Tired of waiting for Albemarle County planning staff to approve his site plan, Richard Spurzem appealed to a higher power: the Albemarle County Circuit Court.
Spurzem, of Neighborhood Properties, wants to turn about 40 acres of land on Route 29 North into a 188-unit residential community. The land was rezoned as part of the North Pointe megadevelopment (championed by Chuck Rotgin), which the county Board of Supervisors approved in 2006 by a slim 4-2 vote. If Spurzem gets the property built in the next year, he stands to fill many of the units with employees of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is relocating hundreds of people to the National Ground Intelligence Center site just two miles up the road.
But to build he must first get county approval—which isn’t something granted lightly. He first submitted a preliminary site plan last year. It was disapproved, but he made revisions and resubmitted a few months ago.
Once again, the county disapproved the plan. But instead of making changes and resubmitting, Spurzem opted to take the county to court.
“We could have sat and talked with them for years,” says Spurzem. “And that’s what a lot of developers end up doing, which is going back and forth with comments that literally go on for years.” His lawyers filed suit October 22.
This isn’t the first time that Spurzem has prayed to the judicial gods to spare him from the county’s dictates. In 2005, he successfully sued Albemarle County to win approval of a preliminary site plan for Gazebo Plaza, a shopping center planned for Pantops near the intersection with I-64.
The technicalities of the issues are hard to follow, but the big question is whether Spurzem’s site plan is generally in accordance with the development plan that was part of the North Pointe rezoning. Spurzem thinks that the conceptual drawings submitted in 2006 weren’t meant to be taken as if they were fully engineered—in other words, that there should be some leeway when plans get down to the nitty gritty. He had to change the bend of a road, for instance, because of Virginia Department of Transportation standards, which meant tweaking the layout of the units.
“We don’t think that the position is that it has to look identical to the drawing that was given at the rezoning level,” says Spurzem. “So I think it’s going to be a question of the judge looking at the rezoning thing, and looking at our plan, and basically making a decision whether they are in general conformity with each other.”
Spurzem says that at one meeting, a county staffer told him that his site plan didn’t fit her vision of the project. “And our response was, ‘Well, O.K., but the rezoning doesn’t allow for just one vision, one allowable use. You need to tell us why our vision of the property and of the development is not allowed.’ So it’s a fundamental question, if the planning staff has a vision of the property if that’s the one and only vision that’s going to get approved.”
The county, naturally, has its own way of looking at the issue and isn’t about to roll over. In a written denial of the site plan, county planner Gerald Gatobu argued that Spurzem’s site plan showed development in an area designated as a conservation area. Spurzem admits that he’s moved around some of the area that would go to the conservation easement, but he says there’s still the same amount of conservation area.
County Attorney Larry Davis is looking over the suit and preparing the county’s response. “Stay tuned,” says Davis.
Even if Spurzem wins the suit, he doesn’t know if he’ll get his North Pointe units built in time to profit from the new wave at NGIC. Last time he sued, it still took a year after winning to get his final site plan approved.
“Everything with Albemarle County is slow,” says Spurzem. “So we’ll see.”
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