Each year the Blacksburg Rotary Club presents a Citizen of the Year Award to a non-Rotarian who exemplifies the Rotary International motto of Service above Self,” in his or her professional and personal lives and in service to the community. Thursday, the club presented the 2019 award to Tim Colley of Colley Architects in Blacksburg.
As part of the award, the club donates $500 to a charity of the recipient’s choice. Colley selected Habitat for Humanity of the New River Valley, with which he is involved. He also has volunteered with the YMCA at Virginia Tech and the Montgomery County Christmas Store and currently serves on the Blacksburg Planning Commission.
Club president Mike Snyder presented Colley with a book titled Just Because that will be placed in the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library in his honor.
Colley said he volunteered for the planning commission because he felt the board could benefit from a design professional’s input on many of the matters the commission deals with. He was selected three years ago to serve a four-year term, providing the group with a different perspective.
Colley said the biggest challenge right now for the planning commission is the burgeoning number of Virginia Tech students, who thus put pressure on housing needs. “We try to increase the density of the areas where students are already living,” Colley said, “rather than spread student housing into single-family neighborhoods. We don’t have it all figured out yet. It’s a challenge, but we’re trying to do the best we can.”
Another delicate balancing act the commission has to handle, he said, is rezoning request that conflict with Blacksburg’s comprehensive development plan. Approved last summer, that plan looks forward by 7-10 years, providing a framework for how Blacksburg will develop. Colley noted that when the commission is presented with a rezoning application that some residents object to, quite often the reason given for the objection is that it conflict with the comprehensive plan.
Colley has also put in more than 20 years of volunteer service with the architects’ professional organization, The American Institute of Architects.
Club membership director Chadd Yeatts made the presentation, after which Colley made a few brief remarks and then answered questions from the Rotarians. Colley opened his Blacksburg firm in 2007. He is an army veteran who entered Virginia Tech as an undergraduate after serving in the military. He went on to earn a masters degree.
Colley said all of his firm’s production and design work is accomplished with the focus on how it contributes to the community and how any project can be made energy efficient with minimal damage to the environment. His firm employs five people, and he constantly encourages them to get involved in the community. He noted he has had people in his firm who volunteered to coach children’s soccer.
Moreover, Colley said his firm “practices what we preach” in that in 2016, Colley Architects was named Montgomery County’s Green County of the Year. He said his firm’s employees drive electric cars as much as they can.
Colley Architects has been active with higher education with a portfolio of some 230 projects at Virginia Tech alone and other design and development work at Radford University, Georgia Mason University and Virginia Military Institute.
The company has also done quite a bit of restaurant work and some single-family projects, but, Colley said, “not much.”
The company is licensed in Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.