Potentially, if Biscuit Run and North Pointe are built out. Charlottesville Tomorrow has an excellent round-up of last night’s sessions. If you are concerned or curious about growth issues in the region, you have no excuse for not being informed.
The DP has a good summary here.
Listening this morning to WINA discuss the slew of accidents and traffic tie-ups all over the County and City, I was amused to hear someone call in and ask … (paraphrased) “Now, do they still think it’s a good idea to build all of those homes?”
Affordable housing? North Pointe has that:
Approximately 10 percent of North Pointe’s housing would be designated affordable, which means each unit must cost no more than $190,000. There would also be “not a lot of†workforce housing costing around $238,000, Chuck Rotgin of Great Eastern said.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Technorati Tags: albemarle, charlottesville, growth, sprawl
If Biscuit Run and North Point keep getting this kind of turn out with lots of negative public opinion, then I think we could expect the county to move the meetings to a daytime schedule so less people will be able to attend.
It seems to me like they’ve already decided to give this an approval, the rest of it’s just going through the motions so the “community” feels like it’s had some input.
I hope your well-founded cynicism proves not to be the case. While that sort of move would certainly not be a surprise, I would hope that there are enough people watching that would vocally call them on that action.
One of the worst part of Biscuit Run is that it’s in the designated growth area; if only they had a plan for the infrastructure …
I hope my well founded cynicism proves not to be the case. But I don’t think people would call them on that sort of actions.
Jim wrote:
I’m sure they do. It will go something like this… They will officially put off dealing with it until it reaches a crisis level. Then once it has they will be able to approve whatever needs to be done with little oversite or criticism claiming all the while that because the problem has reached crisis levels it must be dealt with now. At that point the public will be so fed up with whatever headaches the lack of prior planning has caused they will gladly give the BoS a get out of jail free card just to have the problems fixed. Then after all that they’ll raise everyone’s property taxes to cover the needed infrastructure improvements because the state of VA is backward and doesn’t allow that cost to be passed on to developers and the new homeowners.
Too often I’ve seen those sort of scheduling tricks used. The most popular one is- A lot of people show up and give vocally negative input against whatever the project is. No decision gets made that night, it gets put off for a month or two (during which time opposing voices lose steam and focus regarding the issue) and then the next notice on that issue gets put in the legal section of the classifieds on a tuesday or wednesday issue when no one gets the paper. No one (or very few people) shows up and the project gets quietly approved.
Look at what they did with the complaints about the Crozet development. They created a citizens board (not sure what they officially called it) to insulate the BoS from having to listen to the angry public at every meeting.
As for the designated growth areas I’d like to see a map that shows what areas aren’t designated growth areas. I imagine we’d see some interesting patterns.
Here are the rural and development areas (PDF)
Regarding their desire to minimize the public input – you may be right, but I think (and hope) that there is now enough public awareness, and with the help of advocacy groups such as Charlottesville Tomorrow that the public will be aware of the process.
Your interpretation of their infrastructure plan is probably right. Sadly and shamefully.
Pingback: cvillenews.com » Blog Archive » Blogging Round Up
Thanks for the PDF.
How long do you think it will be before they expand those “designated growth areas?”
And one additional follow up on my infrastructure plan commentary as an example of non-existant infrastructure planning… that development that is going to go up near Glenmore and which will add way more traffic then that stretch of 250 then it already has…
One would think that in conjunction with approving that new development they’d also included a widening of the road and traffic lights to handle the additional increase in auto traffic. That would be the correct and responsible thing to do. But of course all they could say was “No. Vdot wouldn’t approve the funding” (or something similar).
[Not to mention that a portion of the money Glenmore residents paid when purchasing their homes was supposed to include a fee, paid into a fund which was supposed to be used to pay for a traffic light at their intersection – when the traffic volume sufficiently warrented it. Of course that is an issue to be taken up with their developer. Who I think does not want to release those funds for that purpose.]
Disclaimer: I’m not 100 percent sure about the facts with regards to the portion of this post in [brackets].
It looks like according to PEC…
http://www.pecva.org/counties/albemarle/index.php
the number of new houses approved on in the pipeline is more like 14,000. It looks like this includes things like Old Trail, which are already under construction. Nonetheless, that’s a frightening number….
Pingback: Biscuit Run Development in CharlAlbemarle – DOA? | Real Central VA