Business park courts Crozetians

At a neighborhood meeting and open house they organized December 9, Will Yancey and his team took another step toward persuading Albemarle County to approve the Yancey Mills Business Park in Crozet. However, much of the neighborhood seemed not to notice.
 

The Yancey Mills Business Park, adjoining the current Yancey Lumber Company on Route 250, would extend south and west to Interstate 64 and east toward Western Albemarle High School. The 148 acres of fields and forest have been in the Yancey family since at least the 1890s, and by rezoning it for light industrial use, Yancey hopes to give local businesses a place to expand, relocate or legally park their heavy equipment. Several of them, including an arborist and hardwood supplier, wrote letters of support to the Albemarle County Planning Commission.

After setting aside space for athletic fields, roads, and stream buffers, Yancey says, the lot would leave about 80 or 90 acres for businesses, almost doubling the light industrial land available in Albemarle. In her presentation for Yancey, attorney Valerie Long highlighted the business park’s proximity to existing water and utilities as well as to the interstate, which would limit traffic through Crozet. The project might also attract new businesses, such as a pharmaceutical warehouse or a machinery dealer, that could find neither room nor roads previously.

However, the proposed land lies outside the existing Crozet Development Area, and so it requires the county Board of Supervisors to make exception to its policy against expanding the growth area. The project got new life December 3 when supervisors voted to overrule the county Planning Commission and reconsider the project when the county reviews the Crozet Master Plan next year. Still, it’s a steep road ahead: The county would first have to amend its comprehensive plan to allow the business park, and then rezone the parcels, a process that could take many months to a year. That’s why Mark Keller, the project’s landscape and engineering firm, explained “we’re trying to stay vague and flexible” when it comes to specific site design, prospective tenants, or impacts on traffic and jobs.

Yet precisely those things worry Paula Welch and her neighbor, who live opposite Yancey Lumber. The pair were two of only three neighbors to attend the meeting. Welch did not receive an invitation—a friend of Welch’s who lives farther away received the flyer and passed it along.

“Why wasn’t it given to the people who are the Yancey Mills community?” Welch asks. “We’re not trying to cause problems —we just want intelligent, planned and considerate development.” Yancey and his public relations consultant said hundreds of invitations were sent through various mailing lists.

Welch, all the same, appreciates the research Yancey has done and his forethought. After all, she originally heard the project “would be strip malls, which would be 10 times worse.”