We’ve now arrived at December 5, and while I’d like to write about International Ninja Day or World Soil Day or Krampusnacht, my particular area to explore is growth and development and other topics that stem from being in a community that seems to be a place where a lot of people want to be. Charlottesville Community Engagement strives to bring listeners and readers information about as much as possible. I’m Sean Tubbs, endlessly looking for more things to describe.
In this edition:
Charlottesville’s purchase of land along the Rivanna River is complete
City Council’s trip to Montgomery County to tour the transit system there will happen in January
Council opted to make a major change to the Development Code less than a week before the public hearing
First shout-out: WTJU holding Classical Marathon
All year long, WTJU Classical provides Charlottesville with a serene and inspiring musical oasis. The radio station now needs your support to keep this classical community vibrant and thriving!
Please tune in now through December 10 for WTJU’s 2023 Classical Marathon. It’s a round-the-clock celebration of classical music, specially programmed for your listening pleasure.
Their classical celebration also features a tremendous lineup of guest hosts from Charlottesville’s classical community, including Ben Rous from Charlottesville Symphony, Michael Slon from University Singers and Oratorio Society, Miriam Gordon-Stewart from Victory Hall Opera, Leanne Clement of Charlottesville Opera, I-Jen Fang from UVA Music, and Fiona Hughes from Three Notch’d Road. And longtime WTJU host Michael Latsko returns for a special musical mashup!
Please consider a gift today to keep WTJU going!
Charlottesville’s $5.9M purchase of floodplain land complete
As this newsletter goes out, Charlottesville City Council is holding their public hearing on the city’s draft zoning code which will increase the number of development rights across the city. The exact extent won’t be known until after Council holds their deliberations and makes their adjustments based on feedback received tonight.
Council’s decision to spend $5.9 million to extinguish the development rights on over 23.8 acres of land along the Rivanna River has now been fully implemented as announced by City Manager Sam Sanders.
“0 East High, the set of properties we’ve been referencing as 0 East High that’s been the source of a lot of conversation is now officially owned by the City of Charlottesville,” Sanders said. “It will be maintained as a passive recreation area until we are able to find some capacity to figure out what to become of it but for now it will be what it is and you can all be happy that’s the case.”
Council made the decision to buy the property from developer Wendell Wood after ratifying a determination by the Planning Commission. In August and again in September, that body concluded that some of the public facilities that would be constructed to support the proposed 245 units would not comply with the Comprehensive Plan. The contract also included a clause that any legal claims would not be pursued in court as I reported on November 4.
The price per unit is $24,081.62 according to a rough calculation. That’s a relatively good deal compared to the $67,187 per unit that an entity associated with the Jefferson Scholars Foundation spent last November to buy 1.59 acres of land across from their headquarters. That property had been slated for 64 units. That transaction was $4.3 million in total.
A thought as the Development Code proceeds: Will other entities begin to buy up land in the city to prevent it from being developed?
Council’s trip to Montgomery County delayed to January
Charlottesville City Manager Sam Sanders said last night a date has not been scheduled for City Council to travel to a D.C. area community to inform a decision about the future fuel source for Charlottesville Area Transit vehicles.
“A few weeks back I announced that Council had agreed to go on a site visit to Montgomery County, Maryland in regards to taking a look at some work that had been done in that community for integrating battery-electric buses into their fleet,” Sanders said.
Sanders said scheduling such an event during December has proved to be a challenge so the trip will now take place in January as a one-day event.
The firm Kimley Horn was hired to conduct the study. An advocacy organization called the Community Climate Collaborative has arranged for many of its staff and volunteers to ask Council to make a decision before the report is concluded. Read their blog post from November 21, 2023 to learn more.
A final report from Kimley Horn will be given at a work session.
Learn more from some previous articles:
Charlottesville Area Transit to study alternative fuels, March 14, 2022
City Council gets update on study on future fuels for CAT, August 2, 2023
Charlottesville Area Transit fuel study recommendations delayed until January, November 10, 2023
Second shout-out: Magic on the Mall
In today’s second Patreon-fueled shout-out: The holidays are here and the Friends of Charlottesville Downtown and the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau are ready for another season of Magic on the Mall!
Festivities began this Saturday, November 25 and coming up later this weekend there will once again be something for every member of the family!
