In an era where every day seems to have a celebration of something obscure or suspect such as National Tooth Fairy Day or Be An Angel Day, every single installment of Charlottesville Community Engagement seeks to draw your attention to some of the complexity of the world and to point you in the direction of resources to make sense of something you don’t know. I’m Sean Tubbs, hoping to spark curiosity and provide lamplight each and every day.
On today’s edition:
The Southern Environmental Law Center has filed a petition in Fairfax Circuit Court seeking to keep Virginia in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
The University of Virginia has selected two groups to develop two affordable housing projects and Piedmont Housing Alliance is one of the choices
The Albemarle County Planning Commission continues its work on the Comprehensive Plan by taking a look at the proposed “activity center” designation
First shout-out: Charlottesville Jazz Society
In today’s first subscriber-supported shout-out: The Charlottesville Jazz Society is pleased to announce a new monthly series devoted to showcasing this area’s great local jazz talent. Beginning August 27th at Miller’s Downtown, every final Sunday of the month will showcase the finest bands in and around Charlottesville, Richmond and beyond.
To kick things off, one of Charlottesville’s favorite drummers, Jim Howe, will bring an exciting group featuring internationally known guitarist Royce Campbell. Jim Howe and Friends will play from approximately 6 to 8 pm, opening things up after that to any musicians who want to sit in and jam. These Local Jazz Spotlight shows are free and open to the public and are sponsored in part by WTJU Radio. The CJS is grateful to Miller’s for their long-time support of jazz in Charlottesville, and for offering a home for this new series.
For more information on The Charlottesville Jazz Society, now in its 16th year of preserving jazz through live performances and education, visit cvillejazz.org.
SELC files suit to stop Virginia’s exit from RGGI
The Southern Environmental Law Center has filed suit in Fairfax Circuit Court to stop the Youngkin administration from following through with its plans to remove Virginia from an interstate compact intended to ultimately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (view the petition)
In June, the State Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-3 to exit the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative administratively. States that participate in RGGI require power plant owners to purchase allowances for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted.
“The fact is that the General Assembly made a specific legislative decision to require Virginia to participate in RGGI, and only the General Assembly may revisit that choice,” reads paragraph 7 of the petition filed Monday. (read the petition)
Governor Glenn Youngkin signaled within hours of being sworn in in January 2022 that he wanted to leave RGGI by signing Executive Order #9. Legislation to withdraw did not pass the General Assembly that year, so Youngkin opted to so administratively.
The SELC’s petition argues that the administration has exceeded its authority and violated the Virginia Constitution and maintains that the Air Pollution Control Board cannot use higher utility bills as a rationale to repeal a regulation required by law.
In a statement, the Virginia Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources said the body acted appropriately.
“Our State Air Pollution Control Board has acted and believes that Virginia is not required to be in RGGI and that the citizens of Virginia should not be subjected to this unnecessary tax,” said Travis Voyles.
The SELC’s petition argues that Virginians have benefited from joining the interstate compact.
“Carbon dioxide emissions from Virginia power plants have declined by 16.8 percent in the first two years of participation,” reads paragraph 4 of the petition. “The RGGI auctions have also generated over $650 million for Virginians, which have flowed to important flood resiliency and energy efficiency programs, as required by the 2020 RGGI Act.”
SELC’s petition is on behalf of several groups including the Association of Energy Conservation Professionals, Virginia Interfaith Power & Light, Appalachian Voices, and Faith Alliance for Climate Solutions.
RGGI itself is run by a nonprofit organization that exists to run the auctions. Today the group released a report on the secondary market for Carbon Dioxide allowances. That may be of interest to one or two of you who want to better understand how this process works. (read the report)
UVA has picked two groups to move forward with affordable housing projects
Two different non-profit groups have been selected by the University of Virginia to develop two parcels of land that will be donated by the institution or its real estate foundation for the purposes of affordable housing.
The Piedmont Housing Alliance will develop the Piedmont site off of Fontaine Avenue. That’s a 12 acre site that is currently home to low-density apartments to University faculty and staff.
“We are excited to partner with UVA on the Piedmont site,” said Sunshine Mathon, executive director of the Piedmont Housing Alliance. “Although negotiations and site diligence are still underway, our goal is to develop a sensitive, thoughtful plan to respect the history of the site while creating much-needed affordable housing for our community.”
The Preservation of Affordable Housing will develop a two-acre site at 10th and Wertland. The Boston-based organization has worked on projects in 11 states and the District of Columbia, according to their website.
Both groups were among five asked to submit proposals earlier this year.
“The partnership terms will hold the developers accountable for creating high quality developments that will be affordable and well maintained for the long term,” reads the July 7 announcement on the website for the President’s Council on UVA-Community Partnerships.
The website goes on to state that construction would not likely start until 2025 at the earliest.
A third site will be developed at the North Fork Discovery Park but a request for proposals for that site won’t be released until a rezoning with Albemarle County is completed.
Second shout-out: eBike Lending Library
In today’s second subscriber supported shout-out, one Patreon supporters wants you to know that Charlottesville now has an eBike Lending Library! E-bikes are a great way to get around the community but there are many brands and styles to choose from. Because many e-bikes are sold online, it can be a challenge to try an e-bike before buying one.
The Charlottesville E-bike Lending Library is a free, not-for-profit service working to expand access to e-bikes in the area. They have a small collection of e-bikes that we lend out to community members for up to a week, for free. You can experience your daily commute, go grocery shopping, or even bike your kids to school, and decide whether e-bikes are right for you. Check out this service at https://www.ebikelibrarycville.org!
