Cville Area Land Use: Week Ahead for October 27, 2025

Posted on by Sean Tubbs
Highlights this week:
  • Greene County Supervisors will ask the Commonwealth of Virginia to step in to fund local social services departments if federal reimbursements no longer come due to the federal shutdown.
  • Charlottesville’s Department of Neighborhood Development Services will brief the Planning Commission on the scope of a study to review the city’s environmental regulations to see if they can be amended to allow more infill residential development.
  • An investment company that bought the Cavalier Crossing apartment complex in Albemarle County will go before the Planning Commission for a rezoning to add 165 units
  • The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority will get an update Tuesday on major construction projects including the Central Water Line which kicks off this month
  • The Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s Board of Commissioners meets on Monday
  • There are no meetings in Louisa County or Nelson County this week.
  • There’s one meeting in Fluvanna County

Thanks as always to the Piedmont Environmental Council for their ongoing support of this research each week.

Monday, October 27, 2025

Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Commissioners to meet

The Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority does not post its agenda on its website though the 6 p.m. meeting on October 27 is listed on their calendar. The entry on one of Charlottesville’s calendars does have a link to the Zoom meeting, but the other calendar has no information.

“If required, the agenda information will be here once published,” reads the second calendar entry.

Do government bodies have to publish what they’re going to be doing? What about their minutes? The City of Charlottesville is now a full partner with CRHA on providing housing to come in the community, using public funds. Should members of the public be able to see what’s happening? What would happen if all local governments simply stopped providing information? Would anyone care?

In any case, I uploaded the CRHA materials to a public place:

In other meetings:
  • The Charlottesville Retirement Commission will meet at 9 a.m. in a virtual meeting. (meeting info)
  • The Albemarle Architectural Review Board will meet at 1 p.m. in Lane Auditorium of the county’s office building at 401 McIntire Road. On the consent agenda is an initial site plan for the second phase of Riverbend Development’s Archer North community between Brookhill and Forest Lakes. (meeting info) (agenda)
  • The Fluvanna County Social Services Board will meet at 3 p.m. in the 1st floor conference room at 8880 James Madison Highway in Fork Union. There is no agenda posted. (meeting info)

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Greene Supervisors want Virginia to step in to fund local social services during federal shutdown

The Greene County Board of Supervisors will meet at 4:30 p.m. with the Planning Commission followed by a closed meeting before the regular meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. (meeting info)

The joint work session is another chance to talk about agritourism and attempts to further regular events that are allowed to be held under state law at agricultural operations, farm wineries, farm breweries, and distilleries.

“The Board of Supervisors has requested that the language for Farm Wineries, Farm Breweries, and Events at Agricultural Operations in the zoning ordinance be reviewed to provide for increased clarity and additional regulation of events, number of vehicles and people, and amplified sound,” reads the staff report.

The two groups last got together on July 22. The Planning Commission has had six work sessions and has arrived at some suggestions. For instance, right now a special use permit is required if there are to be more than 400 attendees at events. The proposed change would lower that to 150. All uses would require a zoning certification to ensure there is a bona fide agricultural use.

A comparison between the 2015 ordinance and proposed changes for this year (Credit: Greene County)

There is no specific reason stated for the closed meeting.

There are three presentations with the first being a quarterly update from the Virginia Department of Transportation. That is not available in advance, but there are two projects listed in Greene County from the Culpeper District.

There was also a study of U.S. 29 in Albemarle and Greene that was published in July 2023. That may be worth revisiting as we consider that the second presentation is on the Central Virginia Partnership for Economic Development’s Central Virginia Innovation Corridor Strategic Roadmap. Earlier this month, CVPED officials briefed the economic development authorities of Albemarle and Charlottesville.

I will be looking to see what questions Greene Supervisors ask about the impact of Astra Zeneca’s $4.5 billion investment in northern Albemarle at Rivanna Futures. That’s less than six miles from the intersection of U.S. 33 and U.S. 29 compared to just over eight miles to the intersection of U.S. 29 and the U.S. 250 bypass. Is Greene ready?

The third presentation is from a group called Everblue and is a review of something called the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant. The slide deck has the tag: Building a skilled local workforce for energy auditing. I can’t tell if this is a sales pitch or something Greene has already committed to doing as there is no staff report. (presentation)

The consent agenda gives us more information, though, as it appears that Greene County has been awarded a total of $199,880 for two rounds of training for people to become energy auditors. The grant comes from the Virginia Department of Energy according to the resolution.

Another item on the consent agenda is a resolution to participate in the update of a solid waste management plan by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

“The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established a National Recycling Goal to increase the U.S. recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030, and a national goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030, a goal recognized as a meaningful and achievable target for improving environmental and economic outcomes,” reads the resolution.

For now, that goal remains on the EPA’s website.

If you’re interested in solid waste in Greene County, there are three reports to glean through:

The next item is a letter from Greene County to Governor Glenn Youngkin and other Virginia officials calling for state funding for federal funds that will not be available if the federal shutdown continues. In Virginia, localities are reimbursed by the Virginia Department of Social Services a month after any expenditures related to assisting people.

“There are insufficient funds remaining to cover reimbursements for November should the shutdown persist,” reads the letter from Board Chair Steve Catalano. “This situation poses a serious fiscal and operational challenge for local service agencies across the Commonwealth.”

The letter asks the state to ask for a line of credit from the Virginia Department of the Treasury to temporarily fund local social services operations during the shutdown. If that’s not practical, Greene County requests that the General Assembly authorize the reallocation of funds from non-essential services for local social services.

