Ground broken for joint Albemarle/Charlottesville General District Court

After several years of planning, members of Charlottesville City Council and the Board of Supervisors picked up golden shovels this morning in Court Square for a joint project on land that’s long been slated for this purpose. 

The combined General District Court is the first phase of an investment by Albemarle County for judicial and legal proceedings.

“The origins of this work today date back to 2001 and a jointly-funded study by the city and the county to envision the future of courts,” said Deputy County Executive Trevor Henry. “That work eventually lead to the acquisition of the property that we’re standing on by the city and county in 2005.”

That property is the Levy Opera House, a 19th century structure which had been purchased by the Perry Foundation in the 1970’s to protect it from demolition. 

“This building was designed in 1851 as a town hall, constructed in 1852 in the Greek Revival style having seating for 600 people,” said Donna Price, the chair of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors. “Jefferson Levy remodeled the town hall into an opera house seating 800 people. It continued with that usage until closing in 1912 when it was occupied by the Jefferson School for Boys.” 

The new building will be built in a parking lot between the Levy Opera House and the Swan Tavern. The first task during this construction project will be to remove an expansion from the 1980’s. 

This building will be 58,000 square feet and will feature courtrooms for both localities as well as offices for the clerk of court for both Albemarle and Charlottesville. The cost of the first phase is $36.8 million, according to Henry. 

Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook said he’s been working on this issue for many years as an attorney and as a one-time head of the Charlottesville Albemarle Bar Association. 

“It didn’t get done until an agreement was put together about five or six years ago, but that agreement still had some problems with it,” Snook said. “When we actually tried to implement it, one of the pieces with it that there had to be a certain number of parking spaces.”

Those spaces for Albemarle were originally to have been in a new parking garage, but the agreement has been updated to have the county have the sole daytime use of a surface lot on Market Street. (Albemarle and Charlottesville reach new agreement on parking, December 8, 2022)

“This is a good example I believe of the kind of city and county cooperation at the court level that we see everyday, at the governmental level that we’re seeing more and more but quite frankly over the years has sometimes been a problem,” Snook said. “But this is the kind of thing we need to keep working on and I’m so glad we’re finally getting to this day and I’m looking forward to picking up one of those shovels and overturning a pile of dirt.” 

The final word before the dirt was overturned came from Jeffrey Richardson, the Albemarle County Executive. He thanked interim City Manager Michael C. Rogers for approaching the parking agreement in a collaborative spirit.

“I don’t believe that citizens wake up, our community members wake up every day and think about their government unless they have something serious they need to deal with,” Richardson said. “But I do believe in general that our community and our citizens expect us to get things done and to try to work together.” 

For information, visit the county’s website. 

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