In early March of 2008, the Christiansburg Town Council tasked its Planning Commission (PC) with looking into historic districts. Unfortunately, this has never once come up on council's agenda since then, and they didn't indicate when they wanted to hear back from this appointed body on the matter.
Veto by inaction? Or a consensus that this isn't wanted or needed, based upon what hard data? How many other conditional use permits or rezoning applications will come to council before they revisit this topic?
This half-arsed response was relative to encroachments in the three existing historic districts and as regards historic district overlays, where contributing structures outside of established districts could be recognized.
In the 15 months since then, the PC has included this topic on its agenda several times but has little to show for it. This included a presentation by a state agency explaining the tax incentives and resources available for protecting these assets and numerous ready-to-go programs that could be adopted. This included a presentation on options available to the town, conducted by students at Virginia Tech. The professor is heard on a video tape of this meeting sounding fairly stunned that the town's planning processes do not include executive summaries of the agenda items prepared by staff, much less any background reports or information.
The Planning Director and Town Manager have repeatedly stated these historic districts are represented on the town's zoning map. Take a look at this map, and see if you can locate these districts (much less any historically significant structures). You may presume the use of the "zoom" keys or slowness for this document to load from the town's own website are meant to discourage your being familiar with this information.
This response demonstrates, again, how outdated the town's charter, code and comprehensive plans are. Those documents may be required by the state, meant to be the guiding legal foundation for governing this progressive town -- but that appears to be far from how council uses them.