Planning Commission
Planning Commission
Tue, March 24, 2026
Agenda items
Vote records
Discussion summary
Transcript
Meeting summaryAI-generated
Planning Commission — March 24, 2026
This was a work session of the Charlottesville Planning Commission, meaning no votes were taken. The session covered two substantive topics: proposed amendments to the city's homestay (short-term rental) ordinance, and an update on transportation planning initiatives. A lengthy informal conversation was captured before the meeting was called to order; that portion has been set aside as it contains no substantive public business.
Homestay Ordinance Review
Background and Current Rules
Zoning staff member Missy Creasy presented a comprehensive review of the city's homestay ordinance, which regulates short-term rentals (defined as residential properties rented for fewer than 30 days at a time) in residential zones R-A, R-B, and R-C. The ordinance is roughly a decade old and was considered pioneering when adopted — many other localities modeled their own ordinances on Charlottesville's. Key current rules include: operators must reside at the property at least 185 days per year; permits cost $100 annually; a maximum of six adults (plus any number of children) may occupy a homestay; and staff may inspect premises once per year with advance notice.
New Enforcement Tool: Granicus Software
The city recently procured Granicus, a software platform that automatically locates short-term rental listings across all major booking platforms (Airbnb, VRBO, etc.), catalogs rental history, and generates enforcement letters. The system has identified approximately 529 listings, though staff noted that number is inflated by duplicate listings and is being refined. Commissioner of Revenue Todd Diver (who appeared as a staff resource) noted his office has tracked roughly 250 business licenses annually for several years, which he considers a more reliable baseline count. Before Granicus, staff had to manually visit each platform website and screenshot listings — a significant time burden.
Tax Revenue
Diver explained that transient occupancy tax (9% rate) from short-term rentals generated approximately $1.5 million in 2024, compared to $7.6 million from hotels and motels. Short-term rentals represented about 14% of total lodging inventory (roughly 4,100 hotel rooms exist in the market, per AirDNA data). Notably, Airbnb and VRBO now remit the occupancy tax directly to the city on behalf of hosts, so tax collection is largely automatic and not dependent on Granicus compliance enforcement.
Options Considered but Not Recommended
Staff walked through several amendments that had been considered and publicly vetted, including: reducing the maximum rental days from 180 to 90 per year; requiring formal safety inspections; increasing maximum occupancy from six to eight adults; and extending the permit term from one to three years (with a fee increase to $500). These proposals were presented to a community open house in December 2025 and received mixed reactions. The 90-day cap in particular was unpopular.
Key Complication: State Law
A significant factor in staff's final recommendation was a new General Assembly law requiring localities, *if they amend their short-term rental ordinance*, to also allow tenants (renters) to operate homestays with landlord permission. Staff and city attorneys view this as an unknown risk — it could substantially expand the number of homestay operators and is difficult to administer — and it would only be triggered by an ordinance change. If the ordinance remains untouched, the requirement does not apply.
Staff Recommendation: No Changes
Staff recommended maintaining the existing ordinance without amendment, while strengthening compliance monitoring using Granicus, improving permitting education, watching how the tenant-operator provision plays out in other Virginia localities, and conducting annual inspections for short-term rentals in commercial and mixed-use zones (a separate ongoing effort by the fire marshal).
Commissioner Todd Diver's Dissent on Fees
Diver made a pointed argument: the annual $100 permit fee is the single biggest impediment to enforcement because zoning staff spend enormous time chasing annual renewals and checks. His office cannot issue business licenses until a homestay permit is confirmed, meaning hundreds of paid business license applications sit in limbo each year. He advocated strongly for making the homestay permit a one-time fee (at a higher dollar amount) rather than annual — similar to other home occupation permits. Staff acknowledged the tension but said the annual renewal cycle is their primary opportunity to verify ongoing compliance.
Public Comment
Several operators and community members spoke:
Deborah Weiss (longtime operator) said her backyard ADU homestay is her financial lifeline given property taxes exceeding $11,000 per year, and argued her unit *added* housing rather than removing it. She cautioned against assuming all Granicus listings represent full-time commercial operations — many are occasional weekend or graduation rentals.
Chas Webster (STR operator and commercial property owner) raised concerns about transparency in the process, saying the STR advocacy group was caught off guard by the meeting. He argued that commercial properties can already operate full-time Airbnbs with fewer restrictions than residential operators face, which he called inequitable. He also noted the importance of STR-driven tourism for local restaurants.
Colleen Kelly (online commenter, compliant operator) supported the no-change recommendation, noted that compliant hosts are harmed by non-compliant operators who undercut prices and damage neighborhood relations, and argued that short-term rentals "punch above their weight" in tax revenue relative to their share of inventory.
Sam Galand (resident, non-operator) spoke in support of property owners' rights, questioned the rationale for the six-adult cap, and argued that removing the homestay option for ADUs could discourage new housing construction.
Genevieve Keller (former planning commissioner, current operator) helped draft the original ordinance and supported keeping it as-is, noting that six adults was a deliberate threshold to prevent de facto apartment use. She said the ordinance's weak link has always been enforcement.
Sarah Sheldon (wedding photographer and mother) spoke about the value of whole-home Airbnbs for families, wedding parties, and local vendors like cleaners whose businesses depend on STR activity.
Robin Sealy and Janice Cavanaugh both described how small homestay income helps them afford rising property taxes. Cavanaugh asked how the 185-day residency requirement is actually tracked (staff acknowledged it is difficult to enforce) and noted that most condo associations already prohibit short-term rentals by policy.
Commission Discussion
Commissioners generally supported the no-change recommendation but had nuanced views on a few points:
Several commissioners (Arnes, Clark/Josh, Payne-analog) said they saw no principled reason to prevent tenants from operating homestays — it is already happening informally and helps renters afford Charlottesville. They were uncomfortable with the idea of freezing the ordinance permanently just to avoid the tenant-allowance trigger.
One commissioner (Joseph) said the tenant-homestay idea didn't feel right but wanted more time to think through the reasoning.
Commissioners noted that concerns like parking and noise are better addressed through existing parking, noise, and fire codes rather than through STR-specific occupancy limits.
One commissioner flagged contradictory language in the current code (the homestay section references home occupation rules that prohibit guest visits after 9 p.m. and allow exterior signs — both at odds with actual homestay operation). Reid Broadhead, the zoning administrator, confirmed these are known issues already in the queue for a zoning text amendment cleanup.
The UVA representative (non-voting) suggested exploring whether online platforms could be required to verify that listings hold valid local permits, and whether a two-unit minimum on a property could help ensure owner occupancy — both ideas noted as beyond the immediate scope.
Commissioners asked staff to find a way to update the ordinance in the future without being permanently blocked by the tenant-operator state law requirement.
No vote was taken. Staff will present to City Council in May.
Transportation Planning Update
Ben Chambers, the city's transportation planning manager, gave an overview of his team's current work. His team of four covers transit planning, safe routes to school, bike/pedestrian coordination, traffic calming, sidewalk priorities, and corridor planning.
Active Projects of Note:
A VDOT STAR study for the West Main/Ridge intersection is underway and could become the city's first Smart Scale application in four years if endorsed by council in July.
A second STAR study covers the Route 29 North/250 Bypass interchange, in partnership with Albemarle County.
Route 2 bus service is being extended into the county, adding access to PVCC and the Mill Creek area. A full bus stop inventory has been completed and will inform future shelter, bench, and lighting investments.
School zone flasher regulations were updated — the city code had outdated school names and inconsistent speed limit language. The standard is now 25 mph outside school hours, 15 mph at drop-off and pickup.
An e-bike voucher program issued roughly 90 bikes last year; this year a tiered voucher system adds a $1,500 cap for low-income residents and a new $100 safety voucher for helmets and locks.
Rose Hill Drive restriping is being planned ahead of a 2027 repaving. A community walk audit was held earlier in March; design options (potentially including a mini-roundabout) will be presented April 13. A preferred alternative is targeted for council in June.
City-Wide Mobility Plan
The most significant announcement was the launch of a scoping process for a comprehensive, city-wide mobility plan. Chambers explained that the city's existing transportation plans (Bike Ped Master Plan, Streets that Work, etc.) are in conflict with each other, lack clear priority rules when modes compete for limited right-of-way, and don't include measurable implementation targets. The mobility plan is intended to replace or consolidate those documents.
Timeline: an existing conditions report and draft scoping document will be posted publicly May 5; a public survey opens May 7; the Planning Commission will review the scope May 26; council briefing is June 1; consultant procurement is targeted for summer 2026. The full plan is expected to take 18–24 months to develop after a consultant is on board — an estimated adoption around summer 2028.
Commissioners encouraged Chambers to use plain language rather than technical jargon, to explicitly frame trade-offs for council and the public, to integrate sustainability and emissions goals (transportation is now the city's largest and growing source of emissions), to include measurable annual reporting metrics, and to align with Albemarle County's parallel mobility planning effort. Chambers confirmed the county has hired a new principal transportation planner doing the same process in parallel, and that both teams are coordinating on language and priorities.
Key Takeaways
No changes to the homestay ordinance are recommended at this time. Staff's primary rationale is that amending the ordinance would trigger a state law requirement to allow tenants to operate homestays — an unknown risk the city isn't ready to manage. Commissioners largely agreed with the outcome but were uncomfortable treating the state law as a permanent barrier to future updates.
Enforcement remains the core problem. The Granicus software is a meaningful improvement, but fines are capped at $5,000, the 185-day residency requirement is nearly impossible to verify, and annual permit renewals consume significant staff capacity. The Commissioner of Revenue argued forcefully for a one-time permit fee to free up enforcement bandwidth.
Short-term rentals generate roughly $1.5 million in annual transient occupancy tax and represent about 14% of the local lodging market; tax is now remitted directly by platforms, making collection largely automatic.
A city-wide mobility plan is being scoped, with a goal of replacing the city's conflicting patchwork of transportation plans with a single, actionable, measurable document. Consultant procurement is targeted for summer 2026, with plan adoption estimated around 2028.
Rose Hill Drive redesign is actively underway, with public design options — potentially including a mini-roundabout — to be presented April 13 ahead of a 2027 repaving.
AI-generated summary from voice-to-text transcript. Not the official record. Verify important details with the source documents linked above.
What happened at this meeting
Transportation Project Update
# Transportation Project Update Summary
Ben Chambers, the city's transportation planning manager, presented a comprehensive update on multiple departmental initiatives led by his team including Tommy (bike-ped coordinator), Kyle (safe routes to school coordinator), and Zoe (transit planner). Current projects include STAR studies with VDOT for West Main/Ridge and US 29/250 bypass interchanges, Route 2 transit expansion into the county, standardized school zone speed limits (25 mph when school not in session, 15 mph when in session), and an e-bike voucher pilot program that distributed approximately 110 vouchers with a 90+ redemption rate, with plans to tier vouchers for low-income residents (up to $1,500) and add $100 safety vouchers for helmets and locks. Staff also outlined a city-wide Mobility Plan initiative to unify conflicting existing transportation plans around complete streets and multimodal access, with community engagement scheduled for May-June and adoption targeted for summer 2028, while coordinating with Albemarle County and integrating CAT transit through a parallel CARTA prioritization study. Commission members emphasized the need for measurable, actionable metrics (such as lane miles, vehicle miles traveled, and mode share tracked annually), clear non-technical community communication focused on trade-offs and priorities, and deeper integration of Parks and Recreation trails, high-density neighborhood bus stop planning, and transit as an extension of walkability and bikability.
Ben Chambers, the city's transportation planning manager, presented a comprehensive update on multiple departmental initiatives led by his team including Tommy (bike-ped coordinator), Kyle (safe routes to school coordinator), and Zoe (transit planner). Current projects include STAR studies with VDOT for West Main/Ridge and US 29/250 bypass interchanges, Route 2 transit expansion into the county, standardized school zone speed limits (25 mph when school not in session, 15 mph when in session), and an e-bike voucher pilot program that distributed approximately 110 vouchers with a 90+ redemption rate, with plans to tier vouchers for low-income residents (up to $1,500) and add $100 safety vouchers for helmets and locks. Staff also outlined a city-wide Mobility Plan initiative to unify conflicting existing transportation plans around complete streets and multimodal access, with community engagement scheduled for May-June and adoption targeted for summer 2028, while coordinating with Albemarle County and integrating CAT transit through a parallel CARTA prioritization study. Commission members emphasized the need for measurable, actionable metrics (such as lane miles, vehicle miles traveled, and mode share tracked annually), clear non-technical community communication focused on trade-offs and priorities, and deeper integration of Parks and Recreation trails, high-density neighborhood bus stop planning, and transit as an extension of walkability and bikability.
Homestay Ordinance Amendments
# Homestuck Ordinance Amendments Summary
Staff member Missy Creasy presented a comprehensive overview of the Homestay Ordinance Amendments project, which aims to update decade-old regulations governing homestays and short-term rentals in Charlottesville. Current regulations require proof of residency, a $100 annual permit, safety measures, and restrict properties to one homestay per property with owner occupancy of at least 185 days per year and a maximum of six adults. After reviewing comparative regulations from other localities, conducting community engagement (including a 500-person survey identifying economic benefits alongside housing and nuisance concerns), and analyzing enforcement challenges, staff ultimately recommended maintaining the existing ordinance while strengthening monitoring through new enforcement tools like the Granicus system—which identified 529 potential short-term rentals—rather than implementing proposed amendments such as reducing rental days to 90 per year or increasing occupancy limits. The Planning Commission chair noted that no votes would be taken that evening and welcomed continued public comment and feedback on whether changes should be pursued.
Staff member Missy Creasy presented a comprehensive overview of the Homestay Ordinance Amendments project, which aims to update decade-old regulations governing homestays and short-term rentals in Charlottesville. Current regulations require proof of residency, a $100 annual permit, safety measures, and restrict properties to one homestay per property with owner occupancy of at least 185 days per year and a maximum of six adults. After reviewing comparative regulations from other localities, conducting community engagement (including a 500-person survey identifying economic benefits alongside housing and nuisance concerns), and analyzing enforcement challenges, staff ultimately recommended maintaining the existing ordinance while strengthening monitoring through new enforcement tools like the Granicus system—which identified 529 potential short-term rentals—rather than implementing proposed amendments such as reducing rental days to 90 per year or increasing occupancy limits. The Planning Commission chair noted that no votes would be taken that evening and welcomed continued public comment and feedback on whether changes should be pursued.
Agenda items (2)
Procedural (2)
1ProceduralTransportation Project Update
City staff will provide an update on ongoing transportation projects, including information about current road, transit, or infrastructure work affecting Charlottesville residents.
