uvAggravator2.0

By Bridgett Lynn
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Thursday, July 29, 2010
 

Click to enlarge

A proposal to increase the size of the University of Virginia’s Fontaine Research Park by 310,000 square feet has moved one step closer to reality.

The Albemarle County Planning Commission on Tuesday recommended approval for a rezoning, despite concerns from city residents that an expanded research park would mean more traffic through their neighborhoods.

“The Comprehensive Plan proposes the Sunset-Fontaine connector to be accommodated on the site,” county planner Claudette Grant said. “Outside of showing this area on the application plan, the applicant has made no commitment elsewhere to address this [project].”

City, county and university planners agreed on the concept for the road as part of a 2004 planning study. The road would reduce traffic congestion on Old Lynchburg Road and would link to the county’s designated growth areas south of Interstate 64.

The University of Virginia Foundation originally proposed in 2007 to expand Fontaine Research Park by 725,000 square feet but has scaled that back to 310,000 square feet.

“The major issue was the need for a traffic study,” Grant said. “The traffic study revealed that the research park could propose an additional 310,000 square feet instead of 725,000 square feet in order to mitigate traffic impacts.”

Fred Missel, director of design and development of the UVa Foundation, said at the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association’s meeting held earlier this month that the county has not yet decided what the exact route of the connector should be. However, the county is suggesting at least one alternative.

“Staff believes an alternative location would be to utilize parts of Natural Resources Drive which accesses the Department of Forestry building,” Grant said. “This would necessitate relocation of a part of this road which the applicant has indicated they are not supportive of because this would generate too much traffic going through the park.”

Staff also recommended the applicant participate in a Sunset-Fontaine connector study that the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission will be undertaking.

The Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing for the UVa Foundation’s plans at its meeting Aug. 4.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Thursday, July 29, 2010
 

With the state casting doubt on the viability of a proposed alternative water supply plan for the region, Albemarle County’s representatives on the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority said Tuesday that they are ready to move forward with the plan adopted in 2006.

However, Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris said the City Council is not yet ready to make that determination.

“I am not convinced that [it’s] the best path forward,” Norris said.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100727-RWSA

The approved plan calls for a new dam to enlarge the Ragged Mountain reservoir as well as a new pipeline to connect it to the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. To satisfy concerns the City Council has raised about the scope and cost of the plan, the RWSA commissioned a series of studies to re-examine all of its components.

Only three of these studies remain to be completed. In August, the RWSA Board will hear details of the Interstate 64 embankment study and a review of the 2004 demand analysis. Also next month, the City Council will receive the first phase of its independently commissioned study of repairing and extending the 1908 Lower Ragged Mountain Dam.

“The whole point of doing these studies was to say, ‘Are there other ways of meeting our long-term goals,’” Norris said. He said he wanted a summary that lists the costs and benefits of four or five alternatives to the current plan.

Albemarle County Supervisor Kenneth C. Boyd objected to listing that many options, given that the studies were commissioned to reaffirm the plan, and not to start from scratch.

“We have the numbers now, so we know what the costs are going to be,” Boyd said. He said he and his board are convinced that a combination of dredging the South Fork reservoir and expanding the existing Lower Ragged Mountain Dam would not provide water to meet the target of 18.7 million gallons a day by 2055.

“I can tell you that the Board of Supervisors is solidly behind the plan we decided on in 2006,” Boyd said. “Everything we’ve done so far has just reinforced that that’s the best way to go.”

Albemarle County Service Authority Executive Director Gary O’Connell said his board was also prepared to move forward.

The discussion comes after a draft report from the Department of Environmental Quality cast doubt on the ability of dredging combined with renovations to the existing Ragged Mountain dam to meet the required long-term water needs. Norris had suggested in February 2009 that instead of building a new dam, the existing dam could be raised by 13 feet to provide sufficient water storage at a potentially lower cost.

Boyd asked Norris on Tuesday if the City Council could decide in August whether to move ahead with the approved plan. Norris said he was unsure when the council would be able to discuss the matter but that it would do so when all studies are complete.

“I’m not interested in delaying this any longer than necessary,” Norris said.

In other water supply news, further revisions of the design for an earthen dam at Ragged Mountain have enabled Schnabel engineers to lower the size of the full dam by 3 feet, while still allowing 2,189 million gallons of storage. This reduces the number of trees that will need to be removed by 3 acres, according to RWSA Executive Director Thomas L. Frederick Jr.

TIMELINE FOR PODCAST:

• 01:00 - RWSA Chair Mike Gaffney calls meeting to order
• 02:00 - Executive Director Tom Frederick's monthly report
• 16:20 - Public comment from Rich Collins against the adopted community water supply plan
• 20:00 - Public comment from Dede Smith requesting information about CIP
• 23:20 - Public comment from Bob Gelgas in support of the adopted community water supply plan
• 26:50 - Public comment from Neil Williamson urging swift action on water supply plan
• 27:45 - Public comment from Tim Reese of the Piedmont Landscape Association
• 28:44 - Public comment from Liz Palmer in support of the adopted community water supply plan
• 30:30 - Public comment from Colette Hall questioning who is going to pay for plan
• 33:10 - Public comment from Norman Carlson calling for swift action on water supply plan
• 35:30 - Responses to public comment from Tom Frederick
• 42:00 - Board discusses and adopts consent agenda
• 42:30 - Discussion of Capital Improvement Program
• 1:16:30 - Presentation by Greeley and Hansen representative on Sanitary Sewer Study
• 1:31:10 - Presentation by Schnabel Engineering on implications of earthen dam
• 1:36:30 - Presentation by Schnabel Engineering on phasing options for earthen dam
• 1:47:30 - Discussion of next steps in the community water supply plan
• 2:07:50 - Discussion of future of RWSA property near ACSA's Camelot Wastewater Treatment Plant

  
  

Charlottesville’s Leslie Macko, who stood at President Obama’s side as an example of people who need unemployment benefits, actually lost her job because of after a conviction for prescription drug fraud. Jessica Jaglois at CBS-19 dug up this gem, which certainly has the potential to become national news. Macko said that she’d been laid off from ACAC, and needed unemployment benefits extended since there were no other jobs to be had. In fact, ACAC fired her after she was convicted. Which leaves me wondering how she’s getting unemployment. Don’t you have to be laid off to be eligible?

07/29 Update: ACAC has added an update to the story to clarify something that definitely wasn’t clear the first time around, which is that her firing had nothing to do with her drug conviction. She was convicted of prescription drug fraud (and, in another incident, grand larceny), and she was fired, but that the two aren’t related.

Jim Baldi is accused of stealing federal tax withholdings from his clients’ employees.

The Coca-Cola bottling plant on Preston is closing down. Like the USPS, they’re relocating services to Sandston.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, July 27, 2010

The director of Virginia’s state park system said Biscuit Run could open as a park within four years, depending on whether the General Assembly approves a bond referendum in 2012.

“If the stars all line up, it could happen,” said Joe Elton, state parks director.

The land was sold to the state for $9.8 million on the last day of 2009 by Forest Lodge LLC, a company that had paid $46.2 million for 1,200 acres. In 2007, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors approved a rezoning that would have allowed the construction of 3,100 homes south of Charlottesville.

However, the poor economy prompted the landowners to work with the state on a deal that involved selling the land below market rate in exchange for preservation tax credits.

“Biscuit Run was a surprise opportunity for us,” Elton said. “For 20 years there’s been the notion that there’s a need for a state park in the greater Charlottesville area.”

Last week, Elton gave an update on master-planning efforts to members of the group Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards. He said the park’s cultural and natural resources have been surveyed, and the boundaries of the park have been marked. An advisory committee is working on the plan now, and there will be at least two meetings early next year to get input from the public. The master plan will have to be approved by the Board of Conservation and Recreation.

Virginia’s park system was created in 1936 and has since expanded to 35 parks. Elton said the system received an injection of resources for improvements due to a pair of bond referendums in 1992 and 2002. A third is being considered for 2012, which could provide the capital for phase one of Biscuit Run, which would allow the park to be open to the public at least during the day by 2014 at the earliest.

“Phase one is infrastructure,” Elton said. “Roads, trails, picnic areas.”

Full build-out of the park would likely include cabins, which have become a money-maker for the park system. Elton said the state made more than $4 million in rentals last year, all of which goes back into the system.

Some in the community hope the park will include athletic fields, but Elton said such amenities are not likely to become part of the plan.

“State parks are generally more passive recreation,” Elton said. In all, he said he anticipated that less than 15 percent of the park would be developed, leaving the rest for open space.

One potential obstacle to the park’s swift development is a desire to keep the park intact. Currently, there is a 36-acre parcel owned by the Breeden family, the original owners of the larger parcel sold to Forest Lodge LLC in 2004. Elton said negotiations are under way to conduct a land swap.

“We’d like to not have a hole in the middle of the park,” Elton said. “They’d like to be on the edge of the property.”

The General Assembly would have to approve any land-swap deal.

Elton himself has visited the property three times to determine its suitability for a park.

“When I got to the highest point [in the park], I had a 360-degree view and I don’t remember seeing any evidence of man. I saw forest,” Elton said.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Projects to maintain the community’s urban wastewater system are the primary driver of a $171.6 million capital improvement program for the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

The five-year plan, which was presented to the RWSA board on Tuesday, anticipates spending $49 million on projects related to the urban water system and $121 million on the urban sewer system.

“We have inherited an infrastructure that has not been well taken care of in the past, but could be in the future,” said the RWSA’s executive director, Thomas L. Frederick Jr.

Download RWSA's Draft Capital Improvement Plan

A breakdown of projects related to the community water supply plan. Click to enlarge.

The capital budget is derived by calculating all the projects, both water and sewer, that RWSA engineers have recommended as necessary. While a final decision about the future of the long-term community water supply plan has not been made, the capital plan assumes construction of the water plan adopted in 2006.

