand how that growth impacts and goes into the rural area at the expense of housing stock, I think.

So I'm throwing that out there.

Again, I'm still pondering on that one myself.

And if you haven't, I think it would be useful for other supervisors.

You go back and you look at that nine-year comparison.

It was back in January where the last report came out.

But to look at that and how the single family it detached goes is something that we need.

I think it was useful to look at in light of this information.

I don't think our current growth policy gets at the needs and the demands of what we're seeing, so I definitely think we need to work on.

I presume that's why you're asking the question, do we even need to go through this and do a new growth management policy?

Did I understand the question right?

The answer is yes.

The retail office space, I'm not even sure how to respond to all of that yet.

I feel like if this comes back to us that it would be useful.

in both sides, the residential and who the experts are there, but the economic development team coming forward and saying what they think is the answer to that question relative to what we know our project enable is.

I think it suggested that, so that's gonna be helpful for me to understand the square footage that's gonna be needed for, I mean, our project, our application that's before us tonight is suggesting less retail, office, all of that,

But it's also looking at the whole area.

So we're dealing with that issue right now, this evening.

So I hope the next, if it's a work session or a presentation, I don't know.

But that would definitely be something that I hope there'll be a team of folks that we can kind of interact with and have some go back and forth with.

So we're not just doing this, spewing out quick responses.

Not that that's a problem today.

I'll leave it at that, I think.

Did I answer the question?

Thank you.

Hi, thank you for this.

A lot of information and really valuable.

I have some questions.

I know some of the questions that I have you've anticipated and said they're not being considered yet.

So, for example, the build-out in the rural areas, the historical trends to the extent that they might incorporate

numbers that we haven't really put into this for the growth.

They're pretty relevant for what our capacity is even so, even if not considered.

But it's just bare bones.

One of the things that I meant to look up and I didn't is the population of the development area compared to the rural area right now.

I don't have it handy right in front of me.

I apologize for not bringing it up earlier.

It just occurred to me as we were going through recognizing the size of Charlottesville and the number of people in Charlottesville and then the size of the

current growth or development areas in Albemarle which are what I understand is three and a half times the size of Charlottesville.

So it's important to sort of look at what are we talking about in terms of build out and what's our neighbor Charlottesville talking about in terms of build out because we're

connected, very closely connected.

Just in terms of the presentation, a couple quick questions.

Since we had up here a minute ago slides 25 and 15, I just want to make sure I understand by looking at those two real quickly, and I'll focus on a number on each one.

if you have them there, 15, okay.

So you have total buildable units, 14,881.

And under review.

And I assume that, for example, neighborhood five, that's Southwood, so a big part of that is probably on that.

All right, if you jump to slide 25,

Remember we had that number 14,000 and this is saying the build out then potential in total is only 9,000.

So basically of what's in the pipeline, you're saying what's left by your analysis is substantially less than what's already in the pipeline.

So the 9,265 would be units that got picked up

But are put in at their maximum build-out potential from that.

OK.

Really important.

To some extent, we've got a chicken and egg problem.

Population forecasts probably depend upon the availability of housing for those people.

So we're looking at how much housing we can put for forecasts of people that we

Anyway, you understand that that's complicated.

And we have rezoning possibilities, so I don't know how much it's possible to, in looking at growth management policies, since we're looking at the comprehensive plan, to look again at the different land uses and recognize that, well,

retail office, hotel are not seeing the growth, are we recognizing that some of these areas might be purposed for other types of uses?

So that has to be considered.

I think that we have to, as we've heard from some speakers earlier, we have to consider climate impacts in our transportation plan and in our housing plan.

And so I look forward to that being included in the next round because we really can't make decisions to just grow into areas and not consider the climate impacts.

Thank you, and I certainly agree with many of what everybody said here, the climate action.

I do have a question on that.

Do you know if Weldon Cooper Center and some of the folks that are estimating our populations, I believe that we're going to see climate migration in this community.

as climate change takes over and we become, we are more of a safer climate in this community than many areas in the country.