What happened
# Transportation Project Update SummaryBen Chambers, the city's transportation planning manager, presented a comprehensive update on multiple departmental initiatives led by his team including Tommy (bike-ped coordinator), Kyle (safe routes to school coordinator), and Zoe (transit planner). Current projects include STAR studies with VDOT for West Main/Ridge and US 29/250 bypass interchanges, Route 2 transit expansion into the county, standardized school zone speed limits (25 mph when school not in session, 15 mph when in session), and an e-bike voucher pilot program that distributed approximately 110 vouchers with a 90+ redemption rate, with plans to tier vouchers for low-income residents (up to $1,500) and add $100 safety vouchers for helmets and locks. Staff also outlined a city-wide Mobility Plan initiative to unify conflicting existing transportation plans around complete streets and multimodal access, with community engagement scheduled for May-June and adoption targeted for summer 2028, while coordinating with Albemarle County and integrating CAT transit through a parallel CARTA prioritization study. Commission members emphasized the need for measurable, actionable metrics (such as lane miles, vehicle miles traveled, and mode share tracked annually), clear non-technical community communication focused on trade-offs and priorities, and deeper integration of Parks and Recreation trails, high-density neighborhood bus stop planning, and transit as an extension of walkability and bikability.
2ProceduralHomestay Ordinance Amendments
The city is considering changes to local rules governing homestays (short-term rental accommodations in residential homes) to address issues like zoning, safety, or neighborhood impacts.
What happened
# Homestuck Ordinance Amendments SummaryStaff member Missy Creasy presented a comprehensive overview of the Homestay Ordinance Amendments project, which aims to update decade-old regulations governing homestays and short-term rentals in Charlottesville. Current regulations require proof of residency, a $100 annual permit, safety measures, and restrict properties to one homestay per property with owner occupancy of at least 185 days per year and a maximum of six adults. After reviewing comparative regulations from other localities, conducting community engagement (including a 500-person survey identifying economic benefits alongside housing and nuisance concerns), and analyzing enforcement challenges, staff ultimately recommended maintaining the existing ordinance while strengthening monitoring through new enforcement tools like the Granicus system—which identified 529 potential short-term rentals—rather than implementing proposed amendments such as reducing rental days to 90 per year or increasing occupancy limits. The Planning Commission chair noted that no votes would be taken that evening and welcomed continued public comment and feedback on whether changes should be pursued.
Verbatim transcript available
534 transcript segments indexed
And I was wondering- Not everybody agreed With that professor. I mean, I actually tried Right. You need at least six good folks. So, yeah. I'm just going to- I mean, I think you could do that in theory.
Yeah. For me personally, it's just not that great of a thing. Paper kind. I think it's done. I've done a little deeper into this issue from the other- That's why I work on SSP. The last time. As to when you found out.
Supposed to share. So I think we just wait to see. Once nothing's filed for us, then we'll just carry on. We talk. Try to communicate and- Robert said she's on her way. Who? I'm talking with- Robert's on her way.
She's right here. Oh. She was just here for a second. Oh, okay. She was in the 2020. Maybe it's the legislator. Yeah. Oh. Bridget can allocate or she operate. It's pretty long. Did you join our meeting?
Give me... After this, I got to run some . There's just zero clarity. And then a bunch of people. Some clients advertise for short-term rentals because they have- You guys. Hey. Hey, hey. It's good. Natural discussion.
How is Seia? Yeah, I don't either. How are you? Good to see you. Four people. Getting out here, you guys, what could be better? Yeah. The only option. Thank you. Here. I could. Oh, I'm not going to be right.
No lessons. I wanted to talk to him. You know. And so- Ask him that. He was overruled by a very important stakeholder. You make a decision about the planning and development committee. And so- Yes. Wow.
Web-based. Yeah. I would do it, but- I have to- Someone will afford to do it. Me. I also told him I'm fully willing to step in if any logistics issues happen. So we'll see. Figured you were going to...
Some stuff. We're overlooking this plane. Look at that. Yeah. Do me a favor. Thanks. Oh, you can hear me squeaking? No. Oh. Can we have this conversation, hope you don't mind, just to be the brake lovers?
Oh, on brakes. Okay. Yeah. Just tighten your brake dust shield a quarter turn clockwise. Yeah. You'll be good. I've tightened them. It's been a while since I've tightened them, but I do try to keep them- No, I don't mind ...
tightened from time to time. But it's not me. Very certain times. Yeah. A lovely reverse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be encouraged. Well, the first time I had these kind of brakes, I went into a bike shop. I'm like, "I think I need new brakes." And they're like, "You just need to tighten them." Oh, that's really good.
Yeah. You're changing the hub like that on really- No, there's like a- I'm tapping that out ... key thing that right where on the disc, there's a brake pad, the caliper or whatever you call it that squeezes.
Okay. Are you slowing us down? Years ago. Yeah, yeah. And I'd say once I, I think it was the Citibikes in New York- Yes ... I did the version two. So you have these brakes that maybe are not that much in the space, the disc brakes on bike, and it's like they're just- Yeah.
Just the dominance. So you guys don't want to- Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's like a must have. That left. No, I thought we were doing just the consultation. Yeah. I got my kid one of those Guardian bikes.
They're advertising on social media. It wooed the kid. Is the other one I see a lot. Yeah, no, you're right. There was an issue. You got the control of both brakes, so you hit it one way it starts the rear brake, and that might lock things sometimes.
They don't look ahead. Yeah, exactly. Looks like- Freestyle bikes, it just brakes them. I've seen a lot of situations where... Yeah. Especially if you want to do some cool tricks. Because me, I always, I ride different freestyle bikes when I was a kid.
Me, I had the old, I have a different version of that brake. I had that. Different kind of setup than we're building, but I still would buy it, so I love that bike. It's my favorite. No, we're at... It's like now that I'm getting out, I ride across the street, I'm bike riding more.
Yeah, definitely. Is it the green route? It's a green route. I used to ride that area. Now I use that. I don't even need a bike build. Right. One of the students from Carson. He is. Should we wait for Ben?
Maybe. Give him a few more minutes. Okay. Get to the hands. Bigger space? Seems like all the space we do. It- Over a tiny place. Probably our total square footage is actually probably lower. Okay. We've got a couple offices.
There. No. A really beautiful building that's right over there. There's a bunch. There's a bunch, yeah. And we're in one of those. We don't take up the whole... Yeah, there's that one that's next to First Bank, I think.
Enjoying that one. It's got the little back that I think he does- It's really pretty ... tighter motions. But then the house is so, it's been cream. Other paper house, it's got the blue, but it's green.
You see a lot of this. This is like his most curated house. I know. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. It is funny that I live in- We're living something like this. Okay. It's that summer. Yeah. Is that it?
Yeah, we're immediately across the street from First Pres. Got you. Over that street that runs south of it, dead ends right into our building. Such a great area. There's a really talentedThe wife is an architect, so they build it for the wife.
Yeah. So- It looks great. They want us all to- John's River Kendall Lighthouse. Have they looked at scary? Have they looked at the board ANMR in Mississippi? You said they used to- End of the air. End of the air.
Right. From St. Mary's. That's what I thought. They've done the- CRJ-900. They did that same on the CRJ-900. Granted, it wasn't equipped with the fueler. Right. Yeah. A lot of- Lines really ... budget for whole resignation.
No, he was thinking two months. Local people, they would get it. I'm just saying, I had a plan. Okay. The problem with the plan was- Right. Yeah. Exactly. They still shouldn't get planned for it. How did DraftKings get their original-- I think they pitched out and two of the times they were literally not even the ones pitching it.
I have to actually, too, go through the expert. And the guy's like waiting around. I go, "Do the expert." I'm like, "All right." They're very thorough. They are. I think they get bored, so. Exactly. Just trying to go.
I had some fun with it. My mistake, I think, was in Farmers Branch, the way the living ends, it comes to Bay 9. So- And then the next day, I was like, I'm going to go. We're trying. And the airport, they were like...
Like seven year accounts. No, I won't. At first I was like, "I thought I'd get my own," but I didn't see the function from the original. Like a panic button. There you go. I think that's it. It's New York.
Where can we start? It's not a ton of options. It's fun. But small leagues are doing is a group of us are going to be training somewhere. When their van went to the wrong place. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of messages and lots of places.
I think I'm reading the second on the agenda. Yeah. I'm sure he'll come. But I'm sure he will. It's kind of long, but you could send this later. Yeah. It's longer. It is, yeah. You can actually give them.
If there's seven things, we'll tell you. There's like good stuff in there too. There's like seven pounds or something. Because I'm not taking January. Yeah, because you get the labor. Exactly. Screen it, kind of.
Absolutely. They should never get to me as long as hosts. Yeah. Something on the train. You don't do that if it's moving. He's doing it. Basically you bought a StarLink or another similar service. He's not responding.
I sent a message. And now they're saying they're moving the data centers to space. I think it's one of those things you say when you're like, "Your life's long." They say they just need a solar array, and that was how many times you've seen the sun.
Yeah. I'm not going to do that stuff. Hey, how are you? Data center in space. Which if I'm thinking about- I'm doing something I did once, and it just- It's radius. Like you can still see stuff. Yeah.
I'm checking it out. You've got to cook. But I assess this and it technically sells on time. It's not the end of the world. Based on what they can create, something like geosynchronous, they can basically- Messages that came in, I was just going to review them and see.
Yeah, I don't know if they- Yeah. They would just be able to get a space elevator. They can just get a wire coming in. Who's out there landing it? Usually you talk to a citizen. Yeah. That's the easy part.
Yeah. You can do that. Make it space-able, maybe that's pretty cheap. This part of the world. Right. Years ago, architectural competition things. And I entered it too. There was a really good science fiction series by like a literature professor at Stanford, and it was kind of like a space.
Yeah. I think Foundation, that I have not finished. I think we're going to back and see if we get our answers. But it is interesting. I almost feel like- You might get user tips ... you tail someone's source.
I think it's interesting sci-fi, it's just not It's not like movies that have really close to the source material. That's just like- Pretty dead-on. I think they depend on the director's artistic license.
Think about it. Start it by 5:30. Huh? I'm thinking about it. Start it at 5:30. I think I would like it, but the way the solution did, they said- Oh, yeah. I've seen that. That's fun. Oh my God, Microsoft.
It's a very big company. Or Amazon. One line. They don't have any training. No. They can get rich from it. Yeah, and they can turn like the whole control over any different individual. Yeah. There's like a period in charge.
Yeah. Talk to the relationship to it. Guessing. And that's reasonable. I can't remember the quote, exactly, so it's a little bit surprising. All right. Let's see. All right, guys, we're going to get started.
We're just going to flip the agenda around. So welcome to tonight's Planning Commission work session. We have two items on our agenda. We have an update on the city's transportation planning, and a report on the city's homestead ordinance.
Unless Ben shows up in the next 30 seconds, it looks like we're going to do the home state ordinance first. No votes are going to be taken tonight. Any votes on the home state ordinance are at least a month or a few months out.
Council hasn't even seen this presentation yet. We don't usually take public comments at our work sessions, but we will tonight for the home state ordinance. So what we're going to do is first, we're going to hear from staff about it.
And then, we're going to have the Planning Commission ask questions, and after that, the public can provide comments. You can also always email us. You can get us at planningcommission@charlesville.gov or if you go to the Planning Commission's page on the city's website, there's a link there to provide feedback.
Yep, that's it. Okay. Good evening, everyone. My name is Missy Creasy, and I'll be guiding you through the materials that have been compiled related to this project. This would be the homestays and short-term rentals.
I'm going to attempt to complete the presentation with time for questions following, but I do encourage commissioners, if there's questions for clarity, to do let me know as needed there. Next slide. All right, so our agenda will be as follows.
We're going to have an introduction. We'll go into the study process, research and data, potential options for changes to the code, some of the community and stakeholder engagement. We'll provide some background on that, as well as implementation and next steps.
I also want everyone to note that there is a website that has a lot of information about the details of this project. This is very much an overview, but there's a lot of different information there. So next slide, Patrick.
All right, so we're going to begin with the definition of homestay, and this is specifically a residential property that's rented less than 30 days. And the properties that we've been studying in this opportunity have been the residential properties in the residential areas, which is R-A, B, and C.
And most of the light yellow that you can see in this map, those are the areas that were most of focus. Property owners who reside at the residence for at least 185 days of the calendar year have the ability to apply for a homestay permit.
It was determined it was time to review the current ordinances that was a decade old. It's one of the early ordinances that were formed for short-term rentals around the country. In fact, we have many communities all over that use our ordinance as they are forming their own ordinance.
So, there are a lot of times where you'll see something that looks pretty familiar out there. The number of homestays has increased pretty significantly, and it was a good opportunity to look at the regulations and context of current comprehensive plan goals.
In fact, there is a specific goal to look at this, and that was part of the reason why this became a project. Next slide. All right. So I'm going to go through the high points of the current regulations.
This is what is on the books today. This includes a proof of residency, including some sort of photo ID. Homestay permit's valid for a year with a $100 fee. The code states the operator is required to have a number of safety measures, including smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers.
The code requires the permit holder allow staff access to the premises once a year if notified in advance. So that's already included in the code. Again, they must reside within the unit at least 185 days of the year, and up to six adults and any number of children may lease a homestay.
Yes. The photo ID requirement, are we adding that, or does that exist? It's a proof of residency. The code gives a couple of examples. We have found that some of the examples that are in there do not provide proof of residency.
So our person who works through these permits works back and forth with applicants to make sure that they have something that shows that the individual is a resident. But it needs to be a photo ID. Yeah, me, for example, my photo ID, my driver's license, has a different address from the one I live at, and there are probably lots of folks like that.
Well, I know that they work with individuals, so it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all. So, all right. I have a question on current regs too. On a previous slide, it says there's a maximum of 30 days per year.
It's not repeated on this slide. And I've been When I was preparing for this, unable to find that referenced. Do you know where that 30-day maximum is referenced? Not off the top of my head, but I believe it has something to do with the levels of residency, because if it's over 30 days, it's a long-term situation.
So it's a rental. Oh, 30 days at a time. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, I agree. All right, so the study process. All right. Next slide. So this is a diagram timeline that we have that shows the progress of this project.
So we started in spring of 2025 with scoping of the project and then information gathering timeframe, followed by a community survey, and then procurement of the Granicus system, which we'll talk a little bit more about as we move forward.
So drafting of the recommendations based on findings began, followed, occurred, and then followed, following in the winter of '25, we met with the community and had other outreach opportunities. So we're now in the process where we're meeting with you all as the commission in the phase five, and then we are scheduled in May to provide a presentation to city council.
Next slide. All right, so the Granicus system. What is this system? So this is a software that's tailored to the city. So it shows the city, and provides a number of data points for us as we are looking at short-term rentals.
One is it locates them, and it locates them by finding listings online. So it helps assist us with proactive enforcement and licensing. Also, the Commissioner of Revenue's office uses this. If it's showing up that a location has been listed- Mm ...
they also link in and make sure that that individual is following the rules that they need in that realm. And it also has the system of generating and sending out letters that help us through the enforcement process.
What we've gained from the system so far was the identification of 529 short-term rentals. That's what it's showing. Again, we're mining through that to see exactly what that is. We think the number's a bit lower, but we're having to do a one by one to try and figure that out.
Is that 500 more than we previously knew about, or just 500 total? Total. Okay. Total that are showing up. It tracks rentals on every platform. So any sort of homestay, short-term rental type of platform that's on the web, they mine that data into this system.
And it catalogs the rental history. And so it's actually taking the information, and if it's been rented in the past, it gives us a flow of what that's looked like. We're in the beginning stages of using this, but it's really made a big difference in us being able to figure out the research phase of concerns that come in.
