Albemarle staff working on five projects to implement new Comprehensive Plan

In Virginia, local governments adopt visionary documents called Comprehensive Plans which set out the general tone for what elected officials want to happen in a community. For instance, Charlottesville City Council’s most recent plan adopted in November 2021 called for changes to the city’s zoning to allow for more residential development.

Since 1979, Albemarle’s Comprehensive Plan has included a growth management policy intended to concentrate dense development in around five percent of the county’s 726 square miles. Supervisors adopted a new update called AC44 in October 2025 that kept the boundaries in place but suggested there may be additional uses allowed in the rural area to accommodate some goals in the Economic Development Strategic Plan.

AC44 went into effect in January at a time when planning staff and a consultant were already working on updates to the county’s land use rules. Supervisors got an update on what staff refer to as “zoning modernization” in March and on April 15 for an update on how AC44 would be implemented.

Resources from the meeting:

• AC44 Implementation Work Project Descriptions (review draft)
• AC44 Implementation – Big Moves Graphic and Work Project Timeline Tables
• AC44 Implementation – Big Moves Summary Sheets
• Presentation from the April 15, 2026 meeting

The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia projects Albemarle County’s population will cross 137,000 by 2040, up from the United States Census count of 112,395 in 2020.

How will Albemarle accommodate the influx of people?

“AC44,” said James Wilkinson, a long range planner in Albemarle County. “It’s a remarkable high level plan of action for how Albemarle county will grow and develop over the next 20 years.”

The new version continues the same growth management policy that’s been in place for decades. On April 15, Supervisors were briefed on five work projects staff wants to undertake in the first year of AC44’s implementation.

In addition to an update of the zoning code, the county wants to create a new version of a Small Area Plan called an “Activity Center Plan.” They also want to review priorities for planning in the Rural Areas and they want do a better job of tracking whether Comprehensive Plan goals are being met.

Let’s start with what staff calls “zoning modernization.”

“This is the comprehensive ongoing update to our 40-year-old ordinance zoning ordinance to make our regulations clearer, more consistent and better aligned with the community’s vision for the future,” Wilkinson said.

The Planning Commission will review the second phase at their work session on May 12.

Since 2000, the county has relied on master plans to guide development in growth areas with one for Crozet adopted for the first time in December 2004. The new idea is to have more focused “activity centers” and AC44 reduced the number of possibilities.

“Looking forward, activity centers are expected to accommodate a significant proportion of the county’s future growth and economic development,” Wilkinson said. “Activity center plans will identify opportunities for increased density, well connected mixed use development, establish multimodal transportation networks, support an expanded housing supply and affordable housing opportunities, prioritize catalyst projects and address infrastructure needs and market conditions.”

The idea would be to do one such plan a year for the next three years. These have not yet been identified.

The third project is to create a multimodal transportation plan that will build on previous documents and studies to recommend a way forward, according to transportation planner Jessica Dimmick.

“The outcomes will include a clearly defined transportation vision, maps of future transportation networks by mode, a prioritized list of transportation projects, policy, program and strategy recommendations, and an implementation plan with a funding strategy,” Dimmick said.

The last official list of transportation priorities in Albemarle County dates back to 2019 according to the transportation section of the planning website. Supervisors saw a version in 2023 that was never formally adopted and are expected to see an updated list in June. (review the 2023 draft list)

Supervisor Michael Pruitt of the Scottsville District sits on the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Transit Authority, a relatively new entity that is doing its own prioritization project. He has previously expressed concern at one of those meetings about the sheer number of plans.

“We also, at our last CARTA meeting, got briefed on the more than a dozen transit plans that have been produced in just this decade,” Pruitt said. “I hope you’ll forgive a layer of maybe mild agitation or skepticism on just thelength of the plan process and wanting to make sure that there’s a deliverable that we will experience not just as a board, but as a community..”

Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District pointed out that many in Crozet are still expecting sidewalks they believe have been promised in that growth area’s master plan and its two updates.

“I do hope that there would be some report back fairly soon about where a sidewalk assessment would fit in and how that could be done and if that can be implemented,” Mallek said.

Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio District said staff has to clearly describe what criteria are being used to score projects.

“I’m sure you’ll put the list out with the information on the, you know, on the agenda packet, but I think it would be helpful for the board to understand what it took to get to those lists or to that,” Gallaway said.

The fourth AC44 project is to review priorities in the rural area and some of this work is closely related to the zoning modernization to increase economic development in some areas. Wilkinson read from a list from the presentation of some of the work currently underway in the current fiscal year.

“Revising regulations for special events on historic and heritage properties, investigating the feasibility of additional permitted uses for registered historic properties, exploring ways to enable small and appropriately scaled agriculture related businesses and support services and considering modifications to expand opportunities for diverse revenue streams for agribusinesses,” Wilkinson said.

The rural area work will also include a look at existing conditions in the rural area to locate key environmental and cultural resources. This would set up creation of a Rural Area Plan intended to identify other non-residential uses that would be useful for economic development purposes.

Mallek said a major purpose for restricting uses in the rural area is watershed protection, something known to long-term county residents. She said she does not have constituents who have approached her looking for ways to make money off of their land but plenty do understand there was a downzoning in 1980 that restricted development rights.

“Those landowners, the ones who have been around for a long time, have already made that significant sacrifice,” Mallek said. “They don’t need to have their quietude blown over by some new resident who decides they want to come in and have a brewery with one hot plant and have weddings 17 times a month. So this is the kind of dichotomy that we’re going to have to figure out when you try to implement some of these generic things that are in the comp plan right now.

The fifth AC44 area is administration and management including a focus on analyzing how well the county is using its growth area to satisfy various needs.

Gallaway said he had no issues with the way the five work projects have been set up, but he said all of the planning needs to have a clear connection to advancing the goals in both Housing Albemarle adopted in July 2021 and the new Economic Development Strategic Plan adopted last summer.

“I want to start hearing that more explicitly, explicitly stated. This is how Housing Albemarle is getting updated through these five work projects versus oh, we’re going to take this plan, we’re going to go do an update to it and then start doing these like cross analysis between the two.”

Deputy County Executive Ann Wall said staff across Albemarle government are coordinating to move those plans forward as the “Big Moves” of AC44 begin to be put in motion.

“As we talked about [and] begun the conversation about activity center planning and what that looks like, the staff have already had conversations with economic development so that we can understand the economic development plan and that we can use the action steps call down in the economic development plan to inform how it is that we’re selecting that first activity center planning,” Wall said. “We know they have to work together.”

For more on land use policy in Albemarle County, continue to read Charlottesville Community Engagement including the next story.

Any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments and I will try to respond with time!

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