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Nov 27, 2023

Planned 84

Jonathan Spiers August 1, 2023 2 The site at 1468 Pony Farm Road, where a 14-lot industrial park is planned. (Image courtesy Commonwealth Commercial) A pair of sizable industrial projects are up for

Jonathan Spiers August 1, 2023 2

The site at 1468 Pony Farm Road, where a 14-lot industrial park is planned. (Image courtesy Commonwealth Commercial)

A pair of sizable industrial projects are up for deciding votes in Goochland, including a potentially 84-acre business park that would straddle the Hanover County line.

The Goochland Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote today on Crescent Communities’ plan for two new spec buildings near Rockville. It also will consider a rezoning requested for what would be Goochland’s half of a 14-lot industrial park proposed off Pony Farm Road, just north of the Interstate 64 Oilville-Goochland exit.

The Pony Farm park is proposed by an LLC led by Todd Walton and Patrick Dolan, who are also pursuing a similar rezoning in Hanover. The 84-acre site is split between the counties, with about 40 acres in Goochland and 44 in Hanover.

Most of the development would occur on the Goochland side, with nine of the lots planned there and the remaining five on the Hanover side, where 23 acres would be retained as open space. The site is one property over from the existing Oilville Business Park.

The Hanover County Planning Commission deferred a vote on the project at its July 20 meeting. If the Hanover rezoning doesn’t go forward, Walton and Dolan have indicated they would still pursue the project on the Goochland side if it’s financially feasible, according to a Goochland staff report.

Walton, who is making his first foray into real estate development after selling his landscaping business two years ago, said the project has been well-received by both counties’ planning staffs.

Todd Walton

“The two-county (aspect) has been a little bit of a challenge, but both counties have been really easy to work with,” Walton said. “We’ve been trying to talk it through with them. Hopefully it goes our way.”

Walton previously owned Tuckahoe Landscaping and Lawn Care, a Rockville-based business he founded in 1990 and sold in 2021 to Valley Landscaping of Christiansburg. The sale included the company’s warehouse and real estate in Rockville’s Lanier Industrial Park, and Walton said a search for something similar in the county revealed a lack of inventory for office-warehouse and flex space.

“I couldn’t find anything around, so I thought it’d be nice if I could find something to try to build on,” he said. “There just isn’t much space like that around. It’s very diffcult to find a spot where you can have a warehouse and parking lot.”

Walton said he was alerted to the Pony Farm property by Commonwealth Commercial’s Joe Buhrman, who had listed the undeveloped land with an asking price of $895,000. County records show the property is owned by Garland Anderson and assessed at $794,000 between the two portions.

“(Buhrman) actually came to me and asked if I’d be interested in doing something with it, so I said, ‘Sure, I’ll try,’” Walton said. “It’s been over a year that we’ve been working on it.”

A site plan shows the lots would be accessed via a dead-end road off Pony Farm Road. (Goochland County documents)

According to plans submitted to the counties, buildings at the park would be restricted to 35 feet in height and would be enclosed by 50-foot buffers on the west and east sides of the property. A right turn lane would be added along Pony Farm Road, and a 30,000-gallon water tank would be included in the development for firefighting use.

Dolan, a friend of Walton’s who said he has a hand in property acquisition and management, described the park as being designed for light industrial users.

“The high-level look at this project is to try to rezone this property to create a 14-parcel light industrial park that stays within the ruralness of the Oilville-Goochland interchange (area),” Dolan said. “It’s really about just trying to protect the DNA of the county and to fill a need that we know exists as the county continues to sprawl further west.”

Walton and Dolan are working with Richmond civil engineering firm RK&K and with Andy Condlin, a local attorney with Roth Jackson Gibbons Condlin who’s representing them in the rezoning requests.

“We’ve master-planned the whole thing with RK&K with the goal of trying to make this thing a holistic, strong project,” Dolan said, “as opposed to piecemealing it the way that we’ve seen some of the other parks in the area do it.”

According to the Goochland staff report, nine speakers and Chairman Tom Rockecharlie opposed the project when it went before the Goochland Planning Commission. Concerns included impacts on traffic and property values, as well as hours of operation, landscaping design for the buffers, and “a rushed application process,” according to the report.

The report notes that the developer requested deferrals three times “to ensure a vote was taken by the Hanover Planning Commission prior to being heard by the Goochland Board of Supervisors.” The water tank was proffered since the Goochland Planning Commission vote in response to citizen concerns.

If approved, Dolan said they would aim to start development as soon as the rezonings are finalized, with the site completed 12 months after that. He did not disclose a cost estimate for the project.

Also at today’s 2 p.m. meeting, Goochland supervisors are scheduled to vote on the proposal from Crescent’s Axial Industrial division to develop two spec buildings totaling 335,000 square feet of space at 2212 Ashland Road, just east of the Lanier Industrial Park and Rockville Commerce Center.

The Planning Commission voted 3-2 last month in support of the Crescent project, which is near the planned “Project Rocky” fulfillment center site.

Jonathan joined BizSense in early 2015 after a decade of reporting in Wilmington, N.C., and at the Henrico County Leader. The Virginia Tech grad covers government, real estate, advertising/marketing and other news. Reach him at [email protected] or (804) 308-2447.

This is what I was Talking about last week. More of this type of development for smaller users needs to be created to capture the businesses exiting redeveloping areas of the City.

The more space for businesses to affordably relocate and update their facilities to be more efficient, the more properties in those areas will turn over and hopefully allow prices of land and units to come down or stabilize because of increased supply.

And yet you have people complaining about the “traffic impact” of 14 small business’s. The ironic thing is this proposed development is literally 1/4 mile from the interstate and there are zero houses between in and the on/off ramps. Not sure you could pick a place with less traffic impact to develop.