So prior to the system, we had a staff member that would go from each of the different servers, each of the different websites, from website to website, plug in the address, try and gather the information.
If there was a listing, we'd have to screenshot everything because the data changes. And this system has allowed for, we click on the address on that map, and it links us to the listings for that address.
So it's been a huge time saver in trying to increase our enforcement issues. All right. Next slide. All right, so this is some data that came out of the system. Again, it talks a little bit about, it shows us, in most cases, an entire house is rented.
That's a data point. And it also shows us information on the number of bedrooms that are listed through the system and percentage throughout the community. So we're good. Another set of good information.
Next slide. So, we've got some data from the Commissioner of Revenue's office concerning transient lodging tax. So short-term rental is 17%. Again, 17% is anybody who's using an online hosting site. So this is a combination of anybody who's in the commercial or mixed-use areas or the residential area.
So it's not just the residential area that we're talking about. That's wholly what's coming from that. And it does note that we still have a very robust market for hotels and motels as well. These numbers are a little confusing to me.
The 12,000 bucks, is that per homestay, or is it per- No, that's total. That's a total revenue- That's the cost- ... you get from homestays ... for business license. The cost for the business license.
Yeah. Oh, wait a second. No, that's the 18. Yes. Okay, what is it? Oh, you're here, great. I didn't know Todd was here. Let's let Todd answer that. Todd Diver is our Commissioner of Revenue. Yeah. The top line's business tangible personal property, so that's business equipment.
Tangible. In a hotel, that's going to be your beds, your fixtures, your things like that. Airbnbs, they don't really have very much. They might report a bed or a TV that's in the bedroom or something, so there's not much money there.
There's no meals tax from homestays. A lot of hotels pay meals tax. Mm-hmm. Transient occupancy tax, that's the big one. You see the hotels and motels pay 7.6 million. I think this was from last year.
The homestays are doing about 1.5. Is that the 9% you referenced earlier? Yes. Your slides earlier, you referenced- The 83%? No, 9%. 9%. Transient occupancy tax. No, 9% is the- No, that's right ... the rate of the tax.
Right. Yeah. So, yes. Okay. The percentage of... Yes. Yeah. Do you want to go first? I've got a quick question. Do we have a sense of the scale between hotels and the short-term rentals, like how many hotel rooms are there in the city versus how many rooms there are in short-term rentals?
I don't. Chris Engel could get it to you. We have that data, but we can get it to you. Okay. We just don't have it at our fingertips right now. That would be more, I think, useful at putting that the- Thanks ...
hotels generate more revenue, but I would guess there's probably a lot more hotel rooms. Kind of a similar question, but do we know what fraction of homestays are actually compliant in paying taxes as of 2025?
With regard to the transient occupancy tax, I can tell you that that is now almost entirely paid by the online platforms. So Airbnb, Vrbo, they're collecting the money, and they're sending it to us. Yeah.
Virtually none of the hosts have to do that anymore. There's been some changes in Richmond. Okay, so the Granicus compliance end is about making sure other rules are followed, not tax collection. Primarily.
We're still getting business license from them, we're still getting tangibles from them. But looking at this chart- It's not much ... the bulk of money is from the platforms, not through Granicus. Okay.
Yeah. Thanks, Todd. Appreciate that. Great. Next slide. Well, I think step back for me. Hold on. Okay. Yes. All right. Next slide is wonderful. Thanks, Patrick. Sorry. All right. In addition to tax revenue that comes in, there are a number of industries that benefit from short-term rentals.
And that includes a lot of our tourist sellers that come into the community, wedding, breweries, vineyards. Those are kind of big things we have around here. Restaurants and businesses. And then the accelerant other areas where we have cleaning and repair companies.
Again, there's business that's involved with that as well. All right. Patrick, next slide. All right. So we started out by doing comparative research from other communities. So online we have charts that show the communities and the details, but this is just the highlights of that.
And we found that most localities require proof of residency. And the fee for a homestay permit definitely varies quite a bit. We're not even in the middle. We're just on the side there a bit. Inspections, many do require safety inspections.
Guest limits, it's very common for there to be a limit per bedroom and/or a number per property. So that is a common thing. Proof of insurance is often required. Proof of residency requirements, all the localities that we were able to find had some sort of proof of residency requirement.
Oh, next slide, Patrick. Sorry. This continues over because there's quite a bit. New for Virginia is this human trafficking certification that operators in Virginia are going to have to be compliant with.
Again, this is something from the state. I know that as we've talked to providers, they're not sure exactly what that is, and we haven't gotten a straight answer either. We know it's going to be a requirement, but until there's clarity, we'll...
But our understanding is it'll be an online training that would be offered to cover that. And I'm sure some of our folks may have some more feedback when we get to that point. All right, next slide. All right.
So, the General Assembly passed a new law that requires localities to allow tenants to be able to operate short-term rentals with the permission of the landlord. Hmm. That is a change, and the requirement would have to be put in place if we made a change to the short-term rental code.
So that is something that came out as part of our study. That has the potential to open up the use of homestays to more operators within the communityUm, and increase the numbers as well as potential increase to neighborhoods.
So there's a lot of unknowns with what that might result in. All right, next slide. Jenna, just- Yep ... just because this confused me, and I expect no one else is confused, but just to be sure everyone understands.
If we don't revise the ordinance, bullet number one doesn't come into play. Bullet number one only comes into play if we go in and change the ordinance. Correct. Yes, we've gotten that interpretation, legal interpretation as well.
All right, so next slide. So proposed options. All right, so the next slide, we have a chart that was put together that provides information concerning the current regulations, besides some of the proposed that had been under consideration.
Many of these were items that we had taken to the public when we went to the open house. And so this is a good visual, and I know folks have had this. It's been online for the last week. Good opportunity to kind of see what is currently on the books required, and then what was a potential proposal, given the feedback that we've had so far.
All right, next slide. We're cutting... There's a proposal to cut the days that can be rented in half. So we're going from 180 to 90. Is that right? Am I reading that right? That was one of the proposals that came through.
Do you know what was driving that? So- Went away, though ... to my question earlier, current regulations are you can rent it out as many days as you want. Yeah. 180. Well, you could if you are there. If you're there.
You have to be there for 185 days, but even if you're there, you can still rent out a room. Yeah. And the other 180 days, you could rent out your entire place. Oh. Yep. And so then to further clarify, these proposals are community proposals or staff proposals?
Mostly staff from the research. Okay. And those came forward to the community meeting. Again, as this has all evolved, we wanted to kind of give the record of the steps that have come along the way. Sure.
Because I get the- Yeah, it's confusing. I'm just trying to reconcile these proposals with a future slide that says the staff is recommending no change. Yes, and we will get there. Okay, so I'm just trying to understand where these proposals lie within a no change recommendations.
We thought about doing a spoiler alert slide at the beginning. Basically saying, "We're going to walk you through all of the recommendations that we considered," but ultimately have decided not to make any recommendations for changes.
So what was the thinking, or staff's thinking when you decided that cutting this to half might be the way to go? And I just wanted to try to clarify that as well, that question. So the regulation today is that you have to live there 185 days, so more than half of the year.
The proposal that we had been considering is that you can rent the unit no more than 90 days. So we weren't proposing to cut the requirement in half. It was just saying... Right? Right. Yeah. 180- It was limited.
Right. So the proposal that we had been- Yeah, it's okay. Why not? You have the... Right. The proposal we had been considering was that you can actually rent out your unit no more than 90 days, but you were still going to be required to have to live there at least half a year.
Got it. You were going to have to be able to demonstrate that you were a permanent resident, but on top of that, we had been considering an additional provision that you could only rent it out 90 days out of the year.
Which kind of translates into- Maybe I'm confused, but So part of the conversation- 365 days. If you live there. Yes. Right. So part of the conversation was, is again, this is accessory in a lot of ways.
This is not supposed to be the main use of this dwelling. The main use is it's where the person lives. And so with the estimate of 90 days, we talked about the potential to rent every weekend, which is a lot of people do the weekends or do special events in the community, and so kind of narrowing down that.
That's where that proposal came. Again, it was not very popular at the community meeting at all. But it was something to continue to enforce, that this is one piece of a puzzle, and that people live in these houses.
Go. One question there, one clarification. I'm still trying to understand the why, because I- We still have time for public. Perfect. Thank you. I may have related questions. Why are we talking about things that you aren't recommending that anybody do?
We're... Sorry. I'm sorry this is so confusing. We're providing kind of the process of this project, and obviously that's led to some confusion. So this was a piece of where we landed or where we progressed through this.
We had this set of recommendations. More information came to light, and we changed as we moved forward. So I'm really sorry, Mr. Clark, and others, that this is a little confusing. It may be less confusing if...
So we will have a chance to ask staff questions when Missy is done with the presentation. So maybe it'd be less confusing if- Oh, it's not ... we kept these little clarifications, and then we really get into questions.
No, it's not confusing. We're talking about things that- We're not talking about, right? None of this is actually happening. But it could. We could advise staff to maybe we like these proposed changes when we get to the end of the conversation tonight.
We don't get to vote on it tonight, but staff is going to be looking for some sort of feedback from us at the end of this to say, "Wait a second. No, maybe you should go ahead and do some changes." Or we say, "No, we agree with you.
Keep it as it is." Or we say something else. Let's let staff finish their presentation and then we can hit them with some questions, and then we can figure out from there where we're going. That make sense, Daryl?
Yep. Thanks, guys. We're most of the way there. It'll be okay. All right, next slide, Patrick. All right. So cost benefit of amending the ordinance. So we had weighing a lot of different things. And as we move forward, I'll talk a little bit about the highlights that we've received from the community so far.
So benefits, more stringent requirements, to demonstrate owner occupancy, internal safety inspection requirement. Again, we currently have the ability to do that. But the proposal would provide more of a requirement.
The occupancy allowance increased from six to eight, allowing for some flexibility, which would work for a lot of places within the community, not all. And then a permit term would reduce staff time, approving permits on an annual basis.
But some of the costs to consider as part of this is increased staff time on internal inspections. Code changing, we would have to jump into the tenant operation allowance at this point in time, and then, there are potential impacts with more guests.
All right, next slide. All right, so community outreach. So we had a survey that went from-- Wait a second. Okay, yes. So these are some of our big outreach opportunities. We conducted a survey online in May and June of last year, and we had 500 respondents to that, and I'll talk a little bit about the areas where the information we heard from that.
We also had a community meeting right in this room on December 3rd. And then we met with a group of SDR advocacy group in February. And this is in addition to just ongoing dialogue. We've had a lot of people provide inquiries.
We've talked to a lot of people throughout this process. So there's been opportunities to gather feedback, and I'm sure that we will gather more as we continue. All right, next slide, Patrick. All right, so the community survey.
So there were a couple of highlights that I want to point out here. So again, we had 500 people respond. That's pretty hefty response for a survey. Key benefits noted were economic opportunities for the owners, tourism, and visitor options.
So they provide more options. And some of the primary concerns that were outlined were housing impacts, neighborhood fabric, and then a variety of nuisance related items, including noise, parking, and traffic issues.
There was a grouping that identified no concerns with short-term rentals, and most of those folks identified as resident homeowners. So that's additional information for consideration. Do you have any idea?
It says a subset. Is that 1%, 5%, 10%? Do you have any idea? I do not, and I do not see your individual who worked with the survey, but that is a question that we can get answered. Thank you. Okay. All right.
So we held a community meeting in December of 2025. We had a diverse group of participants, a lot of different neighborhoods, ages, people in different housing situations. It was an opportunity for attendees to review displays, ask questions of staff, and provide comment, as well as we had a formal presentation and a question and answer session as part of that.
And it was noted in the summary that homestays generate economic benefit, boost tourism, and offer a unique lodging option that helps support local businesses. And some of the concerns that were noted, had to do with rising cost of housing due to lack of availability and the permanent loss of resident base.
Next slide. All right, so during the community meeting, a group of the short-term rental operators organized and contacted the zoning division with a different model for regulating homestays. So this group provided a number of questions for review and had suggestions as to how the ordinance might be changed.
And so highlights of that are noted here on the slide. Staff does want to note that we received comment from other providers in the community who are not part of this group and don't feel that that group represents them.
So that's another thing to consider. So next slide. So what would folks like to see the 185-day rule replaced with? We just would like to see it loosened. Yeah, sure. General syndicate. Yeah. I'm sure we'll get some more feedback.
And there's some information also that's more detailed. This is just some highlights. All right, so next slide. Key findings and staff recommendations. So next slide. We have a number of things that we've learned and/or confirmed through this process.
Community engagement indicates support for short-term rentals within the community with increased enforcement efforts. Community occupancy limits of six adults limits larger properties but provides a number of opportunities for many operators within the community.
Strengthening requirements for home occupancy would be challenging to enforce. Key item that came to light in this process was the state code provision. It's an unknown potential impact that making a change to the code, we would have to put in this allowance for renters to operate home stays with the owner's permission.
And because we're just beginning to implement a lot of our new measures with our enforcement tools, we're concerned about introducing that unknown at this point in time. So speaking of those new measures, staff has also determined with the new resources that we have, the new software, and we have dedicated staff to this effort, that we're hopeful for improvement on the concerns that we've been facing as a community.
Next slide. All right, so here is where we have landed at this moment in time with a recommendation. And that is to maintain our existing code without any amendments at the moment, to strengthen monitoring of home stay compliance, permitting requirements, and education about home stay requirements.
In addition, to continue to monitor the impacts of the state code provision allowance as that is implemented in other places throughout the state of Virginia. And then for home stays that are located in zoning districts that are not the residential districts, again, we did not look at those specifically as part of this process, to conduct the yearly inspections.
Those in commercial and mixed use areas actually end up in a different building code situation, and our fire marshal has been researching the best way to handle those anyway. So that kind of is an aside.
There's that side project going on. And then continue to study the issues pertaining to those situations for a future work plan priority. And that is the presentation. All right. So, I guess we can go just around with questions.
We'll start with that, and if it has to become more conversational, we can do that. But Michael, do you want to start, or you have no- No. Okay. I guess maybe a comment before a question. I think maybe we got hung up on the proposed language on that one slide.
So if it was just an option you considered, I would suggest just not calling it, because it sounds like someone's proposing to do this when it sounds like you considered it but are not proposing to do it.
That might help with our confusion. The word option. Yeah. That makes some sense. I just got information that the subset category was 20%, so 20% of the in the community survey noted- 20% had no issues with the current.
Okay. And I think there was also a question about data on number of listings. So we were able to research that as well. And one statistic we can offer is that in 2025, there were 4,100 hotel rooms in the market, over 1.5 million listing nights available for hotels.
Sorry, this is 2024 data. Short-term rentals accounted for 14% of that inventory. Interesting. Is that pre or post Granicus? This is a different data source. Yeah. Sorry. Is that pre or post platforms dispersing money to the city directly?
This is data that we get from a source called AirDNA. So I'm not sure how it relates to the question you're asking about Granicus. I don't know if it's complete. If it's from the platforms, they hopefully aren't telling you lies.
