Crozet's community blog
Barnes Lumberyard category for the evolution of the Barnes site in Downtown Crozet
Mike Marshall of the Crozet Gazette wrote one side of the Barnes Lumber future and Frank Stoner with Milestone Partners, prospective developer of Barnes Lumber, responded. In internet-speak, the opinions are long, but spend a few minutes reading. You’ll be more aware when you’re finished reading.
Regardless of which side you find yourself on, take some time and get educated about what’s happening and what might happen in Downtown Crozet.
And then ask questions.
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.
Tonight's CCAC meeting. Moved to the Baptist Church as we were locked out of the Meadows #ccac0514 pic.twitter.com/ztdJWG0zwA
— realcrozetva (@realcrozetva) May 15, 2014
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”
2013 – lots happened in Crozet this year – a lot of good, some bad, and I tried to capture most of it here. 2013 is the year that the RealCrozetVA Facebook page (I don’t like FB, but it’s awfully useful) became the third leg in the RealCrozetVA community, the recaps of the Crozet Community Advisory Council meetings proved quite useful, and the Crozet community time and again demonstrated why this is a great place to live. If you’re interested in browsing all the stories, you can see the 2013 archives – 165 stories all – here.
I’ve highlighted some of the stories I posted from each month and done my very best to not editorialize (although if I did, “Crozet Library opened” would have an exclamation point!).
Five things:
– You can subscribe to RealCrozetVA by email, follow RealCrozetVA on Twitter, or like RealCrozetVA on Facebook. A note on Facebook – we tend to have very good conversations and interaction there, but I don’t post everything there that gets published here.
– I’m a Realtor who lives in and loves Crozet. In my ideal world, I’d never get off my bicycle to show houses or meet seller clients. (and I know this will likely never happen). I rarely explicitly say this, but if you’re moving to Crozet or thinking about selling your home, I’d appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
– If you’re curious, these are some of the photos I’ve taken in Crozet this year.
– Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Crozet for reading, commenting and sharing what you see here with your friends. You truly make this a great place.
– Really, thank you. Whenever I hear from people how they read about Crozet here, or used RealCrozetVA to research Crozet before they moved here, or when you let the community know about power outages and such via the RealCrozetVA twitter feed, I’m ever more grateful for the Crozet community and your support here. Thank you.
We had a good discussion about Crozet school’s competitiveness and a great conversation about what we want Crozet to be.
A hotel was announced to be coming to Old Trail in Crozet and many of you described your neighborhoods in Crozet.
We had a rare (and appreciated!) guest post recapping the March Crozet Community Association meeting.
WAHS got a new principal, the Daily Progress called for retrofitting 250 West, a guest’s reflection on the James Sun Memorial 5k, Crozet Volunteer Fire Department got a Twitter account, and the Crozet real estate market started to really pick up.
May 2013
King Family Vineyards responded to the soggy pitch by having Nolo Weekend – and it was tons of fun. A 10 year old was accidentally shot in Crozet. I started to recap the CCAC meetings using Storify – and subsequently did it many more times to what I think is a great success.
June 2013
WAHS’ new principal answered 10 questions, Crozet got another new great restaurant, Restoration and the Field School put together a great kids’ triathlon.
July 2013
The Crozet Gators won the Jefferson Swim League Championship for the first time in 22 years and Restore N Station finally broke ground.
August 2013
We discussed where the next Crozet stop light will be, I thanked Blue Ridge Internetworks for hosting RealCrozetVA, I summarized the CCAC meeting and the Crozet community suffered another rash of car break-ins.
September 2013
The Crozet Library opened, the community responded to a survey on new Crozet hotel, I recapped the September CCAC meeting, I looked at when homes come on the market in Crozet, Ned Gallaway, Albemarle’s At-Large school board member hosted the first community conversation about Albemarle County Schools that I can remember being held by a school board member in Crozet, and you voiced your opinions on what should happen to the old Crozet Library.
October 2013
We figured out what the utility work in front of BP was, I relaunched the Crozet Calendar – and it’s now available for community members to post their own events (ask me how), y’all answered the question – What’s the first thing you tell someone about Crozet?, the 3rd Quarter Crozet real estate market report was interesting, the recap of the CCAC meeting proved useful and interesting, and we had a good conversation about the walkability of Crozet.
November 2013
Lots happened in Crozet on the Crozet Calendar, the awesome Crozet Trails Crew reached a few milestones, the Crozet Angel Tree was quickly accomplished, the buildings downtown were re-sided and the CCAC meeting was live-tweeted by a chorus of people! and recapped here on RealCrozetVA.
December 2013
The Crozet Streetscape meeting was very informative, I looked at the Crozet real estate market in December, Tim Dodson, WAHS junior, wrote about his perspective after having attended and live-tweeted the CCAC meeting, the Streetscape really is coming, we can now drive faster (legally) on 64, and the Barnes Lumberyard redevelopment may be moving forward – see this recap of the December CCAC meeting.
