Board of Supervisors Planning Academy and Budget Work Session   3/8/2016

And we are going to have one other supervisor coming soon.

So we'll have four of us here today.

And I know that Tim needs to call the planning commissioner.

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that.

So I call the Planning Commission to order and as I understand it, we're going to move to 241 later.

And before we begin, I just would like to introduce our officer for today, Officer Payne.

Thank you for being here once again.

We really appreciate your presence.

And I think I'm just, just to make sure that everybody

OK, knows each other.

We have names here.

I see one person I haven't met yet.

So can we just go around and just say who we are and what district we're from so that everybody knows everybody?

And then we'll let Lee Catlin start.

Sure.

Yeah, we're no relationship.

Thank you.

Mike Lafferty, Jack Jouett.

Pam Riley, Scottsville District, Planning Commission.

Diantha McKeel, Supervisor, Jack Jouett District.

and we will be video, oh, excuse me.

Oh wait, I was gonna introduce him in a minute.

I was just gonna say that we were bad.

Okay, no problem.

I wanted to let everybody know that we will be video streaming this.

and so today what we're going to have is our planning academy training and overview and we have our Wayne Sillenberg, our director of planning who is on the dais now.

I was thinking that Lee Catlin, our assistant county executive was going to start us off.

Is that the case?

Thank you, Chair Palmer.

I'm Lee Catlin, assistant county executive.

We're

really actually very excited to bring this planning academy to you.

You may be aware we've been in the process of orienting our new board of supervisors members and based on some very good feedback from previous board members who did not get as robust an orientation we have significantly expanded it doing things like last month we did a joint budget boot camp with new school board members so the planning academy

Together with planning commissioners is a really great opportunity for us and we're looking forward to it.

Just real quickly, as Chair Palmer mentioned to you, we've got three major topics here.

We're going to be talking about an overview of growth management, the updated comp plan, how that guides decisions on growth.

and then Fundamentals of Virginia Land Use Law.

We're also aware that there are several topics that people want to focus on during the question and answer period, so we will make sure that there's the opportunity for that.

Real quickly, we gave you a copy in front of you of many of the issues that Mr. Campner is going to be going over.

We sent it by email, but you also have a hard copy of it.

We did not print out copies of all these PowerPoints but they certainly are available.

If you all would like that, please just let me know.

and again just to emphasize that we are video streaming this.

We're purposefully in this room because we feel like the material that we're gonna be going over is really very valuable to capture on video and have the opportunity in the future for either community advisory committees or just citizens in general who want more background on planning to be able to go and reference this.

So we appreciate you being in a little bit unusual situation of everybody being on the dais so we can have this for the future in video.

Good afternoon and I'm going to really try to give you some background that might help you in understanding why we are where we are.

In our planning efforts because it isn't something that really has just in the last comp plan come to fruition.

It really is a result of a number of years of

efforts and initiatives in the county that really got us to where we are now in growth management.

So I'm going to try to give you that history and help you to understand and understand not only some of the decision points but why those decisions were important at the time and why they're still important.

And really we'll talk about

those things dating back to the first comprehensive plan and really before in fact the first comprehensive plan because in Albemarle the first plan actually followed the adoption of a zoning ordinance and zoning map.

That's not the normal order.

Normally you'd want to have a plan in place and then zone to that plan.

For various reasons in the 60s it was decided that zoning should go through a referendum process in the county and ultimately by referendum it was approved and the first ordinance adopted in 1969.

So it preceded the first comprehensive plan which actually was adopted in 1971.

There also during the early 70s was a major rewrite of our subdivision ordinance which actually was the first land regulation document we had in the county adopted back in 1949.

So this was the first plan and in that plan

A lot of what we do today in fact in growth management policy was set out.

A major focus at that time was water resource and water supply protection.

Even early in the seventies there was a real acknowledgement of the need to protect our water supply.

and it really set out those basic growth management goals that remain today of how we use our resources in designating development areas and rural areas and really focusing on designated development areas for the large part of our growth and protect our natural scenic historic resources and really trying to discourage rural residential development

not related to bonafide agriculture.

And obviously there was a need as well recognized to implement those kinds of provisions in public facilities and service delivery and utilities that supported that approach of development areas being our focus for new growth.

So the land use plan in 1971 was this plan and in reality this was a growth accommodation type of plan.

It was focused on areas that were designated for development but it was intended to accommodate a potential population projected at the time of 185,000 in 1995.

We are at about 110,000 now, so we are not anywhere close even today to that projection.

But it was at the time what we were envisioning as the potential growth of the county and

One thing about the 70s that we experienced that has somewhat changed was during the rapid growth of the University of Virginia when it went coeducational, there was an associated growth of county population at a much higher rate than we had experienced previously or have experienced since.

Just to compare, in the 71 plan there were 20 areas designated for development and about 37,000 acres not including the 14 villages that were designated.

In our current plan just adopted there are five of those areas designated development areas and about 23,000 acres including villages as well or the one village which is Rivanna as well as the urban area in our communities.

So over time there has been modification to what we started out with in our planning efforts.

In the 1977 plan the issues still were very

predominantly about water protection and our water supply watersheds, concerns about the growth that was occurring in the rural areas and how that might affect water supply.

So again an emphasis on water supply protection in that plan update.

There was emphasis in the recommendations on reducing rural growth and particularly focusing on how that affected water supply both in where the boundaries of the development areas were as well as the number of development areas.

With lower growth projections in 77, there was not envisioned to be the need for the extent of development areas that the 71 plan had identified.

So this was the land use plan in 1977.

The map on the left really for the whole county and on the right really focused around the city.

Major initiatives from that plan were water resource protection provisions, runoff control provisions for the reservoir watersheds, as well as urban storm water.

Our first CIP, Capital Improvements Program, followed that plan and

probably most importantly or most significantly a comprehensive rezoning of the county which occurred in 1980, December of 1980 creating new urban zoning districts, a new rural areas district with the development rights included which is the same district we have today.

So we went from rural area zoning that was basically unlimited two acre lots

before this rezoning took place to the approach of the five development right lots and unlimited 21 acre lots we have today in our rural area zoning.

There was the new zoning map that accompanied that

It is worth noting that while most of the rural area got zoned to the rural areas district, where there was existing use or approved development in the rural areas, there was then zoning that was allowed to continue in association with that.

So some of today's

somewhat disjointed areas of zoning that are in the rural areas but are commercial mostly or on occasion industrial were a result of the zoning of 1980.

There were many lawsuits that followed.

The courts upheld though what had been approved and that zoning ordinance essentially has been the base ordinance we've worked with since 1980.

In 1982, there was another update of the plan.

There was still a lot of residential development in the rural areas.

There was still the concern of water supply impacts from development.

And further adjustments were made to development area boundaries to try to be consistent with water supply watershed boundaries.

There was also reduction in the villages, further emphasis on protecting rural areas, but not a lot devoted to real initiatives that supported the development areas.

There was also the concept of the City, County and University really more jointly planning and ultimately in the 80s the three-party agreement of the City, County and University resulted which we today see through the Planning and Coordination Council work of the City, County and University.

and so this was that plan in 1982 and it was then followed by the 1989 plan which was once again recognizing there was still a lot of residential growth in the rural areas also started really focusing on land conservation

how to make the development areas work more successfully and housing affordability actually became a fairly important topic in that plan and in recommendations there was more of a proactive approach to the development areas there was a recommendation to undertake neighborhood plans to really more focus on public facilities and services at a higher level to support the development areas and develop standards for community facilities

There was also, on the rural area side and the land conservation side, the concept of rural preservation developments that arose from that plan.

The idea of clustering lots and preserving larger areas in open space with new subdivision

That ultimately became the Rural Preservation Development, which we don't, which we have in place today, have not seen projects for a while, but have one now in process.

In fact, the Planning Commission tonight will be seeing a Rural Preservation Development.

They also, the idea of how to approach conservation easements more proactively, an open space plan resulted from the 89 Comp Plan,

We moved more into affordable housing initiatives.

There was a change to remove two more villages that were not possible to serve with public utilities or were in water supply watersheds.

And this was the county's overall

Development Area, Rural Area plan that resulted and what was also the plan around the city of Charlottesville which if you compare it to 1982 was not significantly different.

Following the 89 plan there were several significant comp plan amendments for expansion of development areas that were ultimately approved by the Board of Supervisors.

Rivanna Village was actually

A village created after the 89 plan through a plan amendment process, as well as the area that became the North Fork Research Park expansion.

the area that is now approved for North Point development on 29 North and the area where Rivanna Station and NGIC are located in Piney Mountain.

And over 2,400 acres were added in the early 90s as a result of those amendments.

In the 96 land use plan, we started actually in a full-fledged review of the 89 plan in the mid-90s, but ultimately only a land use plan was adopted.

other elements of the comprehensive plan were not adopted at the same time so this was when we first did kind of a piecemeal approach in the comprehensive plan of adopting different chapters and the land use plan focused again on how development the rural areas was impacting the county

and how development areas were experiencing a rather low density form that if continued would create more needs for expansion of development areas.

So recommendations out of the 96 plan were to better emphasize how the development areas could work through infill with new form and density and in aesthetics and quality to become more attractive and marketable and the development areas initiative steering committee known as DISC that ultimately

recommended the neighborhood model was also a result of the 96 plan.

There again were a couple of villages that were removed because they could not get public utility service or they were in water supply watersheds and other initiatives that followed the 96 plan were ACE for our program of conservation easements, dark skies and a greenway plan.

And that's where we arrived at the roughly 35 square miles in development area.

And this was what were the development areas at the time.

Other chapters after 89 included an economic development chapter, a rural area chapter, a natural resources and cultural assets chapter, and an affordable housing chapter.

and then the most recent plan that many of you were involved with at some point it was really to address again the idea of having a full integrated comprehensive plan rather than somewhat separately adopted documents and it really focused on issues that seemed to be most important particularly the development area capacity and whether we needed to expand at all

how to improve the local economy, the idea of other land uses that might be acceptable or appropriate in what is otherwise known as the rural area for agricultural purposes.

There was some time spent on the Monticello viewshed, on solid waste, on urban agriculture, and we had the need for a master plan for the southern and western neighborhoods.

and the recommendations were basically in response to that.

With minor changes to the development area boundaries, the adoption of that master plan for the southern western neighborhoods, some different approaches to economic vitality, the identification of what might be appropriate non-agricultural rural land uses, how to potentially address allowance of urban agriculture,

Protection Policies for the Monticello View Shed and Solid Waste Management Policies, all part of that update.

Now that's just a bit of a background and also the general picture of the 2015 plan update.

Elaine is going to really from this point go into the more specific aspects of this plan and where we are now in 2016 as we move forward.

Do we have any questions for clarification for Wayne before we leave?

Well, I probably won't remember all of them.

Some of them actually were removed before I came to work here, but Earlysville was a village, Stony Point, Ivy, and North Garden.

Those were four that I'm remembering right off the top of my head.

In the first plan there were actually different levels of villages and there were many more.

I think there were fourteen in that first plan and I think that they included some of what we've now considered as being potential crossroad communities in the latest plan but at the time they were rural villages as designated.

for Union was probably one.

I think Advanced Mills may have been as well, and there were several others.

I'm not remembering all of them, unfortunately.

And a lot of the reason that, again, that those were

My question is, this is such a great outline of sort of the administrative history of planning and land use in the county.

Is this in written form anywhere?

This is a presentation we actually developed, a little different form, but the guts of it were about probably six, seven years ago.

It's not in, to my knowledge, in a written form.

Then I would pose a question to our supervisors as we're seeing the transition now of the leadership and planning and our council whether we don't need to commission an administrative history so that we could have this in written form because we also have other senior individuals who are going to be retiring in the next decade and I think it would be really helpful to have this

I think it's a great idea.

I know that Elaine Eccles has a wonderful 10-minute video on Albemarle County comprehensive planning.

I think that's a great idea to have it written if we don't already have that and to make it available online and we can talk about where to post that or you can tell us where the best place to post it is.

I have one quick question just for clarification.

