JAMES CITY — The future of one of the last remaining undeveloped stretches of Monticello Avenue between News Road and New Town Avenue will soon be in the hands of the Board of Supervisors.
Texas-based Verdad Real Estate Development Inc. hopes to transform three connected, wooded parcels across Monticello Avenue from Windsormeade Way into retail and office space in James City County. The developer has submitted an application for a rezoning and special use permit that would allow construction of a project called Monticello Avenue Shops.
The James City County Planning Commission held a public hearing about the proposed development last week and voted 6-0 to recommend approval. The Board of Supervisors will have the final say and is scheduled to take up the matter Sept. 10.
Tim Trant, an attorney with Kaufman & Canoles who represented the developer at the Aug. 7 hearing, presented a site plan showing three standalone structures, each 4,000 square feet, that would occupy the 2.75 acres.
“The vision for the tenants, and what these conditions are modeled on, are professional office space and general retail,” Trant said.
The developer has proffered restrictions on the types of businesses that will occupy the proposed new buildings, prohibiting such uses as convenience stores with fuel sales, grocery stores and fast food restaurants with drive-thrus.
Also included in the developer’s proffers is a limit on the number of vehicles trips during the evening peak hours to no more than 72.
At the planning commission meeting, member Frank Polster raised the issue of increased traffic generated by new businesses. A traffic impact analysis commissioned by the developer indicated that the proposed new businesses would generate 48 vehicle trips during peak morning hours and 72 during the evening peak.
Polster’s concern was that adding to the volume of traffic would only worsen conditions along a corridor that already exceeds county targets.
The developer proposes accessing the new site with what Trant described as a “right turn in, right turn out” design. Vehicular traffic would drive into the retail center only from Monticello Avenue’s eastbound lanes, and traffic patterns would discourage exiting through the adjacent Marketplace Shoppes. There would not be a new turn lane created from Monticello Avenue’s westbound lanes.
The site plan also includes a wooded buffer between the new buildings and homes to the south and east. At the planning commission meeting, Indigo Dam Road resident Miriam Zumbrun said she was worried about added noise and traffic and the loss of the natural setting offered by the parcels in question.
County ordinance would require a sidewalk to be constructed to the south side of the proposed wooded buffer, a component of the plan that neighbor Leonard Sazaki said doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. He recommended removing that sidewalk from the master plan.
The property owners last attempted to sell their parcels about five years ago, but the developer withdrew its application for rezoning in January 2020 after opposition emerged among concerned citizens. The planning commission recommended denial of the application at the time.
Property owner Cheryl Sutherland, a Danville resident whose family still resides in the Williamsburg area, said the family has tried to sell the property no less than five times, but the deal has always fallen through because buyers perceived “that JCC was extremely difficult to work with,” she said.
Sutherland said she felt validated after the Aug. 7 planning commission meeting, at which members acknowledged how difficult county policymakers had made it for her family to sell her property.
Planning commission member Jack Haldeman was on the commission the last time the development of this property came before county officials. He said that a few things have changed this time around, including that the traffic concessions and buffering seem to make this iteration more palatable.
The 72 peak hour trips this development will generate are next-to-nothing given the high amount of residential traffic that’s already present or coming soon in that area of the county thanks to poor land use decisions in the past, according to Haldeman.
Larry Cooke, a longtime local real estate agent who owns one of the three parcels, said that in the nearly 40 years he’s had the property, there have been three different visions for the land by local officials in the county’s comprehensive plan.
But as the Monticello Avenue corridor has grown, Cooke said, there’s only one use that’s clearly suitable.
“There’s no good planning decision that would have that property be anything other than commercial,” he said. “It just makes sense.”
Ben Swenson, ben.swenson05@gmail.com
