Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Police Blow Up Envelope, Cylinder

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 27, 2007 in Crime and Education. 13 Comments

Janitors discovered an envelope and a “cylinder” at Henley and Brownsville this morning, the middle school and elementary school separated by a parking lot in Crozet, across from the street from WAHS. (Which is confusing. Were they in the parking lot between the two? Was the envelope at one school and the cylinder at another?) They contacted police, who got the bomb squad and the FBI involved. Parents were asked to keep students at home, and those kids who had already showed up were ushered over to WAHS. Late this morning the bomb squad did what comes naturally to them: they blew up said envelope and cylinder.

No doubt Jim Camblos is preparing to press charges against some poor kid for the crime of leaving a thank you note and a tin of cookies at her principal’s door.

Biscuit Run Price Tag: $222 Million

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 27, 2007 in Development, Taxes and Transportation. 14 Comments

People very rarely believe me when I point out that Albemarle County actually loses money on each new resident. “But,” they say repeatedly, followed by a mention of a revenue stream that a) has been accounted for and b) doesn’t add up to much. Charlottesville Tomorrow points to a great example of this: the cost of Biscuit Run. The county’s Fiscal Impact Analyst wrote a memo about the total costs of the development that considers the cost of all additional services and additional revenue via taxes and contains this alarming conclusion after looking at both an optimistic and a pessimistic scenario:

The numbers generated by the two scenarios that I ran indicate that, if the County approved [Biscuit Run], the differential net annual fiscal impact would be $4,399,000-$6,665,000 = -$-2,266,000. That number means that, annually, the County would be $2,266,000 worse off approving [Biscuit Run] than denying the proposal. [A twenty-year analysis] in the former reveals a deficit of $88,665,000 while, in the latter case, there exists a deficit of $134,578,000. The difference between those two numbers, $45,913,000, means that, over the course of the twenty year period, the County would be $45,913,000 worse off approving [Biscuit Run] than denying the proposal. […] After taking into account the [developer’s] cash proffers, the new differential would equal $25,213,000 so, over the course of the twenty year period, the County, according to CRIM, would be roughly $25,213,000 worse off approving [Biscuit Run] than denying it.

So this new development may well cost the county $134 million. All of that is on top of the $88M in improvements required to 20 South, Avon, and Old Lynchburg just to handle the additional traffic. For reference, the entire annual budget for the county is just north of $300M.

Even if we wanted to take a vote to see what percentage of Albemarle wants to pay more taxes in order to add 5,000 new residents to the county (and I guarantee you that wouldn’t pass), it wouldn’t matter: the county isn’t given the power to stop developments like this, and a majority of the BoS wouldn’t consider stopping Biscuit Run. How we deal with growth is broken. Totally and utterly broken.

Dorrier Objects to Revenue Sharing

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 26, 2007 in General News. 4 Comments

Back in 1982, Albemarle County was weary of Charlottesville annexing the ever-growing urban ring, enlarging the city and shrinking the county’s tax base. So a deal was struck, preventing the city from expanding but obligating the county to pay the city a percentage of the county’s revenue. In yesterday’s Progress, Jeremy Borden and Seth Rosen wrote about the Board of Supervisors’ Lindsay Dorrier‘s frustration about those payments, which will come to $13M this year. (Lloyd Snook points out that no supervisor objects more strongly than Lindsay Dorrier, whose district is in no danger of annexation.) Dorrier complains that $13M is the most that the county has ever had to pay, and thinks it’s time to look at changing that agreement.

The city, of course, has zero interest in entertaining such an idea, and for good cause. The best quote about this comes from City Manager Gary O’Connell: “We will be ready at a moment’s notice to start a discussion about giving up the revenue sharing agreement and doing annexation.”

I want to know when can the city set up the same deal with UVa: They stop annexing land, Charlottesville gives them a percentage of revenue.