Could you give something, you talked about disjointed zoning left over after the 2000, the 1980 down zoning.

you said there are industrial zoning areas in the rural areas that are part of that.

One industrial area is outside of Earlysville.

That I remember.

Well, we have a small parcel, I think, off of 29 South.

There's some scattered commercial as well, and some of that is west of Crozet on the 250 corridor going to 64.

Just a comment or maybe a question.

We are going to have a question answer period at the end.

I was just before we lost Wayne if we had something that was kind of hot on our mind that we wanted to

I'll just say this because I think it's probably specifically more maybe to my district, but certainly in the Jewett district, I have lots of folks that live in the urban ring.

What we think of as the urban ring, let's put it that way, close in neighborhoods.

And just in the last couple of weeks, I've received two or three emails at least

questioning why they're in the rural area and referencing the fact that it is obviously a mistake and that they are anxious to or would hope at some point it would be recognized and that they would be pulled into the development area where they really consider themselves.

That's some more of the older zoning that was on the other side of the watershed boundary for the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir and so what was decided is that those areas

so we're specifically talking about some of the areas along Georgetown Road, just so people know, Georgetown Road, Hydraulic Road.

Wayne, before you leave, how about the highway commercial on 250 West?

That's some of what was again left over from the original zoning and that's part of what I was referring to with the west of Crozet along that corridor there.

Well that would be a down zoning and that would need to be done comprehensively and you have to be very careful about how you down zone and Greg will probably touch on that during his presentation so I think it's maybe worth him paying a little attention to that for you but

there is the need to make sure as you approach any down zoning that you're doing in a comprehensive manner and reflecting very definitely policies that have been passed through the comprehensive plan.

Well, it is along a historic scenic highway.

It goes through a couple of historic districts.

I don't think it would be really in the county's interest to have that developed quite a bit.

Anyway, I'll let Greg Kendall in.

Okay.

Thank you very much, Wayne.

Now we'll switch over to Elaine Eccles, our principal planner and guru of comprehensive planning.

Good afternoon.

It's good to see you all again.

And that history, we actually do have that history online at our website.

We've got a lot of that same PowerPoint presentation.

And also, interestingly enough, we have a page in the background chapter of the comprehensive plan that's two columns, about six points, that actually does document everything that Wayne was talking about, doesn't articulate it quite as well.

So it would be good to have that for a record.

but it is there so that when our leadership moves on and when we have different generations of planners we do have that history.

So good question and we're mindful as well.

I brought this to you just to remind you what it looks like.

We worked on it for a long time and it is a very large challenge for me to compress this into about a half an hour.

So I'm going to hit on many of the high points that we went through when we did the comprehensive plan update.

Where we started was with articulating the vision for the county, that vision that helps to guide growth and development.

And this was something that the Board of Supervisors worked on and worked on very closely with the Planning Commission to begin with and then they took it and did more with it.

It is what guides everything that comes after this section in the plan.

And you can see the important issues there for preservation, healthy ecosystems, healthy lifestyles, thriving economy, and education.

Very important features of Albemarle County.

Growth management, as Wayne pointed out, is a key part of how we do business in Albemarle County from a land use perspective.

And these particular policies guide what goes on in both the rural areas and the development areas.

We emphasize the importance of livability in our development areas and preservation in our rural areas.

These are key features of natural resources that are important to us and water quality, water preservation, mountain protection, biodiversity are all part of the natural resources chapter of the plan.

We have a number of recommendations in the plan that relate to these items as well as others.

We talk about the importance of natural hazard protection.

We have a section that talks about debris flow and floodplain preservation and planning for hazards in the future.

And a new piece that came into the plan was how we would plan to respond to climate change.

The next chapter has to do with historic cultural and scenic resources, and that really is a two-pronged type item.

One is the historic preservation activities that take place in both the rural area and the development area.

We have an adjunct historic preservation plan that's in the appendix that was put together many years ago.

It needs updating.

But it has a whole list of strategies about how we actually can preserve our resources.

The other part of it is our scenic and cultural resources that we help to maintain in many ways through the entrance corridor guidelines.

The entrance corridors have been designated as important roadways that lead into the historic parts of the county and the city.

And we're enabled by law to have guidelines and regulations around those so that we can maintain the integrity of these important historic corridors as well as tourist corridors.

Economic Development, Wayne was talking about it being a new chapter in the plan, and it is a new chapter now, but he talked about it being an old chapter.

It was a policy.

Our plan was, our old plan was very, very good, but it was a little bit unbalanced in terms of how much information you had on each particular item.

So one of the things we tried to do in this plan was to call out each one of these individual important features.

so that they had their own chapter.

So instead of having a housing chapter or an economic, excuse me, a housing policy and an economic development policy, we actually had a chapter that was devoted to the goals, objectives, and strategies for the county in these areas.

Most of the economic development chapter came from the economic development policy as well as the former economic vitality action plan that we've completed many of those strategies that were in that plan.

The rural area, the corollary to the development area, is really our designated area for agriculture.

It is also a place for crossroads communities that help to support the people who live in the rural areas, in many ways the farmers, the people who are involved in agriculture in the rural areas.

Natural resource preservation is a key feature as well.

There were a number of items that we went through during the comprehensive plan process about how we do preservation and how we help to encourage people to not locate, not build their new houses in the rural area, but instead to look towards making the development areas the places where people want to live, work, and play.

The Development Areas is another chapter.

It is our Chapter 8 in the Comprehensive Plan.

And this one I'm going to go into a little more detail about the neighborhood model in a minute so that I'm just preparing you for that because I have a number of slides in the Development Areas chapter.

We've spent a lot of time working on this particular chapter.

This was part of the disc work that started in 1997.

The master, the development areas guidelines really govern everything that goes on within that boundary but we also have master plans for each one of the designated development areas that Wayne described a minute ago.

There are 12 principles of the neighborhood model and I'll go briefly through them to talk to you about those important aspects that we try to achieve in our designated development areas.

Again, trying to create high quality, attractive, livable areas rather than rural suburbia.

The first one is a pedestrian orientation.

Having sidewalks is an important piece of how people get around in neighborhoods.

This was something that has been around for a while, but it was emphasized as probably the most important principle of the neighborhood model when DISC put it together, and it still is the number one principle.

Some pictures of what a pedestrian orientation is not.

A mixture of uses is also important.

We used in many ways the model of downtown Charlottesville as our mixed use place to provide an illustration of what our development areas could be and do.

We're creating our own mixed use centers.

You can see the shops at Stonefield and there are many others that are under construction or have been built in the development areas since the adoption of the neighborhood model.

This is not a mixture of uses.

Places in the development areas help to create identity for neighborhoods, and we call those places centers.

And a neighborhood center should be walkable by residents who live about a quarter mile from that center.

A center can be a church, a religious institution, it could be a community center, a school.

In Crozet, it's downtown Crozet.

but these centers help us from becoming Anywhere USA.

They create the places of identity for our community.

Another principle is the importance of having a mixture of housing types as well as a mixture of opportunities for all different age levels to live in our development areas and have different choices for housing as well as accessibility.

There was a key in the neighborhood model, a key feature, and that was the aspect of affordability.

And that the affordable units should not look like different units within a neighborhood.

So what you see in this particular illustration is where the red arrow is pointing.

Excuse me.

The red arrow is pointing here, those are the affordable units in this group of townhouses.

This is Wickham Pond, which is the townhouses at Wickham Pond 1, and inside there are some accessory apartments in those townhouses that help to create affordability.

Interconnected streets and transportation networks.

These are some of the aspects that help us to not have to widen large quarters that are not walkable.

We help to create interconnections between neighborhoods.

The one that you see here is the interconnection between Gray Rock and Waylands Grant.

It was an early interconnection that we were able to get and you can see the sidewalks here going from Gray Rock in Crozet to the Waylands Grant subdivision.

We also have interconnections such as Hillsdale Drive which runs parallel to 29 and again it helps to make those connections that keep people from having to get out onto the really heavily congested roads just for local traffic.

Multimodalism.

We know that Brad is an expert in multimodalism and I was expecting that he would be here to enhance this conversation about the multimodal aspects of the development areas.

But there have to be opportunities for people to travel outside of their cars.

If we're going to get people out of their cars, you have to provide something for them instead.

Sidewalks, bikeways, bike paths, transit are some of those ways in which people can get to and from work or play and shopping without having to drive.

Parks and recreational amenities are extremely important to help create high quality neighborhoods.

What you see on the right is the Green and Waylands Grant and this is Belvedere in a park at Belvedere.

Before the neighborhood model came along, parks and open space were really looked at as that leftover space of floodplains and steep slopes and stream buffers and those places that nobody could do anything and they were back behind houses.

And so this aspect of the neighborhood model tries to bring that front and center to help it create a place and an identity in a neighborhood.

Buildings and Spaces of Human Scale are another principle.

You can see the pedestrian walking along the street, and that pedestrian gets a feeling of comfort by being able to discern where the stories are in the buildings, to know how tall those buildings are in relation to that walker.

They help to create more inviting buildings and inviting places than just what you often find in a monolithic building.

Think about what it would be like to walk around the outside of a big box store, and it gives you that feeling of intimidation.

And so what we tried to do with our neighborhood model was to bring these down to a personal scale, a human scale, so that people were comfortable and felt like they were going into an inviting area.

Relegated parking is one of our principles where we seek to have parking to the side or to the back of buildings.

You can see Luxor in Pantops here and the parking is behind that building.

Parking could also be to the side.

This happens in commercial and residential developments.

Redevelopment is another aspect that helps us to keep our boundaries firm.

The firmer the boundaries are, the better the opportunities are for redevelopment and creating higher quality places inside those boundaries.

Hopefully you all recognize this is an old warehouse and now the Northside Library.

Building with terrain and respecting slopes.

The neighborhood model suggests that having terraced retaining walls is preferable to having tall monolithic walls and building with the terrain rather than grading it all out for flat pads helps to retain some of our identity as a hilly area instead of looking again like Everywhere USA.

When you flatten out a site, you create something that's akin to a mesa and sort of a flat top with steep sides.

That becomes really difficult to walk because you can't get from one site to another easily.

It also has an impact on the stability of slopes.

So what we've been working towards with the neighborhood model is trying to have regulations that have more gently graded slopes, encouraging people to build in the hills, and then if you have to do grading and you have to put in retaining walls, do something more than just a tall monolithic wall.

There were some new things that came out of our development areas chapter that some of our board members that are very it's very near and dear to the hearts of some of our board members and that is a new urban and neighborhood revitalization emphasis where what we need to do is to work on getting those improvements for the older neighborhoods things like sidewalks and

drainage improvements, parks that people can walk to so they can access amenities, and more attention needing to be paid to maintenance of older buildings.

Housing.

We're up to the next chapter from the development areas and that is the housing chapter.

So in housing, we took our affordable housing policy and many of those recommendations from the neighborhood model and put them in our own housing chapter that helps to guide the decisions that are made on

How we improve the quality of housing in the county but also the appearance and make sure that affordable housing is provided with new developments.

Chapter, I think it must be Chapter 10 is our transportation chapter and it contains our long-range transportation plan, references to it in our appendix, as well as the key links to our long-range transportation plan, the six-year secondary road plan, but also a lot of information on multimodalism.

Now might be a good time for me to say that you're probably noticing a lot of overlap with terms between chapters, and that is because it really is all connected together.

And at the beginning of every chapter in the plan, there is a link to both the vision as well as the different chapters, how they all work together to help achieve our vision in the comprehensive plan.

Chapter 11, there are 12 chapters before we get to implementation.

Chapter 11 has to do with our parks and green systems.

And this sets out the expectations for our rural area parks and our development area parks.

It houses our greenway plan.

And it talks about the ways in which we interact with the city and their parks and recreational facilities, as well as some of our natural areas that we work with the city on.

Last but not least is the community facilities chapter and that is the chapter where we talk about the different roles that we have to play in the county with providing public services and facilities.

Things such as solid waste and utilities, storm water management, how utilities from private utility companies are actually provided in the county, personal wireless policy and a new broadband policy.

We also have our standards for fire rescue, police, school size and access.

This doesn't really deal with the operation of the schools, but more about the physical improvements that help to provide the context for education.

