Board of Supervisors Regular Second Meeting   11/15/2023

Good afternoon everyone.

As always, it is my pleasure to call to order the Board of Supervisors for Albemarle County today for our November the 15th 1 o'clock p.m.

meeting here at Lane Auditorium.

The supervisors who are present today are Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio District, Supervisor Jim Andrews of the Samuel Miller District, and myself, Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District.

A quorum is present.

I'd also like to mention that on the dais we have today our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, Mr. Steve Rosenberg, and also the Clerk for the Board of Supervisors, Ms.

Claudette Borgerson.

Let me also thank our Albemarle County Police Officers who are present, Officer Andrew Muncy and Master Police Officer Paul Quillian.

We thank you for being here.

I would now ask if you can rise as you are able and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance.

We'll move to item number three and ask that you join us in a moment of silence.

Board, it's time to move to the adoption of the final agenda.

I do need to note that I will be pulling item number 8.3 from the consent agenda.

Does any other supervisor have any amendments to make to the consent or full agenda?

So we have a motion from Supervisor Mallek and a second from Supervisor McKeel.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek?

It's now time for item number five, brief announcements by board members.

Our order today will be first.

Thank you.

While many of you were at VACO, Supervisor McKeel and I had the pleasure of an update on the Southwood project and a meeting with the representatives of the Monacan Nation, Chief Diane Shields.

I got another tour of Southwood, including a look at the back of LH2 where there's going to be a Monacan Indian Nation tribute park.

and it's really nice because it's a little bit of a rise overlooking a stream where they would hunt and so this is the hunting grounds.

It's something that will be designed by the residents as that village too progresses.

You also may recall the previous meeting we had a proclamation on the consent agenda regarding the celebration of National Native American Heritage Month because there was no one here at that time to receive it.

We actually did a more formal presentation at the meeting yesterday, read the proclamation, handed it over to the chief and the tribal representatives and it was a great event.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I would like to make a couple comments about attending VACO just to share a couple of different thoughts.

I won't go real in depth, but the three sessions that I attended, the first was called Behavioral Health Strategies and Solutions for Crisis Care and Criminal Justice Diversion.

The chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Jeffrey McKay, and then the assistant director for Clinical and Prevention Services in Chesterfield County, Doug

Bilski were the presenters of that and the program that's going on in Fairfax and then similar programs that are happening in Chesterfield are right along the lines of what we're doing in terms of crisis intervention strategies and what it is doing is alleviating pressure off of calls to the police department and just having police as we know deal with mental health crisis issues or behavioral health crisis issues.

but also relieving or taking the stress off and the cost off any sort of local jailing that's going on.

And Fairfax is finding that this strategy and this program

is doing just that.

They've had it in place for some time where folks who find themselves in crisis are being, through the intercept model that they use, getting into the place where they're receiving the right treatment and service versus just being dumped into an incarceration situation.

So it was encouraging to see that that was in place and they were seeing some of the economic benefits of it in addition to the just right thing to do elements of it.

One of the quotes I took away from, though, is that Chair McKay mentioned that this is not just a program, it's an ecosystem.

So thinking of crisis intervention as an ecosystem and not some program you put in place for folks, I think is critical because then it shows you the whole strategy

the way the thread weaves between the county executive's team, your department of social services, your not just your police department, but then also your emergency medical response team, ambulance folks, caregivers like that.

In addition to schools, your finance team, all of it is put into place, your criminal justice system.

Yes, just wanted to make note that many of us were at the Veterans Day program that was here in the auditorium.

I know Bea was at another celebration representing us and you'll talk about that I'm sure.

But we were here for the Veterans Day program and that is sponsored by the Charlottesville and Albemarle American Legion Post 74.

It was a great event and a good crowd and I just think we've had this before.

I'm not sure how many years, but it really has become something that I look forward to every year to celebrate our veterans.

And I agree with Jim, the program yesterday for the Monacan Indian Nation was just wonderful, the Southwood Celebration in the park.

And one of the nice things, Jim, that when we were able to sit down and talk after the tour was to determine next steps for the park.

And I do want to thank Jesse.

I don't know if Jesse Brookings is here today, but Jesse did just a great job for us yesterday with that event, as well as many of our other team members.

And so their plans right now in the works were some Zoom meetings.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just a quick, lost my page, just one second, thank you.

The breakout sessions at VACO were particularly spectacular and I'll just make a super quick report on the three which I attended and then there will be posted in the next little bit recordings of each one so people will be able to go online and listen

and I will try to unscramble my notes so that people may have those because writing in one's lap is always hard.

But the first was Penny Gross Hosted and David Bulova who's a delegate from Northern Virginia Fairfax and also had worked for us as a consultant for years on the stormwater issues.

they gave a presentation on what's to come they expect in the legislature and there were so many questions from this packed room of people all about different elements of the environment so that was fascinating.

The second one local government case law update and that was Andy McRoberts and

I don't remember exactly where he's from now, I'm sorry to say.

But he gave an update of probably a dozen cases and where they were in the appellate system.

And Almon counties came out on the good side.

Many of the other counties were overturned.

And he talked a lot about all the details of how that was happening and what the court was using to try to figure these things out.

The third one was brief regional transportation authorities and initiatives.

and that was Bill McCartney, William McCartney was the one who got that together and it included Vivian Watts who's the delegate from District 39, Kevin Page from Hampton Roads Transportation Accountability and Chet Parsons who's a consultant I think or with state government because that part didn't copy.

But it was really exciting to learn from what these bigger agencies have already accomplished and also

ways that we can in our size be able to use their experience to help and they volunteered to take it on the road and go around the commonwealth so we all handed, Christine and I both handed in our cards to say we want to be first on the list so hopefully we will get our PDC to help us get that organized because it was really wonderful.

Alright, thank you.

Yes, thank you very much and I certainly enjoyed the VACO conference and what we did as supervisors, we each went to a different session so we could report back and a lot of our information I think will probably be online.

I know I'm sending two PowerPoints to Claudette so she can share with everybody else and also with the public.

The two of which I attended that I really enjoyed, I did attend a third one and anyway that wasn't

It's good.

The state budget outlook preparing for the biennium, preparing for the next biennium.

Good news is it looks like the state is in good hands.

Now do we, good hands when I say that revenue wise, we're not exactly where we were before with the pandemic monies, but we are doing, we are in a good position.

The outlook is better than they thought it would be.

So that PowerPoint will cover those issues.

The second one I attended was the Virginia Energy Landscapes.

This one was truly worrisome because if your comp plan designates office, retail, or office space, data centers can come in there with as little as five to ten acres.

So that's very worrisome, which means that we, I think we'll be discussing this hopefully with the supervisors, is instead of having

a complaint every five years.

They talked about having a rolling complaint so that we can actually keep up with things that are coming up that we don't even know about that will happen.

But the fact that data centers can come in by right is very worrisome because they use a lot of energy, they use a lot of water.

They are working on that, but nevertheless it's a great big concrete building.

So those are things that we do need to watch out for and that also I'll supply the link for that to everybody and to the rest of my colleagues and also to the public.

I did not attend the Veterans Day event because I was at another event at the exact same time, same date.

It was the Rosenwald school.

They opened up the community center for the Rosenwald school.

It was something I was so proud to be there to represent the board.

And if you give me a little bit of time, I'd like to just read a little bit so you can appreciate this historic event and where we've come.

The Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative was a program explicitly designed to narrow racial schooling gaps for African-American children across the segregated South.

The initiative was the result of a collaboration between Booker T. Washington, the president of the Tuskegee Initiative in Alabama, and Chicago businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears and Roebuck Company.

The two men developed a matching grant program between 1912 and 1937, starting with the construction of six schools in Alabama and sparked an initiative which facilitated the construction of more than 5,300 schools, vocational shops, and teachers' homes across 15 states in the South and Southwest.

The buildings were constructed based on modern designs

that ensured adequate lighting, ventilation, and sanitation.

They had no lights.

They required the lighting from the outside.

Classrooms were required to be fully equipped with books, chairs, desks, blackboards, and other materials to ensure an adequate learning environment.

The effort has been called the most important initiative to advance black education in the early 20th century.

Alright, thank you.

I'd like to start off with this just last couple of days and we've got some photos I'd like to put up and there were four supervisors present at the VACO conference and we were fortunate because VACO only really provides room for three but with Supervisor Mallek having been one of the officers

That gave us our fourth seat there and what you see is Supervisor Mallek assuming the presidency of VACO, the Virginia Association of Counties, representing 95 counties throughout the state and we've got several photos if you don't mind just kind of scrolling through those and what I really want to do is talk about what this means for Albemarle County as well as honor and recognize Supervisor Mallek for what she has accomplished.

In the last 16 years, as she gets ready to start her 17th year on the board, she served on approximately 30 different committees and positions of leadership in county, region, state, and national organizations.

Everything from Albemarle County to the National Association of Counties

the Environmental Protection Agency, and in VACO.

And I'm not going to list all of them, but on VACO alone, she served on the Energy Committee, Environmental and Agricultural Committee, Former Chair, Board of Directors for District 5 for four years, Executive Committee, three years, President-Elect, and now President of VACO.

What I'm going to offer, what I'm going to give to the clerk is a list of the different positions she's had over the years, as well as her remarks upon accepting the position of President at VACO so that they can be kept in the record, because historians will want to know about what our supervisors have done.

And it's significant.

If we want to be leaders, we need to be leaders not only locally,

and regionally, but we need to be leaders throughout the state and the broader region, not just Virginia.

So Supervisor Mallek, I want to commend you.

Yes, let's commend.

It's a testament to her and we can just kind of glow in the shadow of what she has accomplished.

So I will give this to the clerk.

One other thing, Board, my apologies, I did fail to mention that I've looked to move the recess from, I think it was like 2.15 until 3.45, that was kind of early, so I'd like consensus from the Board to move our first recess to, I think it's 3.45 now, yeah, 3.45 rather than 2 o'clock.

appears to be consensus on that.

Is that satisfactory?

Thank you, Mr. Rosenberg.

So also at VACO, in addition to just being appreciative of what Supervisor Mallek has achieved, both for herself and for the county,

What worked out great with there being four of us is that there were three different time period sessions, a total of 12 sessions, and as Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley I believe mentioned, each of us was able to go to a different session.

And I also want to just on a light note comment about how well the four of us worked together to ensure that each supervisor had the opportunity to go to the sessions that meant most to them.

It's that collaborative work that we do together as a board that is indicative and representative of how we handle everything.

I attended federal funding for broadband infrastructure.

I won't cover a whole lot here because I was bothering staff during the meeting by sending a number of emails to them about we need to do this and we need to do that.

I went to key issues and opportunities in the election administration and did you know that early voting for the Virginia presidential primary will start on January 22nd?

Did you know?

That is literally right around the corner.

So yeah, it is sort of scary how quickly that's coming upon us.

So you need to start paying attention to what's going on around the nation.

And who are you going to call?

Issues and perspectives in public safety.

Here's an interesting statistic for you.

In 2012, there were 120,000 volunteers in Fire and Rescue in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

2012, 120,000.

In 2021, there were 20,000.

That's right.

We went from 120,000 to 20,000 across the Commonwealth.

So what we have been facing locally is no different than what anyone else is facing in terms of the challenges of volunteerism.

Similarly, back in the day, a fire truck might cost 300,000, which sounds like a lot to me.

today they're running closer to three quarters of a million to a million dollars so everything has become more expensive.

Mr. Richardson I want to thank you as well as our board for the work that has been done to create our public safety compensation scale which has allowed us to close the gap and I think what this last class we had over a hundred qualified volunteers

for a Fire and Rescue class.

So the work you've done for workforce stability is truly amazing.

Additionally, a few other things just to mention.

I want to just express appreciation to Peter Thompson, who's getting ready to retire.

from the center.

As you know the center is one of the three major capital improvement projects that the county has helped fund and I've been fortunate to attend a number of events there and that's money well spent not just for our seniors but for our entire community.

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of

of accompanying our county executive, Mr. Richardson, to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he presented not only to the MPA, the Masters in Public Administration class, but also to the ICMA fellows.

And it was a thrill, unlike any I've ever seen, to see Mr. Richardson unleashed.

And the way he interacts with these students, there are over 500 MPA students now.

that Mr. Richardson has directly impacted in the quality of service that they will be providing to their communities.

And then the fellows, he had that primo time slot of Thursday afternoon and they're leaving Friday morning at the end of a very demanding week and he had that class engaged and energized and so Mr. Richardson you not only honor us with your service but you've honored the region and I want to thank you for that.

We've already addressed the Veterans Day event, so I'll pass on that.

Last weekend, I had the chance to go to the Vinegar Hill Theater to see Adrenaline.

This was the coolest thing.

There were 11 teams made up of three producers, basically, and they had actors, and in a 72-hour period, they are required to come up with an idea, a genre,

for a movie, about a five to ten minute movie.

And they brought in national judges for this.

I mean, people who have produced first line movies.

And if the judges didn't like their idea, they had to go back and start over, still within that 72 hours.

And the movies were great.

The winning team was from three students from Albemarle County High Schools, which I actually did vote for them.

They didn't win out of the audience, but the professionals chose them.

It was called eviction notice.

It was incredible.

And I really encourage you next year to look for an opportunity to go see adrenaline

at Vinegar Hill.

And then two last things on December 4th, we're going to be working with the Planning Commission and local developers on housing incentives.

It's going to be a really important meeting on the afternoon of December 4th.

And of course, Thanksgiving is coming up, the busiest travel time of the year.

So I just want to encourage everyone to get your rest before you hit the road so that you can safely enjoy the holiday with your family and return.

Anything else from any supervisors?

I just would like to thank Ann for her work with VACo very much on our behalf.

And Jeff, thank you very much for your work.

Yeah, thank you.

It really is important that we not only do stuff locally, but we show, we set the standard.