Typically the RWSA has adopted a capital budget every year, but it has been more than two years, in part because cost estimates for construction and design for a new dam at Ragged Mountain more than doubled from the $34.5 million budgeted in 2008.

The capital budget also sets aside $2.3 million for right of way acquisition for a pipeline to connect the Ragged Mountain and South Fork reservoirs. Construction of the pipeline is not included in the five-year-plan and in February was projected to cost $63 million total.

The capital budget has been updated to reflect Schnabel Engineering’s design for an earthen dam and assumes spending $37.4 million on final design and construction. That figure includes mitigation required by federal and state permits, as well as an enhanced embankment where the reservoir touches Interstate 64.

Tom Frederick

Frederick said RWSA will not have to raise water rates to cover the costs of a new earthen dam in part because the authority has already been saving for its construction. However, Frederick said the RWSA will need to raise wholesale rates an average of 5 percent each year of the CIP to finance wastewater projects.

The majority of money recommended in the capital budget is to address wastewater issues. In March, the city of Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the RWSA all agreed on a coordinated plan to reduce the amount of stormwater that infiltrates the system. Projects include the Moores Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the replacement of the Meadow Creek Interceptor and upgrades of various pumping stations.

Dede Smith of the group Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan questioned several aspects of the capital budget. She pointed out that a study of the pipeline released earlier this year only listed a cost estimate of $1.3 million for right of way for the pipeline. Smith also claimed the terms of the agreement on which the RWSA operates were not being honored.

“As a city resident, I object to the city for paying for any expansion of the water supply,” Smith said.

The RWSA wholesale rates are split into two sections. The city and county pay a portion toward operating costs, and another toward debt service to pay for RWSA infrastructure.

“With respect to water supply, there was a cost allocation agreement adopted in 2003 that established a split of 27 percent to the city and 73 percent to the county,” Frederick said. “Those percentages can be changed immediately upon the adoption of a new agreement.”

The city has been in negotiations with the Albemarle County Service Authority on a new agreement.

“The cost allocation agreement that we’re operating under now was for a different set of improvements,” said the city’s public works director, Judith Mueller. “Until we’re clear on what we’re going to build, it’s hard to do the cost [allocation].”

Mayor Dave Norris

Mayor Dave Norris said he agreed with Smith that the city should not be paying for capacity that it does not need. However Norris also supports a study, currently under way, which will reexamine the 50-year demand projections for both Charlottesville and Albemarle.

“The four-party agreement is pretty clear … that the locality that seeks an increase in supply is expected to pay for that supply,” Norris said.

The RWSA will vote on the capital budget at its meeting in September. Frederick also said he expected a new cost allocation agreement could be in place by then as well.

The cover story of the current C-Ville Weekly asks what’s behind the rash of beggars on the Downtown Mall? There’s the obvious point that we’re in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, which would explain the (apparent) increase in numbers, but what’s up with the new faces, displaying signs and soliciting cash? It’s not clear that there are more beggars, but there are some new faces, employing new tactics, eschewing the passivity common among the chronically homeless who beg downtown. As of 2007, the local homeless population was more likely to be local than the population at large, which busted the “Charlottesville is a homeless mecca myth. This January’s survey showed an 18% increase (with 274 homeless Charlottesvillians in total). Now we’ve got The Haven, the day shelter on Market Street, just a block off the Downtown Mall, and it’s certainly possible that facility has something to do with this. The folks who run it argue that they’re in the habit of upbraiding people for panhandling and, more important, helping people get employed (and employable) so that they’re not homeless.

I visited Reno a couple of years ago, and they had a clever solution to the problem of the hordes of pushy panhandlers wandering around downtown. Near the busiest intersections, in front of the garish casinos, large, eye-catching collection boxes were set up, with signs saying that the best way to help the homeless is to donate to the organizations to assist them, not to give money to individuals. That had the effect of pushing panhandlers away from that block. That may be overkill for Charlottesville, but it could help.

Is the FBI looking for Jim Baldi?

In this week’s Hook, Courteney Stuart explains how 29-year-old businessman Mark Brown came to acquire the Ice Park. He bought it last week for $3M, and intends to keep it closed it for the summer while he has some modifications made to the facility. Brown is taking the financial leap that the prior owners could never justify: installing a removable rink floor, so that it can be closed and rented out each summer as a general-use large venue. (The rink alone is three times larger than The Omni’s ballroom.) It’s slated to re-open on September 15.

Draft letter from DEQ

DEQ's draft model summary

By Brian Wheeler
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Sunday, July 25, 2010

DEQ analysis finds Norris proposal would not provide sufficient supply

A plan that features dredging as a cornerstone of the area’s 50-year water supply plan falls short of long-term needs and might require costly new permits to be put in place, according to an analysis by Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality that could be delivered to local officials as early as this week.

The analysis comes as local leaders appear close to having all the information they say is needed to make a final call on the components of a water plan that was originally approved in 2006 with a price tag of $142 million but has been the subject of contentious debate over costs and design ever since.

DEQ officials say the plan proposed by Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, which combines dredging with a smaller dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir, fails in multiple ways to meet the community’s water supply goals. Dredging was not a piece of the 2006 plan but emerged as a possible part of an alternative solution.

According to Scott Kudlas, a DEQ director responsible for surface and groundwater planning, the Norris plan does not provide enough water, known as “safe yield,” and water releases from the dams would not meet stream-flow requirements in the community’s previously approved permits.

“Our conclusion is that the safe yield of the alternative will not meet the demand,” Kudlas said in an interview. “In order to meet the in-stream flow requirements in the permit, the locality would have to be in voluntary [water] conservation [mode] all the time, and they still wouldn’t meet the in-stream flows from the original permit during the full range of conditions.”

A year ago this week, Norris and David L. Slutzky, then chairman of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, met with DEQ officials in Richmond and asked them to run computer models to evaluate the Norris proposal. The goal was to determine if the region’s 50-year water supply plan could be adjusted to save millions in construction costs without having to restart the state and federal permitting process.

The DEQ’s draft letter accompanying the study concludes that implementing the Norris plan would also “likely require a major permit modification or the issuance of a new permit” for the 2006 water plan.

“When we walked away from that meeting, it was pretty clear to me that the jig was up and that this whole discussion of alternative plans was smoke and mirrors that doesn’t have any grounding in reality,” Slutzky said after reviewing the study. “Now we’ve got some evidence to support that.”

Norris said he needed more time to review the DEQ’s analysis.

“I need to read the report and see how definitively they say … whether or not there might be an acceptable alternative or whether they say nothing short of the current plan is going to pass muster,” Norris said in an interview. “If DEQ comes back and says that the other scenarios that we posited do not meet the requirements, then obviously that’s a major obstacle.”

The draft results were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Charlottesville Tomorrow. DEQ officials said in an interview that Norris had not contacted them in the past year, but that they were actively preparing to submit the study to local officials and could do so as early as this week.

“Frankly, one of the primary reasons there was a delay to providing this information to the localities was that we were really hoping that they would work this out and we wouldn’t have to comment on it,” Kudlas said.

The draft DEQ study provided to Charlottesville Tomorrow indicates that the dredging of South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, combined with a renovation and expansion of the existing 1908 dam at Ragged Mountain, would deliver a safe yield of approximately 16.8 million gallons a day, 1.9 million gallons short of the original goal.

In 2004, the firm Gannett Fleming published a demand analysis projecting that the water supply would require a safe yield of 18.7 million gallons a day by the year 2055 to meet the needs of a growing population and for times of severe drought.

However, the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority is now restudying the safe yield targets at the request of Charlottesville’s City Council. Norris has said he wants the demand analysis to be updated with three new pieces of information: actual water consumption figures since 2004, data on the city’s conservation measures, and land use decisions made since 2004.

“I have always questioned whether the 18.7 MGD threshold is accurate or not and I have never contended that the alternative scenario that I and others have been pursuing is going to meet [that goal],” Norris said. “I am quite certain it won’t, but the question is whether that is a legitimate goal.”

Norris said his initial reading of the DEQ’s draft letter indicated to him that permit modifications could also be taken under consideration.

“I was pleased to see in the letter that they don’t say outright that changes would require a new permit, that we may be able to amend the existing permit,” Norris said.

Thomas L. Frederick Jr., the RWSA’s executive director, said in an interview that changing the demand projections in the permit could introduce delays in the water planning effort.

“If we were to change that number, I think it’s very uncertain how the regulatory agencies would respond,” Frederick said. “The most severe response would be that you would have to start over again and develop alternatives from scratch.”

“The timing is definitely a concern. We have an opportunity today to construct a project that’s been approved, and has all the permits issued,” Frederick. “It is assured to provide the long term needs of this community, and in the minds of most people it could possibly go well beyond 50 years and at a very good price in today’s market. Why would we want to go back and try to modify the plan with the significant uncertainly in cost and time that that might entail?”

Kudlas said the DEQ had been content with the 2004 demand analysis. It’s up to local officials to decide whether to revisit that analysis, he said, but doing so could carry risks.

“We were very satisfied with the demand analysis they presented to begin with and thought it was well done and was reasonable. It is the locality’s prerogative to take another look at it,” Kudlas said. “One of the risks that the locality will need to balance as they look at that projection is what the incremental cost would be should they significantly underestimate the growth. … If you squeeze down your demand, at this point, to justify a smaller facility, you increase the chances that you might be wrong and you might need to add additional storage between now and 2055.”

“Good judgment would tell you that the demand projection is likely understated,” responded Slutzky when asked about the 50-year demand projections. “What we are really talking about here are delay tactics from people who don’t want to just admit they had good intentions, a good idea, and it just didn’t work out.”

“The problem with just looking at those three things [in the new demand analysis] … is that it doesn’t take into account the long-term implications of the [Albemarle County] Comprehensive Plan,” said Slutzky, who says a greater percentage of the population will live in growth areas on public water.