The courts and government administrative buildings and libraries.

Also emergency communication center.

Implementation, the final chapter of the plan, is how we actually grow the plan, how we actually bring that plan to life.

And it is done through the CIP, through the budget work that you all have been doing, programming of different activities, of different schedules, of different facilities and new construction, the work programs of the different departments.

I know that you all have been looking at the Community Development Department work program recently in the last several months and about how we helped to bring that plan to life through our work program.

Obviously our transportation plans and with our policies such as our proffer policy.

That helps to bring our plan to life.

I know that about half of you all worked on the comprehensive plan so you all know that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

You all worked on a lot of the details

About half of you are new but many of you participated in the development of the comprehensive plan of this update.

This plan had a lot of citizen participation and a lot of thoughtful work on the part of both the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors and I think it really reflects a very good roadmap for the future for Albemarle County

and I can try and answer any questions you might have about the plan and the development of the plan.

There's a lot of detail, so if there's not time here for answering those questions, I'll be glad to try and help you with that.

Again, we're gonna have a period at the end for questions, but any clarifications for, questions for clarifications for Elaine before we

Let her go down and bring Greg Campner up, no?

I think we'll have a lot of questions.

Don't go away Elaine.

Greg Kamner, Deputy County Attorney.

What I have been asked to cover today is Virginia Land Use Law 101 and there will be many programs to follow I'm sure and this is a distillation of the Land Use Law Handbook that our office has available online and it's been condensed

to about 19 pages.

Today's presentation has 16 slides.

We'll go through Virginia land use law and at the end I'm gonna return to the comprehensive plan looking at some specific issues.

So beginning with where we fit in the governmental universe as far as land use is concerned, we have no elements of sovereignty.

We have no inherent powers ourselves.

So all of our powers

particularly with respect to zoning come from the General Assembly, come from the state and those of you who are engaged during this General Assembly session you know how that frustrating can be.

We have some broad grants of power, zoning power, the authority to regulate the subdivision of land to planned land uses but

You see each year that the General Assembly tweaks the laws that apply to us.

There are these very specific bills that take certain powers away from us.

That's just a function of where we sit in the hierarchy of government.

We also have a number of limitations on our powers and I'm going to talk about three of them which you hear quite often, particularly with respect to land use issues.

The first is the Dillon Rule.

And just to tell you a little bit about Mr. Dillon, he was actually the Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court in the post-Civil War era.

And at that time local governments were viewed as being corrupt.

and so in his writings, Chief Justice Dillon wrote that governments, local governments should have only these powers.

He thought too that the power should come from the state, from their, the state legislative bodies and that for the most part, localities have only those powers that are expressly delegated so when

Larry and I and the others in our office are asked can we do that we're first looking to see whether or not the General Assembly has said yes you may or you may not the next step we will take is whether or not those powers can be necessarily or fairly implied and once we get into that arena the

Presumptions are against the county having that power, but there are circumstances when those powers can be granted.

I can give you an example of where that question was asked of the Attorney General and how it was answered.

Ten or fifteen years ago the question was posed, in order to protect our agricultural areas, our rural areas,

Can localities have the power to transfer development rights?

And that's a concept where you can shift the right to develop land in your rural areas to your urban areas.

and the Attorney General looked at the statute.

There was no statute in place at the time.

There is now, but at that time there wasn't.

So the question was whether or not that power could be necessarily or fairly implied and the Attorney General concluded that no, that power cannot be implied because the General Assembly has given localities other powers to protect rural areas through zonings, through ag-forestal districts, through open space easements and powers such as that.

the Attorney General concluded that an implied power would not be recognized there.

and then the third area where we will look to see if a power exists is whether or not a power is found to be essential and indispensable.

And that issue actually came up as a minor issue in the YMCA case that we litigated a few years ago because localities have the power to make charitable contributions.

There's a statute that says that you have that power to make

contributions to certain qualifying charitable entities.

And the plaintiffs in that case said, yeah but you don't have the power to enter into an agreement.

And there was an agreement in that case that kind of laid out the county's expectations as to how that contribution would be spent.

and the case law is that particularly the power to contract when the state says that you have the power to do something, you have that power to contract, to enter into an agreement, to actually implement that power as an essential and indispensable power.

The next area that takes away or restricts our exercise of authority is the concept of preemption and that is found in the United States Constitution supremacy clause and it also appears in the state.

and it is a recognition that in the hierarchy of governments, local governments are at the bottom.

So our laws have to be consistent, not in conflict with state laws and we can't be in conflict with federal laws.

And there are three ways in which our local laws can be

preempted.

One is through express preemption.

And those of you who have been on long enough where we've had applications for personal wireless service facilities, part of our powers have been, our local zoning powers have been restricted by the Federal Telecommunications Act.

And there's one area where

We have been expressly preempted.

Our local government cannot base a wireless siting decision based upon radio frequency emissions provided that those emissions levels comply with FCC standards.

So that's an example of an express preemption.

There are also situations where the state or the federal government may adopt laws and have a body of regulations that are so comprehensive that they occupy the field and one that is near and dear to Albemarle County.

is the biosolids statutes, which 10 or 15 years ago, the state's statutes and regulations pertaining to the land application of biosolids were deemed to occupy the field so that a local government, even under its zoning powers, could not exercise any regulatory authority over that kind of activity.

Since then, the General Assembly has backed off and they give localities certain inspection rights

But as far as the ability to apply biosolids, that is a state matter.

And the last area where a conflict can exist is where a local regulation simply places a landowner in the land use context

in conflict with state law where a person cannot comply with both the state laws and the local zoning laws.

So in that situation, the government that's higher up in the hierarchy, their laws are going to prevail.

So that's preemption in three minutes.

And then every type of application that comes forward, we're also looking at a number of constitutional issues that may arise.

And First Amendment will come up with signs.

when we're looking at signs in any type of application that deals with religious institutions because the decisions may affect the establishment clause of the First Amendment which deals with the government's entanglement with religious institutions either promoting or discouraging

or the free exercise clause and that is getting into actually regulating how a religious entity conducts its business.

I'll give you a quick example of that.

Years ago there was an application for a rural church that wanted to establish out on the west side of the county

and the neighbors were complaining about wedding ceremonies and it turned out during the public hearing that weddings were part of this particular church's, it was a religious exercise and so the commission was advised to not pursue imposing a condition that would limit the number of weddings that could be held at that particular church.

So now we will move on.

to the county's decision makers and we will touch on seven bodies and individuals who are the key players in making the various land use decisions for the county.

We start with the Board of Supervisors.

They're the elected body and you are also

The one that is vested with the legislative powers, so comprehensive plan amendments, zoning map amendments, all of the different types of text amendments, special use permits, special exceptions, those are all legislative matters and we'll get to the key

distinction between the legislative matters and some of the other items that are in the land use arena are ministerial in nature and there's a key distinction that I'll touch on in just a moment.

Board of Supervisors also is the appellate body for a number of matters that may eventually get to the board.

Disapprovals of subdivision plats or site plans.

disapprovals of certificates of appropriateness by the ARB, the interpretation of proffers by the zoning administrator, that appeal goes to you as opposed to the Board of Zoning Appeals, and certain decisions by the program administrator under the Water Protection Ordinance.

Touching on the legislative matters versus ministerial items, the legislative matters under longstanding

Case law.

There is a presumption of reasonableness and a presumption of validity to those decisions.

So the person who is challenging your legislative decisions has a heavy burden to overcome those presumptions.

They also involve the exercise in the application of policies, so certainly when you are considering a zoning map amendment and you're considering the comprehensive plan in relation to that, you are evaluating different policies and setting a direction for the county and how its land will develop.

Compare that to subdivision plats and site plans.

Subdivision plats and site plans are addressed by the, at the staff level.

And there's no discretion to be exercised.

The sole task for the planner who is reviewing that is whether or not that application meets the bare minimum requirements of the subdivision ordinance.

And if they do, the plat has to be approved.

Next up is the Planning Commission, and they are an advisory body to the board, so they're making recommendations to the board on all of the legislative matters.

They also have the first crack at certain requests for variations and exceptions under the subdivision ordinance.

I think it's been quite a while.

What we had with Old Trail recently, there were some variations that were requested, the curb versus the curb and gutter for the sites located.

We don't really get that many.

They also too will consider appeals of disapprovals of subdivision plats and site plans by staff.

One other point that distinguishes a planning commission from the board, although the commission makes recommendations on legislative matters, they are not a legislative body.

They are what are called creatures of statute, so unlike a legislative body like the board, which has a number of implied powers,

Planning Commission and the ARB are what are called creatures of statute.

They can only exercise powers that are expressly granted to them.

The Architectural Review Board.

Pointed by the Board of Supervisors, like as I just mentioned, they are also creatures of statute.

They administer the entrance corridor overlay districts that exist in the county.

I believe we have 26 of them now and those are the

the arterial streets that lead to tourist destinations either inside the county or in adjoining localities.

Their tasks are primarily to consider and act on requests for certificates of appropriateness and that is a decision in which they are evaluating

an application within the entrance corridor to determine whether or not it is consistent with the design guidelines that they promulgate that the Board of Supervisors has to actually approve.

Next up is the Board of Zoning Appeals and they are a different body compared to the ARB and the Planning Commission because they stand apart from those other bodies.

They are more independent and that is reflected in part by how they're appointed.

In Albemarle County and in most Virginia localities, the members of the Board of Zoning Appeals are appointed by the Circuit Court.

There are a couple of localities in Virginia where they are appointed by the governing body, but I think the original law had them all being appointed by the circuit court and that reflects, I think, the intended independence that boards of zoning appeals are to have from, for example, the planning commission or the architectural review board.

I've listed there three key functions.

They have one or two other functions that in my 21 years here have never been considered by our Board of Zoning Appeals.

One is interpreting the boundaries of the district map.

We've just never had that issue come up.

The most common applications that they consider are the appeals and the applications for variances.

Our Board of Zoning Appeals these days is meeting once or twice a year.

Back in the mid-2000s, they were sometimes meeting twice a month, and we had a lot of contentious hearings, and we had a lot of appeals to the Circuit Court.

But things have quieted down.

Part of it is the way our regulations have changed.

and with respect to variances, I won't get into the law of variances, which is very complicated and controversial, but I think our staff does a great job working with applicants who might otherwise want to apply for a variance and finding alternative solutions within the framework of the zoning regulations.

They also have the authority, this is a legislative power that has been delegated by the board, which is enabled by state law.

They've been delegated the power to consider special use permits for electric message signs and off-site signs.

And the question always comes up, why was that authority delegated to the Board of Zoning Appeals?

I think when that decision was originally made, the standards for considering those types of special use permits were very similar to those for a variance.

And it was believed at the time that they would be better positioned to consider those applications.

That's a sign that is, let's use the commercial sign as an example because that's really the only type of opposite sign.

Pretty simple.

The zoning administrator plays a very key role in administering the zoning ordinance and I always, I teach other classes, I always say this is, the zoning administrator has to be the most thankless job in local government because it is, it's a brutal job and Amelia does a good job doing it.

Her primary function is to interpret the zoning ordinance and I can tell you that we have a standing meeting every Thursday at two o'clock with Amelia and several others in community development and really it's anybody who wants to join and sometimes those meetings are to hash out

I know that you see a lot of zoning

The Ordinance, as often as it is amended, there is still a lot of text there that really has its origins in 1980 and parts of that, if not all of it, were drafted by the lay people and there are some things that could be done

and if you're feeling historic, you can go back to the 1969 ordinance and you will see exact phrases that were in the 1969 ordinance that still exist in our ordinance today.

That's one of the codes of development that really needs a comprehensive update.

key responsibilities, enforcing the zoning ordinance, sending out the inspectors, citing people, issuing notices of violation, going to general district court to enforce violations of the ordinance if they're not abated, and also making vested rights determination in consultation with our office.

vested rights that's when somebody gets approval for a project and let's say the approved plans show a building that is 15 feet from the side setback line the regulations change and their regulations have been

amended in a way so that there are greater setbacks.

Their approved plan no longer complies with the existing regulations, and if they're far enough along in the approval process of expended funds, they have vested rights.