Ann, Supervisor Mallek, through your work at VACO, NACO, EPA and everything, and Mr. Richardson.

I mean, to see the students and the impact that you're having not only on their lives, but on their communities.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Board.

We have none today, which makes it quick to move to item number seven from the public, and I believe we do have people signed up today.

So we'll turn the floor over to Vice Chair Andrews to read the procedural rules for matters on the agenda but not listed for public hearing, matters previously considered by the board, or matters pending before the board.

Yes, thank you.

We only have people who are here in the audience with us.

During this time set aside for matters on the agenda but not listed for public hearing, individuals may address the Board of Supervisors concerning matters previously considered by the Board or matters that are pending before the Board other than items listed on the agenda for public hearing.

Individuals are allowed one opportunity up to three minutes to speak at each Board meeting.

Timekeeping is conducted through a timer and light system at the podium.

The green light will go on when you begin speaking, which begins your allotted time.

The yellow light indicates you have one minute to finish speaking, the red light indicates your time has expired, and you'll be asked to end your comments.

To give all speakers equal treatment and courtesy, the Board requests that speakers adhere to the following guidelines.

When addressing the board, please state your name and if you live in Albemarle County, your magisterial district, please address comments directly to the board as a whole.

Any written statements or other supporting material may be given to the clerk.

If representing a group or organization, you may ask others present to raise their hands in recognition.

Speakers may not share any unused time with another speaker.

Back and forth debate is not permitted and please do not speak from your seat or overturn as all comments are live streamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for the opportunity.

My name is Susan Perry.

I live in the Scottsville District.

These are my concerns and suggestions regarding the jail renovation.

With your allotted money, please demand the contract with the architects and the engineers be comprehensive and itemized.

This will allow all of us to make informed decisions about all the aspects of the renovation.

To meet the needs of the jail's healthy health does not have to cost tens of millions of dollars.

At the October 12th ACRJ board meeting, Superintendent Coomer and ACRJ board director Diantha McKeel acknowledged the primary plans were based upon a wish list without any consideration for cost.

I was one of the people in the community on Zoom with the superintendent and the Mosley representatives.

It was a fun exercise without any debases in reality.

It was promised at the board meeting the community would be involved once the architects and engineers were working on the actual plans.

Also, Superintendent Coomer stated that the original estimate of 49 million wasn't binding and could be appreciably less if the plans are more modest.

Considering the complexity of the project, I am advocating for an advisory board stakeholder, including former inmates committee, to work with the architects and jail staff for not only transparency but to add expertise, creative ideas, and practical solutions.

This committee could add to the stated commitment for community involvement.

I'm a believer in creativity is fostered through limits and boundaries.

There are lots of boundaries in the existing building, so creative solutions are there to be fostered.

The plan should also include the use of the wing that was built in 2000.

With the plans proposed, the yearly cost to Albemarle for the loans and bonds are a million dollars or more for 27 years.

We as a community decide our priorities for spending our tax dollars.

Prevention, housing, jobs, education, transportation, triad care, etc.

should be our highest priority rather than spending more than necessary on incarceration.

Thank you so much.

Good afternoon.

I'm Doug Earl.

I'm also from the Scottsville district.

And last week I'd like you to know that in three Michigan cities, cities voted to adopt ranked choice voting for their local municipal elections.

These cities were Kalamazoo, East Lansing, and Royal Oak.

These three cities in Michigan marked the 27th straight time

that ranked choice voting has been approved by voters when put to a ballot for municipal elections.

But in Virginia, voters do not have this ballot option.

Local governing boards decide RCV.

While RCV has a track record, proven track record when put to voters, there are also many examples over time where RCV has been blocked by elected officials.

But when put to voters,

RCV has won 27 straight times at the municipal level.

In Albemarle County, most residents don't even know ranked choice voting is an option for them.

We don't know how they feel about it because we've never asked them.

A year ago, the board considered ranked choice voting.

Over this past year, there has been consistent progress.

Obstacles of software acquisition and implementation have been resolved and budget funding has been allocated.

But realistically, by March of this past year, it was too late to adopt for 2023 elections.

However, those elections are now over successfully, and it's time to become intentional about ranked choice voting.

Virginia law requires that the board pass a resolution before adopting an RCV ordinance.

But it would not make sense to consider a resolution before first knowing how the community feels about ranked choice voting.

As part of the county's existing Engage Albemarle Public Affairs program, the board has at its disposal the capability and resident know-how to assess public opinion on this issue.

Please calendar an RCU resolution for a board soon in the next year.

Public announce the opening of this portal on Engage Albemarle for citizens to comment on RCV, yea or nigh.

If the results of the portal are mixed or unenthusiastic, then by all means do not vote for right choice voting.

But as a bare minimum, please give residents the opportunity to express their feelings, since only by law the board can decide this question and should be open to public.

Again, Residences County cannot petition for RCV.

They cannot vote for it on a ballot.

Only this governed body can decide this question for the citizens of Albemarle County.

Our next speaker is Mr. John Hall.

Mr. Hall?

Good afternoon, Donna Price, how are you?

I'm John Hall from both the Samuel Miller managerial district as well as the Jack Jouett managerial district, I think.

Okay, we as people split too many hairs in governing our country as well as our counties, including the county and regional area in Greater Charlottesville,

We are confused as leaders and our language becomes what I say is oxymoronic in how we speak about political issues such as affordable housing, health care, taxation, and criminal and civil justice reform.

That said, the public is often misunderstood in their approach to the City Council or the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

I'll be clear now, we are gathered here to discuss

financial plan for the Albemarle, Charlottesville Regional Jail, and I add the word hall.

Okay.

I've approached Colonel Martin Coomer, Superintendent of the ACRJ, about realizing second-chance artisans and farmers in Biscuit Run Farm Park, as well as vegetable gardening there.

I will be forming a 501c3

Johnny Angel Network, John Hall Technologies and Medicine Hall and salaried board of directors to accomplish erection of buildings paid for and financed by Albemarle County Government.

Dan Funk of Artisan Manufacturing has agreed to serve on my board of directors and for a government erected Artisan Woodshop.

Martin Kummer has agreed to serve on my board of directors.

being superintendent of the ACRJ and act as an editor reviewing the ACRJ inmate handbook with my revisions.

With my help and prayers, along with past supervisor, Colonel Ron Matthews, my dream and hope, who I befriended when Jim Webb tried to bring about criminal justice and jail reform

across the nation during his tenure in Congress.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon.

I hope everyone is well and ready for this.

Before I start, I'm going to read a quote from the Dallin.

The lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

I'm here today to talk to you about the ACRJ renovation.

I sent out a statement to everyone on this board, the city council, and the media.

So we've been fighting this issue for a minute and what we realize is there have been many things that have been changed on the schedule of this renovation.

And we are trying to figure out what we can do to help

Decarceration.

Before the pandemic, the population in the jail has been decreasing.

and at the same time, now we're talking, the population is even more decreasing.

But what I want to talk about, you're going to hear a lot of folks coming, and what I want to focus on is the need to bring people together for a task force to come up with these proposals about this new jail renovation.

The task force should have re-entry groups and people who are formerly incarcerated.

And you know what I hoping that the task was can also do is see how we can prevent Incarceration for folks who are coming out Reentry the whole nine Thank you so much I will let the rest of the folks give their comments.

Good afternoon.

Can you hear me?

Is that low enough?

OK, good.

Thank you.

My name is Ruby, and I'm a member of the People's Coalition Gel Committee, which Harold Foley, who just spoke, is a member of as well.

And I'm also a recent graduate of UVA Law.

And I'm here to ask you to press pause on the request for money to fund

the RFP for a couple of reasons and I just want to talk about them briefly here.

First is that with any expenditure of taxpayer dollars especially one costing over a million dollars and we're looking at a lot of interest for these counties and cities as well we need community engagement and input and that has sorely been lacking up until this point

And so as Mr. Foley said, we need a task force to get together with stakeholders in this, people who provide care to the jail, family of people who are incarcerated, who are personally affected, and get more input as well from the community.

And as Mr. Foley said, the main reason we ask this is that there has been issues with transparency up until this point.

For instance, the timeline that was up on the ACRJ website was changed without any warning.

We've had ACRJ board meetings cancelled left and right and during an imperative time to share this knowledge with the community and inform

people of what's happening.

So that's it's particularly worrisome to us that these meetings are being canceled as well so that there's not really any opportunity to be able to learn more during this crucial period where funding is being asked for.

And finally it's because this money can go towards other resources like re-entry programs as well as programs like restorative justice which are commonwealth attorneys

have been supporting as a program as well.

And as well we should be investing in housing.

I mean we've just talked about the lack of firefighters.

There are a lot of other things that this money could be going towards then building a nicer cage quite frankly.

I'm Daniel Funk.

I live in the Scottsville District.

I've been operating an artisan wood shop with my brother Mike for the last 15 years.

We specialize in antique furniture restoration, repairs, and custom one-off new builds.

Typically we're contacted by customers who own antiques which are in need of cosmetic or structural repair.

We'll pick up their pieces, bring them back to our studio, assess the work needed to bring them back to new, and perform repairs along with our small and dedicated staff.

We've been looking for a more permanent place to work and have recently acquired the old Moose Lodge at 3756 Richmond Road.

We'd like to use the building for our small shop and five to seven person staff.

The building is currently in disrepair, but is suitable for our needs.

If we have permission to use the space, we'll be able to maintain the property and make repairs to the building while providing a much needed service to the area in terms of artisanal craft and service.

I understand that the board has already approved water hookup, which

I feel sets a precedent for repairing, maintaining, and making the property usable.

Originally we were looking to attempt to rezone the property, but after consideration realized that because of the small size and nature of our operation, are now thinking a text amendment to the current zoning may be more appropriate.

I'll turn over the conversation to Connor O'Donnell who's been kind enough to support our goal and has been working with us managing the day-to-day operation of the business.

He can describe for you the details which we are trying to accomplish.

And for clarification, these will be two separate speakers.

You can't share your time.

Yep, separately signed up so it's not a continuation of one speaker.

Good afternoon, Connor O'Donnell in the Jack Jouett District.

So, framing the issue that we have is that the rezoning to a commercial building would

essentially characterized us as a factory, which we are not.

So if Supervisor Price before you leave office decide that you're really attached to this lectern and you want a custom-made version to have at home made by someone in Albemarle, you'd be hard-pressed to find that right now because small-scale artisans cannot operate in the rural area and you wouldn't find a factory producing this kind of furniture in Charlottesville.

This is the kind of work that we do and

and so this property is zoned rural area and so our ask is for a text amendment to incorporate the definition of artisan manufacturing as a permitted use by special use permit in the rural area.

There already is a definition for artisan manufacturing in the Rio 29 form-based code.

and currently if we were to try to operate at all, we would have to be in either commercial or industrial.

What we do falls under manufacturing processing assembly.

We called another person that we work with who runs an upholstery shop and asked them what they operate under.

They also are considered a factory.

So they're putting new cloth on tops of seats and that's the restrictions that they have to operate under.

Currently, there is an allowed use for gift, craft, and antique shops in the rural areas under special use, but as prior staff determination has said that

that does not allow for any type of making or manufacturing.

So if I was a pottery person, I could sell pottery.

I couldn't make my pottery there.

So if you wanted to have this beautiful lectern made for you, you could either find someone who has a home-based workshop, a garage in the rural area that is permitted or you'd have to find someone in the commercial area.

and there is precedent for this.

Nelson County and Goochland County also allow for small-scale artisan manufacturing, primarily rural areas.

And in the Rio 29 district form-based code, there are some restrictions already laid out.

For example, an artisan manufacturing establishment may not have more than 20 full-time employees.

So again, we're asking for this as a special use so that you could put whatever types of restrictions you would like on there.

As you all know, it's either Board of Supervisors or Planning Commission who can initiate a zoning text amendment.

This is our plea to you all to at least inquire to staff to study this.

We'd love for you to initiate it right now after we leave because this is such a great idea.

But at least taking the next step forward so that you all can educate.

I'll leave these two pages right here and we will follow up on email as well.

Good afternoon, Supervisors.

My name is Lisa Drain.

While I currently live in the city, I lived in Albemarle County for 10 years and still own property there.

So I'm speaking to you as a taxpayer in Albemarle County.

I'm also serving currently as the citizen representative to the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail.

and from Charlottesville.

And so I've sat on the board for about two years now, a little over two years, and in that time we've been considering the renovation plan that you'll hear more about from Superintendent Coomer in a few minutes.

I just want to ask you all to make careful consideration of how you're using this taxpayer money.

As you know, the renovation would be funded by the three localities, but in the proportions that each locality uses the jail.

So Albemarle County will be funding the majority of that at about 41-42%.

and so that the lion's share of that money will come from Albemarle County taxpayers.

I'd like you just to consider that we

I think as a community we all want to prevent incarceration.

And I'd like you to look at what creates true public safety.

And I think it really is supporting the people before they end up in the criminal legal system.

So instead of investing in a building

that is there to put people in an inhumane situation.

I would encourage you to invest in your people.

Invest in solutions, community solutions that prevent people from ending up in the carceral system in the first place.

And we know that safe affordable housing, quality education,

Healthcare.

I'd also encourage you to use your taxpayer, to use our taxpayer money to help folks who are already in the system but that are getting out.

So reentry programs,

like the Fountain Fund, mental health services like Region 10, Partner for Mental Health.

You have the Uhuru Foundation that's doing great re-entry work.

We have Region 10, we have

Women's Initiative.

So all of these and many more organizations that are working in the community would be worthy of your support.

Also in terms of the building itself, as I think Mr. Foley mentioned,

The census has gone down quite a bit.

Thank you.

We appreciate your comments.

If you were able to complete them, you can give written comments to the clerk to be appended to the record.

Good afternoon.

My name is Deirdre Gilmore and I'm a resident of Charlottesville.

I've been here all my life.

