Architectural Review Board Meeting   4/19/2021

That would be me.

So I apologize.

I am standing in for Dave today who was unable to join us.

And so Carolyn, I just want to check with you.

You're ready.

All right.

Fantastic.

Thanks.

So I'm calling to order the April 19th, 2021 meeting of the Albemarle County Architectural Review Board.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20-A16, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

A quorum appears to be present.

Opportunities for public access to this meeting are posted on the county's website at the county calendar.

The public has real-time audio visual access to this meeting over Zoom and real-time audio access over telephone.

Both is provided in the lawfully posted meeting notice.

This meeting is being recorded and will be made available on the county's website.

This online meeting is a public record and subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

All speakers, when it's your turn to speak, please first state your name for the record.

Everyone who is participating today, it is good practice to mute your microphone until it's your turn to speak.

Applicants who are making presentations note that your presentation is limited to a total of 15 minutes, which you can divide among your team members.

Carolyn will let us know when the 15 minutes are up.

So starting with disclosures, do any of the ARB members have anything to disclose?

No.

All right, great, thank you.

All right, thank you.

So we will move on to the consent agenda.

It's nice to see everybody on the screen in addition to the ARB members.

There is one consent agenda item today, ARB 2021-28, Biscuit Run Park Initial Site Plan.

If the ARB wants the final plan and architecture for this project to be reviewed by staff instead of the full ARB based on the limited amount of development proposed,

This could be mentioned, oh, that's the note to me.

Alternatively, we can bring this question to the ARB when the final plan is submitted.

Note, staff will not have a presentation prepared.

All right.

Doesn't appear that anybody does.

I'll move to approve the consent agenda.

Great.

OK. OK. No problem.

OK. Mr. Stoner?

Aye.

Thank you, folks, for joining us.

It was a pretty quick presentation that you made.

We appreciate it.

Dave, it's good to see you.

Good to see you.

Thank you all so much.

Thanks, everyone.

All right.

Under regular review items, there are no regular review items today.

and there are no work sessions scheduled for today.

There is one other business item and that is a discussion of the bypass between 29-250 bypass led by myself.

And if you all are ready for that, I am happy to share my screen.

Margaret, am I missing anything that you wanted to cover?

All right.

Give me one second, please.

All right.

Great.

Yep.

All right.

So I'll just open by saying somehow I have chosen the most, well, the stretches of entrance corridors that have the least amount of architecture on them.

So I'm not sure why I did that, but it has become apparent that that is the case.

But I also was struck on this entrance corridor by the amount of buffers that are kind of naturally built in on both sides of the road.

So I will walk us through this and please interrupt if there are any questions.

And if you will just give me one second, for some reason, I am unable to see the participants.

Okay.

So the distance is about 4.1 miles, and the start is on the north side by the Best Buy.

It seemed like the best landmark, even though it's not in the county.

And then moving down to the west and to the south, everyone's very familiar with this stretch of road.

It ended at the intersection of Route 64 and the bypass.

Obviously punctuated by five intersections, first one being the major intersection on 29, the second one being Leonard Sanders Drive, the third one being the intersection of Route 250 and Old Garth Road and Old Ivy, and then moving down to Fontaine Avenue and finally the intersection at 64.

Just for interest, I pulled the average daily trips along this stretch of road, and as I expected, because this is my commute most times, back when I did actually commute further than just into this room, I actually was somewhat surprised.

58,000 average daily trips on the stretch between

29 and 250, 52,000.

You can see here on the stretch up to Fontaine, but it increases to 55,000, probably a lot of folks exiting the city by Fontaine.

And by comparison, along 64, the stretch on the bottom of this page here is actually has less average daily traffic than the stretch between Old Garth or 250 Business and

29 to the north.

This is just a summary of some of the zoning characteristics as you go through here, a mixture of primarily residential, a little bit of high density residential in this area, a small amount of commercial office, and then coming through a large stretch of a mix of sort of

Residential on the right hand side, low density residential essentially on both sides.

And then Lewis Mountain, a lot of wooded landscape to the east.

And then continuing down, as we discussed, I think a couple of weeks ago, the Fontaine Avenue piece and eventually to Route 29 with a small piece of highway commercial zoned here at the end of the intersection of 64 and 250.

