Canova Peterson, AIA, wishes to streamline bureaucracy, which he believes can be burdensome even in bucolic Hanover County. His goal is to parlay his nearly 40 years in Hanover County and nearly 45 years in architecture into a seat on the Hanover County Board of Supervisors.
“Basically,” he said, “in my years of working with community politics and bureaucracy and government, I’ve gotten to know quite a few of the things that shouldn’t be going on. And now I have time to work on this.”
He allowed that there was no one thing that put him in the mood to stir the pot of politics. “There was nothing that happened that made me really ticked off. I think it’s pretty good now, otherwise I wouldn’t live here. Hanover County has done a really good job in a lot of areas, but it needs to be a little more fiscally responsive.”
He said he wanted to see better transparency in budgeting, taxation, and growth. As an architect, he sees activities that shouldn’t occur. “My concern,” he said, “is that too often — not just in Hanover but in a lot of communities — the efforts to have positive approach to growth have people speaking out of both sides of their mouth.”
He believes the county’s administrative staff in charge of growth — the planning and zoning departments — need to understand how to “work with growth properly, without stepping on everyone’s personal property rights as well.“
He referred to some of the county’s growth policies as “meddlesome.” As an architect, he said, he has continually been frustrated by requests for “a finished product before I have it designed.” These requests are at the very early stages of a project when he is seeking to understand the specific boundaries or limits of a piece of property within the zoning and land use restrictions.
Here is where he hopes his architecture background can have the greatest effect. “We are in a situation where we have to look at things with a broad mind and look to the future as well. Hanover has tried several different things to try to keep growth under control.”
For example, he used one of the county’s goals of trying to maintain a rural character. “When you develop six-acre subdivisions in the woods,” he said, “that’s not really rural character.” He recommends working with developers to follow the county’s infrastructure: roads, utilities, and services. “If you don’t, you are automatically pushing growth into other areas. We have to accommodate growth. It is HOW we accommodate it that determines whether it is realistic.”
Streamlining the bureaucracy would be a good start, he said. “All the things that attract people to cities we can’t do because the zoning doesn’t allow it. We have zoned richness out of development. We have to start looking at our regulations, remove the ‘nannying’ pieces, and get back to reasonable land-use regulations.”
Peterson believes Hanover can play a key role in central Virginia’s future. It has the most room to grow of the four major localities with a mere 211 people per square mile, which is slightly more than the state’s average of 202 people per square mile. While Hanover and Chesterfield County are fairly close in size, Chesterfield’s population density more than triples that of Hanover.
Hanover has “great tourism opportunities,” Peterson said. “It has great access to anywhere on the east coast. It is a fantastic place to attract business and in a strong position to be a good generator for economic development.”
And he believes his education in architecture and planning added to his decades of experience in and around Hanover will be a benefit to the county. “I believe architects have an innate feeling for service. If they don’t have that they are not going to make it [as an architect]. You are not going to get rich at it. Architects are particularly well trained in pulling varying things together into a more cohesive whole.”
Peterson is campaigning for a seat on the Hanover County Board of Supervisors representing the Mechanicsville district. The election will be in November.