Albemarle Planning Commission reviews “Activity Centers” in AC44 discussion
The Albemarle Planning Commission had the chance earlier this month to weigh in on four of what planning staff are calling “toolkits” to help frame the ongoing review of the Comprehensive Plan. The overall process is called AC44.
“Tonight we’ll be going over four very dense and important topics that in a way really set the direction for everything else we’ll be talking throughout the comp plan,” said Kevin McDermott, the county’s interim director of planning.
In June, Albemarle released detailed documents on those four topics which I’ve previously written about in other stories.
The Community Advisory Committees had their opportunity to review the documents in July as I wrote about later that month. On August 8, the Planning Commission had their turn.
“So tonight what we’re doing is trying to set the direction for how our team can get into the details of how the county might want to grow into the future,” McDermott said.
The four toolkits emerged during the first phase of the Comprehensive Plan which took a look at the long-standing growth management policy that reserves around five percent land for intense land uses. Development in the rest is kept to a minimum to preserve agricultural land and to concentrate county infrastructure in specific areas.
The broad question to the Planning Commission was to see if staff should pursue some of the ideas that have made their way so far, or just follow the direction of previous Comprehensive Plans.
“They are topics that could support the growth management policy with coordinated land use and transportation planning.” said Tori Kanellopoulos, a principal planner with the county. “They are also ways the AC44 Framework can be applied and they are topics that cut across many planned chapters.”
Let’s go through some definitions of what is in these toolkits.
“Activity centers are locations in the development areas that either now or in the future have a mix of residential, business, and recreational uses, and have a higher intensity and concentration of uses than surrounding areas in underlying land uses,” Kanellopoulos said.
These are to be walkable and supported by transit. The current Comprehensive Plan has the equivalent “Destination Centers” but these Activity Centers would be further delineated by “neighborhood,” “town,” and “destination” types. There would be fewer of them as some areas have not developed as originally plotted out by planners.
One Commissioner supported the reduction.
“We already have, I believe, way too many centers,” said Commissioner Karen Firehock of the Samuel Miller District. “There are C’s everywhere. Awash in C’s!”
Firehock said the county also needs to play a role to make sure infrastructure is in place to make centers attractive to people and developers.
At-Large Commissioner Luis Carrazana agreed with Firehock.
“I think we dilute what we already have if we start to create and have too many of these C’s, so we need to be more intentional about where we’re going to have them so that we can think about infill, we can think about adaptive re-use and densify the ones that we do have because it will be better for our infrastructure,” Carrazana said.
Carrazana’s day job is in the Office of the Architect at the University of Virginia.
Jack Jouett District Commissioner Julian Bivins said this exercise provided an opportunity to review other previously planned centers to see how they’ve turned out.
“Stonefield is smack in the middle of a big center but it’s so hard to get to unless you drive,” Bivins said. “So the whole idea is that the Centers still feel very automobile-centric.”
Some of the existing centers have been detailed in the various master plans that Albemarle has adopted to guide development. Another Commissioner whose day job is related to development at the University of Virginia said these types of plans are important.
“Having a sort of an overall understanding of a concept plan as it relates to these different centers is important,” said Fred Missell, the director of development at the University of Virginia Foundation. He’s also the Scottsville District representative on the Planning Commission.
White Hall District Commissioner Lonnie Murray said he would want the existing Community Advisory Committees to weigh in on what centers should be eliminated. He also floated an idea that was studied by Albemarle County fifteen years ago that was not implemented.
“We should really consider transfer of development rights as a mechanism for flexibility that would allow us to preserve larger areas and shift that development where we want it,” Murray said.
Commissioner Nathan Moore of the Rio District said he was supportive of activity centers but was concerned that much of the discussion was based on what he viewed as low participation rates. (See also: Albemarle County releases results of Comprehensive Plan survey, June 30, 2023)
“Hearing from fewer than a 100 people in person out of a county of 100 and some thousand, it does bother me a little bit,” Moore said. “I want to think about how we get more people engaged in this kind of discussion.”
So that’s one out of four toolkits. I’ll have more from the other discussion in future editions of this newsletter.
On a larger note, the Board of Supervisors will be briefed on the same four toolkits at a meeting in September. The Planning Commission will get into more details on these topics in three other work sessions scheduled for this year.
But will you? I’m looking for comments from people about this process.
Reading material:
Class of 2027 Begins Big Move-In. Here’s How It Went, Jane Kelly, UVA Today, August 17, 2023
Arlington County buys electric buses for its fleet, Jo DeVoe, ARL Now, August 17, 2023
Alexandria to join Arlington, Fairfax counties with school zone speed cameras, Dick Uliano, WTOP, August 16, 2023
Chemicals found in Charlottesville water supply also in synthetic turf on Charlottesville yards, Hawes Spencer, Charlottesville Daily Progress (paywall), August 18, 2023
Another stolen trailer leaves Charlottesville businesses worried they could be next, Jason Armesto, Charlottesville Daily Progress (paywall), August 22, 2023
What is written in #568 stays in #568:
In a perfect world, these newsletter come out each day at a normal time. The world is not perfect, but I’ll keep striving to get a regular routine going. There are over 500 paid subscriptions to this newsletter, and I am here to work for that number as well as the larger number of over 2,300 subscribers! In three years, I’ve assembled quite the body of work but I won’t rest on my laurels.
I’m allergic.
So this is the latest edition, and hopefully it will be supplanted by another one tomorrow, and so on. The odds of this routine becoming more polished does depend on more paid subscriptions.
Ting wants to help incentivize you to do just that by matching your initial subscription. They do so because they want to support this community’s ability to know what’s going on.
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August 22, 2023: Piedmont Housing Alliance selected to develop Piedmont site at UVA; SELC files suit to keep Virginia in RGGI