Albemarle Planning Commissioners request different designations for different kinds of rural land

The Albemarle Board of Supervisors officially kicked off the review of the county’s Comprehensive Plan on November 3, 2021. Just over three years later, the creation of what’s being called AC44 continues slowly. The second of four phases of the state mandated update wrapped up last spring and the third got underway last summer after staff made a few changes to the format but not the content.

On Wednesday, the Board of Supervisors will hold a work session on the draft chapter of the rural area land use chapter. Since 1980, Albemarle has had a growth management policy in place that only allows for intense development on around five percent of the county’s 726 square miles.

Before the Board’s discussion this week, it is worth revisiting the November 19, 2024 work session at which the Albemarle Planning Commission had their review of the draft of the rural area land use chapter.

At the start, Commission Chair Fred Missel pointed out two decisions on the rural area made by consensus so far.

• For instance, further study will be required before any zoning changes are suggested for the areas identified in the Comprehensive Plan as Crossroad Communities. However, the Board agreed that small-scale uses such as doctor’s offices and other professional offices would be acceptable.
• The two bodies have also agreed that there should be small area plans conducted for two of the four rural area interstate interchanges. These would be at Shadwell and Yancey Mills, with Yancey Mills prioritized first.

The process is slow because each work session is only seeking input on specific areas of each chapter, extending broad conversations across multiple work sessions.

“We’ll be focusing on just policy and tools, not getting into the goals, actions, objectives,” said Tonya Swartzendruber, the county’s long-range planning manager.

The Planning Commission got into the goals, actions, and objectives on December 10. At the beginning of the November 19 meeting, Swartzendruber listed some of the reasons the county has sought to protect the rural area.

“Forty-six percent of the land is within our water supply watershed and over 65 percent of the rural area has important soil for agriculture,” Swartzendruber said. “Thirteen percent of the rural area has already been converted to other uses other to residential and other non-rural uses.”

Swartzendruber said farms in Albemarle County brought in $43.2 million in 2022, a figure that comes from the 2022 Agricultural Census conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (take a look at the data for Virginia)

One future planning effort that will take place whenever AC44 concludes is to conduct a rural area land use plan. The phrase “crossroads communities” will be discarded from AC44 document in favor of the term “rural communities.”

Swartzendruber noted that a large number of people live in Albemarle’s rural area.

“Forty-three percent of our population lives in the rural area and while we don’t necessarily want to encourage new non-residential uses, we do want to support our residents that already live there,” Swartzendruber said.

The current direction is to require special use permits for non-residential and non-agricultural uses in the rural area.

Commissioner Lonnie Murray said the original Comprehensive Plan from 1971 had a future land use map that showed areas for agriculture and ones for conservation. He would like to see that restored because different uses might be allowed in each, similar to what Greene County has in place.

“We need to go back to something like this,” Murray said. “Talking about what we expect in the conservation district, in the agricultural district.”

Commissioner Karen Firehock said she would support such a move.

“That is a useful tool because it then says like in a conservation zone, this is a more sensitive area and it’s already enumerated why that is,” Firehock said. “And therefore you’re going to be a little more restrictive in how you would zone that or it’s an agricultural zone and it therefore needs more services related or whatever.”

Commissioner Luis Carrazana also supported the idea because he said it might help add more detail and nuance to the concept that 95 percent of Albemarle’s land is just “green” on the future land use map.

“I think it’s misrepresentative to just say there’s 95 percent in green and for, because people take that to think, well, we have all this land that we’re not using,” Carrazana said. “Well, a lot of that land you really can’t use for, for development. You certainly wouldn’t in good conscience. So I do think that is an important step that I’m certainly in full support of.”

At this meeting, the five Commissioners present also discussed what the Comprehensive Plan should say about agritourism in the county and whether many of those uses really support agricultural businesses.

There was another discussion about what changes might be required to encourage some housing in specific locations. Currently Albemarle County requires a minimum of a two acre lot in the rural area. Planner Ben Holt explained why.

“Some of that is for practical purposes because most of these properties will need septic fields,” Holt said. “It requires a certain amount of land specifically with the drain fields and a drain field reserve. The other thing is discouraging public water and sewer within the rural area, both to keep infrastructure costs down and to discourage sprawl.”

Commissioner Firehock said the difficulty of developing in the rural area was partially intended to direct growth into the areas designated for intensity of use. She said there’s a chart in the 2018 Biodiversity Action Plan worth noting.

“It just shows when the county adopted these new policies, you see the trend line and when [the county] started doing a lot to encourage development in the urban ring, the trend line went right up to the urban ring and started going flat for the rural areas,” Firehock said. “So the policy worked.”

Firehock said the Comprehensive Plan should continue to discourage people from moving to the rural area because more people increases the need for more services such as additional school buses. However, she did suggest additional support for programs to rehabilitate existing homes in the rural area to keep them as viable structures.

When Commissioner Corey Clayborne asked about solar uses in the rural area, he was told by Planning Director Michael Barnes that would come up in the Resilient Communities chapter which will come up in April 2025. He also added the Planning Commission will soon review changes to the county’s solar ordinance.

The Planning Commission reviewed the draft Environmental Stewardship chapter on December 10. I hope to get to that one as well.

Before you go: This article was originally sent out as part of the Charlottesville Community Engagement newsletter in the January 7, 2025 edition. Both are functions of Town Crier Productions. You can support the work by purchasing a paid subscription or contributing monthly through Patreon. You can also send in a check or send an email, but drop me a line first.