Supes To Talk About New Town Parking, Redistricting, Cable Agreement And More

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

James City County Supervisors will be discussing a variety of important topics Tuesday, including New Town parking issues, upcoming redistricting procedures, the county’s cable communication franchise agreement, and the zoning ordinance update.

At the end of January, construction began to expand a building for a new gym in New Town, which effectively cut off an entire block of parking spaces around the construction zone and upset a neighboring business owner. At their late February meeting, two supervisors said they’re concerned with the way the situation has unfolded and with the parking situation in general in New Town, and they requested a work session to discuss the issue.

That will happen at Tuesday afternoon's work session. In a memo about parking, staff doesn’t mention the issue of the gym and related reduction in parking spaces, but does address other challenges to the shared parking design used in New Town.

Many citizens, offices and businesses have requested dedicated parking spaces, which would remove parking spaces from the overall supply, according to the memo. Other challenges include making sure employees park in appropriate locations and tackling customer and business attitudes regarding parking in the area (as people sometimes don’t want to park in one location and have to walk to multiple businesses).

New Town has been considering adding some time-limited parking spaces to encourage sharing and discourage staff from parking in nearby spots.

Planning staff along with representatives from New Town Associates (the organization in charge of parking spaces and public areas in the development), the New Town Design Review Board and the Planning Commission will be on hand to answer questions.

Redistricting

Supervisors will also be deciding on their plan for how to tackle the upcoming redistricting in the county triggered by the 2010 census. The county needs to have districts with roughly the same number of people in each. The board is under a tight deadline, as they need to have the process complete by mid May.

The board will need to decide at their Tuesday evening meeting if they’d like to designate a citizen redistricting committee to guide the process as they’ve done in the past, or whether they’d prefer to take on the project themselves.

If the county appoints a committee, they’ll need to choose members by Wednesday. The committee would have until approximately April 5 to use county software to redraw district boundaries and report back to the board for input, with a public hearing and vote expected around April 26.

Cable Franchise Agreement

County staff, with input from the Cable Communications Committee, has been working diligently on renegotiating the contract for cable service with Cox Communications. The agreement only relates to cable service, not to telephone or internet services, and the county has no ability to regulate rates or programming. The county has limited ability to negotiate about some items such as technical standards; public access, education and government channel capital fees; connection to public facilities and customer service.

Public, educational and government (PEG) access channels will still be available to the public. However, (if supervisors approve it) there will now be a county PEG fee of 25 cents per subscriber per month to support expenses. The fee will generate $66,000 each year for equipment and upgrades needed to televise meetings. These fees are lower than others in nearby localities.

Cox has agreed to a few added benefits and other changes, including a Broadband Adoption Program, which provides internet service and computers to low-income middle school students for $15.

Zoning Ordinance Update

At their work session in the afternoon, the board will hear another progress report on the zoning ordinance update process and will have a chance to give additional feedback to staff. The Planning Commission’s Policy Committee offered their thoughts on some of the key issues already.

After this work session, staff will work on drafting ordinances based on the input they've received, and the ordinances will be reviewed by the Policy Committee and the Planning Commission before coming before the board.

Staff memos and Policy Committee minutes relating to the ordinance update process can be found as attachments to the work session agenda on the county website.

The board will meet at 4 p.m. for their work session in the board room of Building F at the county government complex on Mounts Bay Road. They’ll have their regular meeting at 7 p.m. in the same building. Look on the county website for links to the meeting agendas.