Those, believe it or not, those issues really do not come up that often, but that is an important function of the zoning administrator.

Then the last three roles, we have the subdivision agent, the site plan agent, and the program administrator.

And subdivision agent, of course, administers the subdivision ordinance, site plan agent administers and reviews applications for site plans, and the program administrator administers the water protection ordinance.

And the reason why that role is called the program administrator

and that's Mark Graham in all three cases right now.

Mark is acting as the program administrator.

That's referring to the Virginia Stormwater Management Program and our local regulation is called the Program Authority.

So a quick look at our three development codes and our comprehensive plan.

We have the comprehensive plan.

The most broadest statement I can say, it's our plan for the physical development of the county.

Zoning ordinance regulates how land may be used within zoning districts and establishes minimum lot sizes and standards for building heights and setbacks.

Subdivision ordinance establishes standards for dividing land and imposes requirements for providing public and private improvements.

Our site plan regulations are actually in the zoning ordinance.

Site plans are an interesting hybrid because most of the enabling authority for site plans is under the state subdivision law.

So in most respects, a site plan and a subdivision is going to be evaluated in the same way.

The review is

is ministerial in nature.

Both of them establish minimum requirements for design, minimum requirements for the improvements that are necessary.

They establish road design requirements and things like that.

What types of easements are expected to be dedicated for utilities, the dedication of roads, things like that.

They're very similar.

Site plan regulations also introduce some elements of zoning.

They have the requirements for landscaping, for example.

And then the Water Protection Ordinance, which deals with erosion and sediment control and stormwater management, both during and in perpetuity.

So, on page six of your, the outline, there's a table

that puts all these pieces together for the who does what between the board, the commission, and the ARB.

Amendment to the comprehensive plan.

It can be an amendment to the land use designation.

Land is going to go from a residential designation to industrial or something in between or it can be simply an amendment to the text of the comprehensive plan.

Amending the cash proffer policy.

which is something that may be coming forward soon.

You know in between 1996 and 2015 we added the rural, there was a 2005 rural area plan, there was a natural resources plan in 1999, 1998, so those types of amendments.

The other type of comprehensive plan reviews is one that is delegated to the Planning Commission.

And this is their, it's known as a 2232 review.

That's a reference to the section of the Virginia Code where there's a proposed public feature that is not shown in the comprehensive plan.

It's not part of a larger site plan or subdivision plat.

Let's say it's a school site or something like that.

School site's not shown in the comprehensive plan right now.

It goes through a review by the Planning Commission to determine whether or not that location or that and the character of that school site in that particular location, whether it is in substantial accord with the comprehensive plan.

The Commission reports its decision to the Board of Supervisors.

The Board of Supervisors doesn't have to do anything with it.

They can elect to take up the issue or they can just leave it alone.

And that decision stands.

Zoning map amendments, these are the rezoning.

So when the board had Old Trail in within the last month and they were coming in to amend their proffers, they were amending their application plan, that is a zoning map amendment.

That is a legislative decision.

It goes to the planning commission, the commission makes a recommendation, and then it goes onto the board of supervisors for decision.

zoning and subdivision text amendments those two both are legislative acts they go first to the planning commission because the commission makes a recommendation and it goes onto the board.

One thing I'll touch on just to update you with the General Assembly, the zoning map amendments and the zoning text amendments.

Zoning map amendments, the rezonings impacts are addressed in whole or in part by proffers.

And as of one o'clock, we're still waiting for the governor to sign the bill, SB 549.

That's the proffer legislation.

You received the letter.

from Larry, our letter to the governor, a number of other localities.

That's gonna change how we do business.

The word from David Blount was that we're expecting the governor to sign the bill without amendment.

Three more legislative acts, special use permits, special exceptions.

In the state law, the state law uses the term special exception.

There are different ways that localities

name the same thing.

Special exceptions, special use permits, conditional use permits, they're all the same thing.

Some localities use them for different purposes and that's what we do here.

Special use permits

almost exclusively, if not exclusively, there are permits that allow a particular use in a zoning district.

If you go to our nice laundry list of uses in our zoning ordinance in a particular district, you'll see 20 to 30 uses that are allowed by right and 20 to 30 uses that are allowed by special use permit.

When the district was created, it was envisioned that those special uses were generally consistent with the purpose of that particular district.

But the nature of those uses may present unique circumstances where a case-by-case review, the special use permit process, allows that kind of evaluation and imposing conditions to address the impacts.

So a little distinction between special use permits

and conditions and rezonings and proffers.

They're both intended to address impacts but with the rezoning the applicant offers proffers certain conditions to address the impacts and the board and the Planning Commission can decide whether or not those impacts have been adequately addressed in order to justify support the rezoning.

conditions attached to special use permits and also special exceptions.

They are imposed.

by the Board of Supervisors.

Staff is a practice, staff works with the applicant when they're developing the conditions to get them in a format and of a substance that addresses the impacts that they know is gonna be recommended for the board to impose if the board approves the special use permit.

But they are imposed by the board to address impacts.

Special exception serves a slightly different role.

And that allows certain standards to be waived or varied if certain standards are met.

And the code already lays out the circumstances when certain requirements can be waived or varied.

And the last is the certificate of appropriateness that a proposed development is consistent with the ARB's regulations.

Looking at the development process, subdivision plots, schematic drawing shows how land's gonna be divided.

Site plan, single parcel usually.

It can involve multiple parcels, but it is not creating a new division of boundary lines, but it shows how the land will be developed.

Then various variations or exceptions or provisions in the subdivision ordinance or site plan regulations

that expressly allows certain standards to be modified or varied.

If the applicant has a better way to do something that's novel, certain situations, they have the opportunity to present that and persuade either the subdivision agent or the planning commission to take that step.

Just a few more minutes.

Here's a hypothetical to run you from start to finish as to how these different things fit together.

So let's say we have a parcel that is zoned R1, that's a low density residential

a one dwelling unit per acre.

The comprehensive plan designation is neighborhood residential three to six dwellings per acre.

And I have chosen that this applicant wants to rezone to the R4 zoning district.

So they go through the rezoning process, the zoning map amendment, and they may or may not offer

conditions, proffers that address impacts resulting from that application.

We'll assume that the board is amenable to that rezoning and at the same time the applicant looks at the R4 regulations and thinks that

This project is geared towards a certain market sector and a daycare center would be great to have in that area.

So they apply for a special use permit that would allow that daycare center within that development.

I assume the board approves both the special use permit and the rezoning.

So now we've moved on to the development stage.

This is when the applicant, the subdivider, is figuring out how to carve that land into residential lots and to create the piece of land for the daycare center.

So looking at the R4 regulations and they sees that the maximum setback in the R4 district is 25 feet, but wants to make the case that this is a unique project and wants a special exception that would allow that setback, that maximum setback to be increased to 30 feet.

So that gets improved as well.

and then in conjunction with the subdivision plat the owner applies for an exception to require only curb in certain locations because that area similar to the old trail situation where the curb and gutter might otherwise be required drains right into some open space area so the special or the exception process is available to that applicant to

modified the road design to provide only curb instead of curb and gutter and then while the subdivision plat is being reviewed the applicant has also submitted erosion and sediment control plans and stormwater management plans that shows how erosion

will be dealt with during the construction process, how stormwater will be handled during construction, and also how the stormwater will be treated to improve water quality and how it will be released, and then also to provide for the permanent management of stormwater after all of the construction is finished.

I'm running a little bit late.

Let me go.

Decision making and this is just a very brief slide, more in the outline.

understanding the nature of the application.

Is it a legislative matter or is it a ministerial matter?

The board and the Planning Commission have flexibility.

There's much more latitude.

There's much more consideration of policy with the legislative matters as opposed to the ministerial matters.

So knowing that distinction is critical.

That will shape your analytical framework as you look at a particular application.

and identified the relevant factors and standards.

For the legislative matters, we really just have factors instead of specific standards or findings that have to be made.

And those are in Chapter 4 of your outline.

I've prepared a list of 12 applications.

and that section of the outline lists all of the considerations.

One thing I can tell you is that because we have such a great comprehensive plan, when the Planning Commission and the Board are looking at the legislative matters, the rezonings and the special use permits, a lot of the factors that are listed in

in the subsections for those types of applications.

Our comprehensive plan and staff's analysis incorporates a number of those factors into their analysis.

So you can be assured that the staff report is evaluating the application in the context of the factors that need to be considered.

Identify and organize the probative facts.

Those are the facts that tend to, are relevant and tend to

established whether or not the rezoning should be approved or disapproved.

And you know, those of you who have been on and you've had the public hearings

People present facts, people present their fears, their desires, conjecture, and they speculate.

And decisions need to be based on the facts and the record.

Staff report itself is a document of facts that you can base your decision on.

Applicants, members of the public, certainly present facts.

You as a legislative, members of legislative body,

you have certain knowledge that you can apply to your decision making as well.

And then the last topic, there are certain topics where, and these have all made it to Virginia Supreme Court, where the governing bodies got a little off track and their decision was based on things other than

land use principles.

If your decision's based on land use principles, you're fine.

In each of these cases, protecting an existing business, locality, governing body had approved a project for a particular retail outlet when somebody else came in.

The decision was denied for the sole basis, but they didn't want any competition because they knew that the owner that was already there of the particular store had already spent some money.

Basing a decision on illegitimate or personal reasons.

In the city of Chesapeake, years ago, there was an application for a special use permit for palm reading, which was a use that was allowed by permit.

Staff report recommended approval, planning commission recommended approval.

Got to the city council and there was a huge

crowd, and they were objecting because palm reading was contrary to the teachings of the Bible.

The city council, based on that sole reason in the record, denied the special use permit.

That case went up to the federal appellate court, and the court sent it back to the city council.

So you can't base your decisions on reasons that are not based in land use principles.

That was an improper basis to base a land use decision.

And then serving socioeconomic purposes without express enabling authority.

Requiring affordable housing in your zoning ordinance where there's no quid pro quo.

Under state law, under your zoning ordinance,

If they agree to provide affordable housing, they're entitled to a density bonus.

But without that, the locality under its zoning power could not just mandate that 15, 20% be provided for affordable housing.

Quick jump back into the comprehensive plan just to tie a couple of concepts together and these policies and these parts of the comprehensive plan I'm looking at at the very high level and what I was looking for was how the growth management policy, the economic development section of the code, the development areas part of the comprehensive plan all fit together.

because we want to have consistency because that promotes better decision making.

One thing we know about the growth management policy from the comprehensive plan is that it has been consistently applied, particularly over the last, excuse me, 16 years.

After reading that chapter, it also becomes apparent that when it speaks to directing development into the development areas and when it refers to the development areas, it's speaking to the boundaries as they exist now or as they may exist at some point in the future.

It's at a particular point in time.

Development areas policy does not provide a trigger or criteria for when the development areas should be expanded.

The economic development section of the comprehensive plan, the second bullet there is the key one.

It's to be accomplished along with and within the framework of the other goals and objectives of the Comprehensive Plan.

And here's the other key part.

It acknowledges the need for strategic assessment of properties and ongoing assessment.

Now, before the Comprehensive Plan was adopted in June, there had been

an assessment and that's discussed in the plan and it noted that right now in the development areas we have lands but they're in small parcels and there's inadequate public infrastructure was identified as a concern.

So there's also a capacity analysis that's underway right now that Faith is conducting which will bring us the most current information about where we stand with the potential for development, business development in our development areas.

And then the development areas policy.

Elaine already touched on most of these.

In the third bullet,

What the comprehensive plan says is that premature expansion will frustrate the goals of the growth management policy, the rural area, the neighborhood model.

And so it speaks to redevelopment, developing at the density recommended in the comprehensive plan, all the way up to the development area's boundaries in order to maximize the potential area that is developed

within the development areas before triggering that need to expand the development areas.

finally come to the end.

Elaine also touched on this issue too.

We're trying to create a sense of place and we had a consultant who was here in early 2014 from Maguire Woods Consulting and I've also over the years been compiling excerpts from studies and writings about economic development and tourism and a couple of themes have come through.

