Albemarle Supervisors want to say in governance of the future of public transit

Two of the six members of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors are on the new Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority and have been reviewing a study intended to determine which of several potential routes should be selected for the quest for additional funding.

Five of the six members had the opportunity to review RK&K’s “Regional Transit Service Prioritization Study” and first heard a definition of CARTA from Albemarle staff.

“It was established by the legislature and activated by the city and county,” said Tonya Swartzendruber, a planning manager with Albemarle County. “Its purpose is to serve as a collaborative, multi-jurisdictional entity for identifying and solving transit issues.”

The potential projects reviewed by the study come from a variety of sources including the Regional Transit Vision Plan overseen by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in 2022. Some of these projects also came from the strategic plans put together by Jaunt and Charlottesville Area Transit.

The routes were analyzed by how well they might increase intensity of service and how they might increase the footprint of transit service. Supervisors were shown lists of possible scenarios.

The first comment came from Sally Duncan, elected to represent the Jack Jouett District on the Board of Supervisors in November 2025. Duncan is a member of CARTA who said she had originally thought it would be straight-forward to just fix existing routes.

“It is very expensive,” Duncan said. “There’s just so much that goes into even adding an extra bus, and you need extra mechanics and all of that. But we are clearly working on it in a way that this does feel more hopeful and more significant than the mass amount of plans that have previously been done.”

Supervisor Mike Pruitt is also on CARTA and said it seemed much of the work of the prioritization study was duplicative given that Charlottesville Area Transit is slowly implementing their Transit Strategic Plans.

“It also feels very similar to the work that CAT already does,” Pruitt said. “It is, in fact, in some ways just CARTA now doing the work that CAT would be doing at the end of their current services upgrade implementation process over the next few years, right? They have a series of route improvements they’re currently making.”

CAT Director Garland Williams told the CARTA Board on August 24 that the next round of route changes will take place in February. I’ll be following up in a future newsletter.

Pruitt said CARTA should slowly take on the role of planning for the region but at the moment Albemarle County is nothing more than a customer of CAT services with no meaningful role in decision-making. He said that should change over time.

“It is my view as one of our representatives on CARTA that we should be trying to figure out how to use the regional governance body that we’ve created to actually do regional governance,” Pruitt said.

Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District was one of the unanimous votes to join CARTA but she had thought that meant Albemarle did gain a governance role.

“I thought CARTA was basically absorbing CAT and CAT would no longer exist, and it would just be CARTA that would be doing CAT, JAUNT, and, you know, microCAT,” LaPisto-Kirtley said.

Supervisors, including LaPisto-Kirtley, were told clearly that CARTA would start out as a planning body with no role in running transit agencies. Go back and read that story

Deputy County Executive Ann Wall also provided a reminder on September 16.

“When we originally started talking about CARTA, we started talking about consolidated planning efforts,” Wall said. “Those original conversations were not about providing service.”

Supervisor Ann Mallek was not in office in 2005 when a push toward regional transit was launched but was in office in 2009 when the General Assembly granted permission for CARTA to be formed. She noted that many older materials seemed to be missing from a list used by RK&K for their work.

“We are going round and round in circles,” Mallek said. “It’s just hundreds of thousands of dollars of consultant money has been spent to modernize the wording or something. And I keep asking at those presentations, did you look at this? No, we didn’t.”

Mallek said Albemarle County needs to be involved with actual governance and the study as presented did not offer choice to elected officials who have to sign off on the county’s budgets. Mallek said all Supervisors need access to the data so they can provide information to the two CARTA representatives on how to vote.

Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio District said the current structure is one where CAT is one of the county’s vendors but actually getting additional service changes is difficult. He said he wants 30 minute service on Rio Road and understands the county would have to pay for it because CAT and Jaunt are the only potential vendors.

When elected in 2017, the idea of a regional transit authority was supposed to solve some of the issues.

“It’s been almost ten years since we said we need one governing body. that can make all the decisions, that everybody understands the funding mechanism of it,” Gallaway said. “And it wasn’t just the county and it wasn’t beating up on CAT. It meant that the university needed to be involved. It meant Jaunt had to be part of the equation. And lo and behold, where are we at? We’re still having that same darn conversation. And the routes on Rio Road are still 60 minutes.”

Gallaway said Albemarle doesn’t want to take CAT from the city but City Council will have to be asked if they have the political will to make changes to give Albemarle more of a say. He said at this point he did not think CARTA was the place to advance that question.

Gallaway said when Albemarle invested in MicroCAT, one idea was that ridership data might inform where future fixed routes could go. That so far is not being factored in. He said he hopes to have that conversation at the joint meeting with City Council on October 6.

County Executive Jeff Richardson said there will be an opportunity and representatives from the University of Virginia have been invited.

“I know that we’ll have representation there from the president’s office [and] that it’s a good opportunity for the boards to consider with the partnership report that will be coming out to both boards ahead of that meeting,” Richardson said.

Richardson said the recent trip led by the Chamber of Commerce to Chapel Hill highlighted how the transit system there works as a unified system and can be used as an example to help guide public transportation in this community. I could not afford to pay to go on the trip but I was able to write up a story anyway.

“We’ve got interest from the University of Virginia in learning more about that, and we just got a lot of work to do,” Richardson said.

Supervisor Fred Missel of the Samuel Miller District was not present at the September 16 meeting. He is the director of design and development for the University of Virginia Foundation.

Mallek said another place to compare is Blacksburg Transit which serves Montgomery County and Virginia Tech.

More stories on transit in the September 21, 2026 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement.

Before you go: The goal of Town Crier Productions is to increase awareness about what is happening at the local, regional, state, and federal government levels. Please share the work with others if you want people to know things. Paid subscribers cover the cost of conducting research for this article which was originally published in the September 17, 2026 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement.  You can either subscribe through Substack or make a charitable contribution.