If it's staff screenshotting listings, then you're going to miss things. Yeah. This source is AirDNA, and it does this kind of market research to develop these sort of statistics. So you can take it with a grain of salt, but that's what AirDNA tells us about the share of the market that's coming from home stays.
Could you say those numbers just one more time, the number of hotels? 4,100 hotel rooms in the market. 14% were short-term rentals. And 1.5 listing nights available for hotels, and short-term rentals accounted for 14% of that inventory in 2024.
Thank you. Mm-hmm. So I guess one issue with, or one question about enforcement, the code is set up so that you can't have a full-time short-term rental. You can't own a property and Airbnb it full time.
You have to live there for more than half the yearBut I think, we all know that there are full-time Airbnb homes in the city. I think I live two houses down from one. So since the platforms-- I guess I have two questions.
Since the platforms are paying the occupancy taxes directly to the city, does that mean that there are unregulated short-term rentals who are still paying the occupancy tax to the city? Yes. Okay. And can you talk just a little bit about enforcement of the full-time short-term rentals?
I don't know, do you have any numbers or just a order of magnitude of how many, or what do you do when you learn that there is a unregulated short-term rental or that isn't following the 185-day residency requirement?
Like what are the steps? And I'm just curious to get a sense of scale, like how often does this happen? Well, I must say that that is one of the hardest things to enforce. So the best that we have through the code-- Actually, as we've gone through this process, we have been meeting with our attorneys as part of this, and so they have been with us along the way.
And enforcement of that is going to be a challenge. It will be a challenge all around. In fact, as part of our proposal, we met with the Commonwealth's office as well, trying to work through different enforcement opportunities that would be available, and it's a really tough thing to do.
So there is a lot of, we have to rely on the regulations that we have. We get concerns from people on a regular basis. We investigate them. We do the best we can with violation letters. And it's always going to be a challenge.
Mm-hmm. But you would, given the new software, just because the tax is coming in, you would automatically know about it, right? So our efforts are kind of separate in some ways. Yes, we know that people are paying taxes for something that they may not be doing with all the proper paperwork.
Again, the software gives us the opportunity to more quickly find these locations. Before, it would take hours to go from site to site and try and pick the information off of them, whereas now we have it kind of coming in one thing.
So there'll still be violations, we're just able to find them quicker based on the data that's online, because we don't have to go individually to find it. It comes to one place. What is the violation for running afoul of the short-term rental code?
Like, do you get a fine? There is a fine opportunity. Yeah. It is very limited. Again, this is in the zoning code, and we do have fine opportunities, but they are limited to a zoning violation level. Okay.
Again, we have attempted to explore other opportunities for trying to continue to enforce this. Mm-hmm. We've found some of the most effective ways are peer-related. Yeah. Because people want to have the opportunity to do this in the community, and if there are people who are making it difficult, that becomes a challenge.
Because, again, that is another option. This use could go away for the community. Again, the community doesn't want that. In fact, we've shared that they're very interested in keeping this use in the community.
But that is an option that's on the table if it becomes something that's not working for the community. Yeah. So it sounds like the violation, the fine amount, whatever it is, is not that effective as a deterrent.
It's not a huge deterrent. Yeah. Okay. But once you get on the radar of your neighborhood- Yeah ... it gets complicated because then you're getting letters, and you're getting concerns, and you're getting calls.
And the rules are there, they're pretty straightforward. It's a struggle. The majority of people are doing what they need to be doing, and the ones that we hear about are the very complicated cases. And it's very similar to any kind of property zoning violation that most people are doing what they're supposed to, and then there's situations where there's just struggle.
Can you remind us what that fine is? Is that $75 a day? I don't think it's a per day. I think it's $200. Flat. Yeah. $200. Per occurrence? Per year? Per violation. So it's a violation every time- There's a max though ...
this stays over? It's a couple thousand is the max. Yeah. That's what I thought. So it's- Yeah. So we could- Not effective ... we could send letters and send violations constantly. Yeah. That's not the most effective way.
Again, it is a method, and it's one that we do employ, but it's a challenge. Yeah. I guess I'm mostly looking forward to hearing from people who are using this, probably in the room, who have comments.
And also a question about ADUsWhen you say the number of days that you're living in a unit and you have an attached or detached second unit, which we'll hopefully have more of in the future, how does that work when you have- You can have one on site.
So if you have- At one time or like if you, let's just- You could move it around ... if you have like four little units on your lot or something. You can have one AD or one short-term rental. Okay. Again, this is an accessory to people living in a residential area.
This is not meant to be sole source. Again, I know folks have different opinions on that, but this is something that's supposed to be compatible with residential neighborhood living. And in my read of it is that not only can it only be one unit, it has to be the one that is occupied by the operator.
But you can't live full-time in one unit and rent out the other one as a homestay. Technically. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Well, I know people in my neighborhood- That's my read of it ... who do that, who have a separate one-bedroom unit in their backyard, seem to live in one and rent the other.
Actually, what I can just- What's staff's take on that? Typically, in those cases, it's not going to rise to the level of violation that other things, mainly the ones that we spend the most time are nuisance-related.
So it's technically a violation, but it's not one that we bother with? Okay. So you can't... I'm just- No, it's not. You're allowed to have two. You're allowed to have your house and your ADU. No. You're allowed to have them as units, but not as a homestay.
Okay. We can- Hey, I don't know if you can hear me. This is Reid Broadhead, the zoning administrator. Hey, Reid. Yep. Hi. Well, first I wanted to mention that, for violations, it's $200 for the first violation, and every 10 days we can send a $500 violation, up to 5,000.
So it's a max of 5,000. And then to mention about how many Airbnbs you can have on your property, it's one. You can have one Airbnb on your property. It can either be in the house, it could be in the ADU in the backyard, it could be the ADU in the basement.
But it's one per property. Okay. So one at a time on a property. Yeah, so if there are multiple units, again, on a property, one, because again, this code, this is something that's supposed to be compatible with neighborhood living.
And again, things can always change in the future, but that's kind of where we are now. Okay. I have a little question and a bigger question. Try and be brief. Small question, I assume you've already thought about this and rejected it.
For enforcement, is it possible to say if you've broken the rules in some obvious way, you don't live in the state, for example, can we deny permission to rent on these platforms at all, or is that not possible to do?
Well, we wouldn't be able to tell the platform. We could tell them, but they can do whatever they want. We can revoke permits, and we can not issue permits. And since this is a yearly permit, every year is an opportunity to reevaluate what's going on on-site.
So you can deny a permit, but the operator can still ignore you and pay a fine possibly. Correct. Okay. That happens with all sorts of things everywhere. Shh. Do staff currently deny or revoke a permit if something comes to their attention for enforcement?
Or is it not worth doing? We go through the checklist of items to get the permit, and if the individual can meet that permit requirement, then we issue the permit. I'll follow up afterwards. I think there was a BCA ruling where- Yeah ...
that was not done, where someone didn't live on the site, and BCA determined that you couldn't take the permit away from them. I'll ask afterwards when I have more information. Or is that a- I just remember that.
Okay. Yeah. Again, if we're in a situation where we're ready to remove a permit because of violation, we're going to be working with our attorney's office to make sure that everything is in place to do that.
That would not be the first route we would go, where we very much work with people as much as possible. We want people to take advantage of the opportunities that the community provides. We also want everyone to do that in such a way that allows for a...
I don't know. It's tough. Okay. Last thing, try and be quick. I'm trying to understand if there's a problem to be solved here, or if it's just been 10, 11 years and time to revisit the ordinance. It sounds like there's no recommended changes, there's not a huge problem, and this is more of a refresh, and we checked, and things are roughly okay.
Are there problems that we need to solve in the ordinance, or is this just a review where we said, "Yep, good enough. Keep going as we are"? I think there are always things that can be tinkered with. I think we would be having a very different conversation if we weren't faced with the state legislation that we're working with here.
We might get a little bit more into the weeds and make some adjustments. We have a pretty good ordinance for what it is. Again, backNow, a decade ago, the industry was not quite what it is today. It's a lot more robust now.
And it's very lucrative. And if folks are doing it according to the rules, cool. Go for it. But when people don't do things according to the rules, we hear about it from various sources, and we just try to do the best we can to get folks back into the proper compliance.
Okay. A question. We'll get to staff in a-- Or to public com-- Or public questions. Can we- Shortly. Yeah. You want to go? No, go ahead, please. I have several questions. First off, related to sort of the zoning text directly, there's some references from the homestay section to the home occupancy section that are contradictory, mostly related to...
Well, the contradictory one is that the homestay, you're not allowed an exterior sign, where the home occupancy that's referenced is you're allowed an exterior sign. So maybe it's worth cleaning that up.
Then, one that I think could confuse people trying to do a homestay is subsection four of the home occupation code states that your customers can't visit earlier than 8:00 a.m. or later than 9:00 p.m.
It's kind of hard to have a lobbying place where people can't visit you at night. No. You're not going into anything that we aren't already struggling with. When they put forth the new code- Mm-hmm ...
things were in provisional use, and things were in home occupation, and in temporary use. And those things kind of got mumbled together. And so we're struggling with some of the changes that have come forward.
So yes, we know that those are potential conflicts. Again, we've got to balance all of the activities that are going on. But yes- Sure ... we surely realize that that is not as clear. And usually when we get calls concerning that, our zoning staff is able to provide some clarity.
Sure. Reid, is there- I guess bringing it up for zoning text amendment conversations that we're having periodically to include those in there. Yeah. Reid, isn't that one we talked about is already in the mix?
Yeah. That's the sign issue, and then of course, people use short-term rentals after 9:00 p.m., so it's ridiculous to have it in there. So yes. I don't think it was meant to limit when a guest can go in, and it's just lumping one code into the next, and so it caused some issues.
Now, that being said, I've only heard one complaint from one person about that section of the code, but it is definitely something that needs to be cleaned up. Sure. From a larger standpoint, I understand that when this was developed, basically it's trying to prevent displacement from our residential neighborhoods.
It's trying to maintain neighborhood character, if you will. There are reasons of trying to allow short-term rentals within the city without it causing a disruption, which other localities and municipalities have experienced from them.
I think it would be important to try to strike that balance, along with potentially using short-term rentals as a method of building more housing units in the city, along with student housing, the larger discussion we're having.
The reason the student housing is being built is because they will pay a premium over what a single family will pay for a unit. And so with that premium, developers are willing to put their money at risk to build new buildings to be able to supply them housing.
And with the study we were shown the other day or the other week, we're not really getting that anywhere outside of student housing. Well, short-term rentals operate similarly, that they will provide a return to operators potentially over and above what a long-term rental will, and that's why people gravitate toward them.
Could we use that dynamic as a way of saying that if you, this is just an idea, that if you build an ADU or just a second unit on your house, since we don't really have an ADU ordinance on your property, and you intend to use that as a short-term rental, you can build that extra unit as a way to continue to grow the housing supply in the city?
Because that extra unit isn't going to be an STR forever. You can already do that if you are living in one of the units. Again, this is a hard one, and we'll get into it more, I'm sure. But, the code that we put forward in 2001, that's going to take a while to come into play.
I've been here a while. We had a vision in 2020, and it took over 15 years for that vision to start moving forward. Again, these things all take time. And anyway, I just want to throw that out and note that, the- To be.
If the person lives in one of the units, that's great. But you're saying- Under current regs Sorry, just under a different umbrella of affordable housing incentives. It- Like maybe there's some- Affordable?
Well, no, but like you're saying like- Just another way of getting construction to happen. Maybe there's something, if someone was deciding what to do with their property, maybe there's some incentive, for a different discussion- Yeah ...
to push more people into the longer term. My condensed point is just short-term rentals can bring outsized returns. That's why people want to do short term versus long term. Can you use that dynamic to try to build housing where a long-term rental housing doesn't pencil?
You're also not displacing anybody in residential areas because the house isn't built yet, so there's no one to displace. Do you have more clarifying questions, with a question mark at the end? We will because I'm going to let the planning commission talk once the public has had the chance to make their comments.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought this was our time. No. Oh. Yeah. This is for us to clarify stuff from staff so that- All right ... fewer questions from the public, and they can have a chance to actually make comments to us.
Perfect. That's my question. That was it. Jose, do you have any questions? I've got a thought, not a question. Okay. I've got a series of questions. Unfortunately, they're scattered throughout the PDF, so bear with me.
What is the current practice for multifamily projects? Suppose like a condominium or like the Belmont Lofts or something. If you're in a non-residential district- Mm-hmm ... then you are considered general lodging under the zoning code.
And so that doesn't fall within homestead. So there are other building-related things that come up with that. But are people generally allowed to, if they're in a condominium, allowed to do an Airbnb?
They do it. Okay. Yeah. And we work with that, or it's unenforced? Reid, are you able to speak to that any? Yeah, sure. So I think for multifamily buildings, you have to get your landlord's permission, and so that prevents many from doing it.
Occasionally in a student housing complex, you'll see them for about a month, and then they disappear when the landlord finds out. I'm thinking of- But in- ... a condominium- But- ... like the Belmont Lofts, where people own their unit.
Yeah. They can do it there. Okay. As long as there's no H... We don't follow HA. If there's an HOA and they prohibit it, then they wouldn't be able to do it. But, we would allow it. As Missy said, it would be general lodging.
Okay. You said that Granicus has identified 500-plus of these properties. Do we know how many we knew before we had Granicus? A couple of hundred. Okay, so this actually really did expand how many we know about.
Yeah, but, again, it's like any sort of data thing. Yes, we see all these dots on the page, and we're like, "Hmm." So we're still digging into that to mine down to an actual... We haven't split out the ones that are residential from Granicus.
We've done that a different way. And so there's still much work to be done there. So this data, it's new enough that we haven't had a chance to figure out if all those properties are-- to enforce things or to figure out if they're all complying.
There's been some limited with that. Again, we're at the time where all the applications are coming in because Todd was able to send out a notice to remind everyone they had to pay. Okay. So between that and a notification we sent out to everyone that we have on record, we just got an onslaught.
And so we're working through that, but we're getting kind of through that now, and now we're strategizing on the people who have chosen not to apply for permits but are showing up as having listings. So you said that we have a $100 fee per year.
I get that does not cover enforcement currently, or does it? How close does that come to paying for the city's cost? We don't typically cover our costs. Okay. For the proposed option- Mm-hmm ... the option that may not come to be, 500 for three years, would that actually cover our costs?
We figure it would somewhat come closer. Mm-hmm. It won't completely. Okay. But again, we also wanted to be reasonable about a fee- Mm-hmm ... because that's how all this works, too. Yeah. Yes, it's the cost of doing business, but if it gets too high, then you lose the balance.
Here I'm going to break my own rule and make a comment, just that it seems like that would be the typical non-homestay person taxpayer subsidizing people who are operating homestays. Seems a little unfair, but, sorry, I'll go on from that.
They collect occupancy tax, too. But yeah. Yeah, no, I guess that... Okay. That is true. I wondered. These, let's see. All right. Yeah, sorry. I think that's all my questions. Unless there are any more clarifying questions, we'll let the public talk.