“With respect to the city conservation efforts, that’s lovely, but the state says we already consume the lowest per capita amount of water than anyone else in the commonwealth,” Slutzky said. “Is it realistic to expect the state to believe that we can lower that further with certainty over the next 50 years?”

“At what point do we have enough information to believe we can make the best decision for this community?” asked Frederick. “The Rivanna Board of Directors, with the advice that they are going to get from the elected officials, is going to have to make a determination at some point … because there will always be more questions about more scenarios that someone can ask if they want to delay the project.”

Norris made clear in an interview that his immediate goal is to get more information on the community’s projected water needs.

Norris said he has “never been one to say we should modify the demand in order to justify a smaller facility.”

“I have always said I want a more accurate picture of the demand, and if that argues for a larger facility, then I will support a larger facility,” he said.

Really, WINA? (Screenshot, for posterity.)

Charlottesville blogger Jamelle Bouie is getting famous.

The Progress has sent Brian McNeill to Michigan to cover Oliver Kuttner’s X Prize attempt. I can’t remember the last time the DP sent a reporter more than a few hours from C’ville. Good for them.

By Jean Feroldi
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Thursday, July 22, 2010

Architect Bill Atwood is moving towards a final design for his Waterhouse development on Water Street. Presenting a revised proposal to the Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review Tuesday, Atwood sought approval of the overall massing and material choices for the six-story building, leaving smaller details to be worked out later. 

“I am asking for pretty much material and massing only, the color and the detail and then fenestration is ahead of us,” said Atwood.

Since introducing the Waterhouse development five years ago, Atwood has redesigned his vision for a mixed- use building numerous times as a struggling economy and environmentally-focused design ideas presented new challenges. Originally proposed as two nine-story towers, Atwood opted for a more horizontal approach with his recent designs, focusing on commercial space.

Atwood’s updated plan, which he hoped would address some of the suggestions offered by the BAR in a June meeting, was met with some criticism. Board members overall felt the façade articulation and proportioning of the building could be improved upon to engage the public and the street.

BAR member William Adams advised larger setbacks could be introduced to give some dimension to the building.

“I would like to see provisions for more kind of urbanity or enlivening of the street on the Water Street side, which might mean pulling back on the garage entry side,” Adams said.

Anxious to move forward with the construction of the building, Atwood asked the BAR to support the conceptual ideas, namely the overall massing, for Waterhouse.

“Is it safe to say, because we are under a certain time constraint, that the massing relative to certain adjustments could be approved?” asked Atwood.

Waterhouse is set to include 45,000 sq. feet of office space for an unnamed client employing 230 people.

Board member, Eryn Brennan, recognized Atwood’s concern, making a movement to approve the conceptual massing of the building, while still allowing Atwood to modify the form if necessary.

“Massing to me just means general height and width, I mean that does not mean to me façade articulation as presented here tonight, so in that vein I could support the massing…but I think there is much further refinement for the actual articulation of the façades that could happen,” said Brennan.

The BAR agreed on the conceptual forms of Waterhouse and Atwood will present more specific designs at a future meeting. 


Martha Jefferson Historic Conservation District could see future growth

In other business, the BAR reviewed a request by the Martha Jefferson Neighborhood Association for approval of the Martha Jefferson Historic Conservation District, which would be comprised of 125 properties along Locust, Lexington, and Grove Avenues. The goal of neighborhood residents is to protect the historical character of the area by requiring any construction or demolition in the proposed boundaries first be approved by the BAR.

During a June BAR meeting, the Board determined a committee of members should be established to flesh- out criteria for the district before any decision could be made. In response, a subcommittee involving a BAR member, City staff members, and three neighborhood residents, met June 25 to define the conservation district boundaries and outline significant features of the Martha Jefferson neighborhood.

The committee determined that the district would follow the same boundaries as the Martha Jefferson Historic Register District established in 2007.

Board members supported the neighborhood’s proposal, questioning only the “donut hole,” a group of sixteen properties located within the district’s boundaries not subject to the Conservation District’s criteria.  These properties, north of the Martha Jefferson Hospital on St. Charles Avenue, are also not in the historic register district.

Mary Joy Scala, Charlottesville City’s Preservation and Design Planner, advised the BAR that the boundaries determined by the subcommittee were not absolute and other properties could be added to the Conservation District later even if they were not in the historic register district.

“This is the first conservation district so it’s almost a trial to see how the guidelines work, to see how the people react to being in the district,” said Scala. “I think the thought was let’s do this boundary that we have already established and then if that works and people are interested, then you could add to the district at a later date.”

Members of the Martha Jefferson Neighborhood Association said they were pleased with the results of Tuesday’s meeting, and the BAR unanimously approved the Martha Jefferson Historic Conservation District.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Who should pay when the Albemarle County Service Authority decides to build new infrastructure to increase the reliability of its water distribution system? The ACSA Board of Directors briefly explored that question last week while discussing a proposed $2 million water tank to serve the Village of Rivanna.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100715-ACSA-Glenmore-Water-Tank

At their July 15 meeting, the ACSA board heard a report about a location study for a water tank which would add redundancy, but not additional storage capacity. The tank would ensure the growth area around the Glenmore community continues to have water if there is a break in the line that carries water to eastern Albemarle County.

 “From a system planning standpoint, you put things in place to anticipate something bad happening,” said ACSA executive director Gary O’Connell. 

As part of the conceptual phase, the ACSA hired the Michael Baker Jr. engineering firm to determine how big the structure should be and to provide a preliminary cost estimate. The size and location of the tank will be determined if the project moves into a design phase.

ACSA Board Member John Martin

“I think the tank should be built, but I think we should explore who should pay for it,” said ACSA board member John Martin.  He suggested the possibility of creating a special rate district or even asking the developers of Glenmore to pay for it.

Martin said that when the Board of Supervisors approved the rezoning for the Glenmore development in December 1990, they accepted a proffer that required then developer Frank Kessler to cover the full costs of creating the infrastructure for water and sewer services.

“In order to build [Glenmore], they had to build a 23,000 foot water pipeline from the urban area to where the [neighborhood] was going to be,” Martin said. “One of the proffers was that the developer would provide water and sewer collection, distribution and treatment facilities at his expense.”

Martin said he wanted to know why the developers did not build the tank as Glenmore developed.

Jim Colbaugh, who represents the Scottsville district on the ACSA board, said a tank was possibly not considered to be necessary as the community was growing. 

“Now it’s [over] 800 homes, and it’s a little different and it’s going to be more different as future growth occurs,” Colbaugh said. “They probably never considered capacity issues for a tank when the 1990 agreement was made.”

Download staff report on proposed Glenmore water tank

Download documentation of proffers for Glenmore rezoning

Colbaugh said he would support the ACSA paying for the tank because it would be to increase system reliability, and not to expand capacity. He cited the upgrades the authority currently performing in the Scottsville system as a comparable project. The ACSA is also planning for a tank in the West Leigh subdivision to provide similar redundancy.

O’Connell said the ACSA might not want to set the precedent of asking developers to pay for system enhancements and other capital projects not related to enhancing capacity. He said traditionally such projects have been paid for by current ratepayers.

“With the reserve that we have, we have the ability to finance it and pay for it if the board wanted to move forward,” O’Connell said.

O’Connell said he would like the board to sort out who will pay for it before taking the project to the community for their input. The ACSA Board will discuss the issue again at its meeting in August.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris has asked city staff to begin writing a request for proposals for companies interested in dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir to remove some of the sediment that has accumulated there over the past 43 years.

“What I want to do is to get our ducks in a row so that we’ll be prepared to issue the RFP if council decides officially that dredging should be part of the water-supply solution,” Norris said in an interview. He added that he expects that decision to be made within a couple of months.

HDR Project Manager Carey Burch briefs Council on the study

Dredging was not included in the community water supply plan adopted in 2006 because it was deemed too expensive and because it failed to provide enough water storage capacity for the community’s anticipated needs in 50 years. Instead, the water plan specified a new dam be built at the Ragged Mountain Reservoir as well as a pipeline to supply it from South Fork.

Opponents of the plan, which carried an original price tag of more than $140 million, have urged the council to insist on updated studies, including a second look at dredging. As part of a series of studies, the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority commissioned HDR Engineering to conduct a dredging feasibility study and the council heard the report at its meeting Monday.

HDR identified a total of 1.4 million cubic yards that could be removed without affecting protected wetlands or the shoreline. Project Manager Carey Burch said one of the challenges to dredging is the requirement to find a site for the sediment to dry out.

“There’s not a lot of flat land near the reservoir that doesn’t have something on it,” Burch said. “There are a lot of rolling hills. Land in a conservation districts is out. Land that is in flood plain is out.”

HDR is recommending a multi-phase, one-time dredging project that would cost $34 million to $40 million and take about seven years. The first phase would cost between $8 million and $13 million to gain 58.6 million gallons of storage. The cost depends on whether sand contained in the sediment could be sold.

Burch said sand is particularly valuable, with a cost ranging from $52 and $62 per cubic yard.
The second phase would cost between $26 million and $27 million to restore 169 million gallons of storage. Burch said this phase would be more expensive because it would require the construction of basins to retain water during the dewatering process.

RWSA Executive Director Tom Frederick

In response to a question from Councilor Satyendra Huja, RWSA Executive Director Thomas L. Frederick Jr. said dredging alone would not provide enough water for the community’s future needs.

“The community water supply plan approved in 2006 identified a need for 1.7 billion gallons of additional storage [for the year 2055],” Frederick said. He said dredging as outlined by HDR would supply only 13 percent of that amount.

Supporters of dredging praised the HDR study but said the feasibility study’s approach constrained the dredging alternatives. For example, they said, HDR was told to identify only two potential dewatering sites.

Former City Councilor Kevin Lynch said issuing an RFP for dredging would allow the private sector to come up with its own solutions and may produce lower bids.

