As the community gets ready for election day on November 6th,
Charlottesville Tomorrow
is preparing to mail our non-partisan voter guides featuring the results of interviews with each of the candidates for
Charlottesville City Council
and the
Albemarle County Board of Supervisors
.
Over the next few weeks, this blog will feature some of the questions that did
not
make the cut for the voter guide, but which still offer important insights into the candidates’ views on local growth and development issues.
Our
Election Watch 2007 website
includes the complete audio and written transcript for each candidate interview.
Subscribe to our e-mails
to get immediate notification of the availability of the
2007 Voter Guides
. The content below are excerpts pulled from the verbatim transcripts.
BOARD OF SUPERVISORS, FOURTH IN A SERIES
How do you feel about an expansion of the County’s designated growth areas, currently 5% of the County’s land area, to support a transfer of development rights program or to support a developer’s request to move land from the rural area to the growth area?How do you feel about an expansion of the County’s designated growth areas, currently 5% of the County’s land area, to support a transfer of development rights program or to support a developer’s request to move land from the rural area to the growth area?
RIVANNA
Ken Boyd (R)-Incumbent
: Well, I think that the transfer of development rights program is an intriguing idea and I’m very anxious to see more about it but I really am not going to make up my mind until I’ve had more analysis that would come from the staff and from a report which we haven’t received yet.
Marcia Joseph (D)-Challenger
: …I think there [is] still available land out there, not only green land that hasn’t been used, but land that could be redeveloped. I don’t think we need to expand them at this point. TDRs are a very interesting concept. Before I would ever commit to anything like that, I’d like to see what other localities are doing, what have they done, what have they been successful in doing… the receiving area of these transferred development rights is extremely critical because you realize that there’s no rezoning going on, that that increased density just goes on in there so we’d have to make very very sure that all of this infrastructure that we’ve been talking about is adequate and could support that increased density.
SCOTTSVILLE
Lindsay Dorrier (D)-Incumbent
: I am against any expansion of the growth area in Albemarle County.
Kevin Fletcher (I)-Challenger
: I am not in favor of expanding our growth area… because we have squandered I think a lot of our opportunities in the growth area, but I think that the proposed plan benefits most everyone except I guess the small landowner in Albemarle County, the people who are developers or land speculators, you know, they get what they want… the proposed plan would, as I believe as Mr. Slutzky has proposed, puts a great deal of burden of this plan on the small landowners and I’m not in favor of that in any way…. I don’t think there’s been any new legislation to allow the transferring of development rights…
Denny King (I)-Challenger
: You know, the more I look at the 95/5% split, the more I become convinced that such an imbalance, such an enormous imbalance of 95% and 5%, how could it ever be sustainable?… Are we rapidly becoming northern Virginia?…
Transferring more development into the 5% or expanding the growth areas, I don’t think does much to address the basic imbalance. That’s simply a band-aid…
WHITE HALL
David Wyant (R)-Incumbent
: Well, I’m opposed to expanding the development areas and especially Crozet, if we do a Transfer of Development Rights, if it’s ever considered. I think if you look at Albemarle County from up at 20,000 [feet], it’s kind of unusual to have a development area outside of the major one of in the County, but I understand why years ago the Board selected that with ConAgra and the ACME [businesses] that no longer exist there.
…When we get into the Transfer of Development Rights, what you’re going to have to consider there, as I’ve said in engineering, I’m trying to provide services and the trunk lines and the other means for water and sewer, [TDRs] really [do] change that. I as a designer of those infrastructures, it’s difficult for me to design for that when those boundaries are changing on it…
Ann Mallek (D)-Challenger
: I oppose expanding the growth area. We made a commitment that growth area residents would have the countryside nearby, so that the growth area does not become a huge monolith, with miles and miles of high rise and high density living. If we betray that trust our growth areas will fail. Providing greater encouragement to farming nearby would increase the proximity of farm products to customers.
Kendall Singleton