Have you all taken into account the idea or possibility of climate migration?

And I don't even know how you do that.

Rachel, to be honest with you, I just, my gut says, when I look at fires and storms

and flooding and everything that's happening.

And not to say that we're perfectly safe, because we certainly have our challenges, but we don't have the challenges that other areas in the country have.

And we have a major medical center.

I think we're going to start to see climate migration.

That's a great question and I don't know either.

I respectfully disagree.

In Florida right now you can't even get private insurance for your homes.

The state carries

an insurance housing home insurance plan which is a nothing hamburger and people are starting to panic.

I just think that we need to look at that and I'll leave that alone because I have no clue how you do that.

I have these ideas and I don't know how to

But anyway, another question that I have is, or comment on just the basics.

I did talk to Rachel about this.

Just like with transit,

Bus line seven means nothing to me for the most part.

Neighborhood one means nothing to me and I appreciate that you guys know that, but can we please come up with a better way of calling this?

I know because I can tell neighborhood six is in the Jouett district because of the density and the action you see.

and for a lot of my Jewett district, not all, but can we come up with other names as we're going through the comp plan so that when we reference neighborhood one, we kind of know what neighborhood one is?

And I don't know how you do that to make it short and sweet, but Jim got at it a minute ago.

He informed me where Southwood was, right?

So maybe it's just giving us a way of recognizing with a big area in that neighborhood that, oh, that's the area where Southwood is, right?

So I would really appreciate that with these two maps going forward as we're looking into the future.

The other comment that I would make is the Planning Commission met and discussed this.

I understand that we were rushing to get this to us, but we didn't get any of the comments from the Planning Commission because their minutes weren't ready.

I understand that, but even better than getting that, I would love to have a work session scheduled with the Planning Commission, and I would suggest the EDA around this work.

I'd love to know what Roger thinks and what the EDA thinks.

I think maybe you can have a joint work session with all three of those bodies, but I think it could really be a very robust conversation.

I think for us to be dealing with this in isolation probably doesn't work in my world.

That's a comment for the future.

I'm very concerned that this community, if you look at our median price of our houses, which is higher than almost everywhere around us, I am concerned that we are really becoming a retirement community, and mainly a retirement community for rich white people, and I'm just going to say it, and that is very concerning for me.

Not your all's fault.

But I will say that in my world, a community that is not growing is dying, right?

A community has to grow.

You don't have to grow immensely.

We're not talking about unbridled growth.

and we have managed in this community in our county to grow at a reasonable rate, one to two percent a year.

I think it's important that we continue to have that growth.

I am very concerned though with that we keep taking away our commercial and industrial land.

We're rezoning it and I've heard Roger say several times, when you rezone and you take this commercial and industrial land away, you need to be replacing it and we're not talking about that at all.

That's why I think the EDA and Roger need to be at the table with us for a conversation around how we do this as we're going forward, right?

We all have concerns about the timeline that we're spending on these rezonings and I think we're working on that and I see Jody in the back and hopefully we'll be able to cut down some of those timelines which is sort of a little different discussion and I get that.

And I consider this just the beginning of the work.

I'm just sort of talking about where I'm hoping we'll go.

I guess I'm including next steps along in this, and I don't know if this was part of our ... Go ahead, keep going.

Okay.

Work session with the Planning Commission and with EDA, and I also, as we're going forward with all of these discussions in the comp plan, I need to see maps that identify all of our land use.

Ace, donated easements, park land, steep slopes, man-made and natural.

Forestall, Ag.

I think we have to be looking at all of that for the whole county so that we can see maybe overlays.

We can see where the areas are, what we have in different land use, and what's available.

I don't even know.

Then I'd like to see that in my magisterial districts.

I was playing around with some of the maps from the feds just over the weekend and was able to pull up a lot of that myself.