Great. You guys want to moderate, or should I, or how does this work? I think he has a question. I think Todd has a question. Oh, Todd. I'm sorry. I'm sort of public here today. Well, you're staff. Okay.
Can I come up now? Are you being public? I'm sort of being- So you've got to pick a hat ... a commissioner of the revenue, actually. Okay. But wasn't really part of the presentation. So, I'm mostly here to pee in the Corn Flakes.
So I'll answer a couple of questions. The 30-day occupant there, that really has to do with the rules around transient occupancy tax- Understood ... and their license. Okay. Yeah. The 500 or so listings, a lot of times you're going to find multiple listings for one property, so it tends to inflate that.
She's right. We've seen about 250 or so business licenses every year for several years. So I'd say that's a truer number of how many of these we have. With respect to enforcement, in addition to what they have, if you operate a business in the city of Charlottesville and don't get a business license, that's Class 1 misdemeanor.
We used to spend a lot of time chasing folks down. And that's actually a pretty stiff fine. The problem with that is, and I'm going to get into this in a minute, the way that the business license interacts with the home state permit.
I am not supposed to issue a business license to somebody until they have their home state permit. So if I go out spending a lot of time tracking down somebody on one of these for a $35 business license, and then they don't bother to get the home state permit, it's a waste of time.
And so we have pretty much for years, we were actually the office that was really driving the enforcement of these things. And it's kind of shifted over to these guys, and now we've got Granicus, it's probably going to happen more.
What I really want to say here is if you want to know the single biggest impediment to enforcement, it's the annual fee. And I've expressed that to these guys, and whatever. It's the annual fee because the zoning inspectors spend all their time chasing down checks.
That's it. Full stop. And then the way that impacts me, I can't issue a business license until the home state permit's been paid. So the result is that my office sits on hundreds of business licenses that people have filed for and paid for, but that I can't issue because they didn't go to NDS to get the home state permit.
My suggestion has been, and remains, that the home state permit, like every other home occupation permit, should be a one-time thing. Yeah. You run a hair salon in your basement, you pay $100. Now, I know we've got other fees, other permits that get renewals.
They don't have another license hinging on. I think Missy pointed out to me that the cafe spaces and the vendors on the mall, that's a fraction of the number of people. They're much easier to track, and they don't have a business license hinging on that.
If you guys are going to make a change, the only change that I'm here to advocate for is to make the home state permit a single time fee. Make it $500, make it $1,000. I don't give a damn. But I don't need to have to deal...
It is a huge pain to have to wait to see if they've got their home state permit before we can issue that. Right now, I got hundreds of people who've paid for their business license. They've got 60 folks who've gotten their home state permits.
So I'm sitting on those licenses, and it's like that every single year. So if you make a change, that's what I'd advocate for. Sorry. Victoria, let's go to you if you want to- No, that was great. That's what I do.
We work with Todd quite a bit, Todd, Bob from his office, as we're working through this, and this is kind of the one thing that we go back and forth on quite a bit because we understand where Todd's coming from on this.
We get that. But the yearly review is really the main time we get to see what changes have happened and be able to make sure that it's maintaining as following the rules from that standpoint. And so that's why our folks have pushed back on that one just because of trying to keep things from that enforcement end.
But we love Todd. We work with him as we're working with this. I would just counter that you don't need to collect a fee to enforce the rules. You could do that anyway. Anyway, that's it. All right. Looks like you're moderating, Chair.
I'm moderating. All right. Do we have an online comment too? Dan, you got it. Grace. Yes. Thank you. All right. We'll start the public hearing. Starting in in person. You can come- Not a public hearing, just comments from the public.
Comment from the public. Why don't you go ahead, Deborah? Please state your name. You'll have three minutes Okay, I'm Deborah Weiss. I've been in Charlottesville since 1995. I feel like I'm the poster child for this short-term rental thing.
I was instrumental in getting the ADU passed in the early 2000s because I wanted to build a house in my backyard before the city was even up zoned. So, that's what I did. And I started short-term renting it in 2013.
My house does not face the street. It's in my backyard. It has its own parking. I greet every guest. I've never had one single complaint. The city keeps raising the assessments on properties and the property taxes, and now, without my short-term rental, I would be completely priced out of my neighborhood, and the property taxes that I have to pay now are over $11,000 a year.
So I just want to switch it around for a second and let you know that my short-term rental keeps my house affordable to me. Okay? And the other point that I want to make is the correlation between somehow affordable housing and short-term rental is, one, for me, I didn't take away housing, I added housing.
And second, even if I long-term rented my place, it would not be affordable. Okay? My house in my backyard, I feel, is my retirement account. It's my real estate investment, and it's how, pretty much, I put food on my table right now.
And I need it. And so I think we're all for responsible hosting, and I think I do a really good job. And the other point that I want to make is that this is a business and it's really hard work. And it's not something that people think, "Oh, I'll just Airbnb my place and make a ton of money." It's a lot of work.
And I think a lot of people try it, and then they just realize, "Oh, I'm not going to do this." And then they either long-term rent it or they long-term rent it or they stop doing it. And third, I think that there's a lot of places that might show up on your software where it's people who rent their house out for graduation, or they rent their house out just for football season.
They're not doing it all the time. So I think that you need to take the amount of places with a grain of salt. So that's all I'm saying. Thank you. And just a heads up, we are going to limit these to three minutes each.
Dan, do you have a- I think they've got the clock going. Oh, I can't see it. Okay, there we go. They switch between online and in-person. Do we have any online people? Yes. We'll have one after you. Okay.
My name's Chas Webster. You may have seen some of my emails. Two parts here, really. I think some of us have gotten some texts from our STR group that we were a little surprised today. Well, first, we were the ones that came to this meeting last minute, finding out about it.
And so, shared with other people within our group, but also our hosts, "Hey, this is going on. Did you know about this?" We didn't, so we didn't feel it was overly transparent. Had some questions then, and that's why we started writing NDS and asking for things to slow down so we could be part of the conversation.
And then today, our understanding was that they were going to basically not ask for anything at this point and work on just enforcement and conversation and communication with us, which we've welcomed.
It seems that there may have been another agenda, and that's confusing to us. I personally have commercial and residential properties with a business partner of mine. Many downtown and midtown. A lot of residential units.
Some of those we do rent to Airbnb, and I think one of the pictures that we-- and Airbnb companies, people who rent from us, and we allow to do Airbnbs. We haven't turned much of our inventory into Airbnb.
We keep it as long-term. It's easier to us. We have a lot of it, so it'd be more work for us. That being said, part of the picture that's not painted here is we, without following all the rules and regulations or being regulated like just a citizen in a neighborhood, can turn all of ours into Airbnb.
And 365 days a year. That seems a little convoluted when we're looking at being stringent and strict on literally citizens in a neighborhood, which also, I think the part of the picture missing here is in that neighborhood, there are buildings and stuff that could do the exact same thing as I'm doing.
We can turn them all into Airbnbs and remove long-term rentals from the market and take extra expendable income just from citizens, which historically has been proven is spent in the area. They're still going to take their yearly family vacations, but they won't eat out as much, they won't order out as much, they won't shop locally or spend as much locally.
Well, as a person that rents to commercial, this is where we saw, my partner and I, a real problem here. And we know that currently, restaurants especially, are having a really tough time. And so we want tourism to grow.
We want the local people to keep eating out and spending locally. And Todd, I don't know when this started, but as long as I've known about Airbnb, and 99%, my understanding, of short-term rentals are on one of the two major platforms, the majority being Airbnb.
They've collected 14.5% tax, and 9% has been going to the city without any problem or extra work. It's not like an Airbnb person can't not pay it. So it's almost that, to your point earlier, we should be incentivizing people, certainly in some of these areas where there is upzoning, to build more of these and actually tax them as much as possible and benefit as much as possible from this so we're not having to constantly just raise property taxes or And to be honest, I feel a little- Thank you.
The last thing, we have a full email and everything we submitted to NDS, we would have submitted to you if we had known that we were actually going to get into this conversation. So we will get all that out to you.
Okay. Thank you very much. Mr. Chair, I have Colleen Kelly online with a hand raise. Colleen, would you like to speak? Yes. Sorry, am I unmuted now? Yes, go ahead. Okay, perfect. Well, thank you for the meeting.
I think a couple things. First of all, I appreciate that we're addressing this, and Missy for your work in the research. I'm glad that the recommendation is to keep everything as it is because Granicus really hasn't been running for very long, and so you don't really have really great data that's out there.
And I think a lot of the problems is just these people that are gaming the system, and I run a very legal, fully compliant Airbnb, and we actually get hurt by people who are taking advantage of the system.
They deflate the prices, they undercut us, they cause problems in the neighborhood, and then we get over-regulated. My second point is the fact that just back of the napkin calculations, if Airbnb is generating $1.58 million in taxes and we're only 14% of the occupancy, that means that we're punching above our weight in terms of how much tax revenue we're giving.
Because of the total amount, that's 15.7% of the total. The third thing I would like to say is that, I am a community member, and I want to reiterate what other speakers have said, is that the Airbnb makes it possible for me to live in Charlottesville and to upkeep my property.
Without it, I would be in a world of financial hurt. And it is a lot of hard work, and it is a lot of my hours. So another thing is the fact that, whenever we talk about all this, is that we're good with, I guess, the compliance, right?
But it would be great that things are paused until we get a better picture of all this. Then I actually had a little bit of a question about one of the data points. It says, "X amount of the entire house is rented." So I'm a little bit curious because technically we're a duplex, and whenever you put things on Airbnb, you either have to say you're renting out a room or you're renting out an entire home.
So technically, even though we're an apartment or duplex, we would fit into the category, if you're using the Airbnb metrics of entire home, we would fall into that category. But we're not in a situation where we're doing rooms.
So I just want to put that out there. And the thing is that as opposed to the Hilton or Marriott taking the money that they earn from short-term rentals and spending it wherever, paying out tax, their dividends to their shareholders, I'm spending all the money that I earn in my Airbnb after expenses in this local community.
And so I feel like it's just another thing to think about whenever you're considering the calculus of how much or how little short-term rentals are contributing to the City of Charlottesville. So, thank you.
Thank you. If there's any other online speakers, you may click the Raise Hand icon, and I can call you out. And then you also have community members here. Yes. So seeing none, we can go back and do in-person speakers.
Good evening. My name's Sam Galand. I live at 1292 Kenwood, up in Greenbrier. So I came kind of midway through the presentation, so it seems like the agenda is not actually being considered or proposed.
But just wanted to offer my comments. So for background, I do not operate an Airbnb, don't really have skin in the game. But I just wanted to speak in support of people's rights to operate a short-term rental, and specifically, I thought that the eight-person maximum was an unreasonable regulation.
I think people should be able to rent their property on a long-term basis or a short-term basis. I think some reasonable rules make sense, but the eight-person seemed kind of arbitrary. If you have a six-bedroom house, that seems unreasonable.
I also noticed, I guess there's a six adult limit. I don't know if that's something that's actually enforced, but that also seems, if that's on the books now, I think that should be reconsidered. I'm not really sure what the reason for that is.
And just a couple points. These rentals provide significant benefits. These are big tax revenue for the city, and these are activity for local businesses. I think if some of these were eliminated, specifically the larger ones , you might just lose some of that economic activity, or maybe it shifts to hotels or shifts to the counties, to Albemarle County, and then that goes to county businesses.
And it's a cool resource for residents. I got married in the city a few years ago, and the wedding party, we rented a big house in our neighborhood, and that was a lot of fun. And if that had not been available, it would've been a very different weekend.
So I think maybe it's a special event, maybe it's graduation, maybe it's a reunion. But these are often good resources for people who live here. It's an opportunity for homeowners. There's a guy on my cul-de-sac, he's looking at adding a unit, and he's thinking, "Maybe I'll rent it long-term.
Maybe I'll do an Airbnb." But if you take away that option, you might get less housing built. We've given homeowners the toolsTo add one unit or add an ADU. If we increase regulation on what they can do, you're going to get less of that.
And then last, like I said, I don't operate an Airbnb, but there are people that have operated these in good faith and built small businesses. So, what I read in the agenda, which would really be killing those businesses, and I was very surprised there was no consideration for them.
So, that's all I had, but I think these provide meaningful benefits for people that operate them and others as well. Thanks. Thank you. Perfect. Good evening. Genevieve Keller, 504 First Street North.
Once upon a time, was that where you sat, and it happened to be during the period in which we crafted these coordinates, and we worked on it for months, and we had much debate. We had a very diverse group of people sitting on the commission at that point in time, variety of ages distributed across the city to people who were operating a bed and breakfast or short-term rental, whatever you want to call it.
One sort of independently and one on a platform. Strong housing advocates. And this was really the best we could come up with. There were those who argued for more than six, and we decided that six was based on a two person per three bedrooms, and any more than that, even then we were thinking about housing our community.
Any more than that, then why don't you have an apartment? Because at that point, you still could have one ADU in your house. So, this is really what we came up with and I've been an operator for-- If you'd asked me 20 years ago I was going to have this, I would say you're absolutely crazy.
Because I spent most of my life being a consultant, flying all over the country, and this is a little bit easier. But the reason I did it was because my son had graduated from college, traveled on a fellowship around the world and came home, and before he was going to go back to school, he just said, "Can I have a B&B?
These are great things. I've done them all over the world." So I let him do it, and then, like kids do, he left me with the football season all booked up, so Mom was left holding the bag. And it turned out to be a pretty good bag.
And I have to say, I kind of enjoy it. And along with other people that talk about paying their real estate taxes, in my family, we're talking about a great-grandmother who raised turkeys. And the family didn't eat the turkeys.
She sold the turkeys to pay her taxes. So I make beds to pay my taxes, and I don't have to fly all over the country and stand in a TSA line to be a consultant. So I've enjoyed doing it. Have a great number of people.
They come for weddings, they come for football, they come for vineyards, they come for sick children, they come for dying parents. They come for lots of things. Because I've been a planning commissioner and I believe in housing, I don't rent anything as a B&B that I could rent as a dwelling unit to a long-term renter.
I don't have any kitchen units, and I say in bold letters, "No kitchen. Support our local restaurants." I think we have as good an ordinance as we could have. I support you keeping what we have now. I think to open it up, open up a big can of worms.
Missy has talked about what you might have to do if you do make a change and hopefully there are ways that you can work with Todd and other ways to collect fees so that you can take care of those things, and there's always another general assembly session next year.
So I think what you're doing now is a good thing, and the only thing is the weak link has been the enforcement. Thank you. John McDonald online. John, would you like to speak? I think you're muted there.
You are trying to speak. Can you hear me? Yes. I find this whole thing a little confusing. I'm looking at your current requirements were up to six adults and any number of children. And then your proposal is two adults per bedroom, up to eight people.
So in your current requirement, there is no requirement of bedrooms as a number of people, any number of children, which seems to me to leave that open to, quite frankly, an infinite number of people in a house.
And now you're saying you can have up to two adults per bedroom, up to eight people. What happened to the children? Is it still unlimited children? And what is your definition of a bedroom? That's it.
This is why I find this very confusing. And at one point, you did say that you were increasing the number of people, and I'd like to know how that increase works. Thank you. Thank you. Do you guys want to answer that real fast or is that...