So I felt like since it's a relatively straightforward and simple stretch of road, I felt like it might be easiest just to take a look at it using aerials and a few snapshots from the ground.

Because quite honestly, it's very straightforward.

There's not a lot of visibility of structures along the way.

So beginning with Best Buy that you see here on the far left and also at the bottom of the screen and then moving to the southwest, there is quite a long stretch, as you all know, of sound wall, sound protection, and it continues.

In fact, this aerial, I think, was done at the time that that was being constructed, from what I can tell.

It continues down to Leonard Sanders Drive, almost.

and then as we continue further we get to the intersection of Leonard Sanders Drive and again this is there's sort of very distant views through some of the landscape to the Darden parking garage and also a little bit to the Darden School but for the most part it's it's completely hidden as you know.

Continuing down we get to a point where you can see University Village Condas a bit in the distance but it's also very far away

and also then to the right or to the west, some of the St. Ann's Bell Field development.

Then as you approach the Ivey intersection, you can see a bit more construction and development in this general area.

Still very well screened from the road.

And continuing down, this is the Fontaine Avenue intersection.

and you can see the Fontaine Research Park.

Again, some areas that you can see through to the Advanced Research and Technology building here and to the pieces of Fontaine from a distance, but again, very well screened.

with the change to the access point coming in through here to go eastbound on 64.

It's definitely helped the backup of traffic along here where there were so many accidents.

It felt like there was about one every couple of weeks along there.

And that's pretty much it.

As I said, it's very straightforward.

It's buffered well on both sides by thick vegetation.

I think the majority of that is the feed out right of way.

The sound walls are one of the major features and I don't think we have the ability to weigh in on VDOT designs.

I may be wrong on that, Margaret, but I'd be interested to know whether there's a way that we could, since it is such a heavy visual presence, and if those types of sound walls continue into the future because of development and increasing in traffic volumes might be something to think about if there are dialogues we could have

with VDOT and also in terms of the different material uses.

Commercial areas clustered primarily at the main intersections and the majority of the views to the built landscapes are well filtered by vegetation.

So I know a very straightforward review.

Not for me.

I thought it looked very comprehensive.

I pulled them up yesterday, and from what I could tell, they were pretty recent.

OK. Yeah, there were a few that went back.

I think they were 2019, actually, Frank.

There were a few that went back to 2012, 2011, and they were more like the 30,000 range.

So that gives you kind of a sense of the growth.

But VDOT's got a pretty, I think, helpful website.

I'll see if I can pull it up again.

And if you're interested, I can send it out.

But you can just essentially hover over the top of the road, and it gives you the total vehicles per day.

And it just, you know, I was thinking about how many, like we talked about, obviously, views on the entrance corridors.

How many cards actually experience those views?

Thanks, Fred.

I just was curious, I guess there's a question for everybody, maybe Margaret in particular, the sound wall, since that does have such an impact on the corridor.

Margaret, do you remember ever reviewing that or getting a chance to review those?

Those are good questions.

I don't know the answers.

I can try and find out because I think that's a really good point.

They're definitely, I mean it's clear those are very, they have a big visual impact.

Thank you.

I think you're right.

I think they use the same color and design for the Rio underpass, right?

Those walls are the same.

Yeah.

And it looks like they went back after the fact and painted it.

Yeah.

That's a good point.

That intersection seemed to get a little extra attention.

You know, how do you go about getting that extra attention?

It seemed to me that there were some residential properties like I guess to the west of Best Buy that the expansion of that on-ramp seemed to be encroaching a little bit further onto those residential properties.

I bet you're right.

Margaret, I also remember when VDOT had, I don't know whether they asked us or they just showed us the drawings, but no, it wasn't VDOT.

It was the airport when they did their signs at the intersection of Airport Road and 29.

Yeah, I think those were being presented basically for information purposes.

But I think on occasion, if a comment could be sought early in the process, and even if they're not required, if somebody is not required to follow the comments, it's possible that they still won't be able to.

So we'll see what we can

That's great.

So is the idea now that we would try to codify some guidelines for

these together or independently of one another?

