City developers on a slippery slope?

Mike Meintzschel spent part of the winter walking around muddied ground with his 12-year-old daughter, filming eroded hillsides, exposed tree roots and water flowing over pavement, unhindered, into Charlottesville creeks.

The videos showing consequences of development was sent to city officials as a plea for them to strengthen rules about building on slopes — Charlottesville’s Steep Slope Ordinance — which Meintzschel said is degrading the city’s landscapes to the point of shock.
“No matter where you build, you’re affecting the watershed,” Meintzschel said. “Whatever they’re doing, it’s not working.”

While feelings about building on Charlottesville’s hillsides vary, several parties agree that the city’s rules need to be changed. The city’s ordinance, which officials are contemplating revising, says that no building can take place on a slope that has a grade in excess of 25 percent, unless a waiver has been granted.

But according to city officials and past and current members of the city Planning Commission, evaluating applications has been difficult because the ordinance’s criteria are too vague.

City Planner Brian Haluska wrote in an e-mail that one of the waiver criterion is so open-ended that essentially any engineer could argue for a waiver.
“The intent of the ordinance was to prevent developers from disturbing critical slopes, yet the ordinance makes it possible for the commission to waive that regulation in any situation, if they desire,” Haluska said.

Commissioners will be discussing the ordinance at a work session Tuesday. Environmental-ists and some residents are pushing for the rules to be stricter. That includes not allowing building in certain areas, particularly where water is nearby, to prevent even more landscape degradation, erosion and sedimentation from
taking place in the city’s rivers and streams.

‘Better criteria’

Of the steep slope waiver requests that have made it to the Planning Commission, the vast majority has been OK’d. Since May 2006, when the ordinance was created, the Planning Commission has seen 22 applications. Nineteen were approved, two were deferred and one was denied.

“It just seems like a song and a dance and a waste if we’re going to approve them all,” said former Planning Commissioner Cheri Lewis, who questioned the rule’s usefulness and wanted to redo the ordinance when she was a member. “We just need better criteria.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center has been pushing the city for months to change its regulations governing waivers, arguing that the criteria are subjective and that some slopes should automatically be ineligible, such as those that are within 100 feet of a stream and slopes that have grades of more than 40 percent.

Currently, proximity to waterways is not a criterion outlined in the city’s regulations.
Kay Slaughter, a senior attorney for special projects at the center, said the advocacy organization is not tied to those particular numbers, but more needs to be done to protect the city’s environment. Earlier this month, Slaughter implored the City Council to have a joint meeting with the Planning Commission about revising the ordinance.

Building should not occur “over a certain grade and proximity to a stream, and I mean even a degraded stream. Because most streams, including big ones like the Meadow Creek and Moore’s Creek, are degraded,” Slaughter, a former Charlottesville mayor, said. “In many ways, developers are going to look at steep slopes to build more. But in some places, you just shouldn’t be doing it.”

Others are unsure that picking a percentage grade would solve the problem and argue that the city needs to look at a range of factors — including proximity to water and influences the project could have on adjacent properties, Planning Commission member Dan Rosensweig said.

“Just because a slope is steep doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worthy of protection,” he said. Rosensweig also said that the ordinance in many cases has worked, because city staff has rejected applications for waivers before commissioners even reviewed them.

Work smarter, not harder

Mark Keller, a landscape architect with Terra Concepts, P.C. who has worked on several steep slope waiver applications for projects in the city, said he would rather have the ordinance be “smarter” instead of making it more difficult to get waivers.
Keller said he worked on waivers for the Boys & Girls Club that will be built on the campus of Buford Middle School, the William Taylor Plaza mixed-use development at the corner of Ridge Street and Cherry Avenue, and for a subdivision on Davis Avenue. The first two were approved, the third deferred.

“To me, professionally, it is tricky and appears somewhat subjective,” he said. “The process can be difficult to navigate and primarily difficult to predict the outcome.”

Keller said developers primarily view the ordinance as a way to stop new development.
“I think it has a stigma attached to it,” he said.

Slaughter said that the ordinance is not supposed to stop growth but find the balance between having good growth and protecting the city’s urban environment.
“The city wants quality development,” she said.