Preserving your sense of individualism, your particular identity

preserving your natural resources, creating a sense of place.

Those are all things that are critical to tourism and economic development.

If we are a land use free for all, that scares away businesses.

If we look like everybody else, if we are, I'm not gonna name any localities, but we look like sprawl,

the tourists are not gonna wanna come here.

If we look like everybody else, the people will just go stay home.

That's all I have.

Thank you very much.

That comes into play for the legislative decisions, for the zoning map amendments, the zoning text amendments, and the special use permits.

For the subdivision and site plan regulations, the health, safety, and welfare is addressed through the minimum standards that are in those regulations.

So that does not come into play.

Mac, you probably have been around long enough where the old versions of the subdivision ordinance and the site plan regulations, when I say you've been around long enough, I mean you've been on the planning commission or involved in local government.

Those regulations used to have this provision that allowed the

County to disapprove a plat or a site plan if the decision maker concluded that it was contrary to the public health, safety, or welfare.

And that's no longer in either of those ordinances because it really can't be there.

I have a question.

Yeah, not many.

So that's what the work sessions are for.

Sometimes the work sessions, or is it just the staff that helps the applicant?

Great.

Maybe this is not.

Health safety and welfare, will you give me some examples?

I'm sorry?

Health safety and welfare, would you give me some examples?

Yeah, public health, safety, and welfare.

You're not saying that lack of access for roads or transportation is not an acceptable reason for denial.

It can be as general as an applicant for a zoning map amendment is proposing a density that is, I think our maximum density of the plan is 36 dwelling units per acre.

and it may be in a location or we may be reaching a point.

Let's assume water capacity is becoming limited and there's a concern about a particular area.

Yeah, extreme density in a particular location may be contrary to public health safety or welfare.

There might be particular uses, let's say we had a school in a area that is mixed use and there's a particular restaurant that is going to, proposing to serve alcohol, but that use is allowed only by special use permit.

there might be a concern about having that, the bar right next to the school.

So the hunting within 300 feet of the school building might be an example, I guess.

And all that makes sense to me.

So those are a little different than talking about not having the infrastructure, transportation, or other issues.

It's a very different, this is much more specific to

VDOT's approval, or school capacities or those issues.

Aren't we denied the ability to use impact as a decision?

We can't charge impact fees, but you can consider the impacts and the extent to which they're addressed or not as part of your consideration.

So we have the, well, you used Biscuit Run as an example.

It was proposing 3,000 dwelling units.

Let's assume that there was no provision for schools.

there was going to be no cash contribution for schools.

So the schools in let's say Kale and Stone Robinson or Walton were gonna be immediately overcrowded.

So the decision could be based on the failure to address impacts which was contrary to public welfare because the schools were gonna be overcrowded.

There was not gonna be the capacity to handle them.

It's possible, let's say that the water and sewer infrastructure was inadequate.

One quick one just on that same subject.

Since in the schools we are at the edge, we're needing that next increment of capacity in our schools.

and could you deny it because you would have to build a new school or you would have to build an addition just because of that small, you know, would you be justified in saying no, not until we build on the addition onto Woodbrook or whatever.

I'm just trying to understand what impact it is.

I would want to see a broader analysis to come along with that.

I would love to see something in the comprehensive plan that says this is the threshold once a school capacity reaches x, you know, in a hard number to rely on

A hard objective number.

Of what?

Of once school reaches this side.

Yeah, once K.L.

So the school board has already addressed what they believe what school's size should be.

Middle schools shouldn't go more than 800.

No, I'm talking about The infrastructure itself.

I'm talking about when a project's timing

can be decided whether it's appropriate or not.

And we have to have objective numbers.

It is a fire marshal citing the school for...

Yeah, what I would wanna see is the much broader analysis and then step back and then take a look.

So that's not what I've heard in the past, so that's interesting to know that it can be broader than just one elementary school.

Yeah.

And the reason we're having this discussion is obviously because we're in such critical situation right now in some of our urban schools.

I'm sorry, Liz.

I just want to make sure somebody else has some time to have a question.

I'm going to say really, really quick, we were supposed to recess a couple minutes ago, but I'm going to suggest we go on to five of and then just start our next meeting at five after and that gets us a couple of extra minutes.

And Tim would like to ask a question.

I'm sorry.

and actually, I think everything has been really good and this builds on that for Greg and Elaine, I think.

It's my understanding that the comprehensive plan can be, we can do an amendment in the middle of the time period like now, correct?

So we don't have to wait for the next five years to follow up on what Greg has said.

So with the proffers being this big thing that we are all considering and even the discussion about whether this governor's signature is here yet,

Would it be a recommendation from staff to Planning Commission and supervisors that we should think about doing just what you suggested in that answer to Diantha?

That we should be thinking about taking specific numbers that the school has presented the supervisors with

and add that into a section in the comprehensive plan so that we have something tangible in terms of impacts as soon as possible given that we're most likely going to be in a different impact fee world.

Take away the word fee.

Short answer is yes, we're going to need to study a lot of issues.

but it's more than the schools because we're talking about planning here so if we have had certain abilities taken away from us then we're looking for new ways to respond and I think that we had an idea presented to us based on a question that you initiated so I'm assuming we're all going to be hearing from staff on this relatively soon.

That's good.

That's good.

Thank you.

I had a question just about health, safety, and welfare, and you were making reference of when that's a consideration and when it's not.

And I was wondering about buy-write projects, and I know if they don't need a special use permit, it might not be something that even comes before the Planning Commission.

I'm never going to tell anyone that a member of the public should not

feel free to express something or to express a concern.

But the county has no ability to disapprove a buy-write project assuming that project complies

with the zoning ordinance and applies with the site plan regulations if it needs a site plan or complies with all of the permitting requirements for building permits and all of that.

They have to comply with all the laws, but if they do, we don't have the ability to

pull the carpet out from under them and say no.

And as Elaine pointed out, we do have stale zoning.

We had some big fights off of Morgantown Road with the Faulconer construction site, because there's a business park in the middle of the rural areas.

And I hate to say it, but we have to live with that in a lot of respects.

The question was brought up about

I went over that and in order to be valid there have to be there either has to have been fraud in the original up zoning or change in circumstances and there are a couple of examples in the case law

and the third example is when the down zoning is comprehensive in nature.

So the 1980 down zoning, that was comprehensive in nature.

That down zoned 95% of the territory of the county.

We don't have a good body of case law.

We have some kind of ridiculous examples.

in the case law of what's comprehensive or not.

So we know from Virginia Beach that a 3% down zoning of 3% of the territory, that's not comprehensive.

In Prince William County, they down zoned even a lesser percentage of that.

That's not comprehensive.

Change circumstances, we have an area that had been zoned to high density residential

and the area all around it had developed as single family, low density residential.

And the city down zoned that pocket of high density residential in the center of that.

And the court said that circumstances had changed.

The way the neighbor had developed that high density residential was no longer appropriate.

So even though it wasn't comprehensive in the land mass that was,

Would a former master plan adoption of a 6 to 18 or 12 to 26 or whatever the numbers were and then in the middle of a single family neighborhood and then people have the sort of realization ten years later, oh my god, what did we do?

You can all, amending the master plan, amending the comprehensive plan is not subject to the same constraints as amending the zoning regulations.

Comprehensive plan is merely advisory in nature.

It's a policy document.

I'll just make one closing comment if I may because I want Elaine to hear this and I really enjoyed the walk through the comp plan but it also pointed out to me different places where there are conflicts because and what popped into mind was the walkability section talking about how there should be sidewalks but in so many of our older neighborhoods in Crozet the access to the new townhouses is across the 11 foot wide narrow street, Tabor Park, those places with no sidewalks, Twisty Turney,

and other places too.

I just have a question.

I just had one quick comment that our comp plan, I think, really does an excellent job, to be honest with you, with neighborhoods.

I think where we're lacking right now is it's not so good with economic development.

And I think we saw that with a brewery issue.

I think we need to figure out how that, to make that stronger.

And a process laid out.

I guess I can just do a follow-up to say that Faith and we have worked out now, and there are going to be two meetings with the Planning Commission, she's going to come and present the sort of process of the strategic plan first, and then we're going to have a meeting that is just focused on the interface of economic development and planning and land use, and I guess with staff we can work out whether you all would like to be part of that.

We actually have a date for it, which- Love to come.

Tax Day?

Tax Day.

That's wonderful to hear, and yes, because I do think we need to make that- That's a Friday.

That's a Tuesday.

April 12th.

And is it in the evening?

Because we have a budget public hearing on the 12th of April.

At 6 o'clock.

But maybe we need to... That's Kelly in the closet again.

Good to hear.

So I think we better recess now.

Great meeting.

We're ready to get started on our next budget work session, our budget work session.

And we have Lori Alhouse, our Director of Office of Management and Budget, walking us through this, I suspect.

Yes, thank you.

Madam Chair, members of the board, I'm here to talk with you about the budget today.

This is the fourth of four work sessions that you've had on the budget.

This slide shows where we are in the process.

Our work session today is we're gonna, the main purpose is for you to finalize your tax rate for advertisement and approve your board proposed budget.

The public hearing that comes next is March 30th, and that will be the public hearing on your proposed budget.

Here's the agenda for today's meeting.

We're gonna basically open the meeting, which I just did.

We're gonna talk about your recommended budget in total.

You'll have a board discussion on the items that you identified for today's discussion and any other items you'd like to discuss today.

you'll make some decisions on those items and then you'll make decisions on what you'd like to have in your proposed budget and at that point we'll take a break if needed and OMB will do calculations based on any changes you might want to make from the county executives recommended budget to the board's proposed budget.

We'll then review any calculations that may have changed and your final approach.

May I have, I have a question.

So there's still going to be some discussion over the next month about

about some of the specifics in this budget.

And can you tell us when that's going to be?

Because I think that's important.

I know the board members would like to have some further discussion about this and we're setting- We haven't begun to do what we need to do yet.

Right.

And we don't have, right now we don't have those meetings scheduled for longer discussions.

And so could you give me an idea of when you're

Okay, here's what I understand and then we can discuss this further.

Basically, we schedule four work sessions, which we are today, and you're going to make a decision on your tax rate cap.

which is the highest tax rate that you could go and you could go under it if you want to and you would identify some items you would like in the proposed budget that may be different from the budget in front of you today.

That'll be our decisions today.

After that, you have a lot of opportunities for public input and opportunities to still consider changing your budget before it's finally adopted.

And when we talked about having another one we had the discussion while you set the tax rate

Larry might be able to shed some light on some timing.

There are two things you have to do to finish up your work on the fiscal year budget.

One is you have to

set a tax rate for the real property taxes.

And what the legal constraint on that is is that in order to increase the tax rate, you have to advertise that proposed increase at least 30 days in advance of the public hearing on the tax rate.

And you have to adopt the tax rate prior to April the 15th.

So in order to meet your scheduled public hearing

date on the tax rate which is April the 12th.

You really need to finalize the highest tax rate that you wish to consider in the budget today because that ad has to be to meet the schedule would have to be in the newspaper this weekend in order to get that ad to the newspaper which has a very prescribed legal format that has to be finalized

I don't think we're talking about that.

The second part is the adoption of the budget document itself.

The public hearing that you scheduled for that is on March the 30th.

The ad for that budget

Public Hearing has to be published at least seven days in advance of the budget public hearing.

Again, to run it on the weekend before and you back out the deadline for staff to prepare the final ad.

and the proposed tax rates that go into that budget add.

I think the deadline for doing that, we looked at it.

If you want to make further changes to the budget that would change the lines on that budget as proposed before you advertise it, you probably have until the 14th to make that final decision.

But I think the schedule was that you would

Payer, you would forward a budget at least for public hearing today that would be consistent with the schedule that you previously adopted and that doesn't mean that you can't change that budget but the one that would be advertised for public hearing would be what you have

proposed to you by the county executive and the changes that you've made in that budget at the end of today's date.

That would keep you on schedule.

Between now and the adoption of the budget, which is programmed to be on either April the 12th or April the 13th, you will have a lot of public meetings, you'll have a public hearing on the budget, and after receiving that input, there may be changes that you want to make to the budget.

