An Albemarle County report lays out a need for more light industrial zoning, and Will Yancey is proposing a business park on the outskirts of Crozet that would add 150 acres of light industrial. Yet Yancey is smashing against a well-established county principle that opposes expanding the growth areas.
Light industrial is a broad zoning classification that includes everything from auto body shops to biotech manufacturing. Over the last 12 years, Albemarle County has seen significant shifts in its workforce, losing thousands of manufacturing jobs while gaining hundreds of positions in fields like computer design, company management and electronic shipping. The recent real estate boom, with its emphasis on residential and retail, led to higher rents and, in some cases like Willow Glen, rezonings of light industrial land for housing and stores. Assuming a 3.5 percent annual growth rate, county staff projects a need for 300 additional acres of light industrial land by 2026.
 Will Yancey is proposing a 148-acre business park in the wedge between Interstate 64 and Route 250, but the idea failed to captivate the county Planning Commission because it’s outside the Crozet growth area. The boundary extends to Route 250. |
Yancey is enthusiastic about his plans for a new business park in the wedge of southern Crozet between I-64 and Route 250, and will choose whether to submit a comprehensive plan amendment for the project by September.
“We have had very preliminary and informal talks with a number of local businesses, many who seem interested in exploring the possibility of using our site should it be approved,” says Yancey via e-mail. He says that the business park could keep light industrial users in the county “rather than relocating with their tax dollars to a surrounding county as many have done recently.”
Yancey’s idea would likely be applauded—if it were sited a few hundred feet closer to Crozet. The land, owned by members of the Yancey family, lies behind the Yancey Lumber Mill and just outside the Crozet growth area. Largely for that reason, the proposal was met with skepticism by the county Planning Commission during a work session July 30.
“We need to identify land for light industrial development in the growth area and to try to find ways to economically allow land to be used for that purpose,” says Commissioner Jon Cannon. “But my view is also that there’s a strong presumption that land be identified within the existing growth area.”
Almost 30 years ago, as a way of reducing sprawl, Albemarle County supervisors drew lines around 5 percent of county land where they wanted to see growth; the rest was called “rural area,” where development would be discouraged. Even though it is in between two major highways and near water and sewer hook-ups, Yancey’s proposed business park is officially in the rural area.
In the past 16 months, the Board of Supervisors has held firm against two rural area rezonings—one for an indoor soccer complex off Polo Grounds Road, the other a sports entertainment center just south of Pantops—despite the fact that they were both just outside the growth area. The Board passed a resolution of intent to expand the growth area by 30 acres in 2006 for Wendell Wood after he sold land to the National Ground Intelligence Center, but as it became part of the delayed Places29 Master Plan, that still hasn’t won final approval.
This time around, even supervisors who are firm believers in keeping set growth area boundaries aren’t ruling out Yancey’s idea just yet. “I’m inherently reluctant to expand the growth area,” says Supervisor David Slutzky. “On the other hand, if a persuasive case can be made that we don’t have enough light industrial and the location makes sense, it’s conceivable that I may support it.”
Ann Mallek, the Board’s newest member and whose district includes Crozet, suggested to Yancey that he tie it to the Crozet Master Plan update, which comes up this year. In terms of expanding the growth area, “I’m not keen on it in general,” says Mallek, though she says she’s open to looking at it. “There’s lots of things about that location that make it very different from other places in the rural area. That whole process is something that we have to be very deliberate about.”
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