Albemarle Supervisors support move toward Regional Transit Authority

If demographers at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University are to be believed, Albemarle is on track to have 155,102 people by 2050. For decades, the county has had a growth management strategy that has limited development to areas close to the City of Charlottesville in order to provide enough density to eventually support transit. 

In late October, Charlottesville Area Transit launched a one-year pilot to provide microtransit service to areas in Albemarle not served by buses running up and down on a fixed route. This is one of many fruits that have come out of the Regional Transit Partnership formed in 2017. 

Another could be a Regional Transit Authority that works to find ways to help provide alternate ways for people to get around. Both Albemarle and Charlottesville have funded a portion of two studies intended to usher in a new era of more options for people to be able to move around the community. Both studies are under the auspices of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission. 

The first study is the Regional Transit Vision, an aspirational document completed last year that details two possible scenarios for more transit throughout the entire area, including Buckingham, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson counties. (download the plan)

 The second study is to recommend ways and mechanisms to put the vision into action. 

“The Regional Transit Vision plan established a unified vision for transit service throughout our region and the intention of the governance study is to identify opportunities to more formally coordinate regional transit services and dedicate funding to support the realization of transit operations identified in the vision plan,” said Sandy Shackleford, Director of Planning and Transportation.

The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation also funded the two studies, both of which involved the hiring of the firm AECOM. Dr. Stephanie Amoaning-Yankson is the project manager and she said the plan had many visions. 

“One was to create a region that could work in a collaborative manner, an inclusive manner, and using an equitable process to provide a transit system that represents both rural and urban needs,” Amoaning-Yankson said.

The governance study kicked off last year with a primer of the existing system. Rather than recap that all here, here’s a series of stories I’ve previously written. 

• Council considers spending $30K toward governance study; Jaunt hopes to play a role, September 23, 2022
• Governance study: A primer on regional transit systems, December 15, 2022
• Two out of five phases completed for transit governance study, April 5, 2023
• Charlottesville City Council learns more about transit governance study, August 17, 2023
• MPO Policy Board gets update on regional transit governance study, November 5, 2023

That regional vision came in both constrained and unconstrained flavors, with the details of the constrained network structured by an eye toward how much funding could reasonably be generated to pay for all of the buses, drivers, fuel, and operational staff needed to expand the number and frequency of routes. 

The unconstrained network imagined a world where funding didn’t matter, so we’ll focus on the constrained vision which would be fueled by increases in taxes that would go to a new regional transportation authority. 

“What this network would go to support is an increase in the amount of service both within the urban core and the rural areas,” Amoaning-Yankson said. 

The constrained vision would vastly increase what Charlottesville Area Transit does now. 

Since the spring of 2020, the city-owned and operated Charlottesville Area Transit has been on reduced service with no buses running at all on Sunday.  There were plans in the summer of 2021 to realign CAT’s routes and to restore Sunday service to limited lines, but they have so far not been implemented.

The constrained plan would restore seven day service and would reduce headways to at least 30 minutes per route.

“This increase in service would represent increasing CAT’s current service by about 113 percent,” Amoaning-Yankson said. “For the rural network, what we are looking at is more hours of service in the day meaning you have to wait around less for a bus to come, having more service throughout the week, as well as having additional routes to increase the accessibility to the jurisdictions.”

This would also involve extending transit to the North Fork Discovery Park operated by the University of Virginia Foundation. 

Amoaning-Yankson said the governance study would work toward coordinating and implementing the service. There is currently a “regional transit partnership” that has no authority. 

Albemarle County currently has no means of governance over Charlottesville Area Transit, but the Board of Supervisors does appoint four members of the Jaunt Board of Directors. The next segment in this newsletter will take a look at the status quo, but Amoaning-Yankson asked this broad question of Supervisors: 

“What are your thoughts on adopting a regional approach to governing transit?” Amoaning-Yankson asked. 

“One is to have decision making and funding all linked together so everybody is involved in the decision-making and planning, all of the various stakeholders,” said Supervisor Ann Mallek. 

Supervisor Mallek was on the Board of Supervisors in 2008 when the TJPDC was coordinating efforts toward a Regional Transit Authority. In 2009, the General Assembly granted permission for such a body to be formed (HB2158), but a bill to allow voters to decide on a one-percent sales tax increase failed in committee. 

The idea was shelved for several years but continued to be a matter of study including the formation of the Regional Transit Partnership in 2017. 

Over those same years, Albemarle County has been asked to pay more of their share of CAT’s funding without any ownership. 

But back to the question. Supervisor Donna Price thought a regional approach to transit governance would work. She said she lived in the Hampton Roads area for 18 years and the many cities there did not collaborate very often.

“They really did not talk with each other from the regional approach,” Price said. “They were more focused on their own individual locale which meant you did not have the interconnection between the different areas,” Price said. 

Supervisor Bea LaPisto Kirtley said a regional approach would help attract more funding.

“We don’t have the population in Albemarle County or in Charlottesville but together and with some of these other areas, we do have the population to be able to make this work,” LaPisto Kirtley said. 

Time for the next question.

“My next question that I’d want feedback on are if you have any initial concerns you may have with establishing a regional entity?” Amoaning-Yankson asked.

