Month: May 2014

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WAHS’ Environmental Academy Taking Shape

K Burnell Evans at the Daily Progress reports:

Plans are taking shape for one of the few new initiatives to escape the chopping block this spring when Albemarle County school officials slashed $3.9 million from the fiscal plan for the coming school year.

Students have been selected and a curriculum drawn up for freshmen entering the Environmental Studies Academy at Western Albemarle High School this fall. A group of 16 male and nine female students will form the academy’s entering class, said Adam Mulcahy, a biology and ecology teacher at Western who will lead the program.

And. Wow.

In an informal survey of his students, Mulcahy (a biology and ecology teacher at Western who will lead the program) told the School Board last week, about 80 percent of respondents had never planted something with their own hands.

The new Environmental Academy looks pretty cool.

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A Fun Crozet Weekend – 26 May 2014

One of the challenging things about living in Crozet is making time to take advantage of the things to be done!

Picking strawberries at Chiles Orchard on Saturday …

A nice bike ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway …

If I hadn’t been at an open house for a cool farmhouse near downtown Crozet, I’d like to think we would have made it to polo at King Family Vineyards … but not to worry – they’re having it next weekend too.

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The past Week on Facebook – 5-25-14

I don’t particularly like Facebook, but I recognize its value to the community and sometimes a quick post on Facebook is better than a quick blog post so as not to flood everyone’s inboxes. I might start doing this type of post more often – what do you think?

21 May – I asked what Delegate Steve Landes thought about the “storm troopers” at last year’s Lock’n Festival. (no response. (Edit: I’ve sent a followup email as well and will call tomorrow morning)

21 May – There was an earthquake centered in Powatan; many in Crozet felt it. (I did not, but my wife did)

22 May – Crozet Safety Corps reported a peeping tom in Park Road/Westhall.

“We have another report of an adult male peeping into a window of a home in Crozet’s Park Road/ Brookwood neighborhood. This person was described as a white male peeping into a bedroom window between 9:30 and 10 p.m. last night.

23 May – I asked if anyone had anything to add to the Crozet Calendar.

25 May – I asked what folks are doing in Crozet on this phenomenal weekend. So far, strawberries at Chiles and polo at King Family are popular.

Notes:

– You don’t have to have a Facebook account to see what’s posted there.

– You can follow RealCrozetVA on Twitter (usually the fastest for “breaking” things like the earthquake and derecho and power outages)

– You can receive RealCrozetVA in your email.

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CCAC Meeting – 15 May 2014 – A More Typical Meeting than Usual

This (putting together this story and last night’s meeting) took a lot longer than usual. Storify (the awesome service I use to aggregate the tweets) wasn’t functioning as usual, so I had to manually pull in the tweets.

– More discussion on Barnes Lumber development
– Rutherfoord hotel aiming for late Spring 2015 opening
– Streetscape is moving forward
– Library is kicking butt
– CCAC is going to try to meet again before the Albemarle Planning Commission hearing about Barnes Lumberyard on 17 June.

As usual, please click through, scroll all the way to the bottom and work your way up. And then get involved and ask questions.

Update 16 May 2014:

Frank Stoner with Milestone sends this:

Thanks for the summary. People need to remember that this part of the process is only about identifying the transportation corridors and figuring out general land use patterns. The real planning process won’t start until the rezoning is completed so I don’t know how people could already surmise that our plan won’t be pedestrian friendly. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the successful redevelopment of downtown will require full community engagement on several critical questions that are not addressed by the existing master plan. They are as follows:

1 – What will downtown Crozet’s identity be? What will make it a desirable destination? What should it look and feel like?
2 – How will people get there ? The Library Avenue extension needs a connection back to 240 near downtown to provide adequate circulation within the downtown commercial district?
3 – What businesses do we want to locate downtown and how can we make it an attractive place to locate businesses?
4 – How will we provide adequate parking for the DCD and still promote compact, pedestrian friendly development? DCD needs a long range parking plan.
5 – How will we build and maintain quality civic and green space in the downtown district?

I’m hopeful that we can work side by side with the CCAC and the rest of the Crozet community to address these important questions because, without consensus and solutions to these, the rezoning, with our without the SUP won’t bring the stores, businesses and residents that we need for downtown to be successful.

Frank

Update 2:

This is a 10mb pdf of the most recent comments from Albemarle County Staff. If you’re curious to read/learn more, go to Albemarle County’s great County View and search by either application # – SP201400001 or as I did it, “PLApplication ProjectName Contains:” = Barnes. Continue reading “CCAC Meeting – 15 May 2014 – A More Typical Meeting than Usual”