And the reason I think you need to invest in people in our cages is because I echo

what my other people have said.

Right now I'm real tired, so I'm trying to stay focused.

But over half of the people I believe deals with mental illness that's going in and out of the criminal justice system.

But I found, I believe, I thought for a long time it was over half, but they say it's 90 percent of the people that's going in.

One thing I'm really tired of, and I witnessed something before I came here, the arrest of a young black man surrounded by at least seven police officers.

And it took me back to a time where I remember them treating my family like that.

I don't understand, you know, you have people that sit in high places that have no lived experiences that make decisions for us and decide that we should be in prison.

as if we can't do better by them.

And I'm going to reiterate this.

Most of them are suffering with mental illness, abuse.

So when you deal with people that are suffering with mental illness and abuse, they oftentimes act in a way where most of y'all don't understand.

And I think a lot of y'all do, but being the still that is our people, I think people think it's fine because this has been going on for far so long.

I think what we need to do is invest in clinics.

I think we need affordable housing.

I think we need to invest in our teachers and also invest in the people that's investing in those people that's in our community.

I think you need to, before you decide that you want to take people and lock them up, maybe, just maybe,

For one night you spend time in a jail cell because I know for a fact now y'all take people and you lock them in these jails and you know I have someone dear to me that's been on lockdown for two weeks can only come out every three days to shower

Now how is any of this helping us?

It's not.

It's a better way that y'all can use that money other than to build a three-story jail with some fancy gym or whatever you want to call it.

Let's invest in people.

Look at people.

Look at us.

Look at us like we human.

Thank you ma'am.

We do appreciate it.

If you weren't unable to finish your remarks, you can give them in writing to the clerk.

It'll be easier for you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

My name is Rosea Parker.

I am a city resident, but I also have family in Albemarle County.

I have also sat on the PCRB, creating that with my people from 2017.

I also sit on the Reentry Council.

I've also sat on the DMC.

So I've sat on many boards.

dealing with incarceration.

I am a mother of a child that has been incarcerated.

Majority of my family has been incarcerated all my life.

So therefore, that makes me a fighter.

So I have to continually fight for my people that have been traumatized, dehumanized, and de-socialized.

We are a people.

We are human.

but just because of the color of our skin don't make us no different than anyone else.

If you've lived in communities that we have lived in where the city and the county has traumatized our people, where there's no funds or resources for us to come up from substance abuse and mental health abuse, putting our people in these cages don't make anything better.

It makes it worse.

It makes the inmates more traumatized.

As sitting on the reentry council, it took us years to even come up with things and for the jail to even agree with us to help our people before it's time for them to come out.

30 days is not enough.

60 days is not enough.

90 days is not enough because they're already coming in traumatized.

They are traumatized from the police getting into the system, going to the jail, going to the court system,

That's not correct for them.

Not everybody deserves to be in jail.

So with mental health, reach intent is not the only answer.

It's other people in this community that does the same work.

But there are a lot of work.

There are people that want to be politically correct and want to say things that people want to hear, but it's not their opinion or that's not what they feel.

So I'm standing here asking you

not to put that three-story rooms in the jail because what is that going to do for our people?

It's not going to do anything but traumatize them more.

They need more things in the jail that will get a person help, the correct help, get people in there who really care about people.

We have homelessness out here.

That's what's going to get them to the jail system because we have people that don't understand them.

Our people are very misunderstood and correct.

There are Caucasians in the jail, but we override all of those numbers.

We fight hard in the city to get people to really understand what it's like to really live in trauma.

And it's definitely trauma in Albemarle County.

All right.

That is correct.

All right.

Thank you all.

Board, we can now move to item number eight, the consent agenda.

I move that we adopt the consent agenda as amended without 8.3.

All right, we have a motion from Supervisor Andrews, a second from Supervisor Mallek.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

We can move to item number nine, the Albemarle, Charlottesville Regional Jail, ACRJ Renovation Project Interim Financing.

Good afternoon.

Let me hold the presentation.

All right, good afternoon.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I appreciate that.

My name is Jacob Sumner.

I'm the interim chief financial officer for the county.

And I'm here this afternoon really just as an introduction for this topic.

There will be two speakers.

Superintendent Colonel Coomer will be presenting first, followed by Courtney Rogers of Davenport, who is the financial advisor for the board.

The topic of the presentation today will be the plan of finance for the jails renovation project.

Carl Humer came before the board early in January of this year talking about the plan for this project.

This is the next step, the next phase of that project.

I did mention that Courtney Rogers is here with Davenport.

He may be a familiar face as Davenport is also the financial advisor for the county, but today he is here in the capacity as financial advisor for the jail.

So I just wanted to make that distinction if he's a familiar face to you all, but he is here as a representative with the jail.

All right.

Thank you very much, Mr. Sumner.

Good afternoon, Colonel.

Hello everyone, how are you?

So as Jacob said, my name is Martin Coombe, I'm the superintendent of the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail and we're here today to get approval for a resolution to seek interim funding.

That interim funding will be used for architectural and engineering services.

It's important to note that something we've all agreed on is there needs to be some type of renovation at the jail.

It's the scope of work that's in question in the community and here today.

The interim financing will help hire an architectural firm that will come here and work with the community in community engagement sessions to determine what that ultimate scope of work will be.

I made sure it was in the contract with the A&E firm to do just that.

They are required to hold public sessions with community members

in order to engage and seek feedback and input as to what the jail will look like and what the scope of work will entail.

Without that, we have no idea what the final cost will be or what it will look like.

Once that is done, three versions of the scope of work or the renovation will be submitted

The community will have a chance to come back, look at all three options, and then the board will make the final decision as to what the scope of work will be.

Once that's determined, we'll put it up for bid.

Contractors will bid on that.

We will then know the final cost.

At that point, we'll come back to each of the three jurisdictions with the final cost of the bill, with the selected design, and again seek a resolution to move forward with permanent construction financing.

Several things that we've discussed in the last couple of years is the need for the renovation.

One, to work with individuals, provide service to people who have mental illness.

It is a significant portion of people in jails all across the country who suffer from mental illness.

The vast majority, however, suffer from mild to moderate mental health.

Those who suffer from extreme mental illness, they are treatable in other hospitals and other settings.

But for those who come to jail that I have no control over, they deserve a space and resources to treat their mental illness.

When we release them back to the community, they're better off.

Right now, we currently don't have that.

Quality of air, there is none in that facility.

It's not really filtered.

It's not conditioned.

It's not properly heated.

I'm referring to the old section, 1974.

Over the last 50 years, that facility has been occupied 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days.

People living and working there exceeded its rated capacity.

That building is therefore three times older, as far as wear and tear goes, than a normal 50-year-old office building is occupied 40 hours a week.

It is in time for a renovation to some degree, not just for me,

Not just for my staff, not just for the inmates, but for the family and friends and people who come to that jail.

They deserve a safe, conducive environment.

It's more efficient to operate.

It's more comfortable for everyone who works there.

We need community input.

I don't have all the ideas.

I don't have all the solutions.

I need community input to make that happen.

This interim financing will make that process possible.

So if there's any questions for me about the process itself, the timeline, the renovation, I'm happy to answer those questions.

Madam Chair, members of the board, great to see you all again.

I'm Courtney Rogers with Davenport & Company, as Jacob said, your advisor, but today I'm actually here on behalf of the jail board.

I will mention real quick, we did close on the financings this morning successfully, so congratulations to you all, the money's in the bank, so now we can get some of those projects going for the county.

But we're here today to talk about the jail.

You might remember I presented to you earlier, back before I think we knew what was going on with the General Assembly,

and one of the things that happened with our schedule is it slid because of the budget process.

We needed to understand that we had to go ahead from the state and now that's why we're here with a revised schedule.

So I'm going to go back over some of the things just in case you may have forgotten and for those in the public who may not have been here that day about the process.

It is an unusual process.

It's not like the process that we just went through with you all week.

We go to the market, we borrow the money, and then we start spending it.

Here we have some interim processes that we have to go through, and I think it'll make sense once we go through this.

So, essentially there's two parts.

There's an interim financing, which is what we're here today to get your permission to move forward with, is the interim financing.

which will basically fund the A&E, the design, if you will, of the facility.

That will get us to a point that we can actually go and bid it out and actually have a more permanent number.

Then we'll come back to you for the permanent financing and the OK to move forward with that once we have that number as the Colonel just mentioned.

Today's world, the state will reimburse up to 25% for eligible costs.

And so that's what we had to go to the General Assembly to get permission for.

In order to do that, the authority had to go through and do what's called a community-based corrections plan and planning study.

They did that.

sent it to the Board of Local and Regional Jails and so that was accepted there.

And so they put it forward into the General Assembly's queue, if you will, and it was approved during the budget process.

So we did get our 25% reimbursement for eligible costs.

We don't know what that eligible cost is going to be yet because we don't know the final numbers, but you'll see we've made some assumptions in our presentation today.

So now that we've got that approved, now we move forward with the inter-financing and that's why we're here today.

So the interim financing essentially, as I said, it's going to take us to the point of getting design.

They have gone through the bidding process and actually have selected a firm.

So we actually know that number, which we'll talk about in just a moment.

That was another part that we were waiting on is to get that.

Once we had the state budget approval, we need to know what are we going to borrow for?

What's the number?

And so we have that now.

and then as I said we'll come back as part two and do the permanent financing as well as what's called a grant anticipation note and that's basically the 25%.

The state doesn't give us the money up front.

We have to go and borrow it and then once everything's finalized the state then reimburses us and that's what that grant anticipation note will be paid off with.

So our assumptions today, and again, they are assumptions because we don't know what the final number is, is using a number of $49 million for the project cost.

Basically, we're assuming $48 million will be eligible for the reimbursement, so that takes us to about $12 million that will be reimbursed by the state.

So roughly $36 million we'll be borrowing plus the extra $37 million.

We have updated since we talked last the estimates as far as the breakdown by the jurisdictions your number actually went down a little bit Charlottesville's I think went down a little bit and then Nelson's went up a little bit

So the number that we're looking to borrow for the interim piece is 4.1 million and change there, 4.1 million.

We're assuming an estimated rate of around 4.5% right now.

We will do a term of 18 months.

That's what we think it'll take to go through this process.

And then give us a little bit of cushion so that if things are delayed, we've got some time.

And so that would be basically paid off in roughly the spring of 2025.

So as you look through the schedule, you can see the check marks were basically through the first four items.

We did go ahead, because we're trying to get this done by year-end, we did just because of the holidays, the extra couple of weeks that we lose, we went ahead and sent the RFP out because we wanted to give the banks time to start looking at the RFP.

But just so you know, if for some reason any or all of the localities says, no we don't want to do this, there's no cost.

We'll just tell the banks we're not going through with it.

But we did need to go ahead and send that out, so I wanted you to be aware of that so that it is out on the street.

We need to get permission not only from you all, but we'll be at Nelson County tomorrow night and then I'll be at the City of Charlottesville on Monday to do the same presentation for them.

So we will need to get all three localities permission to move forward with this financing.

So we're looking to get the responses back in early December.

We won't have time to look at it, have any questions that go back to the banks.

And then we would come back to the authority board who will make the final decision on who we're actually going to use and what financing the interest rate will end up being.

And then the idea is to get closed before year-end.

Part 2, as you'll see in a moment, we're going to have some of the numbers to just give you a sense, and they haven't changed materially from what we saw last time, but what we did here is we've got the GAN, which is estimated to be $14.4 million, and the reason it's more than $12 million is because it's the interest on the GAN as well.

The state does reimburse for some of the interest, so we used an interest rate of 4.5% there for a three-year term.

and then for the long-term financing, we used a conservative 5.5% takeout as far as the interest rate there.

And that would be over 27 years, the first couple of years of the interest only and then 25 years of level debt service.

We'll go through the whole timetable but essentially start to finish it'll be 2027 before the actual construction is looking to be finished and that's when the state will come back and repay that GAN at that point so but roughly about a two-year construction period.

So the debt service schedule you saw this chart before

On the left-hand side, we've got in the first column the projected debt service on this bond, this band anticipation note, if you will, bond anticipation note.

And then the GAN is in column B, which is again the grant anticipation note paid by the state.

And then we've got the debt service on the bonds itself.

The last three columns you can see allocated between the three jurisdictions.

So you're in the final column there.

The number did go down a little bit again because your percentage went down to 45.4 percent.

And of course that changes year to year as you all know, but that's the number we're working with for the moment.

Thank you very much.

We will go through our order.

Supervisor Andrews.

And we're just questions at this stage.

Right, on the GAN it's half the interest costs, so that column shows actually the

This has remained consistent, the information we've been receiving for the past, what, three years that this has been coming before us.

Thank you.

I don't really have any questions.

I guess I would just ask for

Help the community understand there was, we're talking about this amount of money, which is a large amount of money.

In order to seek reimbursement from the state to 25%, you must conduct a community-based corrections plan.

We hired most of the architects to conduct that.

They came in, and there's two parts to that plan.

One, do we need to add additional beds?

The answer was no.

And that's a testament to this community, the work that they've done, our local prosecutors, defense, courts, police, re-entry services.

So no new beds will be added and quite frankly the board of local regional jails found that refreshing That someone was actually coming not to ask for more beds, but to ask to improve the conditions of their facility I think it's one of the things that helped us get the reimbursement approved We also we met with the community at that time.

It was during COVID.

We switched to zoom.

It was very poorly attended I'm sure that COVID had a lot to do with that, but we did seek public engagement on several

Times.

From that public engagement, you meet with not just the general public, but you also meet with all of your stakeholders, law enforcement, courts, sheriff's departments, service providers, probation, parole, and you kind of get feedback from them.

What do you see that's needed in the facility to meet your needs?

We took that list, and yes, for some people, it was a wish list.

I would like to see this.

I would like to see outdoor recreation.

I'd like to see skylights.

A garden was one example.

Bike racks was another.