“I think you’ll find that when it’s a real RFP and people are talking about real money and not just a study, you’ll get better proposals back and you’ll see parcels [of land] that were not [considered] in the study,” Lynch said.

Norris said he is leaning towards dredging but is not ready to decide his vote until additional studies are completed.

“I haven’t been convinced yet that we can’t meet our 50-year water supply needs through a combination of dredging and a slightly enlarged dam at Ragged Mountain,” he said.

In August, the firm Black and Veatch will complete the first phase of a study of whether it is feasible to build on top of the 102-year-old Lower Ragged Mountain Dam instead of building a new, larger earthen dam downstream. The RWSA board will also get a report in August related to a re-examination of the 2004 demand analysis that served as the basis for the community water supply plan.

Leslie Macko, of Charlottesville, stood with the president in the Rose Garden yesterday as an example of somebody who needs unemployment benefits extended.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Beyer wants to remove this copse of trees to avoid building a retaining wall in order to build 4 homes

Despite complaints from neighboring residents, the Charlottesville Planning Commission voted at their meeting last week to allow the removal of 10 mature trees in the 110-home cto the landscape plan approved in 2004 would eliminate the need for major retaining walls.

Members of the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association pleaded with the commission to deny the request.

“When they received permission to build this giant development of in-fill housing, [Beyer] knew perfectly well that there was challenging topography,” said Andrea Weider. She added that the neighborhood fought hard to require that the trees be spared when the original rezoning was granted by City Council.

Weider argued that if the Commission granted the request, they would be fundamentally changing the parameters of the original PUD.

“This group of ten that we’re talking about today are some of the very few that are left on this completely vanquished landscape of 22 acres,” said Weider. Instead, she said Beyer should be required to build the retaining walls as shown in the adopted plan.

The property was rezoned to Planned Unit Development in 2004 and to date, only 26 of the approved 110 homes have been built.  Previous attempts to amend the site plan in April 2007 were deferred.

“There’s no doubt that Huntley has been controversial in the past,” said developer Paul Beyer. “The issue in a nutshell is that the current grades are going to require significant retaining walls in order for the homes to be built.”

These walls would be at least 25 to 30 feet tall, and Beyer said that could present a safety issue. He said he understood the concerns of neighbors, but said his development was a net positive for the city.

 “Huntley was designed to keep the professional classes in the city,” Beyer said. “It was seen as a need to make sure that we kept in the tax base people who use city services, [so] they don’t go into Albemarle.”

The five commissioners who participated in the discussion all agreed that to grant the landscape amendment would not significantly change the concept plan under which the PUD was originally granted. They agreed that with sufficient mitigation, removing the trees would be a more favorable option than building the retaining wall.

Commissioner Genevieve Keller abstained from the vote because she was unable to visit the site before the meeting. Commissioner John Santoski recused himself from the debate because he lives near the property.

Commissioner Michael Osteen said the solution should not be to require a specific number of trees, but rather to ensure a more complete approach.

“For all the problems that we have had [with Huntley], the one thing that is going to bail this thing out is a reforested hillside ten years down the road,” Osteen said.

The request was granted with several conditions. An exact number of trees was not specified, but Beyer has been directed to work with the city arborist to adequately reforest the section of land. Beyer also must report back to the city on the development’s progress in two years time.

By Jean Feroldi
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Monday, July 19, 2010

After three years of negotiations with Albemarle County over development proposals for the Fontaine Research Park, the University of Virginia Foundation says it will offer an expansion plan that is less than half its original size when it goes before the Planning Commission later this month.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100714_Fontaine_Research_Park

Fontaine Research Park - Photo: Megan Lovett, Daily Progress

Meanwhile, county officials and neighbors in Charlottesville’s Fry’s Spring neighborhood are holding out hope that the rezoning will help build the Fontaine-Sunset Connector Road.

First recommended in September 2004, the Fontaine-Sunset Connector Road would link Fontaine Avenue to Sunset Avenue, passing through the Fontaine Research Park and the Granger property, a 69.5 acre tract of undeveloped land.

At Wednesday’s meeting of the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association, Fred Missel, director of Design and Development of the UVa Foundation, presented updated plans for the research park’s expansion. Missel cited the county’s indecision over the exact route of the connector as one reason for the revised plans.

“The county actually came back and said … that may not be the best alignment,” said Missel. “It’s important for us to move forward with [our expansion].”

One of the alignments developed as part of the Southern Urban Area B Study. Click for a larger image.

Peter Hedlund, president of the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association, said he was concerned about the lack of support for the road by the UVa Foundation.

“You’ve definitely identified the issue that’s of the greatest concern to the neighborhood,” said Hedlund. “The more commitment there is to that road being built, I think the more you find neighborhoods like ours in full support of your proposal.”

“We are not dropping the connector,” Missel responded. “We’re simply unable to move forward because there hasn’t been a decision as to where the location of the connector would be finally.”

Elaine Echols, the principal planner for development areas in Albemarle County, said in an interview that the county’s preferred alignment for the Fontaine-Sunset connector would run along the eastern edge of the research park connecting with Stribling Avenue.

“The one that was agreed on is the extension of Stribling but the alignment is not really settled,” said Echols.

The UVa Foundation’s original 2007 proposal sought to increase development size of Fontaine Research Park by 725,000 square feet and included a second entrance on Fontaine Avenue along with other road improvements to deal with a greater volume of traffic.

The new plan seeks an additional 310,000 square feet and would eliminate the need for a second entrance to the park based on traffic studies. The Fontaine Research Park houses offices, clinics and research facilities for over 1,000 employees.

In a May 2009 Planning and Coordination Council Meeting, Leonard W. Sandridge, UVa’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, told county officials that the university is prepared to build the road up to its property line, but would not commit to funding off-site transportation improvements such as the bridge over to the Granger property.

Fontaine Research Park - Photo: Megan Lovett, Daily Progress

If the rezoning is approved by Albemarle County, the UVa Foundation would install some transportation improvements such as traffic signals and turn lanes to ease traffic flow and would continue with planning for a future Fontaine-Sunset Connector on its property.

Albemarle County has said it expects voluntary developer proffers from both the UVa Foundation and owners of the adjacent Granger property to help pay for the connector road and mitigate the impact of new development.

The county’s comprehensive plan calls for construction of the road to support new development. It would alleviate traffic congestion on Old Lynchburg road and provide additional linkage to the county’s designated growth areas south of Interstate 64.

However, Missel said Wednesday that the UVa Foundation sees less need for the connector road now that the Biscuit Run property is no longer being developed and will become a future state park.

“Biscuit Run is no longer the big development that it was going to be and so a lot of the traffic that was going to be coming through [the Fry’s Spring] neighborhood … won’t be there now because Biscuit Run is gone,” Missel said.

Missel also commented that traffic studies revealed most vehicles accessing the research park do so via U.S. 29 and I-64. As a result, he said, traffic in the city is not as significantly affected by the park’s users.

• 01:30 – Presentation on the expansion for Fontaine Research Park by Fred Missel, Director of Design and Development of the UVA Foundation
• 17:49 – Comment from Peter Hedlund stressing the importance of the Fontaine-Sunset Connector Road
• 18:54 – Missel overviews traffic improvements included in the expansion

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Sunday, July 18, 2010

Dry conditions have prompted the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to declare a drought watch for the entire state. However, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) is not yet ready to declare that the community’s urban water system at risk of becoming depleted.

“Absent any rain over the next couple of weeks, I assume we will get to a place where this community has a formal drought watch in place,” said Gary O’Connell, the executive director of the Albemarle County Service Authority.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100715-ACSA-Drought

Under the terms of its drought response and contingency plan, the RWSA uses a computer model operated by the firm Hydrologics  to determine the probability of a hydrologic drought. Current conditions of reservoirs and streams are compared with historical patterns and long-range weather forecasts to predict the drought potential.

According to the plan, a drought watch is to be declared by the RWSA if there is a 20% probability that the total capacity of the RWSA’s urban water system will drop below 80% within 12 weeks.

“Running the model today, [there is] only a 15% chance of reaching that figure in 12 weeks,” said Tamara Ambler, the RWSA’s watershed manager.  “We’re still below the threshold.”

Ambler said the RWSA will continue running the model on a regular basis throughout the summer.  

On Friday, the urban reservoirs were at 94.3% capacity. However, both long-range forecasts and water demand patterns have officials concerned that could begin to drop.

O’Connell said even with increased efforts by local government to encourage people to use less water in their homes, people tend to use more to lawns and other plants to keep them green.

“The average use has been going down, but as soon as we get into a dry weather period, it jumps back up,” O’Connell said.

According to RWSA data, the community used 12.5 million gallons of water on July 8, corresponding with a period where no rain fell in the community for ten days.  

“On days of high heat, people do lots of outdoor watering,” O’Connell said. “As soon as it rained, it dropped back down to 10 million gallons.”

The statewide drought watch announced this week is designed to encourage citizens and localities to begin to reduce water in order to preserve water supply for as long as possible in case conditions stay dry.

Eighty-six percent of Virginia is experiencing abnormally dry conditions according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a consortium of federal agencies and universities.  

"What we're doing with this drought watch declaration is to encourage all localities to take the appropriate steps to conserve water," said Bill Hayden, a spokesman for the DEQ. "The conditions are there where we can have a drought really quickly."

Under a drought watch, ACSA customers and Charlottesville water users would be asked to voluntarily restrict usage by only watering outdoor plants and lawns at night.

The ACSA and the Charlottesville utilities division will begin running a series of advertisements to encourage people to resist the temptation to keep their plants green.

"We're saying people let their lawns go dormant rather than water them because they'll come back when the rains return," said Lauren Hildebrand, the city’s director of utilities. She added the city and the ACSA also encourage citizens to plant drought-tolerant vegetation.

