The lawsuit against Charlottesville’s new Development Code was filed in January 2024 about a month before the rules went into effect. Staff in the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development Services have continued to transition to the new rules and plan a first set of revisions this year.
The new code includes provisions that the Board of Zoning Appeals will step in to settle disputes.
They’ll do so tonight in a meeting at CitySpace that begins at 4 p.m. The property owner of 2603 Jefferson Park Avenue wants to build a taller fence than allowed under the new code.
“In the former zoning ordinance, there were no restrictions to where a fence could be located or how tall it could be as long as it didn’t restrict sight lines for vehicular traffic,” reads the staff report.
The new code restricts fence height in a front yard to no more than four feet.
Neither the owners of 2603 Jefferson Park Avenue nor the fence construction company they hired were aware of the new ordinance. A notice of violation was given on April 24, 2025 and the property owner said she needed the higher fence to help block noise which aggravates her post-traumatic stress disorder.
The situation could be remedied in one of two ways. An application could be filed for a special exception which would go through the Planning Commission and the City Council, or a variance could be filed. The BZA takes up the latter.
However, staff claims that the fence does block sight lines.
Learn more in the staff report.
Before you go: This segment went out in the June 26, 2025 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement and then published here about an hour later. This story should have come out in a previous edition, but that did not happen. This is all a work in progress. Want it to progress further? Take a look here and consider some form of support.
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