So the architects take that into account.

And you have to submit a design that meets the results of the CVCP.

You have to.

And you have to put an estimate to that so they know how much they'll be on the hook for.

What are they going to reimburse?

and that's what they did.

They came up with a design that implemented everything that we had discussed to meet the needs of what the community wanted, stakeholders, my staff, and what they saw the facility needed, both in terms of mechanicals, changes to the building to bring it to code, ADA compliance, new department of correction standards, number of toilets and showers per individual.

Put that into a design, they came up with $49 million was the estimated cost.

You submit that to the state and base your 25% off that.

Now, we can always go back and ask for less money from the state.

They will have no objection, I'm sure.

But we cannot go back and ask for more.

So you do put the maximum amount that you that you would be seeking in your original.

Yeah, thank you very much.

And we did hear, Colonel Coomer, some comments from the public today about wanting a task force to, at some point, to talk to inmates, to talk to staff.

Absolutely.

That's something I've heard from the community now for two years.

So in order to make that happen,

At that table, you have to have architects and engineers and experts to publicly engage, to listen to input and say, that's feasible, it's not feasible.

You can't do that because of code, or you have to do this because of code.

You take all that input in, but that person has to be at the table to make that happen.

Therefore, that's why interim funding will hire architects, mostly architects, and in the contract specifically states, I made sure it was in there.

There would be, shall be, community engagement, active community engagement, where we seek input on what they think is most important, what they want to see, there will be costs associated with it.

It's difficult to bring itemized cost.

They'll then present three individual plans with a total estimated cost of each of those.

Come back, present those to the community, more engagement,

When that process is finished, all three will be presented to our board who will then make the final decision.

I guess that's all I have for right now.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for your presentation.

My question relates more to the mental health issue.

It sounds like what you're proposing is not only renovation, much needed renovation and updating of the jail facility, but how do you, and you're addressing moderate and medium mental health issues because the serious mental health issues

go to other facilities, you said.

So how are you proposing in this renovation to separate the two jail-hardened or criminal-hardened people versus those with mild mental health issues so that they don't become a product with their ability to be with other criminals so that doesn't

they don't become hardened like that, they don't suffer because of the fact that they're with other people who really don't care about, I mean they're in jail for a reason but we do have people with mild mental health issues that shouldn't be exposed.

Yes ma'am, well the 1974 edition obviously at that point mental illness in jails was not on top of anybody's priority.

There's no space in the old part of the jail designed to deal with individuals who suffer from mental illness.

The 2000 edition did not take that into account either.

That was merely to add additional bed space.

And it was minimum to medium custody bed space, not designed for individuals with mental illness.

The proposal as it is today that was presented to the state has a floor, there's only two floors by the way, that have ever been recommended.

I'm not sure where the third floor came from.

But there's only two floors that have ever been recommended or discussed.

The second floor will be trauma-informed design.

and designed with the intent that people with mental illness can be housed there safely in an environment that is conducive to their mental health.

It'll allow us to get them stabilized if they've been off their medication in a quiet environment, natural sunlight, sound editing material, more observation from staff, hooked onto our medical department where our mental health staff are now.

I have the mental health staff that I need.

I have two full-time mental health nurse practitioners.

I have a part-time as well.

I can treat them, I just need the environment to keep them stable, to help them maintain to be healthy.

It's one thing to give them medication, but to keep them in an environment that currently, as it is, you can deteriorate rather quickly.

Do I think that people with mental illness would be better treated in the community?

Absolutely.

But if they come to my jail, which I have no control over,

I have an obligation to do the best I can to treat them while they're there until they're released.

And this new addition, again it's in this presentation, would indeed create that space.

Thank you very much.

If I may.

If we could go back to the part two timetable.

I just want to make sure I understand something on the timetable.

First of all, I applaud that the design phase begins with stakeholder engagement an entire year referenced there.

Then it says secure county design approvals, and you've mentioned coming back to this board for approval of design, but I know that the authority approves the final design and I know we've got three jurisdictions, so I just want to make sure I understand, you know, in the end the three jurisdictions have to approve the financing

Which part is done by which jurisdiction by the authority?

That's a great question.

I certainly understand the confusion there.

Because the jail is in Albemarle County, there are certain permits and designs and so forth that be approved by the building and permitting office, not necessarily this board in and of itself.

So that's part of the construction piece of it, but I can certainly understand that.

Okay.

So each jurisdiction will approve the

if approved here today, the next resolution seeking full-time permanent funding for the actual project itself.

This is, as Supervisor Galloway mentioned, it's been several years that this process has been presented to us at the different phases.

I found everything that's been presented for this part with regard to the construction to be consistent, and that's the reason why I don't have any questions, but I will have some comments.

All right?

Board, at this time, we'll go through our order for comments.

We do have an action item to address at the end of comments.

Thank you.

I am supportive.

I recognize no increase in size that is necessary to go through this more than year-long design process with community engagement.

I very much appreciate the presenting of three options.

If I may, I was also pleased to see an email from Commonwealth Attorney Hingely.

Related to this and if it's okay, I'll quote a sentence from it.

He says I completely agree We need many more harm reduction based voluntary accessible culturally appropriate community-based responses to criminal behavior that are fully disconnected from the criminal legal system addressing root causes is and should remain a high priority and

The desire for community-based responses does not, however, change the fact that ACRJ is in immediate and urgent need of renovation and improvement.

And he also adds that these contemplated improvements will create a supportive and humane environment for residents, family members, visitors, program personnel, treatment providers, and staff.

All right, thank you.

Thank You chair price so I'm very supportive as well the I want to make a couple of points as to why the I see the renovation of this jail in a lot of ways the continuation of the programming that happened especially when Commonwealth Attorney Hingeley came to office the diversionary programs that we've done the crisis intervention programs that we've put in place I would offer that

that in agreement with all of the public speakers that there are many things that we have done over the last four years to do the very things that you're saying that you're supportive of and perhaps we just need to get on the same page as to what has been invested in in terms of the people and the programming to do that.

One of the critical points here, and we don't want to get into a comparison, if we don't, this is a CIP program in many ways for us, we're investing in a capital asset

So if you do not use the monies for that, it doesn't get resorted back to programming or people.

That's coming out of a whole separate fund.

Yes, it could be used to do a school or to do some other item.

But the fact is we own or have a partial ownership or a responsibility for a capital investment.

And the fact is, is that regardless of the use, you must do the things to keep it properly maintained as a viable physical plant.

and this physical plant is sorely past due for that type of maintenance and renovation.

So we have to do that and that is I think an appropriate use of CIP programming.

I too appreciated the letter the Commonwealth Hingely and I'm sure Commonwealth Attorney Platania would agree with him.

He stated that the jail population is at historic lows.

I know he is very much committed in working with our police department and others in the criminal justice to get folks to the proper support services.

My comment about the VACO session that I attended, they follow what's called a sequential intercept model.

And that was one of my notes coming back to the county.

I assume we're using that, but I don't know.

So it would be the follow-up, are we doing this sequential intercept model?

And it's basically seven stages.

where different folks, depending on a crisis and the level of crisis that they're having, intercepts or intersects with services, police department, what have you.

And then where are the gaps in services that are identified by the model?

And the idea is to reduce jail as the solution when we all know that that's probably not the treatment that the vast majority of folks in crisis need.

and I think in Fairfax they're seeing something like a, I mean it was 70%, 80% diversionary than ending up in their jail system.

And that's quite a successful statement to say.

And with our crisis intervention team, I mean we've already invested in it.

We're already down the road to doing that.

So I appreciate that not

I know it's not everybody's hobby to follow the ins and outs of what we do over the course of four, five, six years, but I do encourage to let's work together to understand the things that we are doing, and then we can have conversation about, all right, are you doing enough?

Are you targeting the programming enough?

Because I'm very happy to engage in that type of dialogue.

So for the comments about careful consideration of how money is being used, I believe that was a quote that I picked up on in public comment.

Yes, I give very careful consideration to how money is used, and it's not just for $49 million projects, but it's also for

$250,000 programming that we do.

We do it year in and year out in our budget and I stand as we all do in front of our public folks during town halls and others to say why we are doing what we're doing with the money that we are collecting from our taxpayers.

So I think this is a responsible use of those tax dollars.

And then the tour that I took of the facility.

If there was not any more rationale than the need

for the renovation and the investment in the facility, in addition to all the things I know we're doing to do diversionary programming, that tour really struck at home that that's a facility that needs desperate work to bring it on par as a place where anybody should be in, regardless of the reason.

And again, I appreciate the consistency.

Yes, and I appreciate everything that my fellow supervisors have said so far.

I would also just like to quote, we're all quoting, I think, from Jim Hengele's email because it was so beautifully written, but he said, we intend to continue reducing the number of people confined at ACRJ consistent with public safety, but I believe there will always be people for whom confinement in jail is the only reasonable alternative.

I want the jail to be a supportive and humane environment for those people.

And to just piggyback on what Ned just said, we hear a number of people in the community saying, well, you just need to replace the HVAC system.

Or there in the old section of the renovation that's going to take place in the old section, there is not an air filter in that whole section.

There are no air filters to replace.

They're solid concrete walls.

The only way to put a true HVAC system and provide an environment for the staff and the inmates

that is healthy is to tear down the walls and start from scratch.

There's no piping.

There's nothing there.

So it's critical that we get this renovation done.

Let me just look at my notes a minute.

I've heard a lot, and obviously I'm very supportive of this renovation, but I've heard several people in the community say we need to invest in people.

I think this is investing in people.

We're investing in our staff and we're investing in our inmates and we're investing in the community that comes into the jail, the families and the lawyers and the attorneys that come into the jail to do their work.

So we are, this is a renovation that invests in people, to me.

and just it has occurred to me over the last couple of days that this community is spending or has been and is spending $50 million on a renovation for courts.

The courts, $50 million for a facility where people don't live 24-7, where some people aren't even there every day working, and it benefits

I will say the community that goes into the courts, it benefits the judges and the attorneys and all those folks.

While we may not actually have to spend 50 million dollars, we don't know what that amount is going to be right now, we're investing in that amount of money in a very different population and it's a population of folks that are working and living in our criminal justice system.

So the 50 million dollar price tag

I just find it amazing that it's okay to spend it on one population but not spend it on the other population.

It's very sad to me.

We desperately, desperately need for our inmates, for our staff, and for our community this renovation.

We're not even in ... ADA compliance is not there.

Colonel Coomer's staff has to go out into the parking lot and carry people in that are in wheelchairs.

And you can imagine in the cells they're carrying the people in wheelchairs into the cells.

I mean, it is really time for this renovation.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I also really appreciate the staged plans and the staged

levels of funding, spending the right amount of money to find out what the real number is and I've seen this over 20 years.

Sometimes projects are advanced based on not enough information because they're trying to save money on that stage and then it's not sufficient.

Or then they realize that the plan wasn't what was really needed and there's even more years of spinning wheels and wasted money in the long run.

So this whole layout of the plan to go forward

makes a lot of sense to me and I think it will have the right outcome.

But we do have to have the time and the expertise to get the needs identified and the right designs drawn and also learn from all the various players.

So getting it right and not fast is really important.

but our residents and our community deserves to have modern healthy spaces so that the people who do live there and can get the proper care for their recovery and true rehabilitation not just warehousing and that the people who work there also are able to provide the best service that they can for the residents because of the facility being so much better and having a place where families can stay connected

is so much better, so much important to that family preservation.

So I am happy to vote for this.

Thank you.

Yes, I'm also supportive.

I do believe that we want the diversionary efforts that we started here in Albemarle to continue.

I do agree with supporting the mental health accommodations that have been presented.

I think we're going to see more and more of that.

as I hope the other types of, the people who've actually committed crimes, I'm hoping that will go down.

That would be nice.

I appreciate our careful consideration of cost to make sure that we, with that, we also accommodate the needs of those who are incarcerated, those needing mental health, who have mental health issues, that we address that.

and the needs of the families of those people that are incarcerated so that the families can help, especially those with mental health issues, that they can be there for them and hopefully a program that will work.

so that they can return to their loved ones.

Thank you.

I will endeavor not to simply repeat what other supervisors have said.

It's my 45-year career as an attorney in the criminal justice system draws near a close.

It is my firm belief that there will always be a need for incarceration because there will always be people who will engage in criminal conduct.

Colonel Coomer, you address the difference between those who do not have the capacity to understand the criminality of their conduct, but we would say, you know, mental incapacity.

I'm going to read from the Model Penal Code, Section 401, says that a defendant is not responsible for criminal conduct.

where that individual as a result of mental disease or defect did not possess a substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of their conduct or to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.

And that's the group that you were talking about.

What we need to recognize is there are people who have psychological conditions but they do not rise to the level that they are not criminally culpable or responsible for their conduct and we must have a process that deals with that which may

include incarceration.

We're dealing with the jail, not a prison, so we're dealing with the lower level of criminality rather than those who would be put away for many years at a time.

I am a both and believer.

I believe both that we must improve the physical facility and in response to the comments from the public, which I greatly appreciate,

I also believe that we must continue to do the things that, for example, Supervisor Galloway has mentioned we are doing in order to reduce the likelihood that someone may be in incarceration.

And I'd like to parallel this a little bit if I could with affordable housing.

It's one thing to say we have housing.

it's another thing to say whether or not that is substandard housing and I do not believe this community would be willing to accept a conclusion that we have sufficient housing because everyone has a roof over their head if that housing was substandard and for those who are detainees in the jail this is housing

and right now it is substandard housing and we have an obligation to bring that up to a level that is sufficient.

And for our staff that works there, we would not allow our employees to work in an environment that is not healthy, but right now that's what we're facing at the jail.

And I believe that by improving the facility and continuing to do the things that we are doing to reduce the likelihood of incarceration, we are protecting our staff, we are protecting those who are detained,

and we will be able to provide a better avenue for them to avoid going back into jail.