But I think as part of our discussions, we really need to have those maps and those overlays so we understand that Ann has the forest and the White Hall district backed by the National Park and you can't build there, right?

and not to say that we're going to open it all up and just go for everything, but I think we have to have a recognition of what we have where.

We used to get that a decade or so ago.

We don't get those anymore, Ann.

And somehow or another we stopped receiving them.

We need to go back to that at least while we're discussing the comp plan and updates to the comp plan and this work.

Donna, I think I'm almost through.

Hold on just a minute.

Let me check my notes.

Neighborhoods, Roger Johnson, concern would be in retirement, reduced timeline for zoning.

I think I may have covered it.

The only comment I'll make, and it's really not maybe relevant to this discussion, but I want to make sure

As we're going through the development area and the comp plan review that even though an area like I have in the Jouett district that is a zero maybe or doesn't have a lot going on, we need to get back to with our strategic work that those areas are not ignored.

because they're some of our most affordable areas and we need to figure out how to keep them but make sure that they don't continue to swirl down.

And that gets into property management and I'm getting outside of our purview here but I just don't want to forget those areas.

And I think I'm through.

I'm not so sure it does.

I guess I'm not so sure it does.

I'm on the bubble about that.

I need some more information.

My first response was probably yes, but I'm not so sure it does, to be honest with you, as I'm talking through my discussions.

I think that's what we're looking at with the comp plan review, right?

We need to figure that out.

All right, I'll be as quick as I can.

As I was retiring from the Navy, the new acronym was BLUF, B-L-U-F, bottom line up front.

So to answer your question, does the policy provide opportunities?

Probably not.

But more significantly, does the application of the policy by decisions of this board provide opportunities?

And I think definitely not.

I don't think we are building

to capacity.

So a few questions that I would ask is, you know, what has been the build-out versus the maximum potential build-out in the past?

And I think, Supervisor Galloway, this goes to a comment that you made.

As we look to the future, let's first look to the past to see if the maximum build-out, for example, was 100 units and we've only been building 58 units, then we can apply that going forward and we're probably not going to come anywhere near that maximum build-out.

going forward?

Because is there any reason to believe that the future build out will be any better than the past?

I think not.

In fact, I think it's less likely in the future because the more development means more people and the more people means more not in my backyard,

and we hear that with every application that comes before us.

People who live in the development area who believe in their mind that it should remain as rural as the undeveloped rural area and that's not the case.

So that pressure continues to build against maximum build out in the development area.

As you know, we really only have three options, build up, build out, or fill in.

I don't think we can build down.

I mean, that's just not gonna work.

And if I caught the 58% right, then that means that's what we've done in the past.

There's no reason to think we will do any better than that in the future, probably less.

I kind of equate this to climate change, human-induced climate change.

As we talk about that, we've got the world, the earth, and everything that we do that affects our ability to live.

Well, that's the same thing we're dealing with with our development area.

If we don't build in as much as we can in our density in the development area, we will be into the rural area much sooner than we anticipate.

And I just simply don't believe that the numbers based upon this board's decisions

is going to be able to meet that maximum build out.

And that's, you know, we got to look at ourselves in the mirror board because we're the ones who have to increase the density when we do the approvals or we will fill up and we will be moving out sooner than we wanted to.

And I will leave it at that, but I understand there are some other comments.

I just, since this slide is here, and I appreciate Supervisor Andrews taking it further.

Yes.

I concur with Supervisor McKeel on climate migration.

If it drops a little over 100 more feet, there will not be water to supply the cities and the people out there.

Farms are already going fallow and they said that will show up next year in the grocery stores because the food that's being grown this year is what would show up next year but the fields are not being harvested or planted because they don't have the water because people in LA have increased the water usage so they've got green lawns.

So as they are now in like year 32 of a mega drought, I think there will be population swings

I was going to say in North Carolina right now, the coastline of North Carolina, the farmers can't plant crops now because of the salt that's coming inland and killing their crops.

