New NDS director previews departmental work plan for Charlottesville PC

At the beginning of the final meeting of the Charlottesville Planning Commission for 2024, the new director of the Neighborhood Development Services stood before the appointed body to get feedback on what her department will be doing in 2025. But first, Kellie Brown went over some highlights for the year.

“We have and we continue to support a significant, significant amount of development review and building review,” Brown said. “Over 1,000 permits reviewed in this past year. 1,700 permits issued and a significant number of inspections. Over 6,000.”

Brown recently joined NDS after being a planner in Arlington County for 16 years, as I reported in September.

There are 28 employees in NDS with four current vacancies. The department is divided into a planning section and a section that provides support to zoning administration, building inspection, and historic preservation.

“I supervise the work of our larger planning team which is made up of our current planning services led by Matt Alfele as our development services planning manager,” Brown said. “Also our transportation planning group and then our support services.”

The city is currently hiring for a long range planning manager, a position that pays between $83,678.40 and $107,203.20 a year.

The new zoning ordinance went into effect on February 19 and since then the NDS department has processed applications under the new rules as well as several under the old rules that made it under the deadline. That includes ten major development plans, two of which have been approved.

The Comprehensive Plan that helped guide the creation of the Development Code is now more than three years old having been adopted originally in November 2021. Soon it will be time to get to work on an update.

“It might be hard to believe that we have just adopted our comp plan not too long ago, but we will be required to conduct a review,” Brown said. “How should we be setting ourselves up to complete that by 2026? What are the key areas that we really want to be focused on there?”

Before that, though, the city will create a new transportation plan to guide activity across multiple city departments.

“This is an item that has emerged really recognizing that the city has a number of priorities across several different plan documents,” Brown said. “ They don’t always speak to each other consistently and they don’t always come across in a way that everyone can kind of understand where we’re headed.”

Before that plan is finished, the city still needs to move forward with policies to make streets safer through traffic calming, lowering speed limits, and building more infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.

The city also plans to crack down on short-term rentals that are not compliant.

“We will be focusing on home stays,” Brown said. “So improving enforcement by investing in software that will really help us with tracking. But also that can be a data point to conduct a zoning study to help refine our existing regulations to make enforcement easier.”

When the Development Code was adopted, former NDS Director and now Deputy City Manager James Freas said small area plans would follow for those sections designated in the Future Land Use Map as “Sensitive Communities” with the first being for 10th and Page.

“Our initial step there will be starting to pull together an understanding of the existing conditions in that neighborhood, and really seeking to identify what are the key issues that can be addressed, that should be addressed, that a small area plan can help resolve, and working with the community as well, collaborating with them to identify those key planning issues,” Brown said.

Three of the seven Planning Commissioners reside in the 10th and Page neighborhood.

There will also be refinements to the Development Code itself including the production of educational materials to explain how it works both for homeowners as well as investors. She said the city will also be developing a task force to study the possibility of what she referred to as “stabilizing” neglected and deteriorated properties. Here’s how that reads in the presentation:

“Assemble a task force to identify and develop customized plans to address limited number of most neglected/deteriorating properties and return them to stabilized housing opportunities,” reads the presentation.

But a lot of work will also go into tweaking the code itself.

“Things like providing better language to allow attached dwellings across zoning side lot lines,” Brown said. “Right now there’s [a] four foot setback still that makes an attached dwelling unit impossible to build across two development lots.”

There are also policy questions which could be revisited in the next fiscal year such as whether to proceed with limited commercial uses in residential neighborhoods or whether the heights of buildings in residential districts need to be adjusted. A more pressing need is to provide more clarity on what the appropriate height and massing should be on the Downtown Mall.

Developer Jeffrey Levien has proposed a 184 foot tall structure at the site of the current Violet Crown and the Board of Architectural Review will resume their conversation on a pre-application conference on December 17.

Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg suggested NDS provide a service like Albemarle County does with its development dashboard that tracks progress toward housing production.

“They split it up into their comp plan areas and we could split it up into our planning neighborhoods and they split it up into like, you know, single family, detached, attached, multifamily,” Stolzenberg said. “Just something that simple would be great to see as a product from the city and then, you know, five years later of producing that we could much more easily start to see trends externally.”

Brown will present to the work plan to City Council in January.