A drought warning is declared if there is a 10% probability that total useable storage will drop to 70% of capacity within 10 weeks. A drought emergency would be called if there is a 5% or greater possibility that useable capacity drops to 60% of storage.

Legally-mandated restrictions can only be enacted by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and the Charlottesville City Council following the RWSA’s declaration of a drought warning.

It’s not a drought yet, it just seems like it.

By Bridgett Lynn
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Friday, July 16, 2010

No action has been taken yet by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors to approve an economic development action plan that has been under review for the past two months.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100714-BOS-Econ

“Probably one of the most overriding concerns that we heard [from the public] was that the plan did not provide adequate references to resource protection and possible impacts [to] quality of life,” said Lee Catlin, the county's Community Relations manager.

The plan calls for objectives to be met in five areas ranging from improving the county’s business climate to promoting agriculture and tourism.

Dawn Story speaks during the public hearing

According to staff, the plan has been revised to address issues of resource protection, the importance of jobs for current county residents, a measure of rural economy, and refocuses on nurturing existing enterprises as opposed to a primary focus on attracting new businesses into the community.

“All this is, is a plan for us to promote economic vitality in our community,” Supervisor Ken Boyd said. “It’s an important issue that needs to take front and center, and I think we’re through studying this. Let’s start moving forward with some of this action plan.”

Rich Collins, a member of Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP), criticized the plan and said it was “nothing but a growth plan.”

“It’s [not intended as] an idea to increase population in town. It’s really to provide jobs for our people,” Boyd responded.

Boyd also insisted that it would not negatively impact the county’s Comprehensive Plan.

“This is not some perfect document that we’re going to set that’s going to identify every single angle in the community,” Boyd said. “We’re still bound by the Comprehensive Plan no matter what we put in this document.”

The Board of Supervisors now anticipates a final vote on the action plan to occur at their August 4, 2010 meeting. That meeting will not include further public input opportunities on the plan.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Friday, July 16, 2010

Members of the Albemarle County Service Authority support expanding the dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir to help meet the region’s long term water supply needs.

But at its meeting Thursday, the ACSA decided against spending its own money now to push the earthen dam proposal forward, opting instead to wait until several final studies of the embattled water plan are finished and leaders can make a final overall decision.

“There’s a hard push to get all these studies [finalized] so that when the summer is over, [all the information] will be in front of decision-makers,” said ACSA Executive Director Gary O’Connell.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100715-ACSA-Water-Supply

RWSA executive director Tom Frederick briefed the ACSA board of directors on a variety of issues

RWSA Executive Director Thomas Frederick said, “The question to be answered is: ‘Is the plan we approved in 2006 the right plan, or does it need to be modified?’”

Any long term water supply plan will need the support of the Charlottesville City Council, which has not been convinced that a new dam is the best way to meet the community’s needs.

In order to satisfy their concerns, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has commissioned several studies to reevaluate components of the plan originally adopted by council and the Albemarle Board of Supervisors in 2006.

The studies completed so far include a feasibility study of dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, a new design and cost estimate for an earthen dam at Ragged Mountain, as well as a reevaluation of a concept to build a pipeline between the two reservoirs.

Studies that remain to be completed include an analysis of the Interstate 64 embankment, which would be inundated by a larger reservoir and a new analysis of the water demand projections on which the water supply plan is based. Both of those will be presented to the RWSA board at its August meeting.

A 2004 study conducted by Gannett Fleming showed that the community would need to supply a safe-yield of 18.7 million gallons a day in order to withstand a drought equivalent to the worst on record. Critics have argued that amount is too high and the community should plan for a lower amount.

In addition, the City of Charlottesville has commissioned its own study to determine whether the existing Ragged Mountain Dam, built in 1908, can be repaired and enlarged. The first phase of that study will be completed by the middle of August.

At Thursday’s ACSA meeting, board member Liz Palmer said interest existed in moving the dam expansion ahead to take advantage of market conditions.

“We want to get going as soon as possible because we want to take advantage of current construction prices,” Palmer said.

Frederick had asked the ACSA board members if they would be willing to pay for three additional projects to advance design work for the Ragged Mountain Dam to speed up the time it would take to put the project out for bid. Frederick said it will take about nine months to complete the final design and another three months to bid the project.

This work includes $35,000 to apply for modifications to federal and state environmental permits, $10,000 to begin the process to receive a special use permit from Albemarle County, and $85,000 for final design work on elements for a tower that will convey water to the dam’s spillway.

“It seems like we wouldn’t be hurting anything if we waited to try and bundle this stuff in August if we felt we needed to at that time,” said ACSA board member Jim Colbaugh. “It seems like the appropriate time to take a position would be at our next meeting if we need to.”

After further discussion, the ACSA board opted not to contribute funds to any additional work at this time. City Council will hear a special briefing on dredging from the firm HDR at its meeting on Monday night.

Frederick also told the ACSA board that he has asked dam designers Schnabel Engineering to develop plans for phasing construction of the earthen dam. Frederick said the RWSA wants options to only build an earthen dam that would elevate the pool by 13 feet, to build a 45-foot dam in two stages, and to build a 45-foot dam but only fill it 13 feet for the foreseeable future.

]

By Brian Wheeler
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Friday, July 16, 2010

City leaders gathered Thursday with local residents and transportation officials for a “transit summit” to identify ways to improve the Charlottesville Area Transit system. Bus riders said the system needs to be cleaner and more frequent, while a panel of experts said public transit in Charlottesville is at a crossroads.

“We are hoping to get good ideas from lots of people on how to improve transit in Charlottesville,” said Bill Watterson, the head of CAT. “We are serving almost a million more riders than we were six years ago, and we just had a year with our most ridership ever, nearly 2.2 million riders.”

"Transit summit" panelists (L to R) Lester Hoel, Bob Dunphy, Brad Sheffield, and Maurice Jones

Charlottesville’s City Council requested the summit and asked that local transit be studied for improvements that could increase ridership even further.

Lester Hoel, a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and former director of the Center for Transportation Studies, was one of the panelists invited to provide feedback.

“You have a system that’s fairly mature, how much more can you do with it? In our view, there is really only one thing you can do and that is look at the frequency of service on those buses,” Hoel said.

“When you have a bus with a frequency of service of one hour … you’ll never use it,” Hoel said. “That’s not an [attractive] alternative. We are talking about [having instead] a frequency of service of 10 minutes, even 30 minutes is a stretch.”

Donna Carty is a city resident who said she recently returned to the community after living for 25 years in other cities where she didn’t need a car.

“If you want people to use your transit system, it’s got to be a full substitute for a car. If you have to have a car in addition … you are going to use it rather than transit,” Carty said. “A full substitute for a car means people can not only get back and forth to work and back home but can have a full social life and can volunteer [in the community].”

Brad Sheffield, a panelist representing the Renaissance Planning Group, said CAT was at a crossroads and might need to consider a major route restructuring.

“One [approach] is to do frequency improvements, which is either going to cost more money or [require] a sacrifice of certain parts of the route structure to improve the frequency,” Sheffield said. “The other direction is more of a restructuring approach of looking at a backbone or feeder approach where roads like Route 29 and Main Street act as a backbone and subsystems feed in.”

City Councilor Kristin Szakos, who was interviewed in the morning by the panel, said she thought the restructuring approach should be considered.

“I really hope that we look in a concentrated way at the idea of a trunk and feeder system where we have busses in the city that run often enough that people can just take them without knowing the [schedule] ahead of time and just know that a bus is coming,” Szakos said in an interview.

“We need to make sure that we serve all the people who don’t have a choice, and the bus is the only way they have of getting places, and then we also need to reach out to the people that have choices, that drive cars, and get them on the buses,” Szakos said.

Belmont resident Cynthia Fahringer addresses the "transit summit" held in CitySpace in the Market Street Parking Garage

Belmont resident Cynthia Fahringer, a regular user of public transit, said in addition to improved reliability, the buses needed to be cleaner to get more riders.

“The bus system has become very stigmatized. … It’s filthy, it’s absolutely filthy,” Fahringer said. “If you want choice riders, you better clean up your act, and that can be dealt with very easily.”

“It is essential to have a bus that is clean,” Watterson agreed. “We want the bus to not have odors, we want there to not be trash, etc. You are having a bad experience and we are not doing a good job by you and we need to improve upon that.”

Watterson said in an interview that he has not received many concerns about the buses being dirty. He added that one of the goals of the summit was to get suggestions as to how use $110,000 in the city’s current budget for system improvements.

“I am not going to object if [the City Council’s] decision is that part of what we can do is add another person … so we can do more in terms of cleaning our buses,” Watterson said.

“I learned some things today … about potential next steps for our community as we think about ways to improve transit,” Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris said to close the summit. “When it comes down to it, the product has to sell itself. A clean, efficient and reliable system that’s comfortable is going to increase ridership in and of itself, so that needs to be a priority.”

The saga of Jim Baldi’s noisy Belmont restaurant is ending not with a bang, but a whimper. Bel Rio’s landlord, Jeff Easter, has told them to be quiet, Rachana Dixit writes for the Daily Progress. Easter says that his lease limited them to jazz performances, not traditionally known for being loud, and Baldi’s move to having DJs spinning thumpy music just isn’t permitted. There’s a twist, too—Bel Rio is shut down, a sign on the door saying it’s only temporary, but it’s not clear why or when—or if—it’s reopening. Council is set to consider lowering the noise ordinance further on Monday, just to deal with Bel Rio, but I imagine they’ll put that off for a future meeting, since it’s entirely possible that this is the end of the matter. Until it comes up again in 5-10 years, the next time somebody opens a noisy venue in a residential area.

