“The relatively pristine, wooded character of the County’s high elevations—the blue backdrop of the mountains—defines much of the character of Albemarle County and has served as an inspiration and cultural landmark for residents since colonial times.”
So we need to protect it with more zoning—and government incentives.
That’s the thrust of a proposal for a Mountain Overlay District (MOD), which would create stricter development laws in the portions of the county marked as mountainous. The proposal, released this year after two years of planning by a 12-member committee, came to the Board of Supervisors (www.albemarle.org) for a work session at their December 13 meeting.
How do we keep the mountain this way? County supervisors were slow to acknowledge support for increasing building restrictions in the mountains, but most appeared willing by the end of a December 13 work session.
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As the meeting began, it appeared the MOD might suffer the fate of a “Mountain Protection Plan” that died in 1998. Several supervisors questioned whether restricting road construction on steep slopes might unfairly reduce development potential for mountain landowners.
“I think what ya’ll are trying to do—we just don’t want a bunch of houses sitting up on a mountaintop,” said Supervisor David Wyant. “Do we want a Wintergreen, I guess is what it boils down to.”
Jon Cannon, the planning commissioner who chaired the MOD committee, responded that this isn’t an ordinance about aesthetics. “This is about the mountain resource itself—the soils, the forests, the water that comes out of the mountains.”
County staff thought the meeting would center on whether the MOD zoning should extend to the entire rural area—but that broader question quickly became extraneous when simply applying new restrictions to the mountains appeared up for debate. After losing much time to discussion of what should be discussed, the board couldn’t get through each aspect of the proposed MOD and will take up the topic at their January 10 meeting.
Government watchdogs in the audience are cautiously optimistic following the discussion. “I’m encouraged by the level of debate about what they’ve discussed so far,” says Morgan Butler of the Southern Environmental Law Center. Neil Williamson, executive director of the Free Enterprise Forum, describes himself as “cautiously optimistic,” but wants more discussion of incentives to encourage property owners to conserve the mountains. “It’s another example of government reaching for the stick first,” says Williamson.
But local developer Wendell Wood is far from pleased. “It’s just another method to stop growth,” says Wood. “Because why? Because we’re saying we don’t want to destroy the mountains. Well, who says [building houses] is destroying? What’s wrong with Monticello? What’s wrong with Brown’s Mountain? Show me the damage.”
