Afton broadband tower location OKed

Towers, presentations and public hearings made up the majority of the business the Board of Supervisors handled at its first meeting of the year last Tuesday.

The board approved the Rockfish Valley Fire Department site as the location for the Afton tower in the county’s broadband project. All of the board members voted in favor of the proposed location except for Tommy Harvey, the new chair of the board, who abstained since he is the Rockfish Valley Fire chief.

Community members expressed their approval of the site and their appreciation of the county for taking into consideration their comments on their objection to the originally proposed site at 10368 Crtizer Road.

Board members and residents said they thought the fire department was a good site because it was less visually obtrusive and the money from having the tower on the property would go to the fire department and thus back into the county.

The board was also presented with an amended tower ordinance. Some of the major changes in the new ordinance are increasing the allowed height of the towers, reducing the distance the tower has to be from a scenic byway and creating a fourth classification for broadband towers.

A Class I tower can now exceed 90 feet and must be more than 500 feet from a scenic byway. A Class II tower is now a tower that is between 90 feet to 130 feet and must be at least 1,000 feet from a scenic byway. A Class III tower is now a tower over 130 feet and must be at least 2,000 feet from a scenic byway.

“We need to redo the ordinance because every time an application comes in we need to make exemptions and I haven’t heard of any being rejected,” Harvey said. “It needs to reflect what we’re doing.”

Board members said they needed more time to look it over and will be voting on it within the coming meetings.

Among the presentations the board received, was an explanation of the reassessment performed in the county.

Sale prices for property and houses continued to fall last year throughout Nelson County, said Mike Hickey of Blue Ridge Mass Appraisal, the company that conducted the county’s reassessment.

The number of sales also decreased from 2010 to 2011. In 2010 there were 496 sales and in 2011 there were 208 sales.

The biggest decline was seen in Wintergreen, which is primarily a secondary home area and one of the first areas affected in a recession. Only 116 sales were made in Wintergreen, 158 less than 2010, said Hickey.

Hickey cited the decrease in land value as a reason for some of the houses’ values to go up. The value is determined on sale prices. If a house is selling for a certain price, but the land value is down, then the value of the house has to increase to make up the difference and reach the sale price.

In other business, the board unanimously voted to discontinue the use of an open-top trash bin at the Gladstone collection site because it was too expensive for the amount of waste it was collecting.

Preceding the motion and vote, Susan McSwain, the director of solid waste and management for the county, gave a presentation informing the board that the Gladstone site was the most expensive of the collection sites in Nelson and was one of the lowest in waste collected. She said two months at Gladstone cost the same as six months at the other sites, except for the Rockfish site where it equaled about three months.

She said very few large items were brought to Gladstone over the two-month experimental period that should have been deposited in the open-top.

Another concern the board expressed was that people were just dumping items in the open-top since it was unattended, including possible waste from outside of Nelson.

Harvey said, “The tonnage for the compact didn’t decrease so what this is telling me is it’s more inviting for other waste.”

There are four staffed sites and two unstaffed sites in the county for garbage and recycling collection. Gladstone is an unstaffed site for only garbage.

Before the experiment at Gladstone, the last time the site had an open-top was in 1998, McSwain said.

In other business, the board passed a resolution recognizing the Nelson County High School one-act play ensemble and awarded the students $2,000 towards their trip to New York City in the spring.

This was the first meeting for Larry Saunders, the new south district representative.