At their meeting on June 3, 2026, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors will be presented with an updated list of transportation priorities as ranked by county staff. While the elected officials were able to see a draft list in 2023, the most recently approved list is from 2019. The delay is due to the adoption of a new Comprehensive Plan last October.
“The purpose of this prioritization effort is to produce a ranked project list within a relatively short timeframe using readily available data and resources, without a large-scale overhaul of the methodology developed in 2023,” reads the staff report.
There are a total of 169 projects and one purpose for the project is to guide use of the county’s Transportation Leveraging fund which covers the costs of local money required to match federal or state grants. According to the draft FY2027 budget, Albemarle has about $14 million on hand and will put another $4.5 million into the fund in FY2029.
This version of the prioritization list introduces the concept of project stages. Those in the first require further study before being eligible for funding. The second stage projects still need to go through preliminary engineering in order to have cost estimates produced. Third stage ones are ready to pursue funding. Fourth stage? Fully funded and off the list!
That same budget lists $13.6 million in funding for Eastern Avenue in Crozet. Last year, the county tried to move that project forward with a public-private partnership but the effort did not yield a successful bid as reported by the Crozet Gazette.
The list of projects is going before Supervisors for a vote at the same time the county begins work on a “Multimodal Transportation Plan” as one of the five Comprehensive Plan projects being undertaken first. Learn more about those projects in this story I wrote in mid-May.
The prioritizations themselves are carved in a few different ways and come with a caveat.
“The scoring methodology does not account for other factors such as cost and project effectiveness that may influence project selection,” reads page 5 of the report accompanying the list. “Additionally, funding opportunities may arise in which projects that are ranked lower on the list, even those that are not top ranked, are most eligible and competitive, and these projects may be funded before projects that rank higher.”
For instance, the top-ranked project for bike and pedestrian mobility and safety is the Rivanna River Bicycle and Pedestrian Crossing. The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission has tried and failed three times to secure federal funding for the $42.5 million project. They’re trying a fourth for funds to additional engineering to try to reduce the cost.
Anyone with an interest in transportation should take a look at these documents. There is a lot of jargon in this but you can always ask questions about what it means.
- Transportation Project Prioritization Report
- Map of all of the projects
- Albemarle County Transportation Project List by Project ID
- Scoring methodology
- Map of the priority projects
- Draft list with project scores and ranks, grouped by project stage
Before you move on: Thank you for reading this story about an upcoming meeting in local government. This is the sort of article that fits the mission of Town Crier Productions, a mission to increase awareness about how government works by looking up close at what happens at meetings. This story comes from a Week Ahead edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement published on May 31, 2026.
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