In Saturday’s Progress, Brandon Shulleeta had a long, detailed article about a ridiculous sounding “gay-to-straight camp” run by a guy in Greene County who says he can change people’s sexuality. He claims a whopping 13% success rate for attendees of his $650 weekends. (For straight folks who can’t understand why this is so dumb, consider whether a weekend-long camp would be sufficient to make you gay. Yeah, you neither, huh?) This isn’t normally the sort of thing I’d write about here, but there were a couple of paragraphs in there that I loved—I’ve revisited them with a chuckle about once a day since—and I’ve just got to share. Shulleeta talked with Ted Cox, a straight guy working on a book about the faux science of gay-to-straight therapy, who attended the camp, posing as a gay guy wanting to go straight:

At one point during a camp weekend, participants were told to perform a hold with each other that’s similar to how a parent would hold a child, Cox said. Another hold involved one man leaning back into another’s chest. The positions were not sexual in nature, Cox said, but he doesn’t see how they could help someone become straight.

“I would think that some of the things we did at the camp would be counter-productive,” said Cox, who called the weekend “literally the gayest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

If you think that’s as funny as I do, you might enjoy an article Cox wrote about the experience.

This article is an extended version of what appears in the Daily Progress.

By Bridgett Lynn & Brian Wheeler
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, July 14, 2010

While Albemarle County is seeking to increase its industrial and commercial land activity, proposals reviewed as part of the Crozet Master Plan to build a new business park and convert some residential homes to mixed use have been rejected by the Planning Commission.

Will Yancey appeared at the public hearing Tuesday to lobby for his family’s 2008 application to create a light-industrial business park just outside the Crozet development area near the intersection of Interstate 64 and U.S. 250.

Will Yancey

“We don’t have enough industrial land,” Yancey said. “In the last three years there have been two studies, one in 2007 and one that was just completed recently, that indicated Albemarle had a shortage of industrial land.”

ISSUE PROFILE The Yancey Mills Business Park What: A proposal to create a light industrial business park for offices and equipment storage yard(s) on 148 acres of rural land adjacent to the Crozet designated growth area in Albemarle County

Where: Behind the Yancey Lumber Company sawmill near the interchange of Interstate 64 and U.S. Route 250 West--The business park would cover a total of 184 acres and include 36 acres of heavy industrial land used today for the sawmill's operations

Community Issues: 1) The business park would be on land designated for rural uses in the watershed of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. As such, the property is not in the jurisdictional area for public water and sewer. Albemarle's comprehensive plan directs that new residential and industrial development should occur within the existing designated growth areas. 2) The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has expressed interest in increasing the amount of land zoned for light industrial uses and in revisiting the uses of land at the Shadwell and Yancey Mills interchanges of I-64. 3) Downtown Crozet has existing industrial property that can be redeveloped. Doing so has the potential to add truck traffic onto roads servicing a growing residential community. The proposed business park, on the other hand, would be accessed by a four-lane section of Route 250 West at the interstate interchange. Supporters say this would keep trucks away from Crozet. 4) Supporters of the project say it would bring jobs closer to the growing residential community in Crozet. The developer has said he would proffer some land for use by Western Albemarle High School for use as athletic fields. 5) The Planning Commission, the Crozet Community Advisory Council, and majority of members of the public that participated in the 2009-2010 update of the Crozet Master Plan have expressed opposition to the business park proposal.

Timeline: July 13, 2010 - PC recommends a second time to the Board of Supervisors that the business park proposal be denied January 19, 2010 - PC reviews Albemarle County industrial land inventory January 6, 2010 - BOS adopts pro-business action plan which calls, in part, for expedited report on industrial land inventory and consideration of adding Yancey Mills into expanded growth area December 4, 2008 - BOS overturns decision by the PC to table proposal and directs it to be reconsidered as part of the Crozet Master Plan update November 11, 2008 - PC votes to end review of business park proposal July 29, 2008 - Will Yancey makes preliminary proposal to PC on Comprehensize Plan Amendment (CPA) to allow for creation of business park PC = Albemarle County Planning Commission BOS = Albemarle County Board of Supervisors

See all stories on the Yancey Mills Business Park

According to county staff, the majority of Crozet residents and the Crozet Community Advisory Council (CCAC) do not support the proposed business park which would be on 184 acres around the site of the Yancey Lumber Co. sawmill.

“The public very adamantly said they were opposed to having a 1.1 [million] to 1.8 million square foot industrial park right outside of the master plan boundaries,” said Mary Rice, a former advisory council member.

“The proposal has serious flaws beyond generating sprawl in the rural area,” said Morgan Butler of the Southern Environmental Law Center. “The property is located in the water supply watershed. It drains to the South Fork Rivanna River and ultimately to the South Fork Reservoir. Major development activity on this land would almost certainly increase the amount of sediment and other pollutants entering that drinking water reservoir.”

Other concerns about the proposed business park were that it would undermine efforts to invigorate businesses in Downtown Crozet and would negatively impact traffic near the interstate.

“Our recommendation is that it’s bad for the master plan,” said Mike Marshall, chairman of the advisory council. “We don’t think it ought to be allowed.”

Mike Marshall, chair of the Crozet Community Advisory Board

The planning commission indicated last month that the Yancey Mills project should be independently reviewed by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors. At Tuesday’s meeting, the commission formally voted to exclude the project from the master plan update and went a step further and also voted 4-3 to recommend the Board of Supervisors deny the business park request. Commissioners Don Franco, Linda Porterfield, and Edward Smith voted against that motion. 

Porterfield was the only commissioner who supported further study of the Yancey Mills project when the commission originally rejected it in November 2008 by a 6-1 vote. Franco and Smith joined the commission subsequent to that decision.

“We have not studied the Yancey proposal,” Porterfield said Tuesday. “We can’t vote it down if we don’t know anything about it.”

“There is no place else that I’m aware of in this county right now that there is one entity that controls that much land with good transportation,” Porterfield said. "If we don’t start thinking about that, we’re going to be supporting this entire county on residential taxes.”

The other topic getting considerable attention at the public hearing related to a proposal to mix commercial and residential uses in a small area north of downtown.  The commission voted unanimously to maintain the existing residential character of the neighborhood around Wayland Drive and St. George Avenue.

“We’ve had some interest for quite some time from property owners…wanting to have greater use of their property than just the single family residential use that they have right now,” said Elaine Echols, Albemarle County’s principal planner for the development areas.

“What we came up…with the community was a recommendation for mixed use in this particular area with a modification to the stream buffer to allow for redevelopment if there’s mitigation which helps to protect the water supply,” said Echols.

Jenny Martin spoke on behalf of the property owners that supported the staff’s recommendation. She said the proposal would create a transition between commercial and residential use.

“This designation of mixed use will create a buffer to the north of Crozet between commercial and residential which today does not currently exist and will preserve the look and feel of the village of Crozet,” Martin said.

However, other members of the community and representatives of the CCAC spoke against the proposal.

“The resolution that the advisory council passed was on where to maintain the boundary between commercial use…and residential,” said Marshall. “The motion…to maintain that natural [creek] boundary, which is the boundary today, as the future boundary…passed 10 to 2.”

“I cannot understand why just two houses in Wayland Park should be included in a transition zone for mixed use,” said Joyce Shifflett, a resident of St. George Avenue. “To consider just two houses in the subdivision for mixed use would be totally unfair to us and the other property owners in Wayland Park.”

In 2006, county staff prepared a report estimating that Crozet, which has a population of about 5,500 today, could reach a maximum population of about 24,000.  The revised plan now anticipates a long-term population capacity of approximately 18,000.

“I’m all for the community deciding that it wants a much lower total build out,” said Peter Loach of the Piedmont Housing Alliance. “I just want [the community] to be aware…as they lower density and make each house sit on a bigger piece of land, each house is going to cost more and become much less affordable.

Staff will incorporate changes recommended by the Planning Commission and bring the plan back for final approval at their meeting July 27.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, July 14, 2010

City planning staff have received direction from the Charlottesville Planning Commission on how the city’s critical slopes ordinance should be rewritten.

“The direction of the staff over the next month will be to primarily work on the process for a slope review,” Haluska said.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100713-CPC-Slopes

The various phases of the Brookwood development required critical slopes waivers in order to be constructed.

Currently, any construction activity that will disturb any hillside with a grade of 25% or more must be approved by the Planning Commission in the form of a critical slopes waiver. The ordinance is being rewritten to address complaints by groups such as the Southern Environmental Law Center that the existing criteria on which waivers are granted are too vague.

“Staff in the next couple months wants to nail down where the bars are between those various categories,” said city planner Brian Haluska. “We got broad consensus around some sort of category of slopes where a public purpose is the rationale for a waiver."

Chairman Jason Pearson said there are benefits to an undisturbed slope which can be quantified. These include erosion control, groundwater recharge, reduced stormwater velocity, adding to the city’s tree canopy, and providing habitat for wildlife.

“You put all those on one side, and you weigh those, and then we decide as a commission if there is some other public purpose that the applicant brings forward that outweighs all those benefits,” Pearson said. “You’d have to mitigate above and beyond what was already there in order for us to allow that waiver to occur.”

The challenge for staff will be to define the thresholds in such a way that the process is transparent and objective. Another question is what waiver requests would be decided by staff, and what should be decided by the commission.

“Depending on where you set the bar, this ordinance may actually get tighter,” Haluska said. “We may move away from 25% to some other holistic standard to find out what sites meet which,” Haluska said.

Commissioner Genevieve Keller, an architectural historian, said she was concerned that staff lacked the expertise to determine the aesthetic or cultural values of certain slopes.

“I’m worried about that component missing,” Keller said. “I’m not sure what we as a commission or a community can do to make sure those values are represented in a staff review.”

The Commission will give further direction to staff during the commission’s work session in August.  They’ve requested further visual aids to help them better understand the critical slopes concept. The rewritten ordinance will come before the Planning Commission for a public hearing as early as October.

At the same meeting, the Commission considered two waiver requests under the existing rules. They voted to approve a request that would allow the Kroger on Hydraulic Road to expand its fuel center.