This schedule doesn't stop you from doing that.

I just want to make it clear to the public that the tax rate and the bottom line budget amount that is approved today is what we're locked into as far as a maximum.

That's basically correct.

I think some of the concern is when are we actually going to be able to have that discussion.

We talked last time about a bond referendum, that sort of thing.

Do we want to discuss more about if we're expecting to do that?

And maybe at the end of the discussion today we'll see how far we get.

You have a three hour meeting, three to six today.

Mr. Foley, do you have any information you'd like to share about with the bond referendums?

At the last meeting discussion on this we talked about adopting a CIP and then maybe having to amend it based on discussion that would occur in May.

We are actually since the last conversation we had

Staff believes that we should come to you in April and we are hoping on April the 13th in the afternoon, which again is the regular meeting, that we would use that work session to have a preliminary discussion on projects you might want to consider putting in a bond referendum in November.

We will actually need you to tell us what projects you'd like to consider putting on a bond referendum so that we could then run some financial scenarios for you for the May discussion on strategic planning.

I think it's pretty critical that we understand what projects you think make sense to put out to the voters.

So we'll be prepared to help you kind of make those decisions.

We've already talked with the schools about putting forward some different scenarios that they have now.

after all the review that's gone on they have rethought some things and they think there's particular approaches that would be appropriate and make the most sense.

So we would do that with some local government projects too to get your direction.

So we could then come back to you in May in the strategic context and see how that plays out with the rest of the budget and what's been going on.

that has all been based on the premise that you all would actually move forward with a budget, a CIP.

In terms of the work sessions that we've had up to this point, we've tried to go through functional areas and then ask you if you had questions and wanted to make changes and so forth.

If that didn't work well and you needed more time, you wanna wait till the hearings and all that, we will need to probably pretty quickly decide when you'd like to consider

expenditure changes within the total that you've set the tax rate on, as Brad said just a moment ago.

So we typically in the past and even in the past two years, we have had all of these work sessions to get your input on what you'd like to change, but then we've typically had one other session where you really

talked about the expenditures after you'd set the tax rate.

So that's gonna have to happen somewhere after the 30th and before the 12th to be specific.

And of course, any big things that we've not talked about so far, and we've got a few of them that we'll go over with you today, if there are other major changes that you think you want to consider on the expenditure side, of course, staff would like to know that as early as we can so we can do any analysis that's necessary for you to be in a position to make some decisions.

That's kind of where we are with the referendum and then also on the operating side, we certainly would like to get a date nailed down if you want to have another session to talk about expenditures.

On the bond referendum, I would suggest that we try to schedule this so that we can engage our CACs to talk with them about what the bond referendum means and how they could help advocate for the projects that may be in there.

because outside of a planning role, I would hope that we also view them as a advocacy role for those improvements that are related to the planning that they want to see.

So if we go ahead and put a list together before consulting with them, some of them might feel a little left out of the loop.

I would point out though, Mr. Sheffield, that those are public bodies that can't advocate

for a bond rep.

Okay.

So a better word is to educate.

In my mind, it's the same, but I understand legally they're very two different things.

But if all else, it's just to make sure that the CACs that have been around for a while, like the Pantops one, they talk about pedestrian bridge, this is their chance to

try to get that idea into a bond referendum.

Thanks for correcting me on that efficacy.

Based on that input, I guess the clarity would be

That's when we plan to have a discussion hoping for some direction from you all because we will have to move pretty quickly after that into the May session and the school board will have to in May make a decision about what they're going to suggest beyond the referendum.

the reason why I brought it up was because it might inform what we put in the budget this time if we're expecting to do a referendum then we're going to maybe do this budget differently and that's why that's where the concern lies

To me, when we're thinking about a bond referendum, we're talking about a fairly significant capital outlay.

And that really influences some of the decisions we're going to be making here today as to what goes into this budget, what gets omitted from the budget.

So I do think we have to be careful, Brad, not to invite

This is all the goodies that are available put in for them because Santa Claus has arrived with the bond referendum and we can get your project funded without a problem.

I do think we're going to have to be ruthlessly strategic in this bond referendum to be very clear about what it is that truly is a priority for us to fund.

via the Bond Referendum, otherwise we open the gates of hell because everyone will come forth arguing that they have a project that's important, that should be funded, it was in the CIP, it should have been rated higher, and our whole process goes down into a slog.

So therefore I really think we do need to think about what we're going to be

putting in what are the priorities and you know we've heard the last time we talked about educational priorities and moving the needle forward instead of doing reactive incremental adjustments really truly making some changes here in the long-term interests of the community.

So I would urge us as we go through this to think about that when we talk about the CIP.

What is actually, and not get into a long discussion about it, agree that we're going to park some things in the potential CIP funding via the bond referendum parking lot and leave it there and have a discussion about it as we look at the essential items for this budget.

Liz, I had the same concern you did about

putting those big ticket items afterwards when I actually would urge us almost to reverse the process.

But we are where we are.

We're not going to change the process.

And I guess I'm a little confused too because while I grant, I think Brad has a great idea about input from the CACs, the bond referendum language has to be worded in such a way, I mean it has to be specifically worded certain ways.

and we're not necessarily going to be camp, take projects out from every magisterial district in that bond referendum.

We're talking about big projects here.

Something like this.

Right.

Yeah, it's really not even as simple as just saying these are the seven projects we'd like to do.

We have to word the questions, we have to get with the courts, the schools have to take action.

and really importantly, and I saw one of the emails from a citizen that said this is great, a bond is good so we can get everything done as if there wasn't a cost to paying that back and that is not the case and that's one reason why

again the CIP that you have now is the list of projects and it's been vetted by your oversight committee school board has put their thoughts into it it's come it's gotten lots and lots of review and process so you have a pretty good CIP that the public can look at and say this is important to me and give you the feedback on but when you get to the 13th

which is about, maybe we can tweak that a little bit but when you get to the 13th, you all will need to be in a position to say these are the things we'd like to move forward with so that in May, when we come back, you really understand the implications of those projects and what they'll cost not just on debt service but also on the operating side so that you make a well-informed decision as you move that process forward and you'll have to do all that in such a timeframe so that we can get to the court

in time to get the order put in or whatever the right terminology is.

So we do have a lot ahead of us and not the least of which is the financial analysis in the strategic planning session where you look at the other things you've identified such as transit expenses and things like that that may be part of that future.

This is one of the reasons that we weren't sure if it was completely primed.

We're 100% moving forward with this, but I do think there's a good bit to be thought through.

We'll talk about some projects today that then will also impact the financial analysis going forward.

Yes, let's revisit this and let Lori get going.

All right, thanks very much.

This is good conversation because you need to put it all in context.

I'm gonna just start really briefly with going back to our budget goals when we put the fiscal year 17 recommended budget together for you.

And basically the goals were that we're gonna meet our current commitments and obligations,

We are going to hold the line on our existing expenditures.

We're going to minimize the impacts on our current level of services.

because we really wanted to be careful and think long term with this budget.

This budget is just not a one year, it is a one year budget but we want to think more long term as we do our budgeting.

So the other thing we did was we invested in some meaningful solutions moving forward.

We recommend that we work with the board and the citizens on priorities long term.

We've talked about a term called priority based budgeting that we suggest that we do embark on over the next year.

and then we move more to a realistic two-year fiscal plan as we move forward.

So those are the main budget goals that we put together with this budget and we still feel very strongly in that.

And I've showed you many times this

funding gap picture.

I changed it just a little bit today.

We do long-range financial planning, as you know, in the county.

We put a lot of energy in it.

The board gets very involved with many work sessions about the five-year plan.

And when we put that plan together with the very best projections and estimates that we have, we see a widening gap when you look at revenues over expenditures.

So it's nothing you can fix in one year because it's structurally

has a gap that widens along the way.

So we really believe we should hold the line in fiscal year 17, which is what this budget is proposing, while we strategically develop a plan for the future.

So it's cut two parts to it.

Just a little bit of thinking about the future here.

When we look at fiscal year 18 and 19, so again, we're talking about 17 today, and that's what we're going to focus on in a minute, but you really have to keep in mind some of your future challenges coming down the road.

So we put this slide together just to kind of emphasize some of the challenges we're seeing as we look ahead fiscally.

So for example, fiscal year 18, which is your 17-18 year, that widening gap is going to get larger, and if you would think that perhaps real estate, as you know, real estate's your major revenue source, if real estate would

Reassessments, value in real estate would grow at 5%.

That could help close your gap in 18.

But we don't believe it's going to grow at 5% next year, and our estimate is under 2%.

It's at 1.4.

So based on what we're seeing in the economy, we don't think that's going to occur for fiscal year 18.

The other way that you could generate the revenues that we see as needed for schools and local government and to fund the general government's gap that we're seeing at about 3 million, if we share the 60-40 formula, you would have to raise your tax rate 88.8 cents next year.

for helping us with that gap.

Just so we don't scare anybody, it's two, 88.8, not raise it 88.8 cents.

Yes, I'm sorry, two.

Scary enough as it is, right?

So the other thing you could think of is what if the economy really starts chugging along?

We have some really good signs in our economy as far as some of the new building going on at Fifth Street and those types of things.

But the economy would have to increase by 5%.

If that would happen, you'd still have to have a 4% increase in your reassessments to get the same dollar amount.

So we don't see it on the horizon for fiscal year 18.

that the natural growth in our economy will be enough to help us with the gap we're seeing in the five-year planning and long-range budgeting.

And also in 18, there wouldn't be any new general government positions to meet your service demands for growing populations, so that would be two years of no new police officers, no new positions.

So we just want to keep this in perspective, and I know it's thinking a little further ahead than 17, but we think that this is the way we should proceed in more of a two-year look.

And then if you look at 19, and I know you're thinking about capital a lot, but if you look at the current capital plan that we went over in the work session, you already have an increase planned at 2.1 cents for fiscal year 19 just to meet your current capital plan.

In a few moments, we're going to talk about what it would be like if we added Woodbrook, because we know how important that project is.

If you added the Woodbrook Elementary School project, you'd have to increase your tax rate by 2.6 cents in fiscal year 19 to make your CIP balance.

So if you think about the tax rate, again not an increase, but just the total tax rate at that point would be at like 91.4 cents in fiscal year 19.

So again, this was just for some perspective as we move forward.

The other thing that we've been talking about as part of the fiscal year 17 budget process is that we're identifying items for this future strategic discussion.

There's several items that were identified in the work sessions and there was other items that have been identified overall.

So this is just an ongoing list of items that board members have identified that you'd like to talk about more in a longer frame strategic discussion.

You've talked about geo-policing and problem-oriented policing program, leveraging funds.

We had a conversation about the SPCA agreement and possibly re-looking at some things there and thinking about how do we help encourage fundraising for community priorities.

We've talked about the regional library.

We talked about it in the context of increasing hours and

how important libraries are for community access.

There's been conversations about support for the Department of Social Services and their rising caseloads and our concern about that.

You've had conversations about transit and the urbanization of the county and the importance of expanding transit as part of that.

Tourism has been another topic that we brought up for a future strategic discussion.

We're talking about the referendum.

We just talked about that a little bit today.

And then we talked about new school construction versus maintenance of the older schools.

It's just a conceptual item that we would like to talk more about strategically.

And there's probably other topics that will be identified or have been identified that we would include in this list.

and again these are just part of our future strategic planning discussions that will be coming after this process for the fiscal year 17 budget.

So now I've talked with you a little bit about the future.

I'm gonna come back to fiscal year 17.

That's what's before us today for decisions.

The recommended total budget is 375 million dollars.

As you know it includes schools, it includes CIP and it includes general government operations.

The fiscal year 17 budget proposal has a 2.5 cent tax rate increase on real property with one cent dedicated to the CIP, 1.1 cents dedicated to general government operations, and 0.4 cents dedicated to the school division operations.

This recommended fiscal year 17 budget would change the tax rate from 81.9 cents to 84.4 cents.

The other thing that's included in this budget on the revenue side is an increase in vehicle license taxes.

The proposed increase in the registration taxes, it would change from 3850 to 4075 per vehicle for those vehicles 4,000 pounds and less.