I’m going to update this later today, but wanted to publish a draft for those interested in last night’s conversation. It was, in my opinion, a great conversation and dialogue. Great input from the public and the CCAC. There was a lot of information covered last night – from possible timelines, challenges with developing such a large parcel in such a relatively small town, possible businesses that could go in, probable residential components, zoning … a lot. Much of that was captured by @Tim_Dodson and @CvilleKim (and @RealCrozetVA) on Twitter and quite a few not at the meeting few engaged on Twitter as well. Grab a cup of coffee and digest the tweets – and then … ask questions.
Frank Stoner with opening remarks – "we don't intend this to be a presentation as much as a dialogue" pic.twitter.com/E5uAPYydlN
— realcrozetva (@realcrozetva) December 20, 2013
Update: Charlottesville Tomorrow has a great story about last night’s meeting.
– For those curious, the hashtag #CCAC1213 was used to track the conversation on Twitter.
A few of the best questions/topics that were addressed and I’ll address in the update, but ultimately, this was a conversation about the former Barnes property and the future of Crozet:
– (Frank) Stoner: what’s the unique value proposition to bring people downtown? #CCAC1213
– What are some towns that are what you’d like Crozet to be? #CCAC1213
– #CCAC1213 today the challenge for developers is that the infrastructure requirements take up so much of the costs
– Stoner: challenge of replicating old town feel is the execution #CCAC1213 Continue reading “Recapping CCAC – Future of Barnes Lumber Property”
Just wondering … with the pending redevelopment of the Barnes Lumberyard, how will (and will?) the 240 side of Crozet be connected to Downtown Crozet?
Crozet needs a hotel. The County of Albemarle, recognizing this, “Albemarle County will take steps to make itself eligible for a state financing program that could support the construction of hotels.”
Catlin said the county’s economic development team is supportive of having a small hotel, one that keeps the character of Crozet intact, while filling the critical deficiency for adequate lodging. She estimated a future hotel would have between 30 to 60 rooms.
Read more at Charlottesville Tomorrow.
Questions:
– What’s the status of the proposed hotel in Old Trail?
– Could Crozet support two hotels? (I think yes, so long as they’re small and Crozet-ish)
– Where would the second one go? (Presumably in the site of the former Barnes Lumberyard)
– Will Crozet be further fractured?
I posted the following thought on the RealCrozetVA facebook page and it generated quite a few thoughtful comments, but I much prefer to center the conversation here. That said, the comments added to my original thought by changing my premise from “what do we want Crozet to be” to first, let’s define the Crozet culture as it currently is and then define what we want Crozet to look like.
This is something that is been going through my head for the last 12 or 18 months: what is Crozet going to look like in 12 or 20 years? More importantly, what do we want it to look like in 12 or 20 years?
Our town is going to change. That is a known known. But what are the unknowns? Will we encourage the homogenization that is happening in Charlottesville? Will we be able to encourage adoption of the Crozet
culture to those who are new?
If we don’t plan (and act!) accordingly and wisely for the coming growth – the school traffic coming from Old Trail comes to mind as well as the traffic to and from all the schools in the mornings and afternoons, and presumably more when Re-Store ‘n Station opens, and from Westlake Hills – then Crozet won’t be as wonderful a place to live as it is now.
I love Crozet; we’ve been here for 11 years (I think) and I intend to be here for a long time. I make my living representing buyers and sellers moving to and from Crozet, so I have a different perspective than many, but my goal remains to work to do whatever I can to keep and make Crozet a special place to be.
I’m posting below the comments from the conversation … please, take some time to read them all (and thank you to everyone who has already commented). They’re thoughtful, insightful comments about what Crozet was, is and could be. I’ll call out this one as I think it well articulates what most may be thinking:
I think we have to combine and find the way to bring the new into the fold of the old unique Crozet so we can grow together.
* For the purposes of this conversation, “Crozet” means (very roughly) – from the railroad bridge at 240/250 intersection to Greenwood Gourmet just past 64 to about two miles past Crozet Elementary. Seriously. Getting into a discussion about “what are the boundaries of Crozet” won’t serve this discussion well … and may lead to moderation of comments.”
@NBC29 reports: “UB Properties, subsidiary of Union First Market Bank, closes on Barnes Lumber in Crozet after June auction. Plans to market & sell property.”
You’ll remember that a mystery man bid the price up at the auction to a price, outbidding the only other bidder. Here’s hoping more information comes out in the coming days …
Thanks to the Crozet Gazette for the research and story that “no deal closed on the sale of the J. Bruce Barnes Lumber Company acreage in downtown Crozet on July 27, the date called for according to the terms of the June 27 real estate foreclosure auction.”
In other news, Library Avenue has to be torn up a bit “Roell said that construction of Claudius Place, once expected to begin in April, has been delayed because no sanitary sewer line was installed under Library Avenue when it was built.”
… one has to wonder, why wasn’t this thought of before the road went down?
Any guesses as to who it is?
If you remember, the “mystery buyer” wouldn’t say who he represented,
But … “The only hint Thomas would offer: In 30 days the deed will be recorded.”
Hopefully the buyer (and buyer’s intentions) won’t be hidden behind various layers of LLCs as suggested by a HooK commenter.