The Jolly Holly Trolley will be running up and down the Mall from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through December 23
You can take free Selfies with Santa from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, December 16th
Go on a magical scavenger hunt to find the Elves in Cville by starting at Charlottesville Insider or downloading it online!
Follow the Peppermint Trail where you can find all sorts of treats! Locate the map here!
Downtown businesses will have a festive face off in the Best in Snow window competition, and you can vote for the jolliest!
Celebrate with the Chabad House of UVA the fourth night of Hanukkah with a menorah lighting and traditional foods
Visit friendsofcville.org to learn more!
Council to temporarily reduce allowable building heights in entrance corridors until new guidelines are in place
Tonight is the public hearing for the City of Charlottesville’s Development Code which follows several work sessions including one on November 29 at which Councilors went through the zoning map to review specific roads and streets.
At the start of the meeting, Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook raised a question on how the city’s entrance corridors will come into play. Under the current rules, the Planning Commission acts as a body that reviews projects in these areas against design standards.
“I note that virtually every entrance corridor that we’ve got in the city is being designated for CX-8 or NX-10 if you look at Barracks Road [Shopping Center],” Snook said. “And my question is sort of a philosophical question of if we do that, what’s left of our entrance corridor review scheme?”
Snook said the city’s attorneys have told him that the Entrance Corridor Review Board might not have any power to change the massing and size of a building after the draft ordinance becomes the adopted Development Code.
“You could sort of tweak around the edges to make it slightly less objectionable, but if it’s objectionally large, that’s not something the Entrance Corridor Review Board can handle,” Snook said. “If every time you enter the city, you’re greeted on both sides by an eleven story building, I’m not sure if that’s exactly what we want to be doing as a city.”
Snook said one of the purposes of the Cville Plans Together initiative was to eliminate the number of reviews that development projects would have to go through. But the Planning Commission recommended keeping the ECRB in place.
“Ultimately the Planning Commission did make the decision that the value they saw in having that design review on the entrance corridors outweighed the cost that it imposed on development projects and so they opted to retain the entrance corridors within the zoning ordinance,” said James Freas, the city’s director of Neighborhood Development Services.
Snook also said Council had to take into consideration the University of Virginia’s World Heritage Site status from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. UVA has recently signaled their displeasure at large developments at Stadium Road and at 2117 Ivy Road.
“When we incentivize building everything to the max, what we’re likely to get is everything built to the max and I don’t think that our housing shortage is so acute that it matters greatly to the satisfaction of the demand whether 2117 Ivy Road contains 400 students but has the freedom to look better than it does with 600,” Snook said.
Freas said he didn’t see anything in the Development Code that would limit the Planning Commission’s review as the Entrance Corridor Review Board. Both Freas and outside counsel Sharon Pandak said the entrance corridor guidelines need to be updated.
“I think the answer is that you should clarify to the extent that you want to outside of the guidelines what exactly what the ECRB can do within the confines of this ordinance,” Pandak said.
Pandak said the other option would be to clearly delineate what stepbacks and setbacks would be required to address concerns of imposing buildings. The draft Development Code has very limited setbacks and there are either no requirements for stepbacks or these are also limited.
“Basically your legal issue is one in which it will be helpful to us to have greater clarity from Councilors to those things that you absolutely want, those things that we should articulate better than discretion of the ECRB, and then you have waiting out there after you finish the effort, the guidelines,” Pandak said.
Councilor Brian Pinkston said Snook’s issues could have been raised earlier in the process.
“I don’t disagree with what you’re saying but it seems like, I shouldn’t say that the ship has sailed because the ship doesn’t sail until we let it leave port,” Pinkston said. “But when this was conceived with the Planning Commission and the consultants, they evidently wanted it to be as packed as highly as possible.”
Pinkston suggested that guidelines might help with Snook’s concern but said those may take time to develop.
Snook suggested one idea might be to reduce all of the entrance corridors to CX-5 until the guidelines are in place. He said he’s become more passionate about the issue since the joint public hearing in November with the Planning Commission on 2117 Ivy Road. He did some research into what the University of Virginia’s plans are for the Emmet-Ivy Corridor and specifically the Karsh Institute of Democracy.
“And I remember thinking, first of all, it doesn’t look like anything like Monticello and the Rotunda, but it has some connection in style, brick and things like that,” Snook said. “And it looks like it would be a really beautiful building. And I’m thinking that somebody there has a value that they are placing on beauty.”