Thank you.

Just a couple of quick things after what other people said.

Someone made a comment about why not putting apartments in the rural area, and I think that was always linked with the availability of sewer and public water.

In order to have that kind of density, you can't have these big parcels on wells and septic.

That was the decision from many years ago.

I just want to throw that out there.

So I'm now confused about maps 15 and 25 or 14 and 25.

So using neighborhood 2, Rio as an example, I had the 961, but this shows the 897 plus the 961 is what really is what we're looking at for Rio, which makes more sense when you think about all those neighborhoods.

I was having a hard time putting that together.

Someone else asked about the 9,000 units picked up by the methodology but not in the pipeline.

Are those in the same parcels that were

talked about in the 14,800 units.

And maybe I'll have to go back and listen to the recording.

So one figure said 14,000 units.

Another place, it said 9,000 units.

But were those for the same parcels or the growth area as a whole?

Yeah, the best way would be to consider them added together.

So these 9,000 do not include any pipeline, and so they don't have any approved or pending applications on them.

But they got picked up as being vacant or a low enough improvement value that they could be developed someday.

OK, now I got that.

And then do you have any more questions?

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor Mallek.

And I'd say, I'd ask Ms.

All right, thank you.

All right, board, then I would ask if we have other questions just to submit them.

Pardon?

Yeah, and more.

Chair Price, as you transition, I would like to comment, and I understand that you're over time, that the comment by Ms.

McKeel about in the future we may want to take a look at discussing some of this information.

You believe the EDA and the Planning Commission

was mentioned.

That's something that if the board is interested in, that takes time to plan, and that's a significant lift.

And so I'll need to circle back on that with this board, and we can talk about it offline.

But I did want to flag that because, again, that's a tremendous amount of coordination work.

during an already very busy year.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you, everyone.

We'll move on to item number 12, smart scale applications.

And Ms.

Thank you so much for having us today.

We're here to discuss this year's SmartScale applications.

I'm Jessica Hirsch-Ballering.

I'm a principal planner here.

I'm joined by Kevin McDermott, our planning manager.

At the end of our presentation, we'll be seeking a resolution of support from the board for all projects proposed within Albemarle County.

We're also seeking feedback on the details of the projects that we're going to describe today.

While the overall concepts have already been set with our pre-application submissions, we can still explore changes to the details between now and our final submission date, as well as if the projects are funded, we can still explore changes to the details all the way up until project construction.

All right, so first a little background about SmartScale.

The SmartScale grant program is the primary method for funding large-scale transportation projects in Virginia.

SmartScale is a competitive grant program, so VDOT evaluates and scores potential transportation projects from across the state based on how likely the project is to improve safety, reduce congestion, increase accessibility, contribute to economic development, promote efficient land use, and impact the environment.

So this is like a calendar of the overall SmartScale program.

SmartScale is a recurring grant program that's on a two-year cycle.

So we are approaching our final submission deadline of August 1.

We previously submitted pre-applications back at the end of March.

And descriptions of the projects that we submitted as pre-applications were in our quarterly report back in April.

After we submit on August 1st, VDOT is going to review all of the projects in these months here, and then in January of 2023, VDOT will release scores for all applications and make initial funding recommendations.

However, it won't be until June of 2023 here when the Commonwealth Transportation Board will meet to officially determine which applications are funded.

The SmartScale program allows localities of our size to submit a maximum of four applications per funding cycle.

We are expecting to submit four applications, and Kevin is going to describe those projects in detail following this introduction.

The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission and the Charlottesville Albemarle MPO may also submit up to four applications on behalf of the localities that they serve, including Albemarle County.

None of the other localities exceeded their own four application limit, so we were able to ask the TJPDC to submit four applications on our behalf.

I'll be describing those projects in detail later.

The Charlottesville Albemarle MPO, the policy board there about a year ago looked at or identified four projects that they would like to pursue.