Nothing by itself will achieve that.

All of it must be done and I am in favor of this.

I'll look around and see if there are any other comments.

Donna, could I just ask Jeff to speak too because we're talking a lot about mental health and I know there is so much going on in our community around mental health and how we're trying to improve our mental health services.

Jeff, you've toured the jail as well.

Yes, ma'am.

I did have an opportunity to tour the jail and it's been within the last 45 days and I've not had an opportunity to work in my six years in this community with Colonel Coomer to any degree.

I know that our staff sits on the Regional Jail Board as well as Ms.

McKeel.

But having the opportunity to tour the jail was for me quite interesting.

This is my fourth community that I've served and of course in every community we've had jail facilities and I was sitting here thinking back and every community I've been in we've either built a new jail or we've gone through renovation and or expansion.

So when I went over and toured the jail, I spent about an hour with Colonel Coomer, and all 60 minutes of it was an educational opportunity for me.

When I look first of all at just what I call the basics, the basic foundational elements of this, you're looking at bringing a 1972 facility online with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is a law that was passed in 1990.

So that was about 33 years ago.

From that, with that basic assumption, then you've got opportunities then to begin to address what I would just call basic needs of the inmate population to include medical

And I think, Ms.

McKeel, that's what you're speaking to, specific to how we have redesigned our services and our organization over the last 18 months with this board's support to be able to take a more cross-departmental holistic model where we're

looking at 911 calls for service and we are working with our emergency operators to build these calls and to staff these calls in some cases where we determine that the caller is in need of mental health crisis services.

And so it's going to be a cross-connection with our Department of Social Services, Ms.

Stebbins is here today, along with our Fire and Rescue Department with Paramedic,

EMT services and along with the police officer where our goal is to be able to in the field get these folks what they need.

When I toured the facility, Colonel Coomer and I looked at the design model of the medical and mental health facilities and I liked what he said today.

He said from a staffing standpoint, we're really doing good work.

He's got nice

Good qualified staff in the areas of medical needs.

He does a really good job with addressing inmate needs in that regard.

But we're talking about space redesign that recognizes what is needed in 2023.

And finally, I'll wrap my comments up by saying I think there's real opportunities as it relates to basic inmate services to be able to do space redesign where you're going to see a more conducive environment for family.

visitations where there's more privacy and more opportunity for families to visit in space that's conducive to that and then finally also the legalities of attorneys being able to address client needs in a more conducive environment so again it's taking a 1972 facility and some of these basic and basic needs you mentioned air quality I don't know how many staff work there but when you know how much time we're spending on workforce stability and

and we have to be sensitive to what are some of the basic needs of our workforce to be able to come to work every day and to be safe and secure and Colonel Coomer faces some of those same challenges.

Any other comments by supervisors?

Yes.

I move that the board approve the resolution in our packet, attachment B, I believe is what I need for the ACRJ,

Interim financing.

All right.

We have a motion from Supervisor McKeel, a second from Supervisor Mallek.

Ms.

Yes.

Ms.

Price?

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Yes.

All right.

Thank you board.

Thank you both gentlemen for your presentations and let me also thank the public for your input.

At this time board we can move to item number 10, five-year financial plan workshop.

Good afternoon to the chair and the board and thank you for the introduction.

I will be kicking off the presentation today but other staff will be introducing themselves along the way.

I do want to take one moment while Mr. Davidson is pulling up the presentation to thank senior budget analyst Laura Benzant.

She is not presenting today, but a lot of the work to coordinate the content, to do a lot of technical analysis and leadership to pull all of this program together is one of the major contributions that she makes to our team in the Office of Management and Budget.

So today is going to be just a work session on the five-year financial plan.

And it will be a no action request from the board.

We'll have a staff presentation followed by some board supervisors' dialogue.

It's up front?

All right.

It looks like I'll be running slides today.

Just to frame today's discussion and the context of other discussions we've had with the Board of Supervisors this fall.

We've had some previous discussions on long-range planning.

In October, I was here with Dr. Cheryl Bailey to discuss the Economic Outlook Report.

Just two weeks ago, I was here with some consultants from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

to discuss some analysis on the county's transit system that was not only about financial matters but really taking a long-term look at some of the analytical questions around our transit services.

Today we'll kick off our five-year planning process that will continue on December 6 with the school board and then on December 13 we'll be continuing some topics that we'll be talking about later today.

There are just two desired outcomes for today's meeting.

We desire staff to inform the board on the long-range planning assumptions we were making.

And then last year, we began a very heightened effort to make sure we were aligning the board's 23 objectives and six strategic goals to our financial plans and to make sure we were hitting that alignment, not only identifying the assumptions.

And then, of course, giving the chance for a board to provide feedback on that initial financial plan.

As we go through, this is really just again to have staff present those assumptions and that alignment.

We'll provide a few scenarios for the board's consideration and open it up to discussion.

If it helps the board in their discussion later, we've provided a few questions for the board to consider as they hear the content today.

These three questions are what does this plan do well?

What did you expect to see but perhaps did not?

And then what are some areas that require additional information?

So for example, we may discuss a strategic plan goal number one around health and safety.

The board may be satisfied with the staff items as identified.

They may have expected to hear a particular initiative that had been talked about in the past that we did not call out.

Or there may be other areas that really do warrant a later policy or strategic discussion that has not occurred yet.

One final slide of introduction before we get into some content.

Just an introduction.

This is a slide the board has seen before, but for the public's awareness about what long-range financial planning is and what it is not.

I say this every year.

As someone who's had the word budget in my job title for many years, it is a different exercise than budgeting.

Usually when I'm before the board of supervisors, we're talking about changes that will go into effect immediately or within a matter of months as we're approving the budget.

Long-range planning is really about where does our long-term trajectory look like in the county for the next five years.

Really asking ourselves, are we making decisions today that we'll be able to afford in the future?

If we have challenges, we expect we cannot.

What might be done differently with a strategy or policy lever to help change that trajectory?

Also looking at practical questions, aligning or operating the capital budgets.

If the county is building a facility, when it comes online, will we be able to afford to operate that within our projected revenues?

Also, this will give a framework into our annual budget process, and I recognize that my usual disclaimer, this is the best information we have as of today.

When the county executive returns in February in the annual budget, we will have a whole host of new information that was updated in our assumptions, and that will be incorporated into that time.

This is just working on some assumptions and scenarios based on what we think at this time.

So we will not have as many numbers and charts and graphs as we usually would during a budget work session, but I will share right up front the very busiest chart that I'll have to share with you all coming up next when we look at where our revenue picture may look like in the coming five years.

So I'm going to take a moment to talk through this.

This slide looks at the change in general fund revenue growth from fiscal year 7 to 23.

All of these changes are year to year.

And so essentially, the larger the blue chart is in one year, that means the stronger the revenue growth was.

And we can see all the way back to fiscal year 10, there was actually one year where revenues declined during the Great Recession.

Fiscal year 7 is maybe an odd starting point at a glance.

Staff has chosen that because fiscal year 7 is when the county began to reassess property on an annual basis.

When we go back further, that reassessment used to be done every other year, some of the revenue history looked a little choppy.

So we had this as just a framework as we think of it with the future.

We need to at least look and contemplate the past and how that may impact us.

So this is a very kind of unusual looking chart.

So a few lines I'm going to add as a reference.

The first of which is to say if we just took the average of all years, all these different economies, the great recession, the pandemic, recoveries, all of these different factors out there, tax rate changes, inflation's differed, so many programs have changed.

We would see on average our county revenues grow at 4.5%.

But we know that doesn't tell the full story.

As we can see, there are a couple distinct periods here where we see now in the orange line, during the Great Recession and the initial recovery, revenues were on average growing less than 2%.

And though officially the Great Recession ended much sooner than fiscal year 2014, it took a while for county revenues to recover at that time.

Another frame of reference is really kind of considering what happened after that initial recovery leading to the pandemic, which is this yellow line on the screen, where revenues were growing at approximately 5.5%.

This was a period really prior to the pandemic where there was another period of relatively stable revenue growth year to year.

And then the last four years we've been in a very unique time where we saw a very deep, very abbreviated recession that happened in fiscal year 20 where the impacts extended into fiscal year 21.

Prior to then we have seen very strong revenue growth as consumer behaviors have changed.

There's been a very strong real estate market and all the other factors that the board has taken to diversify revenues with some of their actions as well.

So this really just gives us a framework to understand the past and where we may go into the future.

We know in our revenue picture that it's not only the past we must consider, we must take a look at what's changing in our community right now and what are those factors that are going on around us, both at a micro and a macro level.

So I was here with Dr. Bailey in October to present the economic outlook report, and it's a very dense report, so I'm not going to recap that in full, but the three major takeaways for us in the revenue projection of staff were recognizing that just like last year, Albemarle's economy does remain strong, and we generally follow state and national trends.

Second, we know that our national economy has cooled from this time a year ago.

There have been a lot of mixed indicators.

The cooling has not been as fast or maybe as deep as was thought, but we certainly are in a situation where we don't have as strong revenue growth as we've seen the last two years.

This does not mean that we are in a recession or declining revenues.

It's just the rate of growth is not as fast.

And so then third, in that conclusion, that as we think in the near future with these continued mixed signals, we should expect more of the same of this continuing rapidly changing economy, mixed signals, and how different sectors may be impacted.

That does not signal a recession, and I would say compared to last year's report, this is a little more optimistic.

So this was some of the other revenue factors that we were thinking as we looked at what the future may look like.

So at a very high level, this is now to take a look at what the revenue side of our projection may look from fiscal year 4 to 29.

This is the same slide the board saw before that I talked through, but what I'm going to add now are some green projected revenue growth for the next five years, including the fiscal year, fiscal year 24.

I'll elaborate on fiscal year 24.

We are monitoring our revenues closely on a monthly basis.

In fact, on the board's consent agenda today was our first quarter financial report.

And our revenues are tracking slightly better than we expected.

They are less than 1% better than we adopted at the budget at this time.

So while there is not as strong revenue growth compared to fiscal year 22 and 23, it is in line with what we anticipated in fiscal year 24, but actually outperforming the assumptions that were adopted about six months ago.

As we look into fiscal year 25, that really reflects, and again further into fiscal year 26, that does reflect an economic cooling.

That decrease is well ahead of the changes that we saw during the Great Recession and recovery.

It is also not as impactful as the brief recession that took place in the pandemic, but again recognizing that some slowdown would be prudent to plan for, though this slowdown is not as deep or as wide if you were to look at this change chart from this time last year.

Then finally, those last three lines really are just assuming the historical average.

Reading and talking to many economists and financial analysts, it's extremely challenging to predict what those years may look like beyond two years out.

Our approach has been to assume the average and then we'll update every year and adjust as we need to, given the increased volatility.

We would also look at scenario planning, should things improve or not.

So with that, I'm going to begin to turn the conversation from revenue projections into expenditure projections.

This particular slide is the first version of three charts the board is going to see today.

We're on the blue line.

We have our revenue projection, which will be unchanged in these charts.

This red line is our expenditures line.

So we asked ourselves, first to staff, what might a five-year plan look like if we focused only on mandates and obligations?

So we first took a look at our expenditures.

We assumed that revenue growth would be provided to the public school's operations, to our capital debt program in accordance with the board's policy.

We assumed that as we are planning for capital projects to construct them, we would pick up those operations.

We would fulfill other obligations like the county's revenue sharing, or if we have grants that are expiring where we expect the board's desire to continue those services, we would expect to pick those up.

So this leads us to know, at least at a very starting point, we are fundamentally balanced.

The challenge ahead is the Board's strategic plan does not keep a status quo and only meet mandates and obligations.

We then had to go through and consider all the conversations we've had with the Board over the last year plus in the strategic plan, all our financial discussions, and really begin to build in what might those look like, what does that change our trajectory to look like, and then how may we consider this in our financial planning.

So my last slide before I hand it off to discuss our expenditure assumptions is really just one way to look at our strategic plan of the six goals shown on the screen.

And Mr. Davidson will talk through much of this content, but I'm actually going to hand this off to Christy Shifflett, the county's chief operating officer, because we're going to begin our presentation with workforce and customer service, which is goal number six.

Though this goal is not more important than any other goal, it is a unique linchpin where the ability to retain and recruit our workforce has a strong impact on the success and the other five goals.

If we're not able to recreate and retain those staff, even though it's not a one-to-one relationship, that will either help the success or impede our ability to reach those other five goals.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

Good afternoon, Ms.

Good afternoon.

I just had to make sure I know how to advance my slides.

OK.

Good afternoon.

Christy Shifflett, Chief Operating Officer.

So I am going to focus, as Andy said, on workforce and customer service.

So the intention here on this slide is really to introduce the board and our community on our current environment around our workforce stabilization.

We have been working hard on recruitment and retention of our staff, but we have found some hurdles in that process.

Our market that we adjusted last year, in our last fiscal year, our market is comparables of who we see us competing with, where our staff goes, those who provide services and those

localities or such as UVA, for example, that live and are amongst our community.

That market has shifted and when we provided a 4% increase in July, most of our market did something different.

The average increase was about 6% for our market.

So that was one shift that we've been seeing and watching.

Another big difference is the really hybrid work environment that we find most communities and organizations in and that is that we are facing some challenges in the fact that people can live just about anywhere in Virginia

and still continue to work in a locality in a local government.

That's always been something that's been happening and is a modern approach to work in many different organizations but not as much in government services and it is today.

So as organizations have been adapting to do they come back, do they work from home, do they come into the office,

We are seeing many people have options where they can stay home and they can drive to another locality two days a week.

and receive that different compensation.

So that's another thing that we've been watching.

And then I just wanted to also say that in our recruitment realities, we have seen that many of our recruitments have been difficult and our vacancies have been hard to fill.