An aside, the University of Virginia, City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County used to have a public forum where planning issues were discussed but it was discontinued in November 2019 in favor of a closed-body group where reporting details to the public is discouraged except for semi-annual reports. There is no longer any formal public process where top officials interact in public to discuss this issue or any other issue.
The Land Use and Environmental Planning Committee last met on November 17, 2023. There are no elected officials on the body and reports are usually only given in writing and not discussed. Charlottesville has four members but only two were able to attend in November based on the minutes.
Good thing these interactions are part of my beat:
Buildings and Grounds Committee debate lack of brick in proposed Karsh Institute of Democracy, December 13, 2023
UVA Board of Visitors panel endorses design for Karsh Institute, July 4, 2023
Back to entrance corridors.
Vice Mayor Juandiego Wade sought to find a compromise to move forward.
“What can we do now to address, if we can address, his concerns now?” Wade asked.
Let’s go back to one of the takeaways from the November 1 work session at which Council appeared willing to reintroduce legislative approval back into the process. At that work session,
Councilor Michael Payne suggested requiring a special exception or special use permit for more parts of the city as a way of preserving existing businesses. The following quote is from November 29.
“I don’t think a discretionary process means that an upzoning did not occur and is the worst thing in the world as a tradeoff but I don’t think that they are something we don’t need to 100 percent eliminate,” Payne said. “I think we’re drastically reducing the number of discretionary processes versus where we are today which is generally good.”
But Payne disagreed with his fellow Councilors and said reducing all entrance corridors to the by-right heights of CX-5 would be “draconian.” He said areas like Preston Avenue need special attention to avoid displacement by giving residents a voice. He said he did not think Emmet Street and U.S. 29 needed the same attention.
“The K-Mart site is an example,” Payne said. “If you actually had residential built there I don’t think we would want to cap it at five stories and say there’s not even a way you could go above five stories.”
Council further discussed the idea where anything considered an entrance corridor would be CX-5 in the short term while Council figures out how much power the Entrance Corridor Review Board should be. City Manager Samuel Sanders said it would likely be over a year before Freas could get back to that work.
“Because of other things we know that you all will want to take a look at [such as] short-term rentals which is going to take some time and effort,” Sanders said.
Freas said that could take as much as 18 months. He also described how the special use permit process would look like in the development code using NX-8 as an example.
“If Council were to implement this on a city-wide level we would leave the NX-8 in place and in the height section of NX-8 it would offer a base height and then it would say by [special use permit] up to this height,” Freas said. “So if it is NX-8 it would say ‘base height five stories with an SUP up to eight stories.’ Depending on which district you’re in, that number would change.”
Snook said that would work for him and the rest of Council agreed to proceed except for along U.S. 29 north.
Exactly what will be in the Development Code? Good question. Councilors continued to discuss various parts of the map on November 29 and I don’t think there was any full summary of what changes Councilors have sought in the redline draft that’s the subject of the public hearing tonight. The extent of the Corridor Neighborhood Overlay District has not been mapped, for instance.
There’s a lot that I wanted to get to in this and I don’t think I’ve nailed it all down.
But I don’t think the City of Charlottesville has either.
Reading material:
City Council defers vote on Stadium Road development, Garrett Whitton, CBS19, December 4, 2023
Board of Visitors to vote on renaming Alderman Library, undergraduate tuition increases, Finn Trainer, Cavalier Daily, December 4, 2023
Edition #610 is over
Here we are at the end of another edition in which I’m not entirely happy with one of the segments and wish there was more time in the day, the week, the month, and the year. The City of Charlottesville is about to change its rules for development in a way that only people who get paid to study the rules will know exactly what they say.
Maybe that’s always been the case, and maybe we need more journalism about how all of this fits together. Why is this such an attractive place for people to live? Why do population forecasts continue to project upwards? Is the system of local government we have in place really working? Why was the City Council race not competitive this year? Does any of this actually matter?
I don’t know but I know my job is to take my doubt and turn it into questions which eventually end up in stories but the amount of information to process is a lot. Thanks to my subscribers for helping me at least make an attempt in an age when local journalism across the entire country has been eviscerated.
Thanks to Ting for matching the first payment for all new subscriptions.
If you sign up for Ting at this link and enter the promo code COMMUNITY, you’ll get:
Free installation
A second month for free
A $75 gift card to the Downtown Mall
December 5, 2023: Councilors agree to limit by-right height in entrance corridors while new guidelines are written