Architectural Review Board Meeting   5/6/2024

It is actually one o'clock by my watch, so I am calling the May 6th, 2024 meeting of the Albemarle County Architecture Review Board to order.

Yes.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Today's meeting is a hybrid meeting.

The public may access and participate in the meeting electronically.

Instructions for doing so are posted on the Albemarle County website at the Albemarle 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 meeting is a public record and subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

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

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.

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

If applicants in the meeting room have team members attending virtually who will need to present, please make that known when you come to the podium.

Everyone who is participating virtually, please mute your microphone until it is your turn to speak.

Do any ARB members have anything to disclose?

No.

All right.

All right.

Sounds good.

We do not have any consent agenda items today, and we do not have any work sessions today.

So we will roll into our one and only regular review item, which is ARB 2024-33 Flow Kia.

Okay, today we are reviewing the proposed renovation for the Flokia building at Pantops.

This is your second review of the architectural design and it's a first review of the corresponding site changes.

The site is located on the north side of Route 250 East.

It's a short distance east of Town and Country Lane.

The existing building, as you probably remember, was constructed as a restaurant.

It was associated with the Town and Country Motor Lodge, which was originally located just to the west.

and those buildings were part of a group of buildings in the area of Route 250 built in the mid-50s in popular roadside architectural styles.

In this proposal, the front portion of the building would be demolished and it would be replaced with a new showroom building.

The rear service portion of the building would be retained and renovated.

You completed a review of the architectural design for this project on February 19th of this year.

There were seven comments resulting from that review that required revisions.

The first comment was about providing physical samples of the materials to confirm primarily that reflectivity wasn't going to be excessive.

Those samples were provided.

They're actually on the stage behind you if you want to look at them.

The black panel there doesn't appear to be overly reflective and the silver panel does, however, have a metallic finish.

It's used for the angled elements in the building, the entrance surround, and columns on the front elevation.

Given those locations and the amount that's proposed, we don't expect that metallic panel to have a negative impact on the street.

The second comment from February was to ground the building and acknowledge the vertical supports.

To do that, the angled elements were reorganized on both of the side elevations and the front columns were moved to the outside of the curtain wall.

And we feel those changes do help ground the building and establish rhythm.

The service bay was also reduced in height and that helps with the scale and massing.

The third comment asks for confirmation that the window glass conforms to the standard requirements.

The note appears in the plan and the manufacturer's website describes the glass as neutral in color.

There were two comments about mechanical equipment.

A building section was included in this middle that shows the equipment locations and heights level with the parapet.

The equipment is also shown in the perspective images.

Comments from February included a request for information on exterior lighting.

There are no wall-mounted fixtures shown on the drawings and the site plan shows one pole light to be removed.

We've noted also that the current pole fixtures on site don't match what's on the previously approved site plan, so an updated photometric plan will be needed.

Finally, in the previous review, we noted that a new retaining wall is proposed on the east side of the site.

We noted that the site plan amendment would need to include a landscape plan addressing two issues and that would be the existing landscaping that would be impacted by the new construction and there's an easement in the area that would need some coordination.

A landscape plan was provided.

It does include trees and shrubs along the retaining wall that are coordinated with the previously approved design.

However, the easement was not addressed.

That remains an outstanding issue.

The landscape plan shows significantly fewer shrubs at the parking lot perimeters than the previously approved plan shows and it looks like some shrubs have been lost from the site over the years.

So we've recommended that a consistent row of shrubs be shown on the plan and we've added minor comments about tree species and notes on the plan as well.

All right, thanks a lot for that presentation.

Tara, do you have any questions for staff?

No, thank you for the presentation.

I don't have any questions either, believe it or not.

Great, thank you.

My name is Kevin Shaffer.

I'm with Design Develop.

Thank you Margaret for that thorough presentation and the staff report and the guidance that

pretty much covered actually all the revisions to the architecture that I was gonna run through.

So I just wanted to let you know if there's any questions, we're here to answer them.

I think that Margaret did a great job going through the revisions.

Good afternoon, Justin Schimpf, the engineer for the project.

I think most of our questions or comments would make for some clarifications we want from the staff.

Some of the comments not being included is a timing issue.

We submitted this to the county earlier than before the ARB meeting you all had last time, basically.

So a few things didn't get addressed because they came up afterwards.

Starting with a simple one, the Lumos easement just serves the building.

It's always fiber optic, but they no longer use that anymore, and we're having a hard time getting Lumos to respond.

So it's not an easement for some other adjoining business, et cetera.

It's service to that building.

That particular company requires it.