Read the bedroom question. I don't think we can. It was part of the proposal. Yeah. But aren't actual proposals. Right. Well- Yeah. Reid, can you speak to the question of bedrooms? Yeah, sure. So it is limiting.
I think it is something that I've talked with the city attorney in that we would probably allow children To come in as well. It's hard to deal with. And we don't have the answer, but yes. So right now it's six adults and any number of children.
We've heard from lots of people staying with wedding parties and what have you. And so they're exceeding the occupancy right now. In the future, it would be eight per home, two per bedroom, and we would probably exempt children from that in a proposal.
So you could still have families come and you're getting more. So hopefully that helps answer your question. And once again, I would say through this whole presentation, there's been so much research and so much time spent trying to come up with a proposal, and we ran into roadblocks in many different routes that we were trying to take.
And ultimately with this code section that would open it up to renters to be able to potentially utilize the short-term rental ordinance, we decided to recommend nothing. So that's where we are. Thank you.
More public comments? Yeah. Hi, I'm Sarah Sheldon. I want to talk about a couple different separate-ish topics. The first one being, I'm a mom. When I look to go stay places, I don't look at hotels because that sounds terrible with a child.
I want an Airbnb. If I'm going to stay with family, I want an Airbnb. So the last thing that I would want is for the city to make this more difficult for families to come and stay here. Charlottesville is very family-friendly, and I don't want families to look at it and be like, "Let's just go stay somewhere else where I can put my kids in a different room to sleep because my child won't sleep quietly.
He needs to be on his own so he can mumble." I don't know. Kids make a lot of noise. So it's just really nice to be able to go somewhere and have multiple rooms and have a kitchen, have a bathroom with a tub.
These are just things that I don't want the commission to forget. But I was actually talking with our cleaner, and most of her business, or all of her business, is Airbnbs. And the same thing applies to a lot of other vendors in the area.
And I think that it's important not to forget the financial impact that Airbnbs themselves have. There are cleaners in hotels. There are landscapers for hotels. There are small business owners who rely on that.
If Airbnbs became totally outlawed or if it was just single bedrooms, I don't think-- My cleaner's name is Alicia. She's great. If you need a cleaner recommendation, let me know. She's awesome. But if these were to suddenly become single bedrooms, her job would be infinitely more difficult, and she might not have a business at all.
So I just want to make sure people like her were seen and heard because I asked her if she wanted to come. She said no, she didn't have time. She's cleaning, so makes sense. But alternatively, I'm actually a wedding photographer in the area.
None of my couples want to stay in an Airbnb. Much like the gentleman said earlier, his wedding party wanted to stay, or they wanted to stay in an Airbnb, not a hotel. And weddings that I've captured in hotels, they just feel cold and sad and not as comfortable and fun.
Whereas the experience that wedding parties, wedding guests, wedding clients have is better in an Airbnb because it feels more communal. And just from that, yeah. I guess the point that I'm making is people like Airbnbs.
They want to stay in Airbnbs. And I would personally hate if housing went from allowing eight people to it has to be four or six. You can have your mom stay with you, and that sounds terrible. I'd like to let more people stay in these Airbnbs so they can have fun, so they want to come here, so they don't go to Charleston or New York City or somewhere else instead.
I want them to come here so I can shoot their wedding in an Airbnb that Debra owns. That sounds great. Here's an ad to you. But I'd love for them to go there because I actually had a couple stay. It's a nice place.
Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah. I had a couple stay at your Airbnb after their wedding, and they loved it. Oh, thanks. So, I'd rather they have that experience. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Robin Sealy, and I have a teeny tiny little Airbnb.
It's just under 300 square feet. It does not have a full kitchen. It is not going to help solve the housing crisis. I think if that is one of the things that we're trying to do here, and I honestly still not sure exactly what it is that we're trying to solve for, I think you'd have to look individually at each Airbnb to discover whether or not a studio like mine is going to be any great contribution to the city's housing stock.
It doesn't have a kitchen. It's a studio. It's teeny tiny. The other thing I'd say is, even though it's a teeny tiny place with half a kitchen, it is helping me tremendously right now because I'm now retired.
I bought the thing in my house in 2019, and in that time since then, to the state, my tax bill has doubled. It's actually doubled. I was paying under $5,000 a year. I'm now paying almost $10,000 a year.
It would be-Infinitely harder for me if I didn't have the income from that Airbnb to make a contribution to that cost. So, I know there are others who are on the same boat, and we've heard from them. I understand I'm not the numbers person, but on the SDR listserv, there are about 130 people on that listserv.
And it's not just people who own Airbnbs, it's also people who own businesses in the city, because they have a vested interest in keeping Airbnbs open, because that is what is also bringing folks to their restaurants and their stores.
Thank you. Anyone else? Hello, I'm Janice Cavanaugh. I live on Douglas Ave. And like Debbie, been doing Airbnb and short terms for a long time, since 2010, when the market real estate kind of tanked. But I have more questions, really, than comments.
Mine doesn't have a kitchen either, so it would never be in the housing stock. But, it's my understanding that the Airbnb and VRBO do not itemize the taxes to the city. Like, they don't list every property owner taxes, they just send one lump check.
Is that correct? No, they do. They break out by address and gross receipts. Perfect. But I can't share it. No, that's okay. I was told by someone there that they don't, or somebody told me that they just send one check, but- They do send one check, but they send a report.
Per- perfect. Okay. And then how do you determine if this 181 days is the cap? Like, who's tracking? Nobody. Okay. Because it's not- So it's really not even worth putting that in there because there's no way to police it.
I'm not looking at you specifically, but you answer it. No, it's all good. And then in reference, someone asked about condos. I sell real estate. The bulk of the condo associations do not allow short-term rentals.
So Belmont Lofts or the Gleason and stuff, I'm sure there's people who get by with it and do it, but overall, you have to have a 60 or 90-day minimum lease, and that lease has to be approved by the condo associations.
And then how does the city, I guess, police or determine, because there are companies that manage multiple properties for individual homeowners, and they put them on Airbnb and VRBO, and then those people live somewhere else.
So is there any way that the city can determine how that is controlled? Each- Oh. Each individual-- I'm sorry, each individual property owner is responsible for getting a permit. So it's not up to the state, Charlottesville or Airbnb, get a permit for the homeowner.
But if that homeowner lives in Ohio, they can't get a permit? Because they don't live- They have to establish their residency in Virginia, provide us with a photo ID, and sign the document that says, "I swear that I abide by all the regulations and will comply with all your regulations." Okay.
All right. And in reference to the stats you put up earlier, the bulk of the properties are one bedroom, two bedroom, and three bedroom, and very low percentage was higher bedrooms. So how are you going to fit eight, 10 people in the bulk of the places that have three bedrooms if it's two people per bedroom?
It would be up to. I mean, the proposal was an up to- Number of people ... because based on the potential safety inspection, it would determine how many bedrooms were per building code, and then it could be up to.
But still based on two people per bedroom? Okay. Thank you. Any more in-person speakers for public comments? Any more online raised hands for public comments? Raise hands. Chair, I see no more. All right.
Thank you. And just to remind the public again, you can always email us at planningcommission@charlesville.gov, or there's a link on the city's website on the Planning Commission's page. All right, so comments from the Planning Commission.
I think we do this one this time. Ross, you want to go ahead? Yes. Let me get back to my list of comments from last time. Okay. I guess I want to open up the discussion about allowing renters to have homestays.
It seems like the proposal to not make any changes by staff is largely predicate on that would then allow renters to have homestays. I don't necessarily see why that's a bad thing. In the current situation, you're allowing homeowners to beef up their own income, like we've heard several times here tonight.
I don't know why we would allow that privilege to only be for somebody that owns their property and not somebody that rents their property. Of course, this would need to be part of an agreement between the tenant and the person who leases them their homes, but that's not something that we're here to discuss.
I don't see a reason why the city should prevent renters from being able to have their own homestay in their unit. Then an item related to occupancy is maybe a way to get around some of these comments about what the exact number of max people available for a home stay unit should be.
I'm pretty sure that there are fire marshal regulations about occupancy of residential units. Leave it up to the fire marshal. Then my last comment that I would make is whatever changes are made, if any, to not make them more onerous than what we're doing for other home occupations in the city and residential areas.
The comment from the commissioner of revenue about decoupling enforcement from getting a permit or getting a fee, I think is a smart idea. And that's the end of my comments. Okay. Joseph? I don't think I've got anything.
I think this is headed in the right direction. I would disagree with Ross. And again, I can't wrap an argument around it yet. It just doesn't feel good, so I need to think about it a little bit more. But the idea of tenants, being renters, being able to participate in the home stay thing just doesn't feel good, but I need to give that a little more thought to make sure that's where I'm going to land.
Okay. Josh? I think I'll just be echoing things. Like we heard from the audience, it sounds like the ordinance that we have now, the goals make sense, the rules mostly make sense. I think it would be a mistake to drop the max number of nights to 90 days.
That sounds much more onerous and for no public benefit. I also don't think it would be smart to remove the residency requirement like has been suggested. I think having the goal of having owner-occupied homes that do Airbnb, as long as the owner lives there, that's working fine.
Let's keep doing it. I also don't see any public interest in preventing tenants from renting out part of their home, especially because it would require the landlord to approve it, and if they don't like it, they can say no.
So I think it would be a marginal change. I think most people would say, "No, you can't do it," but I don't see why I would tell a landlord they can't their tenant rent out part of the property. I do possibly like the proposed change to require the affidavit, although I think Reid mentioned there already is one.
It's in the document, so I'm not sure. But I think requiring the owner to say, "Yes, I live here," some of them don't, and people don't like lying, I hope. And signing a document saying, "I'll follow the rules," I wouldn't mind that happening.
I certainly wouldn't want to use the fear of tenants renting out part of the unit to prevent us from doing things that are useful. But mostly, I'm happy with the proposal of not making changes because I think the main problem is enforcement.
That's out of the scope of what we can do here, and the regulations sound mostly in good shape to me. I wouldn't want to make this any harder for anybody to provide the service to the community. So I'll stop there.
Yeah. I would echo the same comments, and I think the tenants think maybe that it's good that nothing's happening now. That could be a future study, but it seems like there's a lot of the subleasing, because we have student, this and that.
That kind of happens in a way. There's a lot more of these informal, someone's going abroad, they need someone to stay there for two months. So maybe there's something around that perspective to think about.
But I'm glad I learned a lot more about this through this process, whether or not it was a little messy, and I'm glad we heard from people who are providing these. Again, I think what we have now, it seems to be working as well as it can.
And so maybe with time with the new software, there'll be new opportunities to make some smaller changes if needed, but I'm good with what we have. On the same page, I think its process seems to be going in the right direction.
I don't want to unreasonably curtail short-term rentals. I do think on the issue of tenants being able to do short-term rentals, I don't think it's good if we're in a place where we can't update the ordinance because we don't want to comply with the state law.
So I get that quickly putting in place a way to manage this, like how do we track that the owner has given permission to the tenant, that that's kind of an administrative headache. But I hope that we can figure that out in the future so that we're not stuck with a frozen code that we can't update because we don't want to allow tenants to rent out as short-term rentals.
Okay. I have a few comments, and firstly, I just want to thank the public for coming out and speaking. I didn't announce earlier when I said I didn't have any questions, but I'm a non-voting the UVA rep for the Planning Commission.
My name's Michael Joy, an associate university architect there. So, my comments here, again, are not framed as a representation of the university or anything along those lines. And, I did want to thank Missy for the great presentation.
I found it to be very informative and thought-provoking. And so one of the things I was just going to throw out are just some questions and also maybe some recommendations of possible ideas. And hearing from the community Part of me is wondering, it sounds like it's the people who aren't conforming with the current one that seems to be causing the issue.
And so the idea, the enforcement, it's too onerous for the local government to do, and it's hard and tricky legally and this and that. But I was curious if we could transfer that onus to Airbnb and Vrbo and the others, that they can only collect their booking fees if they're doing business with a legally certified property.
Oh, no. I can tell you, they can't. I'm thinking because maybe this is a state-level thing we could work with. Maybe they could do a commonwealth thing. I don't understand why, if they're sitting there saying that they're having accommodation, that accommodation is not in conformance with local law, how they can make money on that.
I- I know overseas, in certain countries, you have to be licensed and show your license at the bottom. So maybe there's a way to do it. And I understand this is a bigger question. It may not be Charlottesville, but maybe it's a bunch of communities can come together.
I just think it's crazy that they can profit on not being genuine with what they're offering as being legal. Because I feel like there's people who are following the rules, who are doing it and making limitations, and you have other people who aren't.
And anyway, it's just the big software company which has no presence in this town seems to be benefiting the most from these issues. So that was one. It seems like there's a number of college towns across the country that have heightened or enhanced their STR restrictions, or they fully have prohibition on it because they are dealing with the same housing crisis that we are dealing with and the same cost of living crisis.
And I was curious if the city has had any chance to be in conversation to see. Some of them adopted them a number of years ago, and it seems like some of the anecdotal stories are quite beneficial. I was just curious if we're getting a-- We were a thought leader when we adopted this back in the day, and seems like there's some other communities that kind of have chosen a path, and I'd be curious if it's actually helped their housing issues and their cost of living.
And then the last one I was thinking of is, I wonder if there's a way, with these private equity firms snatching up properties all over town, empty houses that are being used as Airbnbs, like Danny mentioned.
We all see them in our neighborhoods. Could we consider a two-unit minimum in order to apply for a homestay? Your property, which is in R-A or B, but you have to have two units there, whether it has to be an ADU.
And so the reason I'm saying this is, in order to get the ADU, you have to go through NDS, you have to get permitted, you have to have it inspected, it has to be up to code, it has to be safe, it has to meet all the necessary requirements.
And then once you have two units on the property, it sort of implies that you live in one of them. And I feel like it doesn't take a perfectly suitable home for a family and just have no one lives in it, and it's constantly illegally being used as a short-term rental.
But it seems like everyone who came up today is doing that, where they have a two-unit property. And I just wonder if that's a very simple way to leverage something that could protect the people who, again, are following the rules.
That's all I had. Doesn't have to be two units. Sorry, we don't have two units. We have our houses, and then we have a basement. I know, but I think NDS would call that a two-unit, right? If you had an ADU basement and the main residence.
Maybe I'm not using the language right. Me, I have two. No, but I think even- That's my backyard ... you can have an ADU in your basement, and I think from a-- Am I wrong? Is that a two-unit when you- There is no such thing anymore as an accessory dwelling unit.
Yeah. It's just units. Okay, so that's what I'm getting at. So the ADU language told units is the new language. I have two bedrooms, a bathroom, and they use the front door. It's part of my house, so it's not any separate section.
It's a separate section, but it's not like an ADU, and it's not a basement. It's two bedrooms I don't need, so I rent them to the public. Yeah. And that would be the thing that would maybe be the risk because you're doing it right, but most of the people, or at least my anecdotal, I see empty houses that no one lives in.
They're 150 days a year. Yeah, I get that problem. And you could make conversions to your home to make those units. I'm not going to spend money to accommodate stuff. I mean, other people do. I'm making money off of it to pay my bills.