What we have on our schedule for the next meeting is to discuss what happens next, now that we've done the question quarters and to have a full discussion about that next time.

My only hesitancy with that is that Dade is not with us here today.

And he, I think, not only reviewed a couple of those reaches, but might also have some interesting insight into how to go about that.

But I'm open.

Well, I did not prepare an answer for that today.

And I,

I feel like Dade sort of had a plan and sort of relying on him to sort of guide us into the next step.

I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, we are hoping to hire a planner that has some urban design or graphic skills.

We haven't gotten through that process yet, but if we get that person in place, we'll have someone who can help us with the guidelines update.

That person will have some time to devote to the guidelines update.

When do they come on board?

It's tough out there.

All of the above.

Yeah, OK. We're working on it.

We're just not quite there yet.

So I don't have a good answer for you today.

I feel like I need to sit back and look through all the presentations again that have been done and see where that takes us and how

I kind of thought of this, and this was just my view, that each corridor would be distilled from these presentations and from our discussions, maybe into like a one-sheeter, kind of like a profile.

I don't know where I got this or if I just come up with this, but I thought of this whole exercise as like in creating an appendix to the guidelines and not necessarily rewriting any of the guidelines, but more of like a tool for applicants and a tool for staff to kind of improve communication or just here's some examples.

And so that's where I've just kind of been thinking about this whole thing is like, how do you take each presentation

I think that sounds great.

That's, I think that's a good way of describing sort of what we were talking about early on.

Yeah, I guess I thought part of the goal was to sort of eliminate this one-size-fits-all approach, whether we could do that with a one-page addendum saying, oh, if you happen to be in this particular corridor, here are the supplemental guidelines, or here, adjust the following, or I don't know.

Yeah, I think a lot of it too is driven by the context conversation.

So often, we review something and say, contextually, this makes a lot of sense because of the adjacent, whatever it is, industrial properties or industrial character.

So this, I think, gives us more tools to guide an application

Here, refer to this.

This is kind of how, you know, we looked at this corridor and kind of saw it this way.

I could see where each one of these one pages, you can start out with just a very basic or very brief description of the overall character of the corridor.

And then everyone very successfully broke the quarters down into segments.

And we might even be able to do that graphically and show what those segments are and then just add the descriptors, what the differences are in those segments.

That's really what the context is changing to point out what those differences are.

And then maybe you could even just pull up

are good examples for people to look at, just have a list, short list.

Yeah, I'd maybe suggest a couple of things.

One is I was just kind of refreshing my memory and looking back through some previous information, Margaret, that you'd sent the group

And it may be good to send some of this to Chris as well, because it was back in October of last year.

And I don't think, Chris, you were on at that point.

And it was images of historic precedents.

You guys probably remember this, I'm sure.

And then some guidelines and a status recap, which was sort of helpful to see.

And in there, Margaret, you suggested we might attempt

to identify significant elements of each building that are relevant to current architecture in the entrance corridors.

And so I think that's kind of where it started to that the idea started to come up and where we started thinking about reviewing the actual entrance corridors and some of their architectural features.

And maybe what we might want to do, Frank, to your point about, you know, having this discussion

Margaret, when you and Dave feel like it's appropriate, we have a work session and, you know, maybe you and Dave or some of us get together in advance of that to kind of chart out an agenda for that.

And then we all can kind of discuss it and sort of not only what we've done, what are the key characteristics, the summary of some of the findings we did from the standpoint of architecture and cultural landscape or whatever it is, but then also how does this then inform the guidelines?

and how do those connections occur.

Sounds good.

All right.

Were you just reading from an email?

Got it.

Yep.

Great.

All right.

Well, this might be the fastest ARB meeting in history, or at least recent history.

Before we end, let me ask for adoption of the April 5, 2020 ARB meetings.

Do I have a motion?

I move.

And a second?

I second.

Great.

All right.

Mr. Stoner?

Aye.

Hi.

Thank you.

The next meeting is a virtual meeting.

It'll be on May 3rd.

Great.

Yes.

Excellent.

All right.

I will look forward to seeing everyone then.

Is there any other discussion?

All right.

I will adjourn.