And Kevin is going to describe those projects towards the end of the presentation.

Lastly, the SmartScale program requires a resolution of support from the local governing body for all projects to be constructed at least partially within the jurisdiction.

So that's why we're here today, to get that resolution of support from you hopefully.

This slide just shows you a list of all 12 projects that would potentially be applied for within Albemarle County.

We're going to go through four projects at a time, and then we'd like to offer you the opportunity to ask questions about those four projects before we move on to the next set.

Let's see here.

A brief description of each project was included in your meeting materials as attachment B. We're going to go through the projects in the same order today as they appeared in your meeting materials.

A note that we do not have cost estimates for any of these projects.

VDOT is working on those for us.

They'll have them ready for us for our final submission, but not yet.

And a reminder that if our SmartScale applications are successful, the SmartScale program will cover the entire cost of the project

and VDOT will administer their construction.

Thank you, Jessica, members of the board.

I am going to pull up the pointer so I can walk you through each of these projects in detail, give you an overview of where the project came from, and then some of the details with it.

So we'll start with the Avon Street Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements.

This project goes from

Mill Creek here in the south end, all the way to Paragory Lane in the north end, and that Paragory Lane separates the regional jail from the National Guard.

This is the National Guard location right here.

This project was identified through the Avon Corridor Study completed a few years ago.

and the basics of it are to construct a shared use path along the western side of Avon from Mill Creek all the way to Paragory Lane and it also includes a pedestrian crossing here to the lakeside apartments and that will connect to the sidewalks that are currently under construction which stretch from

from Swan Lake Drive, I believe is what it's called here at the Lakeside entrance all the way down to the Mill Creek intersection and it continues further south beyond that.

So that's the Avon Street project.

The next one I'm going to talk about is the Belvedere Boulevard-Rio Road intersection improvements.

This project we've looked at a number of times.

It is recommended in the Rio corridor plan, and it was actually something that we looked at for SmartScale last year as part of the improvements at John Warner Parkway and Rio, which that location is just off the screen here.

It would be to the south.

and make sure you orient yourself.

This is Belvedere Boulevard going into the Belvedere development and Rio Road to the left of the screen would be towards 29 and to the right would be heading back towards town.

So this is what's called a green T intersection and really the purpose of this is to provide a protected lane, a merge lane of

along the southbound section of Rio Road so that folks coming out of Belvedere only have to be concerned with the traffic heading this direction when they want to make that left turn.

So they don't have to think about the traffic heading southbound on Rio Road until they get into this turn lane and that makes that movement much easier.

This can be signalized at this time.

We're not sure if it will need to be signalized, but if it is signalized, the signal operations are much more efficient than a typical signal because you don't need to stop the southbound traffic.

You only need to stop the northbound traffic to allow that left turn to occur.

So that's the purpose of this.

This project will restrict some of the access to City Church.

As you can see, this becomes a right in right out movement from the church location to go if they wanted to head to the north or west of Rio, they would have to make a right and go to the roundabout and come back around or to get if they were heading from

the city and wanted to make a left into the church, they would go up to the next intersection which is Greenbrier Terrace and make a U-turn there and come back to get into it.

So that is a small change in the access to that church.

The next project is the 5th Street Extended Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements from Afton Pond Court to Ambrose Commons Drive.

The purpose of this project is to add a shared use path on the west side of Fifth Street.

Afton Pond Court is up here across from Stagecoast Drive.

Just so you know, this is the county office building at Fifth Street right here.

And this is the ABC development.

Currently under construction and this is the roundabout that is already funded So there is a roundabout going in at this location right here The shared use path we show it here from Wahoo Way to the Afton Pond Court ABC development is constructing the shared use path across their frontage and

And then this project would also extend that south along Old Lynchburg Road through Sunset all the way down to Ambrose Commons Drive.

The southward development would be approximately right here.

In the future, we would love to get a pedestrian crossing to access that.

So we are going to look into that in the future.