Wendell Wood, NGIC, and Places29

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 24, 2007 in Development and Transportation. 13 Comments

In last Sunday’s Daily Progress, Jeremy Borden looked at the progress of Places29, Albemarle’s plan to turn 29 north from a blight on the landscape into a place fit for humans. The bit that really got my attention was this quote from developer Wendell Wood:

I know what my customers want. I have no customers looking to open up a small dress boutique. They are obsolete. … [Stores like Target] is where the new marketing is. A lot of people say, ‘We’re hurting the guy at the little hardware store.’ But that’s life.

Wood’s assertion that small businesses are “obsolete” is staggering in its ignorance, shortsightedness, and flat-out wrongness. To the extent to which Wood and like-minded developers have their hand on the rudder of Places29, we are all in deep trouble.

After reading Borden’s article, I was primed for Jayson Whitehead’s article in the current C-Ville Weekly describing the unusual sale of Wood’s land to the National Ground Intelligence Center. Whitehead managed to get a remarkable level of access to nearly every decision maker in the process, providing a level of detail about commercial development in the area unlike anything I’ve read before.

The sketchy deal went a little like this. NGIC (famous for a little claim about aluminum tubes, nuclear materials, and Iraq) has outgrown their brand-new facility up 29, and has decided that they need to expand by 60% in the next five years. (Developer Wendell Wood sold them the 29 acres that they’re on now, back in 1997, for $1M.) Since he owned land adjacent to NGIC, zoned as a Development Area, he offered to sell them 47 acres for their expansion. He was offered $7M for the land. Wood believed that the land was worth something closer to $16M, which you’d think would be the end of the story. ($16M being almost exactly 1,000% more than the adjacent chunk of land was worth ten years ago.) But that was when Rivanna Supervisor Ken Boyd got a telephone call from an NGIC employee, whose identity he won’t disclose, saying that if he didn’t do something, the deal would fall through, and NGIC may simply pack up and leave town.

When Boyd got in touch with Wood, the developer proposed a solution. He had 30 acres of land along 29, designated Rural, preventing any development. If the county would redesignate that land as Development Area, he’d be willing to part with his land for the offered price. The board was pressured into voting on this in just a few weeks, after being told by federal representatives that it was conceivable that NGIC could leave. When the vote was cast it was 5-1 in favor of the deal, with Sally Thomas dissenting, arguing that it was simply bad planning and a bad use of land, and that it didn’t make sense to for the county to be used as a bargaining chip with the feds by a developer. (See Charlottesville Tomorrow for the podcast.)

Places29 — or any plan for development — can never succeed with enormous exceptions being carved out. The question about this deal is whether the county was taken for a ride. That may never be answered.

Downtown Parking Garages to be Sold

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 19, 2007 in Business and Transportation. 18 Comments

In today’s Daily Progress, Brian McNeill writes that Charlottesville Parking Center Inc. intends to sell off their Water St. surface lot, the land that the Water St. parking garage is on, and 284 spaces in the Water St. garage. Water Street GarageThe organization long insisted that there was no danger of any such thing happening, pointing to their mission of 48-year-old mission of providing inexpensive parking downtown rather than profit-seeking. The trouble is that those pillar-of-the-community types are all elderly or deceased (i.e., Hovey Dabney), leaving a business that’s as interested in profit as any other. Former city manager Cole Hendrix seems to figure that’s it, telling the Progress that “now that the CPC people are retiring or passing away, like Hovey Dabney, maybe it’s the beginning of the end of an era.”

It was hard not to see this coming, particularly given last July’s news that CPC was raising rates while seeking to sell off their open lot. Now the city is entirely reliant on this private corporation to make downtown work, a corporation that in no way resembles the one that the city has come to count on. (It was only a few years ago that the city sold off the final free parking lot to a private developer, who put up that hideous rich-folks condo on the corner of Fifth and Water.) That’s launched an interesting debate within the city as to what the proper response is for the city. Mayor David Brown tells the Progress that the city should try to buy the parking lots from CPC, but Councilor Kevin Lynch counters that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to reward a company for treating the city so badly.

If you’ve got any advice for the city on this, I expect they could use it.

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