For vehicles 4,001 pounds and greater,

The tax would change from 4350 to 4575.

Motorcycles would change from 2650 to 2875.

This increase, as we discussed, would generate an additional estimated 250,000 per year, and that amount would be dedicated to the capital program to support transportation revenue sharing.

Now these are the items on this next page that were identified by board members for discussion today.

There could be others that you want to talk about.

These are the ones that we captured that were identified and you said put on the list or we definitely want to have some conversation around it.

So what I've done is prepared a slide or two on each one of these topics and what I'll do is I'll share information about the topic and encourage your conversation at that time.

If any of these items are things that you want as a board to put forward in your proposed budget, we would talk about the funding to be able to do that.

We'll start with the Legal Aid Justice Center funding.

Tax relief for the elderly was brought up as a topic to talk about possibly increasing the funding and the budget.

The CAT route to serve the new Fifth Street Station area.

And when we talked about the CIP there was a lot of conversation about the Woodbrook Elementary School project.

We talked about in fiscal year 17 that we could add the design for the program

or the project, and then in the out years actually constructed.

So we actually modeled for you today how that would work with the 17 design, I'm sorry, the design in fiscal year 17 and the project built in fiscal year 18 and 19.

And we'll show you the impact of that particular project that you could add to your CIP.

Now as we talk about each one of these, you know that there's basically three ways that you can fund them.

You could generate additional revenues, primarily would be by raising the real estate tax rate any further.

You could reduce expenditures somewhere in your budget, or you could utilize some funding from contingencies or set asides.

I'll start with the Legal Aid Justice Center.

There was a conversation about the consideration of restoring funding to the current level, and I just added some information here just to start the conversation.

The funding that's in your budget right now is based on the ABRT's recommendation.

It includes $11,700 for the Legal Aid Justice Center's programs, which is a $27,000 decrease from the amount included in the current budget.

The Legal Aid Justice Center's total budget is around $4.5 million according to the application.

Legal Aid Justice Center requested $68,375 from the county and $108,288 from the city to fund four programs.

The ABRT recommended based on their review and the scoring system that we fund at the current level, the Health Law Initiative Program and no funding for the other three programs that were requested.

And one of them was a brand new program and there is no other funding for brand new programs right now in the budget based on our budget goals.

Well, I think it was Norman or myself who asked us to be included.

I still wish to have it included, restoring it to this year's level.

And I will add that yesterday, the city released their budget, which included fully funding legal aids request, but that's contingent on us funding the request.

And just to piggyback on that, I talked to Kathy Galvin this morning and she said that Maurice's budget they discussed last night, but they had not discussed whether or not they were going to, because I was specifically asking her about legal aid because I said this will come up tonight.

And she said we haven't discussed whether or not we're going to be funding legal aid.

She said it's in the budget.

but she said they're behind us in that they just received Maurice's budget I think last night and she said that discussion for legal aid is yet to come because Kathy and I of course you know met with Mike Murphy from the city and Gretchen Ellis and on Friday and discussed specifically legal aid

the Legal Aid funding.

Just a couple of thoughts, because I've really been thinking about this a lot over the weekend.

I had after my discussion with Gretchen and Mike Murphy, I spent a long time talking to Ron White, who is also our staff, he's the equivalent of Mike Murphy for the county.

You know, our reviewer for the person that follows our projects through.

and in the discussion on Friday, I really learned a lot about how carefully and thoughtfully the process works and how it is technical assistance is offered.

to all of the groups that apply for funding.

Gretchen was pretty clear in the discussion that she really worked hard with Legal Aid as she did with many of the other groups to offer technical assistance for the submission.

and it was interesting because the discussion with Kathy and Mike and Gretchen was separate and then I talked to Ron separately and pretty much of course the discussions matched from both sides because he was talking about how much time Gretchen had spent in offering technical assistance to legal aid but other groups as well.

So it was nice to have both of those discussions on the same day.

It seems like to me that we have a real problem because

Last year, of course, we funded Legal Aid.

It's come back up again, and it seems like it keeps coming up and up again.

Personally, I don't want to be in this position of continuing to have to talk about Legal Aid and whether or not we're going to fund it or whether or not we're not.

based on, I would like to really honor the process that they've gone through this year.

But I do have a couple of questions if you all would indulge me a little bit on, from Tom maybe or whomever might be here.

Because one of the things we talked about last week was the Public Defender's Office and whether or not Legal Aid was really meeting what

the process if they were really a good candidate for the process.

And certainly in my discussion with Ron and Gretchen and Mike, there seemed to be a discussion that they felt like they were.

But from the other viewpoint, Tom, how is Legal Aid, not Legal Aid, Public Defender's Office actually funded?

It's actually funded by the state and it's in localities where public defender's offices have been created.

It's a state funded entity.

Three years ago, I think, the public defender's office came to the county for the first time and asked for

the county to supplement their salaries.

That is something that's enabled by the state code that localities can supplement the salaries of public defenders.

It's not required.

They made a presentation to the board at that time comparing their salaries to the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office and asked you basically to bring them more in line with salaries of the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office because public defenders defend criminal cases

similarly to how commonwealth's attorneys prosecute criminal cases.

They thought there needed to be a more level playing field.

And the board committed to providing some funding for them based on a formula that had been presented by the public defender's office that was also funded again last year with an increase that was equivalent to the salary increase that was given to the commonwealth's attorney's office and the county employees.

Commonwealth's Attorney's Office and county employees in general.

And I think that's where it is again this year in the budget process.

I think what's been recommended is simply that salary adjustment increase.

So that's how the public defender's office has been funded.

Well, I guess what I was thinking about to some degree is when you look at these programs,

There's really no one else in the community that is handling the work that these programs that Legal Aid does.

So if you look at them from the viewpoint of comparing them to some of the other programs that are applying through this process.

There are many areas that are reaching some of the other, touching some of those other populations.

Legal aid certainly has some specific critical needs that they're doing in the community.

At the same time,

I think we're struggling through the process for them to prove some of the outcomes.

They're struggling with how to work through the system.

I think there's no doubt about that.

Is there a way that we could, I don't know whether we would put this on hold for now, not fund it for this year, or temporarily do something, but I'd like to just figure out if there was a way with the city,

Kathy and I were sort of talking about this just because we were meeting together.

Is there any possibility, Larry, that we could think about funding them somehow or another with a contract, more of a contractual way that may look very different from the other programs that go through this

If you wanted to make a donation

contingent upon them doing some certain program you could enter into some type of an arrangement with them.

But I think that's sort of what, as I understand it, what's been presented to the ABRT, that there are certain programs that they want to fund that are supported by the county contribution that they're asking for.

but it's probably similar to the type of thing we might put in a contract, performance and outcomes is kind of what ABRT does.

I was just, one proposal would be that I'd like it to stay alive until we get further down the list for sure but over the years there have been agencies for whom the ABRT process is not compatible and we've taken them out of that and I think this clearly is one where

they are providing, they're the only ones who do the things they do and we had people come to the hearing last year and talk about things that I didn't know they did and that was a real surprise.

Could I jump in?

Oh absolutely.

I mean, first of all, I think we're at the, you know, falling into the trap of the first thing on the agenda takes up a third of our time when we have, we're talking about million dollar issues and we're talking, this is a $20,000 issue, so it's important, but let's not dwell on it for the next hour.

but I suggest that we, you know, we've already agreed that we're going to do the Health Law Initiative Program and I suggest that we just fund the Civil Law Program, the Just Children Program, which we have supported in the past and in the spirit of that we're trying to not do any new programs in any department, basically not do the Immigrant Youth Program, although I think that would be valuable too.

The short math is that the $27,000 decrease is the amount we're talking about keeping alive right now.

I think in the meantime, I really want to, if we, Norman, I'd love to really add a caveat though that, because I don't want to be here next year.

I am not going to keep dealing with this next year.

And at some point I want to say that part of what I've heard is that they're struggling to deal with outcomes based on confidentiality issues at the same time many of the other organizations have managed to work through confidentiality issues.

I really want to see us work out something with them so that they

How about while we're keeping this alive, we asked staff to let us know what being in the judicial category even means.

Is there such a thing and what would that mean?

I mean, there's an awful lot of categories where we don't have a, I mean, what do we do about public defender?

I don't, we don't get statistics of things.

The category really doesn't impact the funding.

I mean, the decision would be whether or not you wanted to receive their request directly rather than going through the ABRT, but that doesn't impact how you would fund them necessarily.

So I have a suggestion that might move us along and let's see if the board's agreeable to this.

If we funded them at the current level that they're funded in 16, which is how we've treated all the ABRT programs this year based on our process for the fiscal year 17 budget, the increase would be $27,000.

You do have, we believe, a potential savings and we had set aside some one-time money for a trial contingency

because we thought there'd be a very high level trial that was gonna cost a little additional money in various areas through the budget of 50,000.

I would suggest we could take 27,000 from that 50.

It's one time funding and that we continue, that we as staff work with the representatives from legal aid and work through this so that next year, as Diantha said, we wouldn't come back to this again next year.

And I don't know how it would work out.

I don't know whether it would work out as funding for next year

Yeah, we can see what the city ends up doing.

We can, staff can follow up and put some thought into how to approach that for the next year.

I think Lori's suggesting some one-time money to take care of the 27,000 if you want to include that in the budget.

Yeah, we had a trial contingency.

It's one-time funding, so we would definitely have to work out something different and work closely with the city and representatives from Legal Aid and work on this.

Yeah, what we would do, we're just level funding where we funded the fiscal year 16, and so we wouldn't pick up, we wouldn't support the new program with that.

It would just be supporting their existing programs.

I think it would be good to go ahead and make a motion to that effect, just to get it behind us.

I think that's perfectly agreeable for me.

I did want to make a comment that

I have trouble about the board stepping in to fund programs that the ABRT does not recommend.

Having worked for United Way, I know how hard people work in the evaluation and assessment process, and we're not privileged.

We're available to that information, but we don't sit in and actually read the full applications and weigh and measure them vis-a-vis one another.

And so we're substituting the study comparative analysis of an application

with what is essentially a political decision which I think is a slippery slope for us because we get into most favored nonprofit organization status and least favored so there are winners and losers and I don't think this board should be choosing winners and losers.

and funding in the non-profit sector.

But if we do go ahead and invalidate the recommendations of the ABRT, which in a way we're doing today with 20,000 for one organization, are we not inviting an annual appeals by others for similar political consideration regardless of what the ABRT may recommend?

You know, Aprille moi le déluge.

I bring this up because I work very closely with an economic director of an organization

work with the Chamber and the Nonprofit Business Council and they applied for the first time this year for ABRT funding and she was very anxious to make an appeal to the board and I said really I'd urge you not to.

I think it's just a matter of you needing to resubmit next year, you've got to make some changes in the application process, there's no guarantee, hang in there.

and I would feel somewhat hypocritical having advised her to be a good citizen, a good organization, follow the rules and we turn around and we break the rules for one organization that's had a successful, albeit repeatedly same letter sent to us campaign urging us to change our thinking.

So I'm happy to come up with a solution but I did want to make the statement that I have concern as a process that we're

following something that can be against our best interest long term.

I will say that I agree with you.

However, I do recognize that we've spent a great deal of time on a smaller amount of cash and we need to move on.

Yeah, I move that we restore the current

I'm not going to make that motion.

Well, it's not assumed in my motion.

It's .007% of our budget.

Staff will figure out how to fund the request when it comes forward next year along with all the other ARBT.

You've made your point clear to Legal Aid that they need to work on a better application.

We actually will, we will actually need to know where we take the money from in the ultimate budget.

Because it is in the budget.

We don't have any ongoing money unless you take it from an ongoing source, but we do have one time.

So we have a point of order to find out if in fact this is a single year funding and thereby an isolated case with no precedent established.

Is that correct?

I'll amend my own motion to reflect what Diantha just said.

Madam Chair, we assume that this review includes whether or not ABRT is the right process going forward.

And to figure this out.

I'll make it easy for you on the next slide because I was the one who had raised the tax relief but it turns out that I don't need to have it raised so we can jump right on to the next one.