We have been maintaining about 80 vacancies since July and that's 80 vacancies across the whole organization.

and that's high for us we believe and also that's not where we want to be and also I would say that in those 80 vacancies and as we've been recruiting just since July we've had 44 positions that we have had to either repost or do an extensive recruitment effort on in order to retain qualified

and High Talent.

So with that I just wanted to share with this board some of the challenges that we've had and also the cost of housing in our area and the cost of living in our area is also something that has been, we might get all the way to the finish line with a candidate only to find that they make the decision that they can't afford to make that move.

So that's another thing that's weighing in.

So with that we really wanted to try to come up with some strategic approaches and that brings us back to our Gallagher study and the work that we did last year and our last fiscal year and on compensation and classification.

So in that Gallagher study we talked about our market as I've mentioned moving to a competitive compensation philosophy which we did and also we focused a lot on our public safety and we invested in our public safety pay scale

and making sure that those positions were, we were retaining those staff.

On the other side though, our classified scale, we were only able to afford, through that affordability lens, to go to a 90% of midpoint.

We would like to recommend that we move to a 100% of midpoint on that pay scale.

So that would mean a strategy where we would bring our employees at a minimum.

The hiring ranges would start at that 100% of midpoint and then beyond.

And we would also have a compression strategy that we would put in place due to time and seat per position.

So that would be step one of a two-step process.

So that would move our pay scales forward, our staff forward on that pay scale, and make us more market competitive.

And then at the same time, we are recommending a 2%

mid-year increase across the board for cost of living for all of our staff.

We believe that this will allow us to keep up with our shifting market and hopefully will make a better impact on our abilities to recruit our staff.

We also wanted to share that the state has provided, has taken action to provide increases mid-year as well to their employees.

So that's another consideration that we're watching.

This decision is not something that we're asking the board to make today.

This will be at our next board meeting.

We'll talk more about the next steps that was in a previous slide.

So as we move forward, now we're going to look at the

five-year plan considerations.

And so that is for us to pay close attention to the affordability lens, understanding that we have to look at all of the things that we're interested in doing.

But in this five-year plan conversation, we wanted to call out that there are market-based compensation strategies in this.

We have put in a 5% market increase in FY 25.

and also 2% for public safety.

And then we have increases in the out years as well.

We have the opportunity to talk through that at a later date, but in an effort to look at this and how this all adds up, we wanted to be realistic about being able to stay highly competitive as well as be able to fill our vacancies, what that might take for our organization.

We also have new positions added in each year.

And these are for really core services.

And so that's another thing that we can talk about.

We have eight new positions loaded into FY 25.

Just recognizing growth, our demand of services, and then also 15 new positions in the out years.

And then lastly, there are healthcare increases that have been included in here, as well as some funding for our employee health clinic.

That is really to offset costs that we're hoping that we can focus and decrease those healthcare costs that continue to happen by having that employee health clinic.

So the next slide is really about within goal six is looking at that full experience of what our staff need to do their best work and so obviously it's salary, it's staff development, but we also think that core business processes and systems are important and so this is just recognizing the decisions that we have made around modernizing our systems.

We are currently working on the community development system.

We are looking to move towards a project on our financial management system as well.

And so those costs are in this five-year plan.

And then lastly, talking about hybrid workspaces.

We recognize, and this board has heard about our challenges in our facilities and that at the rate of growth, we are running out of space, right?

except for that now we get to really think open-mindedly about what space looks like, how much space we need, and how much some of our staff are able to work from home.

And so that might mean coming up with different utilization programming.

And so you've already heard about this.

You've already heard about this previously and just acknowledging that those costs are in this five-year plan.

So with that, it closes our work and our effort on workforce and customer service.

All right, thank you.

Thank you, Christy.

Thank you, Board.

I'm Ryan Davidson, the Deputy Chief of Budget, and I'll be taking you through the rest of the expenditure assumptions in the FY 25-29 five-year plan.

Before we begin, last year's discussion of the five-year plan and the budget was really centered around activating the strategic plan to strengthen our foundations.

As we progress through the implementation of the efforts guided by the strategic plan, the assumptions in this year's plan are centered around the continuation of those efforts, programs, and projects from the previous years and looking at those items that we will continue our progress with the strategic plan and in some areas continuing on to the next steps of the strategic plan.

So as we progress, in orange on each of these slides will be the objectives under each goal that we have categorized funding in three ways.

First are items where there has been recent investment, either new funding or resources, and the benefits may not be fully recognized yet, but they're underway.

Second is items where the resources are in place and no new funding is necessarily needed at this time, but the staff capacity is underway to advance these efforts as well.

And those will be shown under the heading of recent new funding.

The third area is key new assumptions in the five-year plan, many of which the board has weighed in on or given direction previously, and some of which are planned for future discussions with the board, as Christy alluded to.

And those will be noted under new funding.

So as we move through, starting here with Goal 1, first I will note, under the recent funding, the Hearts team, which we have spoken about previously today, and

This is one where there was recent funding in 23 and 24 and the benefits of the community are beginning to be recognized as this program engages in its operations.

So as the assumptions for the new funding in this plan, as you just heard about recently, the ACRJ jail renovations in coming years and the regional jail will be undertaking this renovation and the county will need to fund its share of the debt service to finance these renovations.

Also, there is an increased level of funding dedicated for blight remediation, as outlined in that ordinance, as well as the inclusion of operating impacts of the court's facilities addition and renovation as those facilities come online in the near future.

As we continue to enhance and develop the human service initiatives for our community, some recent operational and one-time funding of note includes funding for the emergency assistance program and for those human

Services, multiple human services positions.

Some new funding assumptions include the new funding for the ABRT human service priority areas that Kaki Demick spoke to the board about back in July as we examined the community nonprofit agency funding processes.

Also included is the county has currently been approved for three FEMA SAFER grants that fund approximately 50 fire rescue employees for three years for each of those grants.

Those positions began to be funded locally in FY24 with increases in our local costs and our local shares in FY25, 26 and the other out years as those grants expire.

Finally, the Fire Rescue Long Range Planning.

This is in response to the changing service demands and the request for supplemental staffing from various volunteer stations as well as in response to the board direction to consider how to adapt in this changing landscape.

This is an effort for us to be more proactive to meet these changing demands and less reactive.

Moving along to Goal 2, these are two objectives where utilizing existing funding and or continuing recent efforts applies.

Specifically, in the area of climate action implementation, it is related to utilizing the existing climate action pool and other existing resources to move those efforts forward.

Finally, I'll note that on this slide, the five-year plan includes operating funding for the Northern Convenience Center and the recently funded Baylor facility once those are constructed.

While these are not solely about this goal or objective, I did not want them to get lost amongst the other assumptions as we do have those operational impacts moving forward.

Continuing with Goal 2, Stream Health, we are looking to continue the work of the next phase of the Stream Health initiatives where funding was previously added for those phases.

The last item, Community Risk Mitigation and Recovery, doesn't have anything specifically tied to it as this is about collaboration and the continuation of work already started rather than true additional resources.

As we move to Goal 3, for broadband it's again the same story about the continuation of the work started in previous fiscal years and using those existing program resources to continue that work and advance those efforts, but not necessarily adding additional new funding on top of that at this point.

On the Long Range Water and Wastewater Plans Initiative, we have worked to establish a collaborative work group with our community partners, ACS, Albemarle County Service Authority, and Rivanna, Solid Water and Sewer Authority, and it's more about the collaboration with our community partners rather than new funding at this time.

Continuing on with Goal 3, the Street Sweeper program was fully funded in FY24 and began operation this past summer, as well as the entrance corridor and right-of-way maintenance programming efforts.

While this presentation mainly focuses on operating funding, I did want to point out the transportation leveraging funding that was included in the FY24-28 CIP as it speaks directly to this goal and objective, and we'll have more conversations on that at a later time.

In terms of new funding assumptions included in the five-year plan, we have transit, where we began the discussion with the board on this item at your last meeting, and as we move forward with the transit services in this community, including micro-transit, as well as others, there will be operational funding impacts, and those have been contemplated in this five-year plan.

For goal four, AC44, this is, again, more about the capacity to continue existing efforts rather than new resources.

In FY24 and some prior years, the Economic Development Fund received one-time funding infusions.

And in FY25 through 29, the five-year plan assumes the beginning of an ongoing and sustainable funding stream for that program as we move forward.

As was noted on the previous slide around the Economic Development Fund, the Housing Fund has received one-time infusions of funding as well, as well as some new positions.

Here again, the FY 25-29 five-year financial plan assumes the inclusion of an ongoing and sustainable funding stream for that program.

As we continue to build out our parks and recreation facilities, the new funding here is the additional operational cost as these projects will be coming online.

While we're not referring to the new CIP funding here, although there will be some as outlined in the 24-28 CIP, this is really looking at the operational costs to move these facilities forward and operate them once they come online.

My comments on Goal 5 will be very brief, given that the December 6 work session will be dedicated to a joint meeting with the school board.

But I do want to note that the five-year plan provides funding to the school operations based on the operating formula around the revenue allocations and the revenue splits with the school.

And I also wanted to note here some of the larger projects in the current five-year CIP plan, such as the high school capacity, elementary schools, and the school renovations,

But again, there will be the opportunity for more engagement with the schools at the December 6th meeting.

So board, now that we have discussed the various assumptions, what does their inclusion look like in the context of the five-year plan?

Before I go into the details of exactly what is in this chart, I did want to start with some of the same disclaimer that Mr. Bowman mentioned earlier, that this is based on our best information as of today and as we continue to refine our future revenue and expenditure assumptions, that will adjust this picture.

Now, some notable unknowns at this time are timing and depth of any economic slowdown, inflation in energy prices and what those may do, impacts of future federal funding, what our future real estate assessments may look like, as well as other things such as revenue sharing with the city, retirement, healthcare increases, and those items.

As Mr. Bowman emphasized, this is a starting point.

This is not a finalized plan.

We wanted to provide you with a starting point to look at.

As we are updating projections, we're also considering what might happen next, when we'll know it, and how we might need to pivot if and when needed.

So the focus is on the long-term trajectory, not necessarily FY 25, as that gap will be worked heading into the annual budget process.

So what does this graph mean?

In this graph, we have included all of the mandates and obligations that were in the first graph that Mr. Bowman spoke about earlier, as well as those areas where staff felt that there was board-supported strategic plan alignment through previous discussions held with the board.

Those assumptions were what was laid out as the new funding in the previous slides.

Also included are compensation strategies that are inflationary based, around 2%.

Mrs. Shifflet spoke of the 5% increases, the market-based strategies.

This is a pure inflationary based, around that 2% mark, to move us forward with inflationary based increases.

Also, position growth that is above zero but below that of what Ms.

Shifflett spoke about that would be needed to keep up with the proper per capita ratio, which was 15, which was an assumption of approximately half of that in this assumption.

And so as you can see, those lines start to diverge a little bit here as we put these assumptions.

But again, as we look through and we continue to look at the choices and the menu of options that have been provided, those lines can close and widen depending on what

So, in this final graph, we have included all of the mandates and obligations, all of those areas where we felt there was board supported strategic plan alignment.

all of the inflationary-based compensation strategies.

But in addition, we have layered on top of that what would it look like if we added all the staff needed to main that FTE per capita ratio, 15 new and additional staff per year, as well as some areas that we plan to bring back to the board for more in-depth future discussion, such as market-based compensation strategies and long-range planning for our fire rescue system.

While we have received feedback on many, if not all of the other assumptions, we wanted to provide the Board with the opportunity for additional information, feedback, and discussion on these particular items listed to the right of this chart, as well as any other items the Board may want additional information on.

Finally, this brings us to our next steps.

The next time we will be in front of the Board is December 6th for the joint meeting with the School Board, where the focus will be primarily on the Capital Improvement Program.

Then on December 13th, we will be back with a continued focus on county government.

And as of right now, the plan is to discuss tax relief for the elderly or disabled and the workforce stabilization items mentioned in the previous slides.

Again, this is in order to afford the board with the opportunity for additional information, provide feedback, and have discussion on these particular items that have not had the same level of discussion as some of the other strategic plan and five-year plan items or other potential areas that the board would like additional discussion.

So this concludes our content for today, and I will hand it over to you, Chair Price, for the Board discussion.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Board, we will go through our order.

Thank you.

This is my opening presentation.

Mr. Bowman mentioned the difference between budgeting and financial projections.

This is evident that budgeting is hard, but this really feels much more difficult.

I guess in terms of what it does well, I very much appreciate that we seem to be preparing ourselves to gather all the different pieces together that need to be considered in our projections and those focused on all the goals, which I think is exactly how we should frame this.

and I appreciate that inflation was taken into account in terms of salaries but I also know that there are things like the expected revenue growth that might have come from real estate assessments or other matters and I don't know exactly how that was couched and whether it really is an inflationary growth in and of itself in terms of the projections on our revenues and how much inflation is involved

in all of these assumptions.

It's difficult.

I guess I very much appreciate the position we're in and I am supportive of closing that gap and recognizing our marketplace in terms of keeping top quality employees and being able to recruit top quality candidates for our positions.

I guess I would like to see in this analysis a better sense of as we invest in certain things, what is our return on investment?

What are our savings that might be realized from some of these investments?

So obviously modernization systems will help us with recruiting.

Modernization Systems may also help us in terms of saving money in the future and it would be nice to see what that return is on those.

I guess the same thing applies for economic development.

I think that an economic development plan is

intended to not just, you know, maintain the vibrancy of our community but also help grow the tax base and increase revenue.

So it would be nice to see that information projected if possible.

I fully appreciate that this is very difficult.

So I'm going to leave it there at the moment and like I said, appreciate the difficulty of the exercise.

All right.

Thank you.

So is this the

Just the questions and maybe do another discussion point or get into these.

Answering these might come later.

Is there, Christy, I don't know if this question can be answered, but Jessica Rice might know the answer or maybe has research on it.

