Scott’s Ivy Exxon has been the site of a gas station in one form or another for over 50 years, and owner Scott Ramm’s dream of expanding the service and repair side of his business has taken more than a dozen of those years to come to fruition. Ramm moved his service station from Barracks Road in Charlottesville to the Ivy Depot stretch of Ivy Road (Rt. 250) in 2012 and began planning the expansion, embarking on the long process of acquiring county and state approvals in 2017. Now, finally, it looks like the path is clear to begin construction.
“The contractor is trying to get things scheduled, which means he could call me any day and say we’re ready to go,” said Ramm. “The questions now revolve around logistics and bringing in more power and the order of building things both inside and outside [the current station]. I do think we’ll be able to stay open during construction.”
The station currently has three bays for auto service work, and the expansion project will build out the rear of the main structure to add five more in a roughly 32,000 square foot addition. The plans also call for renovating the existing bays and front office, installing a canopy out front that extends to the side bathroom entrance, paving the entire front and back parking areas, and installing landscaping across the Ivy Road frontage.
“[The business] will be bigger, more productive, and nicer to look at,” said Ramm. Under the current layout, technicians who need to wait for a part to be delivered often have to rebuild a vehicle to move it out of the way, which wastes time. “In the new design, each technician can work in two bays, and they’ll end up having to do less work because they won’t have to put cars back together and move them back and forth.”
Though Ramm’s property was already zoned for commercial use, the expansion required a Special Use Permit from the county, as there was no original site plan for the existing building and the station operates with a well water system instead of county water service. Those issues and others had to be addressed to bring the business into compliance with (or establish exemptions from) current regulations.
“The hoops that you have to jump through are significant,” said Ramm. “It seems like every time you get something done, there’s something else to do that they didn’t tell you when you started the process, but that you could have been working on while you waited for other things to happen.” Ramm’s Special Use Permit was granted by the Board of Supervisors in 2020, but the subsequent processes—to gain approval for site plan designs, Virginia Department of Transportation restrictions, Health Department compliance and more—took years.
“We’ve had state delays, architectural delays, contractor delays, my own delays,” said Ramm. “Everything takes time. For instance, once we got our permit, we hired a site engineer and got permission for our [architectural] plan. But then [the county] said you need engineering drawings, and to get those you need somebody to give you a proposal to do the work. It takes two to six weeks to get the proposal and another couple of months to get the drawings, and everything is that way.”
The process is arduous for a business owner trying to navigate the myriad rules of construction. “The problem is that the information you need is so siloed at the county,” said Ramm. “Nobody can tell you everything that needs to be done ahead of time. An example is that the county doesn’t inspect construction on commercial buildings, so it’s up to the contractor to hire an engineer certified to perform an inspection. But in Albemarle County that has to be arranged before they’ll release the building permit, which, if they told you that from the start, you could be prepared for.”
The first order of business for the project will be to change the location of the septic system drain field, which is currently where the new section of building is going. Ramm says he plans to hire a new skilled technician for the expansion, and he already has a couple of technicians working in an apprentice program who will move into their own bays when they open.
The recent addition of a new commercial building near the railroad crossing just up the road from Ramm’s station—hosting Wag Veterinary and other services—should bring additional customers to the area, said Ramm. “We really miss having a store,” he said of the former Toddsbury of Ivy quick shop across the street. “Everybody in the neighborhood would love to have a store.”