And one other point to note.

is that after this roundabout at the old Lynchburg intersection, that will go down to one lane.

That is currently two lanes all the way down through Hickory Street where Stagecoach is.

We're going to reduce that down to one lane to make room for that shared use path as it goes down.

And we've modeled that traffic and believe that that won't impact operations through that corridor.

The next project I'm going to talk about is the Old Trail Drive, US 250 West intersection improvements.

This is in Crozet and this project was identified during the transportation planning effort associated with the Crozet Master Plan.

This intersection at Old Trail Drive, Western Albemarle High School, is to the south right here.

And that goes into Old Trail.

This was identified as the worst operations of any intersection in the Crozet area, so that's why we're focusing on this intersection.

And this adds a partially two-lane, partially one-lane roundabout at that intersection.

You can see it only has one lane for the minor street left turns, but two lanes for the through movements on 250.

It does include the pedestrian crossing so students can walk along that shared use path that exists and connect down to the school.

That was it for those first four projects.

Those are on the Albemarle county list.

Thank you, Mr. McDermott.

Board, we're going to go through each of these sections of four at one time rather than do all of them at once.

I do not have any questions and I support all four of them.

Thank you.

No questions.

Thank you.

Supervisor Galloway?

Yeah, Kevin.

I think it's important, and thank you for the signalization for Belvedere and Rye Road.

The signalization needs to stay part of that conversation.

I think it'll end up, if it's needed, will only be used during peak times, and then the light would be flashing yellow or something like that.

You said, clarified for me, where you said the U-turn.

Greenbrier Terrace.

That's the next one.

You can see the homes right here on the edge of the screen.

Good, thank you.

Thank you.

Yes, just a real quick look at number three.

The question about the

Ambrose Commons to Lynchburg Road, reduction in lane.

That's necessary to accommodate the pedestrian path.

And you've studied the traffic

going south and west, what about the other direction?

Okay.

There is a left turn shown here for the Southwood, you can see that right.

This is Hickory Street right here.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

Supervisor McKeel?

No questions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And back to slide number seven, Mr. McDermott, I concur with Supervisor Galloway that because cars coming off of Belvedere turning left would have to watch for cars coming off of Rio turning left.

and a traffic signalization there, given the density of the traffic, I would think would be advisable.

Other than that, thank you.

I have no other questions.

All right, so the next four projects are being submitted by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission on Albemarle County's behalf.

All four projects were identified through VDOT's Project Pipeline Planning Program.

This program focuses on finding transportation solutions for priority locations and corridors identified through V-Trans.

Over the last year, the Project Pipeline Program has focused on the 250 corridor east of Charlottesville, so that's where all of these projects are going to take place.

So our first project is the US 250 Rolkin Road pedestrian improvements.

So to orient you, this is 250 heading east, this is 250 heading west, and Rolkin to the north, and Rolkin to the south.

So this project would be composed of two main components.

First, an at-grade pedestrian crossing for three of the four legs of the intersection, and that would include the addition of two raised concrete pedestrian refuges, one here on the south leg and one here in the northeast corner.

This would reduce pedestrian crossing distances and therefore improve safety.

Second, the project would add a little bit more sidewalk.

So right now if you are on the south side of US 250, you have sidewalk heading east all the way until you get to Rolkin Road and then there's no sidewalk.

So this project would add sidewalk on the south side of 250 from Rolkin all the way to State Farm Boulevard.

I know that this intersection has been discussed previously and there's been community interest in a pedestrian overpass.

So as part of the VDOT's planning program, consultants did consider a pedestrian overpass, but they found that landing that overpass on the south side of this intersection would be technically very challenging, difficult from like an engineering perspective.

So in addition, the overall cost of the project would just make it not competitive at this time.

So we want to note that these pedestrian crossing improvements that we're applying for now would not prevent us from considering a pedestrian overpass in the future.