However, they deferred a request from developer Richard Spurzem to allow a 61-home development on Longwood Drive. In that case, the commission said the application was incomplete and did not give them enough information to make a decision.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, July 14, 2010

After months of discussion over how to amend Charlottesville’s critical slopes ordinance, the Planning Commission decided Tuesday to direct staff to study the issue. Draft language will return before the commission this fall.

“It’s my hope that we’ll end up with a code that is clear and relatively simple and I think that is possible,” commission Chairman Jason Pearson said. “One reason we delayed intentionally was to guarantee that we heard from the public on this issue.”

Under the existing ordinance, any hill that slopes at a grade of 25 percent or more is considered to be critical. If a building site plan proposes the disturbance of the hill, a developer must seek a waiver.

Groups such as the Southern Environmental Law Center have claimed that the existing waiver criteria are too vague. They also claim the ordinance’s purpose does not include a provision that a slope should be protected for aesthetic reasons. 

“Most of the people who speak to me say they are supportive of a broader ordinance with broader purposes that will be more protective of the environment,” said SELC attorney Kay Slaughter. Slaughter, a former city mayor, has argued that waivers are almost always granted.

City Planner Brian Haluska explains the critical slopes ordinance to membersof the commission

While the precise language of the ordinance change was not before the commission Tuesday night, city planner Brian Haluska said in an interview said there will likely be a tiered system where site plans that require major disturbances of slopes would require greater scrutiny. Over the next few months, staff will work out specific details.

In June, the SELC and the Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club called for a total ban on building on slopes greater than 40 percent. However, at a work session later that month, the commission agreed that property owners should always have the right to ask for waiver.

Even though the ordinance is to be rewritten, the commission was set to consider two requests for critical slopes waivers later in the same meeting.

One would allow a developer to build a 61-home development on Longwood Drive. Staff had recommended denial of that request because none of four categories under which it could be granted had been met.

“We didn’t see that the applicant had made a compelling case,” Haluska said. He said further revision to the site plan could result in a favorable recommendation.

The other would allow the Kroger on Hydraulic Road to expand its on-site gas station. In that case, city planner Nick Rogers recommended the commission adopt the waiver because a retaining wall that would replace the slope contains a unique filtration that would treat stormwater.

“It would protect the hillside, and it addresses the increased potential for erosion, sedimentation and water pollution,” Rogers said.

Commission members had not taken action on these two requests at press time, and they did not provide guidance to staff on how to proceed with writing the ordinance.

In other news at the meeting, the commission recommended the City Council approval a special-use permit that would allow the University of Virginia’s new children’s hospital to stand 90 feet tall on West Main Street.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Saturday, July 10, 2010

The property is located off of Old Lynchburg Road

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has agreed to consider whether a 96-home  development in the county’s rural area should be connected to the region’s sewer system. The decision came despite warnings from staff that doing so is against the county’s growth management policy.

“It’s easy to characterize this as a growth management decision, but it’s really not,” said Frank Stoner, the site’s developer.  “Rightly or wrongly, the decision got made to approve this project with one-acre lots in 1977.”

That was three years prior to the board’s decision to channel growth into designated areas in the county, mostly clustered around the city of Charlottesville.  In 1980, the county’s rural areas were downzoned to limit residential density and generally establish minimum lot sizes of 21 acres.

Listen using player above or download the podcast:  Download 20100707-BOS-Whittington

The property Stoner is developing is located on the western side of Old Lynchburg Road just outside the county’s growth area. The Albemarle County Service Authority was previously authorized to provide public water to the property. A prior developer asked the Board to hold a public hearing on the matter in 2006, but they declined to do so.

 “The policy is only to allow changes to the jurisdictional area in cases where the property is adjacent to existing [sewer] lines, and public health and safety are in danger,” said county planner David Benish. 

“Providing service in the rural areas  consumes treatment capacity which is intended for and should be reserved for the development areas.”

At a meeting Wednesday, Supervisor Dennis S. Rooker initially opposed allowing the development to connect to the urban sewer system.

“One of the primary tools we have used to manage growth in the community is to limit the availability of sewer to the growth areas,” said Rooker.

Supervisor Duane Snow said, however, that allowing the development to connect to sewer could be better for the environment.

“It seems like to me that it would be better to have all that [sewage] going into one system then all going into the ground,” said Snow.

County Attorney Larry Davis warned that allowing this development to connect to sewer could set a precedent.

“There are a lot of properties that are adjacent to sewer lines that are in the rural areas, many with pre-existing zoning that’s inconsistent with the comprehensive plan,” said Davis.

Stoner said he is ready to build the development with septic fields, which he said would require the clear-cutting of around 25 acres of trees. Connecting to the sewer system would be more expensive for him, but he said he is willing to make that investment if allowed.

Both Rooker and Supervisor Ann Mallek changed their minds after hearing from Stoner, and a motion to hold the public hearing passed unanimously and will be held in  September. Stoner said he is also considering applying for a comprehensive plan amendment to add the land into the formal development area.

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Friday, July 9, 2010

Source: Google Earth

Virginia Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton has directed Lynchburg and Charlottesville officials to meet in early August to hammer out disagreements over the future of U.S. 29 through Albemarle County.

“They want us to meet with several of the representatives from Lynchburg and lock us in a room,” said Supervisor Dennis Rooker Wednesday. The meeting is to be held on August 5 in Charlottesville and is not open to the public.

Lynchburg and Danville officials have consistently pressed for a bypass of U.S. 29 to be built to allow truck traffic to travel unimpeded along U.S. 29 through Albemarle County.

 “It is very important in terms of getting product to Northern Virginia and getting supplies down to Lynchburg for manufacturing,” said Gary Christie, the director of the Local Government Council of the Region 2000. That organization is the Lynchburg region’s planning body.

Rooker and Supervisor Rodney Thomas traveled to Richmond to meet with Connaughton in early June to discuss their plan to address traffic congestion on U.S. 29. The pair lobbied for funding for a $25.7 million project to widen U.S. 29 to six lanes from the South Fork of the Rivanna River to Airport Road.

“All the models that we’ve gotten back from the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission (TJPDC) have said if [widening] is done, it will relieve some of the traffic congestion,” Thomas said.

While The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has spent $47 million to design and buy property for a western bypass route, elected officials on Charlottesville’s Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) have never approved money to be saved for construction. To actually build the 6.2 mile road would cost an estimated $230 million, according to VDOT spokesman Lou Hatter.

Rooker said Connaughton told him and Thomas that it was doubtful the bypass would be built any time soon.

“He made it clear that [the state] didn’t have the money for it,” Rooker said.

Secretary Connaughton was not available for comment.

Thomas said he supports the bypass, but wants to address immediate traffic issues on U.S. 29. which has an average daily traffic volume of 50,000 vehicles at the South Fork bridge according to data from the TJPDC. 

Thomas said he would favor a plan to sell parts of the right of way in order to pay for other transportation projects to address congestion on U.S. 29.

“I would rather get U.S. 29 widened because it is such a dangerous road right now,” Thomas said. 

The invitation for the meeting did not specify that Connaughton seeks any particular solution, according to Christie. He said he hoped for positive dialogue.

“We’re not going in with a list of demands or a list of expectations,” Christie said. “We’re going in listening and anxious to give feedbacks and comments.”

At times, rhetoric between the two communities has been heated. For example, Lynchburg State Senator Stephen Newman (R-23) has called for the Charlottesville MPO to be stripped of its authority over U.S. 29.

But Rooker said the meeting offers an opportunity for Albemarle officials to explain the many ways in which they’re trying to address congestion on U.S. 29.

“We will try to extend the hand of friendship and see what might be accomplished,” Rooker said.

Here are the documents unsealed in the Yeardley Love case. The Post summarizes them.

This article is an extended version of what appears in today's Daily Progress.

By Bridgett Lynn
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Thursday, July 8, 2010

An organization created to encourage residential energy efficiency has launched a contest to get residents retrofitting their homes and installing renewable technologies. Local leaders say the benefits will include reduced energy costs and the creation of new jobs.

“The Home Energy Makeover Contest is an initiative that will help…to educate local homeowners about the importance of energy efficiency,” said Cynthia Adams, executive director of the Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP).

Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris

“Through energy efficiency, LEAP will stimulate our local economy and generate clean energy jobs which fosters energy independence and makes maintaining our homes more affordable,” said Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris. “We are a lucky community indeed, nowhere else in Virginia does an energy alliance like LEAP exist.”


Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100707-LEAP

Over a year ago, the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County jointly won a $500,000 grant from the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (SEEA) to create LEAP. The grant challenges the community to gain 20 to 40 percent in energy efficiency in 30 to 50 percent of area buildings over the next seven years.

Adams announced on Wednesday that the organization will award up to $10,000 in energy efficiency improvements to two residents living in either Charlottesville or Albemarle as part of a Home Energy Makeover Contest.

Eight runners up will receive free professional home performance assessments worth up to $600 conducted by certified local contractors.

Homeowners Wendy Roberman and Ted Millich had their house audited with LEAP and received suggestions to add insulation, switch out appliances, add a new furnace and windows, and some additional ventilation.

“We were able to quickly narrow down who we wanted to do the work, and we were very satisfied with that work,” said Roberman. “I would recommend people get an audit even if you think you know what you need to do.”

Home Performance with Energy Star program benefits

Prices for a home energy audit are running anywhere from $300 to $600 depending on size of home and number of gas fired appliances located in the home according to Adams.

“The end result of this should be a twenty percent or better efficiency gain for your home and …Energy Star certification,” said Adams.

In coming months, LEAP will launch its Home Performance with Energy Star program. Homeowners will get professional guidance on their energy retrofits and certification that the home has implemented energy conservation measures projected to increase its efficiency by 20 percent or more.

“We prequalify contractors to participate…and we also go behind them on a percentage of their jobs [to] test out [and] check the work [to] make sure that it was done correctly and that all of the diagnostic readings are being reported as they should be,” said Adams.