With the current situation with the vacancies, even if we were in a situation where we were not

like our compensation was leading the market or a lead you know what I mean we're ahead of or above market is there kind of an idea of best case scenario where that vacancy number would be like we're at 80 and I'm sure there's a percentage and then we're re-advertising but even if we were

Like how many of those 80 might be taken out if we were already where we want to be compensation-wise and otherwise?

Work-life balance, the other things that we can say are value adds for working here.

So I think that we're about 12% vacancy rate.

And so we would aim for about 5% would be great.

I think honestly all the rest of this is probably commentary or me getting into those so I'm good now.

Yes, thank you very much.

I guess this is just a clarification for me.

I remember when we were talking about our five-year financial picture, I remember several years ago a discussion about the need to have, and this is kind of a minute question or a detail, but a new ECC facility.

and I haven't heard anything about that for a long time.

I'm not trying to get us down into a swirl but I'm thinking about, we've been talking about the renovation for the jail.

We've been talking about an authority for transit.

I remember the ECC discussion about needing a new facility and of course that's a shared facility and I understand that.

Where do we stand on that when we're talking about information you don't have?

The Emergency Communications Center has prepared a capital improvements plan request and submitted that to our staff this fall.

So that's one of the upcoming budget process that we'll begin to talk about in the context of the CID.

This discussion about all these renovations made me think about some of this.

Oh, comments, okay.

So, responses to plan and assumptions.

I think the, I really agree with the market piece, that staying competitive, and I agree very much with that.

I don't think I really have any questions about the market.

I think you all have handled that very well.

Expect to see but didn't what areas are required for information.

I actually think I'm okay right now.

I guess there will be ongoing discussions in December with the school division as to how their plans are working in with ours because we'll have that ability to have that discussion.

Yeah, I think I made some notes, but I think I am good as far as questions go.

Thank you.

Yes, this is one of the more painful things that I have to deal with because it's so hard to grab onto something.

You all have done a wonderful job in trying to analyze and present us with all the things we don't know.

But that's pretty scary from my perspective.

So understanding the potential challenges and risks every year,

I think we do better on that and I'm sort of grateful that we're in the state we're in compared to where many other places are who are really, really up the creek and very worried about their survival much less how well they're going to be able to do or how many new wonderful things they'll be able to do.

What's missing and not expected to be here is how much we can save versus an offsetting as the processes get redirected and software might take over some of the roles that will allow staff to do different things.

That's still greatly uncertain.

What I would love more additional information about is also not available today and that is that how will we do as we continue to diversify our business growth and will we ever get closer to a 20% revenue pie for the business pie piece instead of 12 or wherever it is now because I think that will make

a big difference to us and I think we'll continue with one of the wonderful additions made to the operation within the last year or so was having the grants person because there were so many places where we had no capacity to be able to do that and so we're on our own funding-wise in many instances that now we will be able to go after

and manage and report on, et cetera, a lot of those other opportunities.

One of the things the transportation people talked about at BACO was what's missing for localities to be able to take better opportunities for the federal dollars, BIL, all those kinds of things.

And there is a new person who's actually a new consultancy the governor has set up.

to try to provide technical assistance for a change to localities.

Same thing with EPA.

There's all sorts of technical assistance available for climate things that we would be normally paying for on our own.

So a major challenge is figuring out where we fit and which program things we should try to fund.

The admonition always is don't chase the dollars, develop the program, and then see where the dollars might be available.

So you all have done the first part here with developing the program, and then we have to fill in the second part.

So I look forward to more information on all of those things, and I look forward to having these slides so I can do more homework on those.

Yes, thank you very much for the presentation.

There is a lot of information here,

A lot of it is frankly worrying to me because of the fact that we're going to have the expenditures and revenues, that gap there, and I guess we'll find out later on how we're going to be closing that gap.

I know that volunteer fire departments are asking for more and more help.

You mentioned that.

So that is taken into the equation that that's going to keep

increasing that they're asking for more and more help.

And I know our safer grants will be going away.

They're each about, what, three years.

And so we will need all that cost as being

I'd like to address that, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, because I think that's a really, really good question with where we are with our five-year financial planning.

First thing, thank you so much to this board and to our grants folks, to our ACFR leadership, to budget and finance with the strategy to go after the safer grants.

now in our third iteration of that.

And this board has been very supportive of that.

And board, you know that that federal funding, it allows us to step into the full cost of the additional staff over a long period of time.

It feathers through several budgets.

I believe Ryan said three grants totaling 50 staff.

Secondly, thank you to our volunteer fire departments across this county.

What an amazing level of service over decades that they've given and they continue to give our community and our citizens.

And, Board, you know that you have seen, I think Supervisor Price quoted the numbers across the Commonwealth that have moved, I think, from 120,000 to 20,000 over a course of time.

We know this is a national level.

of concern and what's happening, but we are working hard to try with the Chief's help to determine that long-term plan.

And this Board asked for that.

Several years ago you said, I appreciate the SAFER grants, I appreciate that as a strategy, and I appreciate our competitiveness with that, but we're going to also have to look beyond a SAFER grant to be able to project.

What do we look like five years out?

and I think later at the end of this presentation we'll be earmarking that we're going to come back to you, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, and say Chief Eggleston and our team, we're going to project out beyond the SAFER grants and we're going to have to take the full cost for those SAFER grants, but in addition to that, if we continue to experience challenges with service delivery, how do we continue to step up, assuming that there may not be federal funding in the future?

and so that's what that's about.

And that level of public safety service in this community, that's a big item for us to talk about.

That is a big item.

So I wanted to take a minute and step in front of the team and talk about that because we've been working on that with your support now for about six years in looking at strategies to be able to afford more services combined with the outstanding volunteer programs that we've got here.

Thank you.

Supervisor Galloway, you had another question?

Well, no, you finish.

I apologize.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you very much for that because I do know that's going to be an additional expense, but it's also an expense that this community really supports.

They support fire.

They support police.

they want those positions and I will just give a shout out for Chief Eggleston because he has been working with the volunteer, at least volunteer fire department at Stonyport and I think the others in getting them the things they need so that they will continue to be viable and we're asking as we ask for more and more volunteers.

I think this community over the decades has been very fortunate to have a very good volunteer fire department

and that's not continuing it looks like so those are expenses we'll have to absorb.

I did want to ask about in the calculations for our five-year economic growth plan

At what level did you assume assessments?

Did that come into that equation?

So last year we had a lot of, we had large assessments as we all know.

It certainly will in the future.

Our approach in this, our revenue projection was very high level in the out years, looking at our revenues in total, the one particular source.

I know that as we look at our revenue data, it really is too early to predict what the next upcoming reassessment would be.

But at the same time, we do have signs that are not causing us an alarm in terms of a

So you've taken more of a middle of the road approach as you plan out the five-year program?

Yes.

Okay, thank you very much.

No other questions.

Thank you.

I apologize for cutting ahead.

Yeah, and I apologize, Supervisor Price.

I may have broke the rhythm and the tempo, but as Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley was asking that, I asked Ryan to go back and just look at slide nine, which addresses projected growth through 29.

No, thank you.

Can you go to slide 26?

You probably stated this, but I missed.

And then 25.

I don't know if I missed a transition there.

This is the total

costs to get to our strategic, to align with our strategic plan and that's the gap that exists.

And then the next one, re-explain the difference between the two slides.

No, sir.

And the combined one is this one?

Yes, sir.

All right.

Thank you.

And actually, that's where I was going to go.

If you go back to number nine first,

and then we're going to do 9, 10, 25 and 26 fairly quickly.

But that really is the issue as we look at 9, which is taking a relatively conservative as we should do approach.

But that's based upon that averaged 4% revenue increase.

So clearly, if the revenue increase is below 4%, what we're going to see in the last two slides and a minute becomes an even greater gap in there.

So if you'll then go to number 10, this is, I understand, here we've got revenues above expenditures, but that's before if you go to 25 and 26.

All of the things we want and need to do in order to achieve our overall objectives here.

And again, that's all based upon anticipated revenues and expenditures.

And if you would go to your questions slide really quickly.

I think your plan is well done.

I appreciate it.

I appreciate the fact that you continually update us on this.

Not necessarily something I expected to see but didn't, but something I would like to see and didn't.

And I can say this because it has no direct personal impact on me, but I believe that the supervisor compensation is inadequate.

And I would very much like to see a comprehensive compensation review of supervisors

not just

based upon our population, unlike, for example, Fairfax County where each district is larger population than our total county and they are full-time.

Based upon my four years, the hours that I put in, the hours I know my predecessor and the hours I know every member on this board does, I believe it's inadequate.

And so I can say that because it won't benefit me.

In areas requiring additional information,

I think you all are covering everything very well.

So for those questions, I don't have anything more.

I do want to give the supervisors an opportunity to go around one more time for any additional comments that you might have.

I think I was kind of hybrid there in my addressing the questions and asking my questions, so I don't really have much to add.

I just encourage, of course, the word I wrote down is nimble, and being nimble in all this is going to be absolutely necessary as much as we can be, because this is a big ship and it's hard to turn.

But there are obviously going to be things that will happen.

that will require us to react and hopefully anticipate as much as possible.

So I really appreciate the effort.

Thank you.

We've been chasing that down ever since and that was our strategy to not be at market.

to be at a percent of market.

And that, I just did not have the ability to see what that means for your long-term organizational health.

So as it goes to your suggestion or recommendation for compensation, in my view, it's not about catching up.

We need to catch up.

It's not about keeping pace.

We have to keep pace.

But we need to move ahead of and then become, stay ahead and lead the market.

I think the health of the organization and ultimately our effectiveness to achieve our strategic plan will demand that.

And if we just get at market and stay pace and we're not leading the way, I think we ultimately fall back behind.

So that's something that whatever we have to do to achieve that objective is what I would be in full support of.

If the positions aren't filled, then

you know the burden that puts on all the rest of the staff becomes particularly problematic because then you're spread you still have the workload you just have to do it with less people so the vacancies creates a morale issue if we do not get those filled and I don't you know organizational help but the performance the effectiveness of the performance of the organization becomes critical and if we're not you know it

At 80% of the market, I'm not saying we haven't had talented people when we've had that compensation strategy, but if you're not paying them well and you're not filling all your positions,

and then you're demanding a big strategic plan with high expectations, then are you really going to get what you're trying to achieve?

So the strategic plan demands that we do the compensation recommendations that you've brought forward.

And I think it's always important to tell folks

Taxpayers, what drives these decisions?

Well, the strategic plan is informed by what we hear that our taxpayers want in the community.

So we best darn well get the folks that are needed to make that strategic plan happen and the compensation strategies needed for that.

The Economic Outlook Report, there were seven recommendations they make towards the end of it.

I'm not going to go through all of those.

But the second one was clearly defined and refined strategic goals, which you just walked through where we're going.

The third one was long-run financial planning and robust scenario planning to illuminate potential checkpoints and develop shopping lists and potential response options.

It was pretty wordy.

But what you all are doing in today's presentation is falling right in line with what the recommendations of the Economic Outlook Report suggested.

The first one was a detailed assessment of the organization's financial foundation, including strength, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.

I think we've been hearing a lot of that.

And then we just talked about number seven was agility in action, where we have to be able to, at a moment's notice, make a decision and not just wait.

So a mid-year adjustment, a looking at what the reality is, becomes just another item that you guys are going, look, this is what was recommended to us in this economic outlook report.

Their final statement said, to enhance resiliency, enhance long-term financial and scenario planning by combining financial forecasting with strategizing, thereby projecting revenues, expenses, and cash for a minimum of three to five years and longer if possible, anticipating the future impacts of costs increases, contracts, revenue trends, service demands, and liabilities,

in developing robust alternative scenarios with documented assumptions.

Well as a board member how in the hell could I not be pleased with what I'm hearing today

after having received this economic outlook report that we all agreed was a lot to, one, digest, but then you already have come back to us today and are showing how you're achieving what's recommended in that report by the folks that are advising us on our finances and our planning.

So well done.

I'm in full support of that.

In terms of additional information or expect to see, nothing came to mind right now, but I'm sure if it does that I'll bring that up at a different time.

Thank you.

Yeah, just a couple of comments perhaps, but I really appreciate this presentation because it really shows me the gap and what we're facing and that's critical because, you know, you have to know what's coming.

So that's great.

I also really appreciate the look at our market.

We have changed our market.

over the years, which is great because our market for a long time was not even appropriate.

Ned, you remember those days.

And the 80% didn't work as well.

So I really appreciate looking at the market.

I think what we're all agreeing on is we need to be an employer of choice.

and what do we do to be an employer of choice and that gets to perhaps the health clinic, it gets to a lot of items that we have discussed which I'm really impressed with.

The other thing that I will say is

I remember ways back, before the pandemic, talking about how a healthy, and reading, about how a healthy community has to have about 30 to 35 percent of their revenues from business tax base.

to be healthy, right?

To not put so much of an emphasis on property tax and residential, about 30%, 35%.

The last time I looked, we were at 18 or 19%.

And so all I'm saying is we have a lot of work to do, in my opinion, around economic development.

And I really look forward to some robust discussions about how to support that work.

and it's a way to diversify, right, in thinking about how to diversify our tax pays and economic development is one of them and I think we're at the cusp of being able to do that and I'm looking forward to some of those discussions about how to strengthen our economic development to diversify our tax pays, right, and to balance us out so that our proportions are much more

support our residents in a much better way than just putting all the cost on property tax.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I did think of a couple in response to other people's questions.

The volunteer numbers that you spoke about are very troubling, but we do have some successes here.

And especially with the recruitment and engagement of young people in the university and others,

So...

One thing which is not on the list but may be forthcoming is the category in which we're updating 50 and 70 year old volunteer fire facilities because when one has a dozen new volunteers all released and ready to go and there's no chairs to sit in because it's too small, it was designed for a different time.

That's just something to put on the list to make sure we're not forgetting and then realizing in February, oh, we forgot to put that in the budget.