Moving on to the next project, US 250 and Peter Jefferson Parkway Intersection Improvements, Park and Ride, and Access Management.

So to orient you, this is 250.

This is heading out of town.

This is heading back towards Charlottesville.

This is Glenorchy to the north, and this is Peter Jefferson Parkway to the south.

So this project has a lot of different pieces.

It has four different parts.

First, if you are eastbound on US 250, if you're heading out of town, there's currently the rightmost lane for you would be a shared through and right turn lane.

The first change would be to convert that shared lane to a through only lane and then add a right turn only lane here.

And that is intended to reduce rear end crashes and improve safety.

The second component would be to implement a through cut.

So this would be a through cut eliminates through movements on the minor approaches.

So in practice, if you were entering the intersection from Glenorchy, you would be able to still make a right turn, you would still be able to make a left turn, but you could not continue through the intersection and go on to Peter Jefferson Parkway.

Similarly, if you were coming from the south up through along Peter Jefferson Parkway, you could turn right, you could turn left onto 250, but you couldn't go through onto Glenorchy.

This means that all the turning movements for the minor approaches, the left-hand turns, the right-hand turns from both north and south, those can all happen at the same time in the light cycle, and that frees up more time every light cycle for more traffic to move along US 250.

So that's intended to improve congestion.

Third, this project would construct a new park and ride on the northwest corner of this intersection.

We don't know exactly where it would be, but the intention is to put it on this side.

Lastly, this project would complete the median between Peter Jefferson Parkway here and Pantops Mountain Road, just over here, so that you can see it in green connecting the existing

median.

This would impact access to the hotel and restaurant, which is down here.

Right now, people can access that by using the existing median break.

With completing the median, people would need to access that hotel and restaurant either via Peter Jefferson Parkway or over here off screen on Worrell.

All right.

Now we're heading a little bit further east, further out of town.

Next project is US 250 and Louisa Road, which is also Route 22 intersection improvements.

So to orient you, this is 250.

This direction is Charlottesville.

This is heading out of Charlottesville.

And this is Louisa Road.

and this project would implement a displaced left turn for eastbound 250 traffic turning northbound onto Louisa Road.

This means that

To turn left, motorists who are heading eastbound would need to cross to the opposite side of 250, right here, at a signalized crossover.

So they're going to cross traffic.

They're going to come along this way and then reach the main intersection, which is also signalized.

And then they can make the left-hand turn onto Louisa.

This allows those left turns to happen at the same time as both of your opposing movements on 250.

So you can have people making that left hand turn onto Louisa at the same time traffic is heading west and east on 250.

And again that just saves time every light cycle allowing for more traffic to move through the intersection and improving efficiency.

This design also improves safety by reducing and spreading out the number of places where vehicles cross paths and thereby reducing potential crashes.

And we get to end on an easy one for this.

Just a little bit further, we're looking at US 250 and Milton Road intersection improvements.

This is 250.

This is Milton.

This is

the intersection we were just talking about of 250 and Louisa Road.

So this project would construct a roundabout which is intended to improve efficiency and safety.

Thank you.

Wow, exciting stuff.

At 22, the light, this is a fascinating approach, this light here into the separate left turn lane, does that only flip when somebody's there?

And I'm interested about the roundabout at Milton because the grade is pretty interesting there.

I mean, it's a big slope in addition, so that'll be some fun-looking design.

So happy I have been hearing about this for years now.

And all the improvements are really going to make a difference.

The roundabout at Milton Road, the grade really isn't that steep.

I mean, I cross over this whole area all the time.

That is a wonderful suggestion, and it's going to work out so well.

But all the suggestions that you have come up with really make it easy.

And I've had so many constituents asking for a crossing at Roken Road and 250.

So they are going to be extremely happy.

I don't think you're going to get any kind of pushback regarding having a pedestrian bridge, because I think the crossing will

will actually do the trick for everybody.

So I'm very, very happy with all these suggestions.

I just have one question.