This is a separate-but-related issue from the potential cessation of SNAP benefits. Younkgin has declared a state of emergency to allow money to continue to flow into that program.

“Local departments are the Commonwealth’s frontline safety net for children, families, and vulnerable adults,” the letter continues. “We cannot fulfill that mission without stable operational funding, especially during periods of national fiscal uncertainty.”

How many more letters like this will we see as the shutdown continues?

Public hearing to be held before Albemarle PC on former Cavalier Crossing development

An investment firm called Bonaventure purchased the former Cavalier Crossing apartment complex in May 2024 for $18 million and immediately planned to spend money to upgrade the community in order to obtain higher rents.

The company renamed the complex Attain on 5th Street and have filed a rezoning application for a portion of the property to Residential-10 to Planned Residential Development in order to build another 165 units. I wrote a story about that for C-Ville Weekly back in May.

That rezoning as well as another request will go before the Albemarle County Planning Commission for a public hearing. The seven member body meets in Lane Auditorium in the county’s office building at 401 McIntire Road. (meeting info) (agenda)

But first there will be a public hearing on a special use permit request for outdoor sales for a Flow dealership at 960 Seminole Trail.

Bonaventure’s sale attracted a lot of concern from housing advocates who said the county should have bought the property to keep it affordable. That same energy helped fuel advocacy for the loan to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville and Piedmont Housing Alliance to purchase the Carlton Mobile Home Park in August 2024.

Staff recommends approval of the rezoning and finds no concerns.

“The proposed rezoning meets the strategies of the growth management policy to promote density in the Development Area and recommendations of Housing Albemarle,” reads the staff report.

The application calls for building five new multifamily buildings on existing parking lots and in unbuilt spaces. The new plans would also call for designating 62 units as affordable.

“However, this is contingent on the Board of Supervisors approving an application for grant funds under the Affordable Rental Housing Incentive Program (ARHIP),” reads the staff report. “The applicant has not submitted the grant application yet, but the applicant intends to pursue the application prior to the rezoning being heard by the Board of Supervisors.”

Under the program, developers get a portion of their real property taxes rebated to them in exchange for guaranteeing that some units will be affordable to households below 60 percent of the area median income and others below 80 percent of AMI.

Bonaventure’s narrative tells the history of the project including the property being rezoned in 1996 for a maximum of 145 units.

“When the Applicant purchased the property, the deferred maintenance and living conditions of the units were substandard and the per-bedroom rent rates were particularly low as a result of the poor conditions,” reads the narrative. “For the community to continue and as a safe and financially viable community, renovations and unit conversion away from student suites to 2- and 3-bedroom traditional apartment units was necessary.”

Credit: The site plan for Attain on 5th (Credit: Timmons Group)

Charlottesville PC to learn more about review of city’s environmental regulations

On October 20, Charlottesville City Council agreed to spend up to $1.5 million on two studies to help the Department of Neighborhood Development plan for the future. One would be a mobility study and the other would be a review of the city’s environmental policies.

“For the environmental policy and regulatory review, we are actually looking at a number of different areas of natural resource management,” NDS Director Kelly Brown told Council on October 6. “So stormwater management, floodplain management, tree canopy and preservation, stream buffers, critical slopes and energy efficiency.”

The Charlottesville Planning Commission will have a work session to go through the scope of the project. The main issue is that some of the city’s requirements for stormwater and tree coverage are at odds with the city’s desire to create more residential density.

Council will take up the study on November 17.

In the meantime, there is a very thorough presentation in the packet worth reviewing with various Comprehensive Plan actions that call for further study.

An overview of some of what the study will review (Credit: City of Charlottesville)

Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority to get update on major capital projects

The Board of Directors for the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority meets at 2:15 p.m. at the headquarters of the Albemarle County Service Authority on Spotnaps Road.

That’s Pantops spelled backward for anyone interested. (tekcap adnega)

There are four items under other business with three of them being considerations of contracts for various projects.

The fourth item is an update on several major construction projects that are either underway or soon to be. This would be a good story for someone to do.

One of the forthcoming projects will be the increase in the pool raise at Ragged Mountain Reservoir (Credit: Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority)

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

No meetings today? This is a fifth window so it is not surprising. But what am I missing?

Thursday, October 30, 2025

Albemarle County to present data on community well-being

Every now and then, Albemarle County convenes all of its growth area advisory committees for information sessions on various topics. On October 30 at 6 p.m. in Lane Auditorium, staff will present reports on three studies.

“This event will feature presentations on three key reports that provide context on the challenges and opportunities we share across the region,” reads the meeting info page.

The three reports:

  • Community Wellbeing Profile: Explore trends in health, education, economic security, and housing in Albemarle County. The profile utilizes the American Human Development Index to provide a comprehensive view of community wellbeing.
  • Orange Dot Report: Learn about the income gap between what families earn and what they need to be self-sufficient. This report highlights key economic pressures households face and helps us understand the local landscape of financial stability and opportunity.
  • MAPP2Health Report: The 2025 Community Health Assessment offers insights into local health challenges and the community context that shapes healthier lives.

There will be a question and answer period. This meeting is advertised as a special meeting of the Board of Supervisors so a quorum can attend.

In one other meeting:
  • The Albemarle County Electoral Board will meet in Room C of the county’s office building at 1600 5th Street. (meeting info)

This post was contributed by Sean Tubbs. Sean is a journalist working to build a new information and news outlet centered around Charlottesville and Virginia. In 2020, he launched a daily newscast and newsletter and also created a semi-regular podcast on the pandemic.

Support for Sean’s “Week Ahead” update comes from The Piedmont Environmental Council.