The economic development comment, I support that too because we've made some progress in the last several years about shifting from home building to primary business.

You know, if you're making widgets and selling them outside the area, you're bringing in outside money here.

That's one of the reasons Rivanna Station is so important to bring in federal dollars that are then circling around in our community.

So I think

that will, if we're successful at continuing those things, that will help to bring dollars which may have fewer expenses with them.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I've had all my questions answered.

I do like how you've laid out this plan.

It's very understandable.

There's a lot more information to come, I realize that.

And I would like to know if there's an update on what Supervisor McKeel said, saying that 18% of our businesses is, is that a... Well that was the last I heard.

That was years ago.

That was the last.

And I was wondering if there's an update on that.

I do not have the precise number, but as last I understand it, that commercial tax base in terms of our total real property is in the 15 to 20 percent range.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

I totally support what you're proposing here.

Definitely believe that we need to go to the 100% midpoint.

I support the across the boards.

I support the hiring and retention bonuses.

I commend the innovative thought of bringing in the health care clinic.

I'm concerned 80 vacancies, if I understand, is about 10% of the county workforce.

40 would be about 5%, tie that in with 44 have had to be reposted and I know that there have been at least a number of situations where highly qualified individuals who wanted to come and work for us

were unable to afford to come here because of both the cost of living here, employment for other family members and other factors.

You know, we here on the board with our own hire of the county attorney showed some real challenges on being able to get the caliber we wanted and had to repost.

And we're very, very successful that we're very happy to have Mr. Rosenberg here.

But, you know, it was a challenge.

I mean, and that is the reality.

in local government these days.

So the things that you were proposing I definitely support and appreciate the great work that's gone in.

I also appreciate the fact that you on a regular basis with some frequency give us these updates.

So we're constantly able to see where we are, where we've been, where we are, and where we think we're going.

And of course there are a lot of variables.

And then one last thing at VACO this week a number of people I spoke with

We're really wanting to know how Albemarle County does it.

I mean, how can we be as successful as we are?

So, Mr. Richardson, your entire staff, we thank you for it.

We know it's like a garden.

It doesn't grow great unless you tend to it, and that's what you're doing, so thank you.

Any other comments?

No?

I believe so.

I know that we are at time, and I certainly will look to my left to Mr. Sumner,

Mr. Davidson, but I've taken about a half page of notes And appreciate your notes board about the the comments about the tax diversification the balance between resident residential and business the continued push for grants

the need to move ahead with market-based modernization of systems and looking for savings and return on investment.

I appreciate that and because we will work hard during the budget process with our departments to try to really hone in on the investments and where we are with that.

So that's a theme that we certainly have heard lessening, our sensitivity of lessening the reliance on the residential tax base.

paying attention in the budget process to our volunteer fire department's capital programs.

So I think I've done a decent job of taking good notes.

Gentlemen, do you have what you need leaving today?

Ms.

Shifflett?

Mr. Bowman, thank you for your leadership, Chair.

All right.

I would ask if everyone be back, though, in seats.

At 4 o'clock, we still have another presentation and it looks like a fairly busy closed session.

There we go.

Thank you all for coming back on time.

We can now move to item number 11, Clean Earth Fill and Inert Waste Activity Program Update.

And Ms.

Filardo, good afternoon still.

Thank you, Chair Price.

Jody Filardo, Community Development Director.

This afternoon we've got, I think, the very shortest presentation I've ever made to the board.

So we are here today to talk about the Clean Earth Fill and Waste Code.

You may recall for those who were here back in 2019 the board adopted a resolution of intent that subsequently resulted in the adoption of ZTA 2019-0007 which created our zoning code 5.1.28 which is the fill and waste code.

Time marched on and we wound up presenting to you on the 20th of July in 2022 a special exception requested by Kendrick Farm for the opportunity to haul in dirt to improve the soil and his farm to make pasture land available for the Kendrick Farm and you did approve that.

Subsequent to that, we've had feedback both from the board indicating an interest to have some information and an update on the particular experience we've had with the fill and waste ordinance.

So we did go out for a period of time, about a little under a month.

This year asking for stakeholder comment on the fill and waste ordinance because we have received quite a lot of varied feedback We did receive during that comment period 67 responses 51 of which tended to be Virginia farmer a boilerplate that was shared and then sent in and

several from Albemarle County Farmers and then two specific individual letters that were shared and 11 others of various types that were not categorically in one

covering one topic or another.

But overall the feedback can be collected into really three main areas.

We heard from our farmers who essentially said two main things.

Please don't regulate clean earth fill or inert waste.

That's very useful on the farm and they were not interested in us moving forward with that.

But they were supportive of regulating contaminants.

The neighbors, on the other hand, have been concerned about the volume of trucks through the neighborhood and also the volume of activities as dirt is being moved.

We had a couple different people indicate that for inert waste, please don't bury it, recycle it instead.

So that was another interest.

And we did hear from a couple folks, part of that 11 other category, that were saying, you know, we have gardens in our homes, but we're on less than five acres.

We want to be able to bring in fill dirt for our gardens.

In addition, as staff, we struggled as we were working through the special exception with Mr. Kendrick on a couple different aspects of this code.

One was there was not clarity in the code about who is actually the regulating authority from the county.

Was it the zoning ordinance or was it the county engineer?

And that got us a little bit confused as to who was the who who had to make the decision about how to move forward with this.

And we've also had some challenges regulating fill coming from site plans.

And we'd like to clarify some of that as well as staff.

With all of that, what we've tried to do today is present at least three options for your consideration.

We're open to many more, but we thought we'd at least start with three that were making sense to us based on the feedback we had received.

The first is, as an option, we can continue to monitor the situation and then return to the board at a later date with yet another update as things move on.

The second was we could engage with stakeholders who are interested in recommending modifications to fill in waste and the third is we could revise the code and then fold it into the zoning ordinance modernization that is going to take a couple years yet to gel but we'll come back to the board for consideration.

So really, that is all we wanted to cover with you all today.

All right.

Thank you.

We'll go through our board order.

Thank you.

If we could go back to slide five there just to keep it in mind when you refer to the three options.

Well, I guess you've just made option four.

What we had done so far up until this point is after we had put in the code, because we put it in relatively quickly, we didn't go through an extensive stakeholder process as we normally like to do because there had been some concern.

There was a particular event that was driving a lot of our board's concern relative to fill-in-waste when this first went in.

So the Continue to Monitor and Return to the Board has really been the approach we've been taking ever since that code went in.

You could look at this as Continue to Monitor and Engage, and we are open to doing that.

Right now,

What we'd like to recommend though is we would like to recommend, if we were going to go that direction, we'd like to recommend that we wait until July 1 of the new fiscal year so that we are staffing appropriately to go through a full engagement process.

We have heard from

An array of different people in the community who are interested in engaging with us on some revisions, and particularly we have some gentlemen in the audience today from the Farm Bureau, one of those constituencies that are interested in helping us work through this.

So we definitely could and would continue to monitor and move forward, but we were hoping on the engage process to hope to push that out a little bit.

Well, I appreciate the time constraints and the need to take this when you're ready to take it, and I don't think July is unreasonable to begin to engage more fully.

But I do see that, you know, that

I read through the ordinance, I wasn't here when it was passed, but I read through the ordinance and I'm not in favor of wholesale repeal of the ordinance.

It seems to have many steps in it that I think are important to put a check on activities that otherwise could create

Mosquito pools could create unsafe conditions, could be disruptive for nearby properties.

There are a lot of protections in there.

That being said, I could see whether maybe some things in here that, based on the experiences we've had, could be revisited and hope that we could do that.

I don't think that option two looks good to me, but as a process, if it had to begin in July, I would be open to that.

All right.

Thank you.

I don't believe I would be in a different spot actually.

It seems the of the different I think if I in this summary it had said there were two instances where we granted clearances.

I mean the

It would seem that the folks that went through that process could be used, I mean I don't know if they're the same individuals or not, but could be helpful to receive feedback and some engagement with to understand moving forward what could be there.

It seems the regulation of

In looking for the common ground, it seems like the contaminant is the piece that everybody wants to, whether the views regulate or whatever word we use, that seems to be a mutual concern there.

So if the ordinance needs to be revisited, I would think that's what we would focus on.

Are we doing something that prohibits or prevents or gets in the way of activity that we would all agree that

would be okay, and does it need to target a different area, I guess, to prevent what we're trying to prevent from happening.

So I'm grateful to supervise Andrews, kind of pointing out that one, two, and three don't seem really like options with the steps.

So I would certainly be in favor of that.

The timing of when it would need to happen,

I would leave that to the staffing and what you would need to do.

I would have to follow your lead on that one, but I guess that's where I'm at.

Other than that, I don't have a whole lot of questions about it.

All right, thank you.

I agree with I think what both of the two supervisors just said.

There was a reason why we put this into place and we were trying to provide some protection so I'm not ready to just say okay we're just going to.

At the same time I understand

Supervisor McKeel, Bart Sobota, the Zoning Administrator.

Yes, we have one that fell in the, if you went through the regulation, what we call the clearance category, that qualified

for just the clearance.

The other one, the property owner who's here this afternoon had come to board actually twice for two special exceptions.

One, the first, the application was denied.

The second one, we worked with Mr. Kendrick and were able to reach a resolution and approval

And so we kind of have those two ends of the spectrum.

There hasn't been a lot in between that the county has been aware of.

So some of you may be aware that there's a large farm on the south side of the county.

I think it's in the Crossroads area that's doing a lot of grading on their farm.

So if you read through the regulation, that particular type of activity, because it's moving dirt on your own farm,

or on the parcel in the farm, it doesn't qualify as a fill activity.

We've had some other ones where the site plan actually covered the fill area offsite, which on the front part of that regulation, the first line, if it's in accordance with an approved plan, site plan onsite, or it's covered the fill area, which is I think what we were talking about as far as

We don't want mud in the streams.

So that's covered by the plan.

So we have had a handful of the other ones.

There's actually a special exception that was submitted or is going to be submitted in the next couple of weeks for two lots in a subdivision in Crozet.

And this is an example of, is this far enough or too far?

It's actually under two acres.

If they pull the house permit,

We wouldn't call a fill because it's an associated when approved permitted activity, but what they want to do is get the two house lots pad ready.

The two lots together equal a little over half an acre, I believe.

So each lot individually doesn't meet the two-acre minimum, yet it's in an approved subdivision, but the subdivision is old enough where there's no active plans.

So we don't have

protections in place, in other words, to have them fall under that protective plan.

You'll have a third scenario that comes before the board in a couple of months on, is this too much or not enough?

That's akin to the comment on the garden.

Do we do fill for garden?

The problem is, in some of this, is it the best?

If we're doing maintenance on the farm road, that doesn't count as fill, right?

And so some of those other activities that we have, you might be able to dump a dump truck load, but maybe not 20 dump truck loads, depending on the size of your garden.

So there is some balance there in the time that we've had.

We do not have very many examples.

But we have gotten a lot of questions and sort of what ifs.

So I don't know if that helps, is more confusing.

And it's like everything else in life.

There's a balance, right?

And some common sense is needed, but it's hard to write ordinances, and I get that.

I mean, yes.

Just complaints.

An example would be we've had some on those two clearances.

We've also had some on the farm activity I just described that is exempt from the regulation.

We've had other ones that actually turned out to be not dumping complaints.

or as far as not clean or fill violations, they turned into underzoning what we would call dumping, illegal dumping, and we would take care of it that way.

So there's some, again, we've got to go out and investigate and we'll see.

And some of them are repetitive, so out of those we may have three or four that came from, were about the same site, but from different folks.

So, sorting through, just thinking about this, we can get all kinds of emails because someone sends out a blast and says, use this cut and paste, and send us all kinds of emails about something, when really trying to figure out the nuances of this and where the actual concerns are and the problems are is a different issue, right?

I'm just not willing to throw this entire thing out and start over again, that's for sure.

I don't know if there's some, and I agree with Ned and Jim, it does seem like there's a way maybe to nuance this in a way that

We investigate a little bit more, take a look at, but I would certainly would need more than two events, right, to make a significant change.

I mean, I would say that there's probably some tweaks as opposed to significant changes.

And since this is the beginning in

In my opinion, an ordinance needs to be a living, breathing document.

As we learn things, we need to make changes and we need to make upgrades.

So definitely some things, even with the few examples that we have, we've learned that there's some tweaks definitely that we have to make.

We've also learned that there's some good things in there that we need to keep.

So I would agree that looking at it and analyzing it and making some tweaks is probably appropriate.

A wholesale removal of it,

And for me, I like that we're tweaked.

That's great.

Because I think this board is always interested in looking at our ordinances and seeing how we can make them better.

But you have to have enough data to figure out what to do to make them better.

And I'm not sure if we have it here.

And although I'm happy to agree to making some tweaks right now, I'm not willing to say we're going to just

completely changed this.

I'm going with your tweaks.

categories of questions.

One was people who said, why is asphalt being allowed, and this is not relevant to any of your cases right now, but why are people allowed to put asphalt in the ground just because the state says it's inert but it's full of petrochemicals and they leach out and this is what happens.

So that's an ongoing assessment that may be evolving over time as well.

And then there are others who talk about the impacts to neighbors category in which we

have been an important characterization for all of our other processes that they said, well, why does this count here?

So I understand all the different threads that have come together on this.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Could you go back to slide four?

and where the neighbors were complaining about the number of trucks, the volume of trucks and everything, that's for one particular property, correct?

Not really.

So we have a, there's a St.

early's vale that's probably the most active.

But generally when we receive a complaint, and probably some of the supervisors can vouch for me on this, it starts with, there's a lot of dump trucks going down my road, what's going on?

And it could be that somebody's got a house permit and they're building a house, but also it's that trigger.

So one of the things we've learned through the process is sometimes it's not the fill itself, but it's the amount of traffic or trucks that are put on the road.