The Board of Supervisors has given the Stonefield shopping center permission to add a Costco, Sean Tubbs wrote for Charlottesville Tomorrow on Thursday. Ken Boyd and Petie Craddock were the dissenters in the vote. Permission was required because the developer, South Carolina-based Edens, needed to change the already approved layout of the roads to accommodate the 155,000 square foot building, and because they’d need to relocate a plaza and eliminate a café in favor of an “enhanced pedestrian corridor,” which I assume is a euphemism for a sidewalk. With these two waivers, that’s a total of seventeen waivers that the county has granted Edens for Stonefield.
As Dave McNair writes in The Hook, all of this is precisely the opposite of what Edens promoted Stonefield as. Back when they were calling this “Albemarle Place,” Edens pitched the development as a mixed-use, new urbanist, anti-shopping-center, complete with renderings that showed something like the Downtown Mall, transplanted to 29 North. (They even labelled one road in the development as “New Main Street,” stomach-turningly.) They’re still touting it as “neighborhood style [sic] development” on their website, despite the addition of Costco.
Those puzzled by Ken Boyd’s dissenting vote might look at this bit of McNair’s article:
“There is somewhat of a campaign of misinformation against the Stonefield application for minor plan variations and it appears to me to be being waged by other developers,” claims Rooker, whose district Stonefield occupies.
“In my opinion,” he adds, “this developer is being singled out for much harsher treatment because of a campaign of opposition from other developers and at least one board member who is carrying their water.”
Say what?
Rooker’s is not the only allegation of a board member carrying water for a developer, but none of his fellow supervisors had responded to such claims by press time.
9/16 Update: I originally wrote that Edens is based in North Carolina. They’re actually based in South Carolina.
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