Connecting you to what’s happening around town

Our Town

*A CROZET UNITED EXCLUSIVE REPORT*

Albemarle County’s Project Heron - Part 2

The response to last week’s exclusive report was exceptionally positive with great engagement. Thank you for sharing the story with your neighbors. We also received many good follow up questions, so in the upcoming issues we will answer some of the most common ones and provide you with additional context.

You asked:  “What is this story really all about? Isn’t news that we are making progress toward building the Eastern Avenue Connector a good thing?” 

Our response: Yes, Riverbend should be commended if they can build the long planned Eastern Avenue Connector at the best value. The problem is that the County hasn’t shared, and is unlikely to know, whether that’s the case.

Instead, it has made the business case for building the bridge more difficult for the public to understand by unnecessarily combining it with another complex issue: Riverbend’s rezoning application for its Oak Bluff development.

The sequencing of these two distinct parts of Project Heron is also a problem. Rather than insist that the Eastern Avenue Connector bridge be built before Riverbend’s rezoning application is approved, the County is planning for them to happen in reverse order. 

There are other details of Project Heron that rightfully raise concern. Shown below are additional facts that we think Crozet citizens need to know and the questions we think they need to be asking.

1. Crozet citizens have not had the opportunity to review the bridge design.  We simply don’t know what it will look like and whether it will have bike lanes or sidewalks. We don’t know how long it will be or whether it will be tall enough to provide a corridor for pedestrians and wildlife to pass underneath it. We don’t know the environmental impact of the bridge on Lickinghole Creek or the surrounding sensitive wetlands and flood plain.

Given that this infrastructure project is one of the most important ones to Crozet, why isn’t the County working closely with the citizens on it? 

What is motivating the County to keep this project out of the public eye?

2. The County has not asked for competitive bids to build the bridge.  As a result, no one knows if Riverbend’s $17M bridge proposal represents the best value for Albemarle taxpayers.  We also can’t assess the actual value of a developer’s proffer without having an apples-to-apples comparison of the County’s alternatives.

If the County believes that Riverbend’s proposal is the strongest, what do they have to lose by going to the market for other offers? 

3. Albemarle County is planning to approve Riverbend’s high-density Oak Bluff development before it has even finalized the bridge design.  In October 2023, Riverbend and the County agreed to a project schedule which included a June 2024 target date for “Approval of the Oak Bluff Rezoning plan”. [It is worth noting that at the time, Riverbend hadn’t even resubmitted its rezoning application for the Oak Bluff development to the County.] 

Albemarle County’s ordinance requires that the Board of Supervisors hold a public hearing prior to approving a rezoning application so that the citizens they represent have a chance to review the plan and provide feedback. 

What is the point of a public hearing if the outcome is evidently pre-determined?  

4. FEMA and VDOT haven’t even reviewed Riverbend’s bridge design, much less granted them the permits and approvals necessary to build it. As previously mentioned, the parties were planning to finalize their Road Plans and submit them to FEMA and VDOT in November 2024, five months after the County approved Riverbend’s Oak Bluff rezoning plan.  

What happens if FEMA and VDOT don’t approve of the Riverbend’s bridge design? What guarantees has the County secured from Riverbend? 

Our source for the information above is an email that we received through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, an excerpt of which is shown below.

We will continue to report on Project Heron as developments unfold. We are also awaiting answers to a separate list of questions that we sent to Albemarle County’s communications and public engagement department.

We welcome an opportunity to collaborate on this story with a legitimate member of the media willing to follow the facts to wherever they lead. We can be reached by email at [email protected].