Planning Commissioners briefed on “refinement” of AC44 process

For decades, Albemarle’s Comprehensive Plan has set the parameters for land use policy in a locality that completely surrounds the City of Charlottesville. The vast majority of the county’s 726 square miles have been designated as rural with residential development discouraged in favor of land conservation. 

State law requires these plans to be updated every five years and the Board of Supervisors last approved the document in June 2015 after several years of discussion. The document is 406 pages long and organized into several chapters, each of which has goals and objectives that signal at a high level what county staff are to do. 

On November 3, 2021, the Board formally began another review process with a target date of completing the task by the summer of 2024. Two of four phases of work under the title AC44 have been completed, but now county staff are suggesting some changes to how the document will be finalized. 

Michael Barnes, hired late last year as Albemarle’s new planning director, briefed the Planning Commission on July 9 about refinements staff wants to make to the process. He said planning staff in April ended AC44’s second phase with a final round of input with the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors on various chapters and their goals and objectives.

“One of the things we were doing at that time —and still we were trying to run several aspects at the same time—was to develop sort of the actions that would undergird those planning goals and objectives,” Barnes said. 

Barnes said many of these action steps crossed multiple chapters and multiple departments. County staff decided to move away from eight chapters on specific topics in favor of “plan elements.” 

“At the same time, senior management was really pushing us to have a little bit more of an innovative and easy to use format and a plan and so those two kind of major efforts sort of us led us to say, let’s make sure we have the structure of the document in a well thought-out outline so we will be able to make it easier to use and easier to read especially for people who aren’t going to make the investment to read the whole thing,” Barnes said. 

Before we go further, let’s go back a step. 

One of the first briefings Supervisors received on the plan’s update was given in October 2021, a few weeks before the process got formally underway. At that time, the elected officials were told that the plan would be reviewed in four phases with the first having the title “Growth Management Policy and Plan Framework.” 

“The goal of this phase is to review, evaluate, and if needed update the growth management policy through the lens of equity, climate action, and county capacity projections,” said Rachel Falkenstein at that meeting. At the time, Falkenstein was a planning manager for the county but she now works for the firm 3TP Ventures. 

This first phase was completed and resulted in something called the “Framework for an Equitable and Resilient Community.” Barnes said that ended up being too vague and non-specific. (download the document)

“What we were also recognizing is that we were using terms that weren’t sort of a defined nomenclature and we were using them in different spots and the same term and so we needed to bring clarity,” Barnes said.

Under this new idea, the new Comprehensive Plan would be arranged in four parts with the first being called “Plan Context.” This is where the already created framework would go as well as the county vision. 

“Those are the policies for what we want our community to look like and a reader should understand what is it that the county is trying to achieve without having to read the whole document,” Barnes said. 

The second phase of the AC44 process to date involved the creation of “toolkits” which were used as a way to think through potential expansion of the county’s designated growth area to accommodate additional development.  Barnes said those still exist but are now labeled in the second part of the Comprehensive Plan to be called “Place Type Framework.” 

“This would be sort of the land uses, the land use map, activity centers, rural areas, development areas,” Barnes said. “That’s sort of the major divide. How things play out geographically in the community, sort of ‘what’s the chessboard?’  The framework for how and where we want to grow, where we want to provide public services, and how we want to protect our resources both in the development area and the rural area.” 

Chapters for each topic would no longer exist and there would be a single goal for each of the ten plan elements. These would be in the third part of the document called “Plan Implementation” where those goals and objectives would go. 

“How we’ll work toward taking that vision our community has and implementing it for our growth management strategy,” Barnes said. 

Existing small area plans and other documents such as Project Enable and the Biodiversity Action Plan would go in the appendix. 

Commissioner input

In the first round of questions, Commissioner Lonnie Murray of the White Hall District expressed support for the existing growth management policy and the way it is currently described.

“I think that that seems to be missing, at least elements seem to be missing, in the last draft I saw,” Murray said. “I think so much emphasis was placed on those planning toolkits that that core conversation of how we establish and encourage growth to be in the growth area and rural uses to be in the rural is kind of missing or didn’t get the level of attention it could get.” 

At-Large Planning Commissioner Luis Carrazana said he liked the direction staff was headed. He said at the very least, the Comprehensive Plan needed to set out what the county hopes to achieve with growth management. 

“You can’t really have one without the other in terms of the rural area and the development area,” Carrazana said. “If we can define how we’re going to grow. What is it that we need to accommodate in the planning horizon and how are we going to get there?”

Carrazana said the term “planning toolkit” was nebulous but imagining new activity centers and imagining new places for some uses in “crossroads communities” was worthwhile. He said the county needed to maximize development areas to preserve rural areas. 

“We need to have a plan that developers can see a path for how we can get to the growth we’re looking for in the planning horizon without always thinking we have to grow the area,” Carrazana said. “Now, if the plan shows we have to grow the area because we can’t meet it, then we can begin to address that.”