Esmont on your own property for their own hardware.

So if that note could be revised to sort of say, you know, if possible or something, and that's such that if we can never get anything, we're not worried about putting trees in there because if we hit the lawn, it's going to disturb our own service.

we'll of course have it marked and we'll avoid it during construction but that's what it is so if we could get that maybe clarified just in the event we can never get them to confirm anything about it and then the other comments I think Margaret if I understand correctly is really the prior approved site plan essentially showed the standard rows of shrubs that have disappeared over time and you all want to see those back per standard so that's understandable so I don't think we have any particular

Concerned about those items.

The other change or conditions was to change the zelkova, different species, which makes sense that we are gonna retain, in this picture right here, if you look, there'll be a couple of zelkova in the very front here, and then a couple is in the back that are as part of this row, and then we'll replant with something different species in the middle.

The retaining wall grading is taking out all of those trees.

in this area, and we're basically, our proposal originally was to replant with the same species.

We're just gonna swap that one out, so it's no longer on the county's approved list.

So I think that's really the only concerns we had about the recommendations.

That's all I have.

All right, thanks a lot for that presentation.

Sure, Justin, I guess the question for you, are the trees in the easement like small trees?

Are there any like large canopy trees?

The Lumos easement?

There are, I have to zoom in on this a bit.

So opposed plants.

The easement's right here.

This is one of the lines right there.

Then it goes to the edges retaining wall.

So actually it looks like we just got, there's hollies and service berries kind of back in the easement area.

The larger trees are actually in the front of it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thanks, Taro.

Do you have any questions?

No, thank you, Justin.

All right.

No, I don't have any questions either.

Thank you.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

ARB will now go into discussion.

Just that I appreciate the design teams addressing the comments.

I think that the renderings as presented show significant development.

I think that a lot of our concerns and comments have been addressed.

And yeah, I appreciate the work that's gone into it and the presentation.

All right.

Yeah, I agree.

Great presentation.

It's very helpful how you highlight the revisions and how you speak about it.

I think just looking at that easement might be a question for you, Margaret.

Is there something that the applicant can include in the plans as far as

Yeah, I think given that additional information we can come up with a different note for the plan.

And knowing it's not the, you know, that the large trees will remain.

All right, thanks.

I'm in total agreement.

I thought I was

Great, well presented revisions and I thought the revisions themselves addressed the previous comments very well.

So I guess if we could take a look at the recommended motion.

I guess I'll just ask the other members if they have any tweaks or anything.

Just reviewing now.

Margaret, that language seems to find me.

Yes, I'll move to recommend approval to ARB 2024-33 flow KIA with the conditions listed in the staff report, including number one, to include an updated photometric plan, two, to add notes to the plan and clarify the extent of landscaping to remain, three, to revise the landscape plan to provide a consistent row of shrubs, four, to replace the zelkova serrata with a tree that's included in the pellet planning lists.

I think because it's such a short meeting, we should.

Sorry.

Yeah.

All right.

Great.

Mr. Hancock.

Aye.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

All right.

On to other business.

My favorite part, which is approval of minutes from the April 15th, 2024 meeting.

I'll move to approve the minutes.

Thanks a lot.

Do any board members or staff have any additional items other than the one that is listed?

I do have one item.

I've got a little short PowerPoint to show you.

Okay, what I want to report on today is about the landscaping at the stormwater facility that's near the retaining walls at the Altoview Apartments, previously Presidio, called Presidio, which we discussed a few months back.

We have learned that some of the trees that are planted around that facility should not have been approved in those locations because they are located on top of the dam.

So we've coordinated with the various players in this and we've asked for the trees that need to be removed to be moved and replanted in nearby locations and that's what we're looking at on this, get a little bit closer here, on this plan.

the trees that are the red circles are the ones that are in locations that should not have been approved and those trees would be moved to the locations that are marked by the blue circles so they would all get moved to locations that are better for the facility and can be approved so this is really just for information there's not a whole lot of other options here and we appreciate the

applicants being willing to move them to acceptable locations.

So they were not

drawn in the incorrect location.

Yeah, the locations that you see in red are what was shown on the plan that was approved and that should not have been approved there.

They were planted where they were shown, but should never have been shown there.

No.

Thanks, Margaret.

Alright, so our next meeting is scheduled for May 20th, 2024.

Are there any members who don't think they'll be able to attend?

I plan to attend.

Same here.

Yeah, me too.

Seems like we'll have a quorum at least.

In that case, the meeting is adjourned to the next meeting on May 20th, 2024.

And by my watch, it is 1.19 PM.