With another conditional use permit coming before the city to allow Washington and Lee University to utilize space in Lexington’s downtown – the third in less than a year – City Council is beginning the process of further defining the city’s relationship with the university in regards to the university’s use of off-campus space, often referred to as a ‘town and gown’ relationship.
City Council member John Driscoll advocated for those discussions during Council’s consideration of the most recent conditional use permit, this one for portions of the Grand’s building on the corner of Washington and Main streets. The problem, he said, is that the applications have been considered individually and not “in terms of their cumulative impact” on the city.
“We’re trying to sort these things out CUP by CUP by CUP,” he said. “We have a bigger issue of town-gown relationships, and I have been advocating since the beginning of the review of the W&L master plan [that] there are good practices in there available on how the university and the city get together and sort out these some of these issues and develop a memorandum of understanding to guide it. And it’s not just what happens in the downtown. I think we’re passionate about the downtown because it’s the only one we have and it’s not that big.”
He also pointed out that the university has not been a party in the discussions over these conditional use permits and any answers to Council’s questions comes through John Adamson, who owns the buildings and is the applicant for the permits.
Driscoll advocated for engaging the university in a conversation about its expansion into downtown and possibly draft a memorandum of understanding on the issue. He further advocated for looking at other localities that have universities that have already addressed this issue and seeing how they went about it.
“In our discussions, we’re very localized and not looking at other places and seeing how they sorted this out,” he said. He noted that the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy had released a policy focus report on town-gown relationships in 2009, which offered guidance to localities on drafting policies on the issue.
City Council is not alone in wanting to address the issue. At its regular meeting on March 13, the Lexington Planning Commission had a discussion about town-gown relationships at the request of Mary Stuart Harlow, who voted against the permit applications for both the Rockbridge Building and the Grand’s building.
She requested that city staff look into if there were any mechanisms available to limit further institutional creep into downtown. Several members of the Commission expressed skepticism about whether this was a problem that warranted investigation.
Jon Eastwood, who chaired the meeting, summarized the discussion by saying, “Our decision to have that conversation is nothing like consensus on the part of this group that there is a problem, but it does reflect that there is consensus on the part of this group that we hear that it is a matter of public concern and that we are attentive to that.”
The Commission agreed to ask staff to investigate in a way that didn’t take too much staff time, requesting that city planner Arne Glaeser provide them with policies by other localities in Virginia that have addressed the issue for members to review.
At last week’s City Council meeting, Mayor Frank Friedman requested that Planning Commission hold off on that process until directed by City Council, saying that he felt it was “up to City Council to drive this.”
“John’s intent is to look more globally at town and gown [relations], not just at zoning,” he said. “That would be a component of it, but the MOU is more comprehensive … I’m not sure of the direction or how it would unfold.”