Comprehensive Plans look ahead 20 years and the Weldon Cooper Center projects the population of Albemarle increasing from the 2020 U.S. Census count of 112,395 to 124,016 in 2030 and 138,523 by 2040. 

Carrazana said not all parts of the rural area are equal and the county’s biodiversity action plan should be used to determine which ones must be protected for ecological purposes. 

Commissioner Murray said he wanted to expand the way the rural area is described to provide more detail for why large portions of the county should not be developed.

“Activity is not just simply commercial and residential,” Murray said. “Activity can also be things like what are the areas that are used for productive agriculture? What are the areas that are productively used for biodiversity conservation?”

Murray said there are also agricultural support services that could be authorized in the county. 

Alongside Barnes at the July 9 discussion was Tonya Swartzendruber, a planning manager recently hired by the county. She welcomed Murray’s comments.

“I appreciate that idea because that’s something that’s been a little fuzzy in my mind and the way that you put it is starting to help me focus it a little bit more,” Swartzendruber said. 

As part of the community engagement process and discussions for the new “Place Type Framework” section of the plan, staff will begin to seek distinctions between public service priorities in the growth and rural areas.

“Our priorities might be slightly different,” Swartzendruber said. “They’re important but how we prioritize what we want and where we want it is going to be fundamentally different in a development area and a rural area so this part two is really to help understand how that works for each area.” 

Swartzendruber said the second part will be a shorter document followed by a much longer  implementation chapter. 

Commissioner Carrazana pointed out that many parts of the development area lack transportation infrastructure to realize the existing potential. For instance, the Crozet Master Plan has called for a north-south road called Eastern Avenue and parts have been built in pieces. He asked if the third part of the plan would provide details of how to complete the bigger picture.

“So are you here going to begin to talk about how do you unlock the development opportunities that are in those activity centers in Crozet, for instance,” Carrazana said. “How do you unlock the higher densities that we talk about in the master plan? Because right now we have a master plan that is not achievable with the infrastructure we have.” 

Carrazana suggested high-level funding strategies be included in the second part of the plan to signal the importance of paying for new infrastructure. 

That prompted Commissioner Julian Bivins of the Jack Jouett District to point out that many developers face a hostile environment in which many members of the community speak out against density that’s allowed at the higher ranges allowed under the current Comprehensive Plan. 

“When we talk about how do we increase the built environment in the development area, my experience to date is that when a developer comes and brings a project that might do that, all hell breaks lose,” Bivins said. “The surrounding communities absolutely bring every bad behavior that is possible for privileged people to bring to that discussion.” 

Bivins said that should prompt a question about whether those densities should be so high given local opposition. He added that the plan needs to be realistic. For instance, the plan should note the county does not own Charlottesville Area Transit as well as other current realities.

“We do not have a park in the county that a person can easily walk to,” Bivins said. 

Carrazana thanked Bivins for his comments and alluded to his own day-job working as an architect for the University of Virginia’s planning agency. He admitted UVA doesn’t face much opposition for its development because they or their real estate foundation acquire most of the land on which they build. 

“And so for us, how we plan for our future is a little bit different because we have a lot more control of our land use so I get its not the same when you transfer it to the county,” Carrazana said. “However, the purpose of long-range planning is that we can begin to identify what are those hurdles? What are the areas that we want to grow? To what density? And then, who are the partners that we need to bring in whether they are other state agencies or private partners to begin to unlock the possibilities of the higher densities?” 

Carrazana said a successful Comprehensive Plan would set up pathways for the county to enter into partnerships to help overcome hurdles to implement what the plan has already said for years.

Commissioner Corey Clayborne said there was one partnership that so far the Comprehensive Plan update has not addressed. Before joining the Albemarle body, Clayborne served as a planning commissioner in Charlottesville. 

“You talk a little bit about the border with the City of Charlottesville for example,” Clayborne said. “I’m not sure if we’ve ever talked about that as a collective group. It’s something staff has, but where does that fall into our plan as we’re looking at 20 years down the road.”

Charlottesville adopted its Comprehensive Plan as the second of three elements of the overall Cville Plans Together initiative which ran from early 2020 to last December when Council adopted a new development code that increased residential density throughout the entire city. 

The Albemarle and Charlottesville Planning Commissions did not meet a single time during the entire time that both localities have been working on plans. 

Clayborne also noted that for a document that originally put climate and equity at the forefront, the materials presented on July 9 didn’t seem to really address either. 

“With climate and equity being the two cannons, I feel like we’re just not bold,” Clayborne said. “Is there a place to be bold with that? With a lot of the climate goals, a lot of it comes from good design. We can’t really mandate that but how do you encourage it? Very little am I impressed with applications from a design standpoint where there are so many missed opportunities.” 

Swartzendruber said staff will continue to work on a final draft to present to the Planning Commission. First they have to present the suggestions to the Board of Supervisors. 

This is not a complete accounting of the Planning Commission’s discussion and I encourage anyone who wants to know more to view the video. Many of these topics will come up again both in the context of the Comprehensive Plan and on bodies such as the Regional Transit Partnership. 

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