Just trying to find a way to create a level playing field that it can be enforced. Are you done? Yeah. Okay. Didn't want to jump in ahead of you. Yeah. I tend to agree the idea of holding off on doing updates just because of the not wanting tenants to participate seems a little odd to me.
I know it's already happening. I have friends who rent who also do Airbnbs, and I guess it's a matter of time till you guys find out or don't. We need that. It does help them. We need those. It helps them pay their rent.
It's something that's useful to them, and it makes Charlottesville affordable to them to be able to do that. And it seems like we don't want to ever step in the way of people being able to rent out their houses for graduation weekend.
That's one time a year. Doesn't seem like it's a bad thing. I don't want to make this so onerous that people can't just do a one weekend out of the year or something that they rent out their houses and make some extra cash.
Yeah, the enforcement thing is frustrating. It seems like we still need to work on that. Let me see. Sorry. All these notes and questions mixed up together. So the fees thing, if we do end up making a change, I think it would be important if we find a way to cover our costs.And the $500 for three years, that would effectively prevent tenants from using this process anyways, if we wanted to go ahead and update.
I have a feeling that someone who rents, probably they may not want to spend $500 to have a three-year license for something that they may only have a year to... They're leasing year to year. And it is an awful lot of money, if you're only going to be renting for a few weekends or something.
Yeah, and I guess the cap on six people that we currently have, or six adults does seem... I mean, we are a wedding community, and it does seem like there's, I imagine that there probably are a number of business owners or Airbnb operators that are upset about that, that they can't lease out their larger house for more than six individuals.
Yes, concerns have been raised for folks in larger places, but as the number of people increase, the external impacts increase. And are those parking, or what are those external impacts? Parking is definitely one of them.
Noise concerns, as you get lots of people together. Reid, I don't know if there's anything else you want to add to that question. Yeah, I would just say parking and noise. Vehicles, especially in the houses that don't have off-street parking, adds more to the neighborhood.
And frankly, that's the major concern that we hear, is that these are groups that are getting together, and they're excited. They're reunions, and so they're going to stay up late every single weekend.
It's like being next to a party house often because you're going to have large groups of people. And there are operators that actually have pretty good policies, and they hold their tenants or renters to those policies, like noise policies and what have you, and that works really well in well-managed properties.
But then there's also others that don't. So that's where we hear from, is the people that are not operating it responsibly. Mm-hmm. I guess whatever we do, we're probably not going to be fully satisfied.
You've put a lot of work into this, so thank you for that. My two cents are the tenant thing is already happening. I'm not sure I see the problem with that, but if updating the code has other implications, then yeah, I don't know.
Final thoughts from anyone else? Questions? Can I do one? Sure. I just want to echo something that Commissioner Arnes said earlier about how to regulate problems. You mentioned the fire code. If there's a safety concern about occupancy, put it in the fire code.
If there are concerns about parking, that belongs in permit parking. Concerns about noise belong in the noise ordinance. These are all concerns that I share, but they're not concerns with STRs. They're concerns with people, and they have their place being regulated in other areas than the STR regs.
Sorry, I'm done. No, exactly. No, it's true, and I think is it right that that's still we have to finally resolve. Yes. When these concerns happen, we want the responsible party to be able to get some relief.
I said that wrong, sorry. The fire marshal has been at the table with us, by the way, throughout this proposal, so that lens has been part of contributing to the discussion. But when there's a situation where things are not going good at an Airbnb, folks are encouraged to call the police for activities that are not occurring properly.
But ultimately, the owner ends up in a responsible spot. And so again, most people do the right thing, and then there's the things that make it difficult for all the people who are doing the right thing.
So what I'm hearing her comment is that there are some of these other avenues to go down. But at the end of the day, it really comes down to the owner. So maybe instead of having individual occupancy limits and noise limits and X, Y, and Z, and parking limits, as part of the permit, there's just a line that sort of references those other things that says, if your occupants aren't following those limits, we have the ability to pull your permit as a way around that, instead of having completely new occupancy limits and those other things.
Just an idea. Yeah. I guess it'll be interesting to see what council thinks. If that's it, I guess we should move on to Ben Chambers. Thank you. Sorry that we- No, I appreciate- ... moved you to the end of the agenda, but...
Right. Yeah. I'll buy you a beer sometime. I'm Ben Chambers. I'm the city's transportation planning manager. I'll clean up my act. I often don't get a chance to come speak with you. You don't really have a lot of transportation items that come up regularly as part of your business.
So I appreciate the chance to come give you an update. Part of this update is telling you when the next time I'm coming back to speak with you is. So having fun spoilers right back in there. Package from you is on its side So first, I want to introduce my team.
And no, we don't have two safe routes to school coordinators, so I'll clear that up. Okay. My team is me, Tommy, Kyle, and Zoe. Tommy is our bike ped coordinator, Kyle is our safe routes to school coordinator, and Zoe is our transit planner.
Got it. Next slide, please. Yes, sir. So you can probably tell from our job titles, we touch on quite an array of different topics. So we do transit planning. We work with schools to do planning to get people to school safely.
We work on traffic calming with public works partners and the fire department as well. We have helped set the sidewalk priorities, which inform the CIP. That's usually when I come to speak with you, is once a year to talk about the CIP, and the biggest item that we usually have in the CIP is the sidewalk priorities.
We're also responsible for planning out corridor intersection improvements, and we operate some biking and walking programs. Next slide, please. So that translates into a very long list of projects that we're working on.
This is just a sample of what we're working on, probably just the highlights of what we've got on our plate today. We've got a STAR study with VDOT that we're doing right now for the intersection in the middle of town at West Main and Ridge.
That will turn into the city's first smart scale application in four years if it's endorsed by city council in July. We've got a second STAR study that we're working with on VDOT that also involves the county, and that's for 29 North and the 250 bypass interchange.
Could you remind me what this acronym means? STAR is a VDOT program. It is a specific planning program. They have STARS program and Pipelines program. They both do the same thing. They're basically just VDOT doing a planning study.
It has some very long acronym, like strategically targeted blah, blah, blah. But it just means VDOT is coming in and doing a study, and they're planning on doing this study so that it will support a smart scale application down the line.
Strateg- Yeah. I was going to say, Strategically Targeted Affordable Roadway Solutions. Yes. So relatable. Yes. Got it. So we do a lot of work coordinating with VDOT. They don't actually own roads in Charlottesville aside from the bypass.
So a lot of it is them coming to us and saying, "We know that this is a regional or statewide need that we need to address here, and it's in the middle of your city. How can we work together?" So we've had a great opportunity to work with them on West Main and Ridge, and then further work with them going up 29.
We also work closely with the region and with our transit agencies, to expand and improve transit. That includes realigning routes, putting in new bus stops. So we're doing that with the Route 2. That is an expansion out into the county, which will allow city residents to connect to such glamorous locations as the jail, but also to the Mill Creek Shopping Center and PVCC.
We're also looking through all of our bus stops while we do that. We've already performed an inventory on all of our bus stops to understand what's on the ground today. Unsurprisingly, we didn't already know the answer to that, but now we do.
And that's going to help us set up the next step of how do we improve what's on the ground, what are our priorities, and where should we be spending money to put more shelters, benches, look at lighting, look at traffic cans, look at improvements to our signage.
So we are working through that. At the same time, we're working with the county to figure out how our regional transit authority is going to work and what priorities it has and where it wants to spend its money once it potentially gets a funding source.
We also, as I mentioned, support access to schools. One of the biggest changes that we've had in that front this year is updating our city code around school zone flashers. Our city code had outdated names for schools.
It was missing some school names, and it didn't provide consistent guidance on what the speed limit should be when school is in session and what it should be when it's not in session. We standardized that to it should be 25 when school is not in session.
That's the maximum speed in front of the school. And then when school's in session, to 15. We are rolling out the changes to those signs now. The other issue is there are some spots where we didn't have signs, where we want to expand our signage coverage.
So Kyle is working through a lot of that right now. We operate a few different biking and walking programs. One of them is our e-bike voucher pilot program, that gives vouchers to city residents, four times a year, quarterly basis.
We put out a lottery and say, "Hey, sign up if you want to do this." We got a lot of interest last year. I believe 90 vouchers were actually redeemed, so there are 90 new bikes out on our streets. This year we changed that program just a little bit so that we could sort of tier the vouchers that we're giving out, so that we could target some higher valued vouchers to folks who wouldn't be able to afford a bike on their own.
So the top tier of voucher now allows a low-income resident who can demonstrate that they are participating in low-income assistance programs, that they will be able to cap a $1,500 voucher that will give them a bike at one of our local bike shops.
Can I ask a quick question? Sure. You said 90 of them were redeemed. How many of them were issued? I think it was over 100. So- We're close to 110. So it wasn't 100% redemption rate because people were getting them and then going to the bike shop and saying, "Hmm, I don't really want to buy a $1,500 bike because I only have a $1,000 voucher." Yeah.
So there was some of that. There was also some feedback that we got around bike parking and where am I going to put this thing? There were folks who live in some of our public housing who are saying, "I don't really have a place to lock this up.
I don't really want to store this in my living room. What do I do with this?"So that's a different process that we're working through, is figuring out the parking question. But with this program specifically, we wanted to address that issue of, okay, what happens with the folks who can't afford that full amount?
So that's the big change this year. A vast majority of them were still redeemed. Vast majority, yeah. The other big change with that program this year is we've added on an additional $100 voucher for all of our winners that we're calling our safety voucher that is to be used for helmets or locks.
We wanted to make sure everybody had those tools so that they were storing their vehicles safely and also riding them safe. Along with that, we also have our monthly walk series. This is our official walks that we do in neighborhoods every second Sunday of the month.
We rotate around the city, so we get to check out a different neighborhood every month. It's been a great way to engage with the community, learn what they're seeing, and also get to point out some things that we're working on along the way.
We have a slightly less official weekly bike ride that does a similar thing, not as programmed or as advertised as our neighborhood walk series, but we love having people come out on both and see the city with our eyes.
The last one before I'll jump into the big bold one is our Rose Hill Drive restriping concept plans. This was an opportunity that came up because Rose Hill Drive is going to be repaved in 2027. We saw that as an opportunity to change some of the striping on Rose Hill so that it could serve all of the users who are trying to use that corridor.
Right now, you're looking at a Rose Hill Drive that is very wide and sort of delineated with a series of different lines. It's 35 mile per hour road in front of a county school. So that sort of goes against our issue that we pointed out with our school zone flashers.
We want to slow down traffic on that road, so it's safer for the school uses, for the folks who are using the corridor, biking, walking, and using transit. So we kicked off this project with the neighborhood at the beginning of this month with a walk audit up and down the corridor.
We'll be returning to them in April with some design options. And hopefully meeting council with a preferred alternative that's been vetted and discussed with the community in June. The last big one on the list is what I'm going to spend most of my time talking about this evening.
We are working on scoping out a city-wide mobility plan. So this is the item I'll be coming back to you with later, but we'll talk through sort of what the process looks like for this and what the timeline is.
So Patrick then. So first, why do we need this? Why do we need a city-wide mobility plan? So, our comp plan actually points to this as a strategy for how we are going to achieve our goals. It says, "Secure funding for a transportation master plan" as part of its goal number one for complete streets.
I can say that we have achieved that goal already. Council has already set aside funding for this effort. So we can say we checked a box on that, but there's other items under goal number one that we need to work on to be able to create that connected network for all users.
This is also something that we identified as staff last year. In January of 2025, we rolled out the Safer Street strategy, which was a phased strategy for us to work on the small problems and the big problems all at once.
This was the second phase of our strategy. Our initial phase was focusing on spot improvements and existing work that we already had on the books. Phase two is looking at things like rewriting all of our plans, sort of bigger in scope.
Phase three is implementing those plans. So then this is a step along the way that we've been following for a little over a year now. And part of the reason that we identified this as a need last year was we were trying to turn to our existing plans and figure out what we were supposed to do next and finding a lot of conflicts.
We were finding that they weren't coherent amongst themselves, and so some plans would be emphasizing one mode over another. Some would be saying we need to be considerate of these factors versus those.
And in the end, they all had priority lists that didn't really jive with each other. So we needed to come up with a way to do that. The other thing we needed to do was look at our comp plan and say, "Where did we make progress?
Where do we have updates to these strategies and goals?" Because some of this stuff is five years old. So where do we need to make updates there? And where are the gaps? Where are the things that we need to make progress on?
So our goals for this, it's got to advance that vision of the comprehensive plan, so that we can have multimodal access, equity, sustainability, and healthy communities addressed through this plan. It's got to prioritize actionable strategies that build connection across the transportation modes.
So not just a plan of wish and dreams, but things we can actually go out and do. It will improve system performance through measurable implementation-focused outcomes. So how are we going to measure whether we're actually doing what we're saying correctly?
And in the end, this needs to support the city's mission to be a place where everyone can thrive. Mobility and making sure that you can get both to home and to work and to all of the other things that make life a joy are important to that goal.
So next slide. The key elements of what we're doing as part of this scoping effort. The first one up top is something that we already did back over late fall or early winter, which was look at our comp plan and see where we're at.
It was a pretty high-level overview to sort of understand what goals we've achieved and what things we've made much progress on, and where we need to fill in those gaps. That sort of highlighted we needed to take an even closer look.
Not everything that the city has said about transportation is captured in the comprehensive plan, so we wanted to do a deeper dive to seeAre there goals and strategies that the comprehensive plan isn't even addressing?
That existing conditions assessment is something we're working on right now, and it's not just looking at demographics or what's the current physical infrastructure on the ground. It's also looking at our existing plans and saying, "What has happened out of these?
What data do we still need? What data do we have?" And sort of laying the groundwork for identifying where the missing links are. That will help us start writing out a scoping report, which will summarize sort of key topics and key deliverables that we're looking to achieve with this plan.
Our scoping report will also include an engagement plan, which will align the expectations for how we are going to be talking to people about what this plan is along every step of the way. And as we do this, we're also coming to you and other stakeholders to solicit your feedback on that existing conditions report and on the scoping report.
Patrick, next slide. So, the timeline for this. Right now, we are working through the internal draft of the existing conditions report, and the scoping report. In May, we will have Bike Month, which will be a big ton of events that we'll be talking about.
But we'll also be doing a lot of engagement for the scoping of the mobility plan. On May the 5th, we plan to release the existing conditions report and draft scope report on the Connect Charlottesville project page for the mobility plan.
On May 7th, we'll be presenting those materials to VPAC, and on May 7th, we'll also be opening up a public survey on the Connect Charlottesville page that's related to the key topics within the scoping report, so that we can get a feel for what are the priorities of the community.
We'll be talking to VPAC and getting their feedback on the 7th, but we also want to hear from the broader community. And then on the 26th, I'll be back here to speak with you so that we can also solicit your feedback and make sure that that's incorporated.
We will be going to council on June 1st. I typically go to council in late spring every year to give them an update on what's going on with transportation planning kind of work. This is that opportunity this year, and it's largely going to be focused on the mobility plan and the scope that we're recommending moving forward with.
