Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 18, 1995 TAG: 9505180015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
In the Toms Creek basin, the last vast swath of essentially undeveloped land in Blacksburg, that's what the question comes down to. The dozens of people who attended a Monday night meeting focusing on the community's desires were presented with a basic dilemma:
If one assumes that development of some sort is inevitable, are the area's residents prepared for it to proceed in a cookie-cutter style - as current zoning would allow - in which tracts of land are broken up into uniform, one-house-per-acre lots? Or should developers have a chance to cluster homes in small, high-density neighborhoods that allow a large part of the property to remain as open space for use by everyone in the communities?
The town's planning and engineering staff and members of a committee rewriting the town's zoning ordinances held the meeting after 70 people turned out for a similar meeting three weeks ago - producing too many opinions, ideas and suggestions to take down at once.
The land in the basin, which is about one-third of the town's total size, is zoned largely for agricultural and limited residential use. The committee is considering breaking it up into three "conservation districts," each of which would possess its own requirements for open space and the nature of potential development.
This week's meeting, like the first one, revealed the deep-felt interest much of the residents hold in how their land and that of their neighbors is developed.
Many residents would prefer that the 6.2 square miles stay the way it is: with acres of rolling farmland, woods and streams. "That's not an option," said senior planner Carol Bousquet.
After the meeting three weeks ago, the planning and engineering staff compiled a list of comments about which residents felt strongly.
Saving the rural character topped the list. Other important issues involved retaining open space, keeping the woods and keeping out development, and improving Shadow Lake and Meadowbrook roads but without development.
No one wanted to allow four units of housing to be built upon each acre, although the flip side of that, one unit per 5 acres, met more disagreement than support. No one asked to bring in development, and twice as many people disagreed with retaining 1-acre-lot zoning as those who agreed.
Participants also expressed interest, if not full-fledged support or disapproval, in clustering. Plenty of residents said they realized development in some form would occur and suggested flexibility in dealing with developers' proposals.
Mo Quinones suggested that new zoning should require 50 percent of a plot of land to remain as open space, and for overall densities to be limited to one unit per 4 acres. But, he said, ordinances might be written so that for every extra 10 percent of land a developer leaves as open space, the developer could increase the density of the housing section by 10 percent.
"That will give him an incentive" to preserve as much open space as possible, said Quinones, who lives next to a piece of property that is being proposed for a development - called Spring Valley - that would use the high-density clustering approach but preserve almost half the land as greenway and open space. That development would have an average density of 2.4 units per acre.
The sentiments of those rewriting the zoning ordinances were summed up in a short video program called "Conserving Rural Character," produced by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
In it, narrator Randall Arendt showed picture after picture of developments that had proceeded in the traditional cookie-cutter style. "There are smarter ways to grow than to spread the homes out in this mindless fashion," Arendt said. "It is clearly the worst way to develop a piece of land."
But if the main question is deciding between two versions of potential development, the main argument may - as one woman surmised - be between two different types of property owners: "People who want to stay in the Toms Creek area and those who want to sell."
The New River Valley Environmental Coalition will sponsor a discussion of the proposed zoning ordinances for the basin Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Virginia Tech Museum of Natural History on Main Street. Councilman Michael Chandler will be on hand.
by CNB