Albemarle PC to review Comprehensive Plan recommendations for land use and transportation

What to get your planning obsessed friends for a holiday gift? Perhaps a recording of the Albemarle County Planning Commission that begins at 6 p.m. in Lane Auditorium. (meeting info)

Why? The only item on the advisory’s final agenda is a work session to get feedback on the draft Land Use and Transportation recommendations for various components that the county refers to as “planning toolkits.” This is part of the county’s update of the Comprehensive Plan, a process that call AC44. 

You may ask: What is a “planning toolkit?” 

“Planning Toolkits included activity centers, factors for future Development Areas expansion, crossroads communities, and rural interstate interchanges,” reads the staff report.

The recommendations are relevant because they address a central question of the AC44 process: How will the county make adjustments to its growth management policies to accommodate thousands more people expected to live here by the year 2044? Before we get to those recommendations, you may find some of the stories I wrote this year to be relevant to this discussion:

• Albemarle Planning Commission reviews “Activity Centers” in AC44 discussion, August 25, 2023
• Albemarle Planning Commission weighs in on criteria to expand development area, September 1, 2023
• Should uses in Albemarle’s Crossroads Communities be expanded?, September 9, 2023

I did not find the time to write up the rural interstate interchanges portion. 

Planning Commissions will be taken through five topic areas and five maps. I’m going to wait until I’ve heard the discussion before I write much of this in detail, but I’m very interested to know what people think about this process to date. Some things to observe.

• Albemarle anticipates using something called the Multimodal System Plan (MMSP) to map out new Activity Centers using different transportation methods. 
• There is a new map showing the location of “Activity Centers” for all of the county’s growth areas. (review the map)
• There are many suggestions to changes for the definitions of various Future Land Use designations in the Comprehensive Plan. For instance, Neighborhood Residential (Low) is currently depicted as between 1 and 1.99 units. Staff recommends changing that to 1 to 3. The full list of changes is listed here. 
• There are updates to the Community Design Guidelines. (review the updates)

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 December 18, 2023 Week Ahead. To ensure this research can be sustained, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing monthly through Patreon.