Supervisor Jim Andrews said service needs to be reliable and that one concern is that each locality has different population densities and different needs. 

“But also recognizing that we share a problem in that the number of people who have to commute long distances in order to work in the city and the county, and all of that is going to make this difficult but important,” Andrews said. 

Price agreed and said Albemarle contains both urban and rural communities.  That could provide a sense of common ground.

“Just within our county we face many of the issues that in combination the TJPDC local governments face,” Price said. 

LaPisto Kirtley said one idea might be to expand microtransit in the rural areas and to combine those with additional fixed routes. 

Supervisor Diantha McKeel is a member of the Regional Transit Partnership and a supporter of the regional transit vision and potential expansion of microtransit.

“We need to serve the urban and the rural and the rural communities certainly need it whether it’s Greene or Nelson or just rural Albemarle County,” McKeel said. “But just to put in fixed routes in those areas is probably not going to be the solution.” 

McKeel also added that the University of Virginia is part of the conversation through their membership on the Regional Transit Partnership. They had been a non-voting member but joined more formally after President Jim Ryan took office.  Here are some information about how the vision plan discusses UVA.

• The phrase “University of Virginia” appears once in the Regional Transit Vision
• The word “University” appears eight times with one of them in the plan’s Objective 2.4: “Improve coordination between regional transit services and major institutions, such as UVA, to maximize transit usage for trips to and from the University and other major trip generators, and to encourage greater investment in transit by the University and other major regional institutions.”
• The letters “UVA” appear 38 times in the plan, but several of these refer to Fluvanna County 

After this story went out in the email, Lucinda Shannon of the TJPDC wrote in response to this section.

“UVA was an active stakeholder in the vision plan and participated in a three day visioning workshop with CAT and Jaunt to help plan the transit services around UVA and the urbanized areas,” Shannon wrote.

Amoaning-Yankson’s next question was whether the region should pursue new legislation or revisit the previous bill. Supervisors didn’t get into those details, but there was also a question of who would be on the new transportation planning body. 

“In terms of membership, we are looking at the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County being the initial members but also having the rural localities join as an option,” Amoaning-Yankson said. “We also want to give an opportunity like we mentioned of having UVA as a partner, and so having the opportunity for the University or other entities to also be part of this.” 

The Authority would take on the responsibility of planning and implementing services. McKeel said getting to this point has been the point of the Regional Transit Partnership. 

“And when we began the partnership as an advisory partnership, that was always the goal,” McKeel said. “We were clear about the fact we were going to come together and talk about the challenges of transit in our region, and looking toward the future of the possibility of an Authority.” 

How to pay for more service?

At a high-level, the constrained network in the vision plan finalized in late 2022 has a $35.1 million cost estimate. After relaying the current levels of state and federal funding, Amoaning-Yankson explained there would be about a $18.9 million deficit that would need to be filled to cover the full cost.  

“What we did then was review different types of funding from the different authorities in the Commonwealth,” Amoaning-Yankson said. 

Some examples of revenue sources include a dedicated portion of the sales tax, receipts from the grantor’s tax, a portion of a fuel tax, the recordation tax, truck registration fees, and a portion of the transient occupancy and lodging tax. 

Through further review and conversations, Amoaning-Yankson said the study will further explore ways to get a portion of the sales tax, the lodging tax, personal property tax, and the real estate tax. 

“We have three different technical memos on each of the stages and we have a fourth and a final report that will provide more details,” Amoaning-Yankson said. 

Here are the four three reviews from the draft. Shannon tells me there are updates in the final project.

• Land Use Assessment – Technical Memo
• Transit Propensity – Technical Memo
• Vision Statement, Goals & Objectives – Technical Memo

But what would Supervisors support? That’s going to be the real question asked across six localities. 

Supervisor Ned Gallaway is a member of the Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Policy Board as well as member of the TJPDC’s Board of Directors. That group had a briefing on October 5. 

“When you start saying specific amounts to a sales tax or transit occupancy tax, they feel like they’re being locked in and [say] ‘Oh, we have to do that one thing’ and when we do that it freaks them out,” Gallaway said. “Especially some of the surrounding localities that are more adverse to the word tax and taxes and taxing than other places.” 

That TJPDC meeting is here if you want to take a look. 

Gallaway said he is a supporter of forming an authority in order to begin bringing money in, no matter what revenue mechanism is eventually used. He asked staff to state how much money the county is currently spending. There was a quick response. 

“It’s approximately $4.8 million in the fiscal year,” said Andy Bowman, interim assistant chief financial officer for policy and partnerships. 

Gallaway said that getting other counties on board might get UVA to be more interested in participating. 

“We don’t get there without a regional transit authority and it can’t just be Albemarle, Charlottesville, and UVA,” Gallaway said. “It has to be broader and bigger than that.” 

This week, the draft study will go before the Fluvanna County Board of Supervisors on December 6. The final report will go before the Regional Transit Partnership at their meeting on January 25. The November and December meetings were canceled.

Before you go: The time to write and research of this article is covered by paid subscribers to Charlottesville Community Engagement. In fact, this particular installment comes from the November 30, 2023 edition.

To ensure this research can be sustained, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing monthly through Patreon.