Planning & Development

With a fresh promise from the Landmark hotel owner that he’ll secure, clean, and structurally assess the hulking unfinished structure on the Downtown Mall, Charlottesville City Council voted on Tuesday, February 18 to defer a formal blight declaration. The new and apparently conciliatory approach of the unfinished hotel’s owner stands in contrast to what has […]

The results of last November’s local and state elections were fuel on the ever-burning fire that is the debate over the Western Bypass. With a new anti-road majority on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors—which appoints crucial voting members to the purse string-holding Metropolitan Planning Organization—and the departure of a governor and transportation secretary who […]

Since last November’s elections removed from state and local office some of the biggest champions of the proposed Western Bypass, the decades-long debate over whether to build the 6.2-mile, $244 million road around Charlottesville has been in a holding pattern. Albemarle County has seated new anti-Bypass appointees on the area’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, which could […]

Albemarle County’s draft water protection ordinance, quietly submitted to the State Department of Environmental Quality last week and set to become local law after brief public review in June, is a long-awaited road map to implementing federal- and state-mandated reductions in pollution from stormwater. Within its 47 pages are rules that will impact development in […]

For a brief moment last week, it looked like the towering unfinished shell of what was to be the Landmark Hotel was doomed to be reduced to rubble, as the Charlottesville Planning Commission declared the structure blighted and debated demolition as a fix: Should the city, as former commission chair Genevieve Keller suggested, “un-Landmark the Landmark”? […]

Charlottesville Area Transit manager John Jones likes to relate a piece of advice about public service passed down to him by an Ohio city manager early in his career. “He said, ‘Son, I’ll tell you one thing about this: It’s a dangerous business. The danger is you put something out there, and then someday you’ve […]

All 6.2 miles of the Western Bypass have come under close scrutiny since the latest plans for the long-debated road around Route 29 in Albemarle County were released last year, but right now, all eyes are focused on a mile-long stretch a few thousand feet northwest of Hydraulic Road. Last August, the keeper of the […]