During June, we'd be finalizing that scope based on feedback that we've received from you, from council, from the public, and then working with our procurement team to get consultant support for that scope sometime this summer.
And next one. Oh, didn't show up. Great. Maybe. So, if you want more information, we'll be posting information on the Connect Charlottesville webpage for the mobility plan. It's connect.charlottesville.gov/cnp.
Not a ton of info up there at the moment, but it will start fleshing out as we get an existing conditions report, a draft scope document, and a survey posted there. I believe that's the end of my slides, so happy to answer any questions.
Is that schedule that you just posted going to be on the Connect Charlottesville site? Is that on there yet? It's a generic schedule at the moment. Yeah. With all of those steps. I think we have it based on month, but we can flesh that out further.
Questions? One, the Rose Hill restriping. I seem to recall, I don't remember, they talked about Rose Hill, some of the upcoming projects, it was like a mini roundabout. I don't remember. Is that including that, that one that says Madison?
So, the mini roundabout is actually partly why we stumbled across the repaving project and saw this opportunity. We were going to our public service team to say, "All right, we're going to go put this on the ground." And they said, "Oh, hold up a minute.
We're going to repave that road soon, so maybe you don't want to do that." Got it. Okay. When we got that feedback, we said, "Oh, now we actually have a little bit more window to go to the community and see if there's a different thing they might want to have here." Mini roundabouts could be an option right now.
So that's back on the table. Okay. Yeah. All right. So that, we will be coming to the community in April. On April 13th, we'll be doing a public engagement event that will show off design options for Rose Hill.
Yeah. It won't be saying, "This is the full corridor," but it'll give you different opportunities at different points. Like an intersection might look like this, or a cross-section of a street might look like this.
Mini roundabouts could be a design option that's on the table, but it's just something we want to solicit- I'm just happy to hear it said yeah realistically, because I couldn't tell if that was something I dreamt or it actually happened.
Thank you, man. Yeah. I'll just share a couple of quick high-level thoughts on the mobility plan. So, I would just encourage you at a high level to use clear language with the community. I think transportation people, and I put myself in this camp, we use a lot of jargon.
We're improvements, level of service, all this stuff, and people want to think, like, "Well, do I have options for getting places? If I want to walk, can I do that, or do I have to drive?" I think one of my favorite transportation thinkers is Jarrett Walker, which I think you probably know well, and I once got to participate in one of his transit network redesigns.
And so much of the process was just focused on, well, we have trade-offs. You can have this, and we can have that, but we can't necessarily have everything. So what do we want to do, and what are your priorities and goals and values?
I just thought that was very clear and valuable. And one example, I've seen a lot of level of stress analyses for bike plans, and I personally really hate them. I think it's simpler to just say, "You know..."Well, are we a NACTO member city, Charlottesville?
Yeah. Okay. So, NACTO has the all ages and all abilities guidance for bike network design, and I've seen some cities where they do plans, it's like, are you really close to an all ages and all abilities facility so that if you're eight or 70, you can be there, near you.
And that's something that I think people can be like, "Yeah." Not like, "Your level of stress is 70." So anyway, I think that's my main thing is, let's be really clear, legible, speak in language that people actually think about and talk about trade-offs and priorities.
So, really excited to see how it goes. Yeah, I appreciate that comment, and I think it's very important to raise that topic of the trade-offs. A lot of what we saw in our plans, and the reason that it was hard for us to make choices with our existing plans, was that they didn't really tell us what to do when we had that trade-off discussion to have.
When we have a plan that says, "Yes, a bike lane should be here. Yes, a sidewalk should be here. Yes, parking should be here. And yes, two travel lanes should be here," and there's only enough room for one lane of parking and one lane of travel, which is a lot of our streets, it doesn't really tell us which one and what mode is most important for them.
So, working through how are we going to make those decisions is really partly what we're trying to solve here. That will be part of our scoping effort is coming up with how do we develop policy that tells us what to do in those situations.
Yeah. And I think getting council to go through a process where they think about the trade-offs and where do they fall, will really help get political buy-in for maybe some challenging corridors and things like that.
Yeah. I got some questions. A couple random ones, and then some about the plan. You mentioned school speed limits, and I think you used the phrase, "When school's in session." Do you mean the entire school day or drop-on and pickup time?
No, it's just drop-off and pickup. Okay. Yeah. That's what I thought. I was hoping it was- Just drop-off and pickup- Okay ... during the time of year when they're in session. Yeah. Next year we'll get it.
Let me see. Oh, I know you weren't covering everything that you do. You mentioned traffic calming. A bunch of it, as you know, went up last year. There's your website, not a website with lists more projects.
And after that initial rush of projects, which was great, I haven't seen much more construction and much more planning there. Is that an active area of work between now and the end of this plan, or is that on hold?
It's an active area of work that we're discussing with public works. What's the next step of what that looks like? Okay. But that'll be continuing before the plan's adopted? Yes. Okay. There's still evaluation on these projects that needs to happen.
There's still consideration of whether there are things that we want to keep on the ground. Some of those were testing kind of things. So, that's still something that public works is diving into. I would encourage you to encourage whoever can do this to keep the websites up to date, with both project status, evaluations.
I was just at FNA a week or two ago, and people have a lot of interest in this topic, and they will email you less if they can read more on websites. Me too. Right. Wonderful. I know it's not your website.
We can share that feedback with other people in the organization as well. I'll ask you later. I don't always know who owns what website, but- So the manager's office is a good place to start. Okay. Yes.
Thank you. Yes. Okay. Some questions about the mobility plan. I appreciate your diagnosis of why the current plans have not led to the progress that we hoped for, because I think uncontroversially, as you've said, the plans are in conflict.
They ask for things that can't all happen at once, and so as a result, not much happens. I think since we adopted any of the plans, take your pick, we have not really built much of the facilities that you're talking about anywhere in the city.
So I think having a plan that allows things to be built will be really important, as you said. I would love to see in your planning process for the plan, having whatever you can written down about implementation, such that implementation and metrics and concrete goals so we can check in after a year or two or three and say, "We aren't meeting our targets, and we couldn't get the right of way, and we're stuck on this, and we're going to adjust." And not just have goals that we can't measure progress towards.
But I would love to see in your implementation chapter, we'll evaluate each year like this, we'll report to council in this way with follow-up metrics, so we can tell how it's going without having to wait for someone to tell us after 10 years, "Oh, it's not working.
Sorry." I think you're the expert, but I would love to see things like goals around actual lane miles of whatever built, about measuring car VMTs, about measuring mode share. If we could say, for example, "Here's our current mode share for different modes.
Here are our goals for 10 years from now." The more those can be in the plan so we can see how we're doing, I think the better it's going to work. I don't think we have much of that right now, but tell me if I'm wrong.
I think we don't have very much of it right now. But I do think that's an area that we have definitely highlighted the need for more of that, so that we can keep track of our progress, which is largely the reason that we stood up the strategic office in the city manager's office.
Right. So I'm sure our new chief strategic officer, Jen Hendrick, is going to make sure that I am including this as part of our planning. But it is part of our goals around this, is to make sure that we have actionableMeasurable things that we can be doing going forward and not just a list of projects that we'd like to be able to do.
Right. And I specifically will, sorry to repeat, I want to know what your reporting will look like every year after it was adopted. Which I think sounds like you're doing, but that'll be great to see.
And then last question about the mobility plan. How much are you all working with sustainability? Because I can't really separate transportation from climate in my mind. They're kind of the same issue.
I think transportation is now, according to Crystal's office, the biggest source of emissions in the city and the only source that is growing. And so I would love to hear how that team and that goal is part of your process.
Yeah. And so they're one of the many people who is going to be engaged pretty heavily in this process. So they're part of our project team for this scoping effort specifically. And I would assume that they're going to be pretty heavily engaged throughout the entire process of planning.
But I mentioned they're just one of many of our partners. We're also partnered with folks not even in the city. Our partners over in Albemarle County, they're actually going through the exact same parallel process as us.
They hired on a new principal transportation planner, and her job is write a countywide mobility plan. So, they are having a series of meetings sort of in parallel with us where they are informing their planning commission, and their board of supervisors, and their local advisory committees, on the exact same process that we're going through in the city.
We're trying to align those to make sure that we're speaking the same language, that we're talking about the same needs, because a lot of people don't know where those boundaries are. So we want to make sure that, if we're talking about improving mode shares for biking and walking, we're accounting for some of that is trips that are coming from Albemarle County that we need to account for too.
Great. Thanks. Yeah. I think along those lines, I would just add, well, and I know you guys already do this, but, sitting on Parks and Rec, the trails are always super popular topic. So making sure that there's any connections or shared funding for that.
And then also just density, neighborhood-wise. I'm thinking the whole South First Street, Friendship Court areas, going to have a lot more population. West Haven. I've been in a lot of meetings in the past where people have a lot of questions about bus stops and where they are, and can they be moved when there's changes happening already in the neighborhood.
And so just making sure that some of those big projects that are happening get aligned with the best possible bus stops for- Right ... people who have trouble getting to bus stops. But... Yeah. On the parks point, luckily, their plan is not that old, so it's not one of these ones that we're dusting off and saying, "Man, this doesn't really match up with anything we're doing." Their plan was adopted last year, and it had a pretty robust trails- Yeah ...
strategy aligned with it. That's definitely something that we want to make sure is aligned with anything that we're planning for the rest of the transportation network because it's part of the transportation network, so yeah.
That will definitely be a part of it. And then yes, bus stop planning, always going to be a part of- Yeah ... our transportation network and always going to be a question that comes up of how can we move those.
Around bus stop planning, it's actually getting harder to move bus stops because a lot of people think of a bus stop just being a sign in the ground, and it's a lot more than that now. We cannot put out a bus stop now.
We can't make a new bus stop or change a bus stop without having a five-by-eight foot concrete pad that we can have someone in a wheelchair roll off of a bus and onto safely. Yeah. Putting out a eight-by-five foot concrete pad sort of makes that permanent.
So when we're talking about moving stops- I guess- ... as soon as the concrete's poured. Yeah. And I was thinking more of these project, big developments that are under construction where there's time to plan for that.
Not necessarily small moves, but when I've been hearing about things, it's usually five or 10 years down the line. Mm-hmm. Like, "Oh, maybe this would be a possible location." But then I don't know what happens to that.
But yeah, when things are already maybe torn up. But yeah. Well, and to the point of the larger developments, our zoning code changes have changed their requirements for what they need to do when they submit site plans.
And part of that change is they have to not just do a traffic impact analysis, but a traffic demand management plan, if they're above a certain size. So your larger public housing developments or any private developments, they're submitting those in- Should be in your purview ...
and saying, "This is where we think people are walking. This is where we think people are biking. This is how we think we're going to draw down the amount of vehicular trips that are going to impact this neighborhood." So we have that opportunity built into code in a way that we didn't prior to the zoning code.
Okay. So that gives us some flexibility before we get the mobility plan passed, but the mobility plan will also provide us with some policies that will inform how we review those TDM plans and direct.
Any questions from this end? Or comments? For your timeline- Yep ... you have through this summer, having contracting with a consultant to put together the plan. Yeah. Do you have any sort of idea of when we might have an adopted plan?
It depends on how fast procurement goes, but then beyond that, I would say it's probably going to be an 18 to 24-month process to get through. So that puts us at summer of '28. Okay. I'm glad we're getting this started now.
Yeah. I figured that could be the answer, but I just wanted to get that out there. Then, I've been looking through the comprehensive plan and trying to understand all of the various appendices that come with the transportation section of the plan, and there are numerous ones.
Wow. And the transportation, I mean, the name of this describing it or at least leaving me, but Master Plan for Transportation, then references like six other plans. Mm-hmm. So is this mobility plan you're discussing intended to replace all of that spiderweb of various plans?
It's- Okay. That would be good, because right now it is, as you probably know very hard to follow, and figure out what's actually happening. So, I think if we could streamline and minimize the number of appendices for the transportation section, would be helpful.
Yeah. It may not cover everything that all of those cover, because some of them were small area plans- Sure ... that we adopted into the transportation master plan section of the comprehensive plan. We're not going back and updating small area plans necessarily as part of this effort, but sort of the bigger, like the Bike Ped Master Plan, the Streets that Work, those kind of larger efforts that were around specifically transportation, that's what this is aimed at simplifying and streamlining.
Okay. I like that a lot. We've talked about it a few times, but the integration of CAT into this plan. CAT is an organization that spans jurisdictional boundaries and has funding from the county. I'm coming from the position of transit is an extension of walkability and bikability of a city.
You can make somebody's, a pedestrian's trip much longer using good transit, even across the city or into the county, if you will. How deeply integrated are we expecting CAT to be into this mobility plan?
So, some of the answers around how we would want the CAT network to be laid out are going to be addressed before we really get into this plan, because we're working on the CARTA prioritization study right now.
So, sort of the regional big lines that you might see heavy investments on for high-frequency service or weekend service or late-night service, a lot of those are going to be laid out on the network already.
And then when we get into the mobility plan, we can talk about where do people within the city specifically need additional access to that network? Where are there places where they have challenges on a local level, not on a regional level, to access to a bus stop at a regional service?
Or where do we need access to a bus that may not be serving a regional purpose, but is just going into a neighborhood and serving, maybe on a lower frequency, but is serving an access need in a neighborhood?
Those are the kinds of questions and policies we can talk about in the mobility plan. But I think a lot of the larger scale, like what does the basic bones of the system look like, you should probably be more interested in the CARTA prioritization study if you're interested in moving places.
Okay, that's good information. It also sounds like the cadence of these studies and plans is working in our favor. Whether that was planned or not, I don't know, but- Sure. We get it. You planned CARTA to pop up?
I like that answer. Okay, good. Yeah, I think this is really a pertinent conversation. There's been a lot of discussion over the many years previous to me being here, and even in the city, about development and housing and that sort of stuff, and we hear a lot of comments about parking issues in neighborhoods.
You've heard that for today, specific to short-term rentals, about how one of the primary nuisances that those bring is parking on the street. And having a good mobility plan and a plan that is actionable that we can work towards can really also help mitigate some of those issues that the development that the city is hoping to have in the near future.
These are really going to work together well, so I'm excited that this mobility plan is coming up now. That's it for me. My only question is, I guess at some point there had been floated the idea of some sort of transportation mobility committee.
Is that something that would be part of this, or is that you guys would stick with just the typical stakeholders and- We're trying to figure out how we will have a stakeholder group that sort of stewards this along, and that might be what we go with.
But we're still sort of fleshing out what that would look like. Got you. Yeah. Okay. So when you see the draft scoping document- Yeah ... it will lay out where we actually ended up on that recommendation.
Okay. Final thoughts anyone? Thank you, guys. Sure. I actually, I did promise I would ask. There was a comment by email about whether we should always allow public comment during work sessions. My response was it needs to be a case by case type situation.
I promised I'd ask. I always like public com-- I mean, it just seems like it's usually helpful for us in here. If, and maybe there's a time limit associated with it. I think that's probably the question.
It's like, okay, we always have up to 15 minutes or up to whatever. That would be the issue, I think. Yeah. I mean, it is, because these are usually constrained. Yeah. The purpose is for us to give feedback and not...