“By going through a prescribed process to identify energy efficiency issues and remedy them using a whole house a approach, owners of existing homes can benefit from the latest in building science too,” said Laura Fiori, president of Key Green Energy Solutions, a LEAP partner.

“Our primary hope in participating in a LEAP program is to create job growth,” said James Sullenberger of Weather Seal Insulation. “Like many local companies, we have been forced to make major changes in an effort to survive and remain competitive in this ever changing market.”

The University of Virginia Community Credit Union is also partnering with LEAP to provide low-interest financing for energy efficiency improvements.

“They put together an energy sense lending program [called Green $ense Lending] that is available exclusively through LEAP that has better rates and longer terms than one can get on a personal loan,” said Adams.

Green $ense Lending products can be paired with LEAP cash incentives, federal energy tax credits and the Commonwealth of Virginia energy rebates to make home energy improvements more economical for area residents.

Winners of the contest are selected through an application review process based on homes that use the most electricity and natural gas, which translates to homes that have the potential to save the most energy.

The contest will be open from July 1 to August 20, and the winners will be announced by September 12.  Applications can be found at the website www.cvillesaves.org.

This article is an extended version of what appears in today's Daily Progress.

By Jean Feroldi
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Thursday, July 8, 2010

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors weighed Wednesday whether to retain a firm to study the historic Albemarle County Jail or to leave the task to the local historical society.

Steven Meeks, president of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, told the board that he did not think that a third-party consultant was necessary, saying his group could handle all the work except for legal evaluations.

“The society’s point of view is…we could undertake a lot of this work ourselves and save the county the $30,000 that could in turn be redirected toward the maintenance of the building,” Meeks said.

Built in 1876 on East High Street, the jail is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A steering committee involving members from the Board of Supervisors, county staff and the historical society was established in 2008 to devise a strategy to reclaim the jail and preserve its architectural and social significance.

As part of the process, Charlottesville architecture firm BushmanDreyfus was recommended to conduct a $30,000 study of the facility. County staff told the supervisors that they supported the historical society’s plan for the jail complex but thought that further legal, physical and operational evaluations were required.

“We recommend … that we proceed with the engagement of BushmanDreyfus architects to assist us with this effort,” said Bill Letteri, Albemarle County’s director of facilities development. “The focus of their work would be aligned specifically with the proposal of the historic society.”

Board members were not convinced that an outside consultant was needed, saying county staff could do the job more affordably.

Supervisor Kenneth C. Boyd said he did not think that the potential uses and expenses for the old jail should be the county’s concern.

“My opinion…would be to have private money taking care of this rather than the county to continue funding it,” Boyd said.

Supervisor Dennis Rooker felt that conveying the responsibility of the Old Jail to the historical society would be the best course of action.

“If the historic society can get in a position where they understand their proposed uses, what it would take to get there and we’re comfortable on our side then we could consider entering into an agreement and that would then put them into a position where they could fundraise,” Rooker said.

Last year, the historical society agreed to take over the Hatton Ferry, another historical asset whose operations were deemed to be no longer suitable given the economic decline. Meeks told the Board that this has been a record year for the ferry, which is under operation for the first time as a non-profit organization.

The Old Jail complex has an unusual legal history because when it was originally obtained by the city in the 1870s, it did not lie within Charlottesville city limits. Later when it was annexed by the city, the county and city were to exercise joint police powers.

“To our knowledge there has never been any application of a joint exercise of power over this property,” said County Attorney Larry Davis. “So, [the jail] probably has no zoning. so in looking at the future use of this property, one issue that we are going to have to resolve is what legal approvals are going to be necessary for any use to be established there.”

The board recommended that the historical society come back later with additional research about how to realize its plan for the jail.

A Forest Lakes resident, angered by the culling of Canada geese to prevent plane crashes: “It’s just so redneck.” Um.

Halsey Minor is the victor in his dispute with Lee Danielson over the Landmark Hotel, Rachana Dixit writes in the Progress. The former business partners took their dispute to arbitration, with Minor wanting $12M from Danielson, and Danielson wanting $6M from Minor. The arbitrator found that Danielson was guilty of “deliberative and reckless conduct” and “gross negligence,” and has ordered him to pay $6.4M to Minor. (A stunning $2.2M of that is in attorneys’ fees.) This tells us nothing about the future of the hotel. There’s still the matter of Minor’s lawsuit against Silverton Bank—and vice versa—the outcome of which may help figure out what’s going to happen to the big, empty tower.

By way of reminder, this whole thing started with Lee Danielson back in 2003, when he bought the Boxer Learning/Central Fidelity building for $3.3M. Three years later he hadn’t done a thing with it, and Oliver Kuttner bought it from him for $3.7M. Though he’d said he was thinking about turning it into affordable housing, he ultimately returned to Danielson’s plan to build a hotel, and sold the whole thing back to Danielson and Minor. Within months, Danielson and Minor couldn’t even agree as to whether they were still building a hotel, started squabbling publicly, and early last year the lawsuits started.

How many times do people have to learn not to do business with Lee Danielson?

A circuit court judge has ruled that Albemarle must unseal most of the warrants in the Yeardley Love case, finding that they simply aren’t grounds to withhold them from public review.

The whale tail may be replaced by a trio of them.

By Bridgett Lynn
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Friday, July 2, 2010

On Tuesday, a second roundtable discussion was held to receive input from the community on a proposed Zoning Text Amendment (ZTA) to update sign regulations for Albemarle County’s entrance corridors and the overall sign approval process.

Listen using player above or download the podcast: Download 20100629-ZTA

“It is clear that the county does not want to do anything that would jeopardize good community design,” said Ron Higgins, Albemarle County’s Chief of Zoning. “Therefore, the signage ZTA is important as it can impact community design standards if not done carefully.”.

A store along U.S. Route 29 North near Lowe’s was discussed as one example of a signage challenge facing a local business.

Under the current sign ordinance, which regulates the location, size, height, number, and design of signs along the entrance corridors, Stereo Types asked for relief because trees required and planted at the neighboring business Salem M Eways are now blocking the visibility of the store’s building sign.

“[The owner] put his sign where he was recommended to put it, and then the…landscape and the landscaping obscured his sign,” said Higgins. “Personally I think his remedy could be a new sign permit and [to] move the sign.”

Ron Higgins (right), Albemarle County's Chief of Zoning, addresses roundtable participants

According to the meeting summary of feedback provided at the first roundtable, Stereo Types was allowed a new sign closer to U.S. 29, but only if it was smaller.  The owner said that a new sign meeting the county’s requirements would cost over $20,000.

To ensure that the sign ordinance does not overly restrict economic vitality of businesses in the area, the Board of Supervisors initiated the Zoning Text Amendment process in May to evaluate the regulations.

Some suggestions made in the first and second roundtables included reducing restrictions on overall sign sizes and the distance a sign is allowed to be placed from its storefront.

“I think about the Penske truck sign that’s near my office…I can never see that sign,” said Neil Williamson, executive director of the Free Enterprise Forum. “The reason businesses spend money on signs, as you well know, is to be found. They don’t really want to have a huge sign if they can [already] be found.”

“[However,] if you start to get to a point where people are competing to have the biggest sign and you’re having all sorts of signs, [then] you get to the point where it’s clutter,” responded Morgan Butler of the Southern Environmental Law Center. “It actually gets harder to find [the stores].”

“The other extreme would be trying to get around the County’s prohibition of billboards and basically turning your sign into an advertisement, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid,” said Butler.

Williamson was concerned that the current sign ordinance is not designed for safety purposes as much as it is for aesthetic purposes. His ‘Eye of the Beholder’ report, which was released in May, used a review of public documents and case studies to highlight the expansion of the Architectural Review Board (ARB) power beyond the scope envisioned when it was founded in 1990.

“What’s the goal of the ordinance?” asked Williamson. “Is it truly safety? Is it aesthetics? Is there something to be done to identify that balance?”

A comprehensive signage package with a modified verbiage about “keeping consistent with history of previous signs” for certain scale and scopes of development was brought up in the first roundtable to be used at the start of construction and reviewed by staff, the ARB, and the Planning Commission.

“It comes down to signs that are meant to help provide the location of an entity,” said Butler. “If there are changes we can make to the ordinance that improves that function of a sign, I think those are well worth exploring.”

The Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on August 17 on the proposed ZTA in accordance to this resolution of intent, and will make its recommendations to the Board of Supervisors at the earliest date possible.

All comments and suggestions from the two roundtables will be considered as the Department of Community Development drafts amendments in July to the current sign ordinance over the next several months. Their hopes is that the results from these roundtables will provide a better balance between business community needs and the desire of the overall community and businesses for a quality built environment.

The draft ZTA with revisions from the ARB and PC is scheduled to be completed on October 6 and sent out for a tentative third roundtable discussion scheduled for October 21.

TIMELINE FOR PODCAST:

• 00:46 – Ron Higgins introduces roundtable discussion
• 19:46 – Jeff Werner of the Piedmont Environmental Council comments on predictability standardization
• 21:18 – Neil Williamson comments on sign visibility
• 23:41 – Higgins talks about comments received from first roundtable
• 24:01 – Werner questions if the County signs will become overwhelming and unappealing
• 30:08 – Morgan Butler talks about signs showing the location of an entity
• 35:01 – Stewart Wright of Zoning Permit Planning answers question about anchor signs
• 46:27 – Wright talks about sign placement
• 44:16 – Werner questions what County needs with the sign regulations to not restrict economic vitality
• 50:06 – Williamson comments on window sign regulations
• 01:02:06 – Butler talks about future technology changing the need for signs
• 01:06:10 – Butler comments on aesthetics being part of the ordinance
• 01:12:02 – Comment from the public on color restrictions on signs
• 01:30:46 – Conclusion