Charlottesville City Council is set to adopt two manuals tonight intended to guide city employees as the new rules for building are implemented. One of them is a 13-page Affordable Dwelling Unit Manual that describes how the city will monitor units that are required by city ordinance to have their price points at certain levels. (read the draft ADU Manual)
The second is the Development Review Procedures Manual and the Charlottesville Planning Commission had their review on January 23.
“This is a document that we’ve created primarily because the zoning ordinance as adopted does not include within it the required submittals that come with any kind of application or timelines or anything like that which was on purpose,” said James Freas, the city’s director of Neighborhood Development Services. “We moved those things out of the ordinance so that we can more readily adjust them and change those things administratively in the future.”
The draft Development Review Procedures Manual is 34 pages long and describes what steps need to happen if someone wants a Comprehensive Plan review, an amendment to the zoning, or a change to a historic or design-control district property.
A major goal of the new zoning ordinance is to eliminate legislative reviews of most projects, and the procedures manual maps out the site plan process and how to get various permits. This is where you find out what public notice requirements would be for any of the above.
The manual also introduces a new concept known as the Development Plan.
“That is going to be kind of a workhorse for our review processes going forward,” Freas said. “The Development Plan is the document where we’re specifically going to be reviewing compliance with zoning.”
The final site plan must demonstrate how stormwater management requirements will be handled and what public improvements must be made by the property owner such as sidewalks and street trees. But Freas said the city wants to be able to discuss applications up front to improve their chances of getting approved by staff.
“There’s a lot more opportunities for administrative waivers, modifications, and then other forms of waivers and permits and stuff like that,” Freas said. “And there’s a lot more opportunity to kind of talk about what’s the best way of reaching compliance on one issue or another and we want to be able to have those conversations before a significant investment has been made on the engineering side.”
Minor development plans would be required for projects with two dwellings or fewer less as compared to a major development plan. Much of the Planning Commission’s discussion on this topic related to making sure that the burdens for the smaller projects were not onerous.
There will also be for the first time landscaping requirements for developments of residential lots.
Any project over 50,000 square feet requires completion of a traffic demand management plan that requires a community meeting.
“It’s a new section that has never existed before and it asks a developer of over 50,000 square feet to provide a plan for mitigating or reducing the impacts on your local transportation and parking systems,” Freas said
Freas ended the meeting with a review of what Council changed in the Development Code following the Planning Commission’s public hearing.
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 February 5, 2024 edition of the newsletter and podcast. This one is backdated to February 5 despite being posted on February 7 because it was written before Council adopted the Development Code Manual. Experiments are weird.
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