Only that I'd say that it really does need to be publicized better.

People that need to be personally contacted.

On this one I need to know how far y'all want to take this discussion because I either need to file a transactional disclosure statement and walk out of the room or not.

because your discussion may impact Jaunt and I can't be part of that discussion.

I think we're making a decision based on the merits of what we need to do for transportation to Fifth Street Station to and from.

They're interconnected, absolutely.

So Larry, are you okay with that?

I said the opposite.

All right, so just go ahead and file this transactional disclosure statement that I'm employed by directors as director of Jaunt.

Regional Transit Agency serving Albemarle County.

I have a personal interest in Jaunt that exceeds $5,000 annually.

Because this subject matter can directly or indirectly positively or negatively impact Jaunt, I am going to disqualify myself and I'm actually going to leave the room.

I did indicate to Karen that this discussion was going on.

John is familiar with the impact as well as I believe some of you as well.

So I don't think there will be too much of an issue.

Yep, I've got you all ready here.

Okay, so this option is to consider increasing funding for the 5th Street Station CAT route.

As you may recall, we have a $50,000 contingency in the current budget, so there is a contingency for some conclusion to the 5th Street Station CAT route that we've put forward.

So let me share with you three options.

Mr.

Bowman from my office has been in touch with the director of CAT and has had a lot of conversations since our last meeting.

Andy Bowman is out sick today, so I'm gonna have to take this without him here today, but I think I understand it well enough to share with you his thoughts on this from what he's heard.

So there's three options.

The first one is you could provide service to Fifth Street Station in the Mill Creek area.

It would be a 50-50 county-city split to do that.

In fiscal year 17, it's a three-fourths of a year funding.

Our share of the cost would be $147,485.

for a full year in fiscal year 18.

Again, we always think two years now, the county share of this cost would increase to $204,000.

That would be for the first option.

The second option that's available and is actually in the city manager's recommended budget right now, which is option two, which would be service to the Fifth Street Station only and not include the Mill Creek area.

This particular one, for three-quarter of a year in fiscal year 17, the county share of the costs would be 123,815.

Again, in 18, the county share would increase to 171.

A third option is a stop, just in the general vicinity of the Fifth Street Station.

That's not necessarily something that CAT would support that's just the impact.

I'm not sure that the CAT would agree to just do one stop at Fifth Street if it impacted all the other stops.

So I think that's really more of an option that says it may not be viable from CAT's perspective.

we could get that clarified.

Andy would be the one to clarify it.

But again, okay, John Jones is here.

So he might be able to clarify that.

I generally wanna be sure that we know what option three means.

The other two would provide service.

And John, if you could also explain what's gonna happen on route on the second option in terms of how that would circulate around.

If you could actually describe the route for both one and two, that would be helpful.

I'm John Jones, I'm the transit manager for the city of Charlottesville.

Thank you for allowing me to speak, Chairman Palmer and members of the Board of Supervisors.

The fact that Andy's not here today would explain why he didn't give me an answer on something we came up with this morning.

Sorry about that.

I have a bit of a surprise for you.

We did look at this this morning.

before I came over here today and we feel that if we use option two, which is, I don't know that you have a packet on that, it's a route that would leave the downtown station and would go down to Southwood and then on its way north to downtown it would break off and go to Fifth Street Station over to Avon Street extended and

to proceed out south on Avon Street extended to Mill Creek.

Take Mill Creek past Monticello High School to Route 20.

Via Route 20, it would go into Piedmont Virginia Community College.

After it came out of Piedmont Virginia Community College, go on to Route 20 and then Monticello Avenue into the downtown station again.

The proposal that I gave Andy would run that service bi-directionally.

So one bus at the, I don't have the schedule all planned out, so please bear with me.

Conceptually, one bus would leave downtown station at the top of the hour and travel the route I just described.

Another bus would leave the downtown station at the bottom of the hour and reverse that route as I just described it.

And both would serve Fifth Street Station.

Using that alignment, we could take the piece of Route 1 and the piece of Route 3 that the county currently now pays for and use some of those federal dollars to roll that all in

and the end result would be your bill for the total service package for the year next year would be 987,000 versus the 1041 million that we were asking for.

And that route would provide very robust service to Fifth Street Station, would also provide service to Southwood and to Piedmont Virginia Community College all rolled into one route versus three routes.

and we would go ahead then and re-align the pieces of Routes 3 and 1 that serve the city and use the federal dollars that we get to continue to operate that service within the city and not running out of the city.

an option that's somewhat outlined here, but it would provide, again, very robust service to Fifth Street Station and Southwood and Piedmont Virginia Community College.

So we would be into the cost under option two.

Yeah.

Three quarter a year cost that Andy has in there for

FY17 at 147, 485 would be what that option would cost.

That's your option one, our service option two.

It's a long route, it's over an hour, so we would need to run it bi-directionally in order for it to provide the same coverage from a revenue standpoint, revenue service standpoint, but it would

It would increase the ADA area down Avalon Street extended.

That is significant.

It wouldn't add very much though because as the Route 1 and Route 3 currently run, a lot of that area is almost included anyway.

but it would grab those housing developments along A1 Street extended down to where it meets with Route 20.

And you didn't check with Karen Davis on what that impact would be?

They did not have a figure for me.

Is she here?

Well, there she is.

Okay, so if you live in Southwood, you can get to do your job downtown.

We already have a bus to Southwood, right?

This would not expand that.

And is that a shorter route right now?

No, not really.

It's about the same.

It would be the same.

It would take an hour for him to get there.

The trip out to Southwood

wouldn't take any longer than it does right now because it would be coming out of downtown and going to Southwood before it comes back to go to Fifth Street Station.

And running it bi-directionally, you'd have two ways out of downtown to go down to Southwood, and it still wouldn't take any longer.

I think it's about 25 minutes to Southwood.

No, it wouldn't change.

I was thinking you were saying it was going to take an hour.

I misunderstood.

The entire loop takes an hour.

You get tied up to PVC release time and you can be stacked up in traffic there for 15 minutes to get out.

And we try to schedule around that.

Madam Chair, maybe just since I know staff's worked so much on this and since Andy was out, he didn't get a chance.

I think what I'm hearing is if you select option one, you actually get more service than we thought under option one.

Is that correct, John?

Yes, you do.

Okay.

In terms of the budget decision that you had before you, I might just suggest that $50,000 has been put in this budget as ongoing and there's a $100,000 proffer.

So if you wanted to go forward with option one for $147,000, there is enough money to fund that, but not on an ongoing basis.

That is an issue you've identified for the strategic planning discussion.

What's the future of transit?

How are we going to go about this and so forth?

So just wanted to offer that if you're interested in option one or two, we have enough in the combination of the $50,000 that was in the budget and then the proffer.

but you'd have to then make a decision on an ongoing basis as to where you wanted to go with transit.

The impact of ADA on John's cost.

Before you go, one quick question from me just to make sure I must have missed it.

So the cost, so you're saying that our option one, which is your option two, the cost would be the same as the numbers that Andy has here or would it change?

Thank you.

And you know, I would tell you that I

I don't know about the 204 for year two.

Okay, I understand.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you very much.

Karen, do you think you could come down for a minute, state your name, where you're from, and also a really brief explanation of why we're asking you about ADA so that people listening will understand.

Sure.

I'm Karen Davis, and I'm with Jaunt.

I'm the Assistant Executive Director.

And the reason we're in tandem with Jaunt is because Jaunt provides the ADA service per CAT.

And the ADA service is a federally mandated program.

And it's that wherever you have a fixed route system, you have to have a corresponding ADA service, so providing door-to-door service for people with disabilities, and there is a qualifying factor for that.

Why it's important to Albemarle, obviously it provides a great service to the citizens, but whenever that fixed route system changes, the three quarters of a mile ADA boundary changes with it.

So with the proposed option that John just described, including the Mill Creek and the Albemarle Health and Rehab,

then all of those individuals in those communities would have the option an opportunity to apply for that ADA service and then of course John would provide it.

So the other impact that it has on the county is that the federal match or federal dollars that we have to provide the ADA service

is a fixed amount.

And so where we were carefully examining the boundaries and actually looking at the Mill Creek area and noticing that it potentially was actually a rural area, this would definitely put it back into the ADA urban area.

So it would be taking those fixed dollars and spreading them out a little bit more, not allowing us to access those rural dollars where there's a one to one match.

But the next step, which you didn't say, I think, is that the county would pick up the cost of this route where the federal dollars were not available because they're used up in other places.

So it will cost the county to go, our cost to go up because the rural dollars are a separate set of money.

It could be.

It just depends, you know, sometimes there's someone who qualifies and rides and only rides occasionally and there are others that ride eight trips a day.

Yeah, it could be.

Thank you.

Tom, could you tell us a little bit about how we would put the money aside if we decided to do this option one that's cats option two?

Well, all right.

Just one question first, and that is, were there, among our options, is there one that would not increase county costs for Jaunt?

I mean, I guess option three wouldn't because it's no change.

I think, you know, if the service had, I think it's the inclusion of the Albemarle Health and Rehab and Mill Creek that will make this significant impact.

So I'm losing track of the options, but so the inclusion of that is what will probably expand your EDA service.

Running down Mill Creek Drive basically.

So assumably, there'd be much less impact on jaunt if you do option two on the screen and that doesn't mean that it prohibits you in the future from expanding that route if you want to get started with this.

So I think John didn't really comment on that but we assume the numbers up there are still

are still good.

The reason he was able to bring that advantage was because it was the much more expanded route.

But what we would do in the budget specifically is project the proffer revenue and dedicate it

to this route along with the $50,000 that's already in the proposed budget for whichever option that you want to pursue.

That would only, the $50,000 is ongoing, so it would be there every year, but the difference between $50,000 and $123,000 or $147,000 is the amount that you have to figure out in the future how you're going to pay for it on an ongoing basis.

But if you were trying to make a decision on this budget,

Just take you through the first year.

Before we go too much further, thank you, Karen.

John, when you asked about, when you were talking about our option two, service to Fifth Street Station only, where would the bus go?

It would go up to Avon extended and make a left hand turn to proceed into town after it came out of Fifth Street Station and that would still grab a great deal of that ADA area and it would

make it definitely continue.

I think the highest impact that we have to think forward to is what Albemarle Health and Rehab does.

We wouldn't go into Albemarle Health and Rehab, no.

We would bypass that going down past Monticello High School on a fixed route.

Albemarle Health and Rehab would be in the ADA area regardless of which of those two options that you would pick.

That three-quarter mile is going to go that far down either way.

Then we would require a bus stop there.

So both of these options include going between Avon and 20 on Mill Creek.

That was not clear to me at the beginning.

No.

But the three-quarter mile radius is going to grab Albemarle Health and Rehab for Jaunt.

Can I see if this makes sense, that we agree to do this for this year, and as one strategy, see if we can get Albemarle Health and Rehab to help pay for it, that say we'll continue this route, but if you want your patients to, or at least evaluate to see how much money is involved, if that's a tremendous amount of money, because they're just feeding all their patients through jaunt,

I can offer you know with the second year if the first year pans out the way I'm pretty sure it probably will because I think we all have to agree that Fifth Street Station's got the potential to be quite a large improvement for the county and the city both in terms of the merchants involved and everything else

There probably is going to be some increase in state and federal funding that come along with the increased performance of service there.

I can't guarantee that, but it's a possibility.

And the way we figure your service out, you're credited for those increases in state and federal funding as part of that.

So there's several dynamics.

There's a lot of things come into play, and I will be honest with you.

The way that the federal appropriations are coming through right now, I can't tell you one way or the other what we're going to get.

Well we have to know it for now for the 2017 budget and then

The 18 budget will take care of itself.

I think she's saying she doesn't know at this point.

Well, because she doesn't know the route.

She has the map with the buffers dropped on it.

Her planning staff will have to figure out the demographics in the area to see what the potential might be for impact on John's services.

Obviously from the amount of discussion on this, we're all very interested in this.

Is that safe to say?

Yes.

And we can use the proffer money to take care of any contingency, any problems we're doing.

Which is John's number one.