Board of Supervisors Regular First Meeting   8/7/2024

I'm getting the thumbs up from our clerk and I believe I've already announced the remote participation by Supervisor Andrews.

Yes.

Thank you.

I can hear you now.

That's great.

I believe you're muted for us.

Okay.

Can you hear me now?

Hello.

Is audio getting to end?

He can hear us.

So he can hear us.

We can't hear him.

Can you?

I only just heard.

So it's to turn up the volume.

I'm not sure what to say.

I am getting...

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm not aware of any changes to the agenda.

If not, I will entertain a motion to adopt the final agenda.

Motion from Supervisor Mallek.

Second from Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

Mr. LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

Aye.

All right.

free screenings and information, health screenings, health and wellness resources, immunizations, community resources, fitness information, financial health resources.

UVA and Centera will be present for all this, and it's Saturday, September 28th, and maybe we can put this also on one of our newsletters, but Saturday, September 28th, from 10 a.m.

to 2 p.m.

at the St.

John Family Life and Fitness Center.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate the comments of earlier speakers calling out all the work that our volunteers do all across our community, whether it's trails or serving their neighbors through storms and helping veterans transition back to civilian life, all sorts of stressors that are made better by our fellow citizens along the way.

I will, this gives me a great reminder to thank the Crozet trails crew who has for 15 years been building trails in the growth area in Crozet and who are now raising donation funds for a significant bridge over Lickenhole Creek which will connect neighborhoods south of the creek to the downtown without having to go on the street which will be wonderful.

I was fortunate to attend the National Night Out and Putt Putt event with the police department last night.

It was a wonderful success.

It was very hot, but there were loads of families and small children or children of all ages.

I say lots of teenagers too with food and

All sorts of different branches of local government to meet with.

I had a great conversation with Mason Walsh, our animal protection officer, to learn what they were up to.

So I really appreciate all the staff effort to bring that event to happen.

Last week, the CACVB hosted their anniversary open house at their new location off of Greenbrier.

I'm Remson Court, and they have greatly expanded their offerings in outdoor recreation on their website, which I was really thrilled to be able to see have the staff person who's developed it running through what the offerings were, which I probably can't get at my house, but people with better broadband certainly could.

talking about their development of an online trail map similar to what Harrisonburg Rockingham has available where they have access to through QR codes and things to be able to get people out on the trail safely and have them feel comfortable about where they are.

from Virginia Cooperative Extension and the U.S.

Department of Agriculture.

We know that Albemarle has been having a drought.

It's the driest June on record for the state since 1895.

The fourth driest in Albemarle County

Amal County has officially received primary natural disaster designation status from the USDA and I will put all the details of this for the clerk so she can have it available but people who have livestock and pasture forage losses can contact the Farm Service Agency in Louisa

and the people who have crop losses can contact the Verona office of FSA to find help for helping to offset those costs for farmers who have to buy hay.

who saw their 12 inches of beautiful forage in May disappear to bare dirt.

It doesn't matter how many acres you have, it's all gone.

Even if no one's eating it, it's all gone because of the wind and the heat that has just shriveled everything up.

So I'm hoping that we have several days of very gentle rain here right now, but that is not going to bring it back, unfortunately, for the crop losses for corn and soybeans, which are already being filled.

So I'll get all those details into the clerk's records so that people can access it that way.

And I appreciate all the comments that were made, Ann, especially about the drought and thanking our volunteers and everyone.

That was really lovely.

I want to send a shout out to VDOT who have completed the work at the roundabout that's going in on hydraulic road.

completed it a week early, which is a real positive for our community.

So a big shout out to VDOT.

We'll have them here this afternoon and we'll be able to thank them in person.

I have not driven that area myself.

It'd be an open yesterday.

I have not gotten over there yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it for the first time.

All right.

Is there anything else from anyone?

Yes.

Yes.

I just wanted to say that I went there also yesterday.

It is fantastic.

It is easy.

And the other thing that was after the going to Putt Putt, which I neglected to say also with Supervisor Mallek, the Putt Putt event, which also included fire, but it was a wonderful night out for the police department.

And they really did a great job.

And it was packed.

So it was really nice seeing all the kids, the long lines, and it was really nice to get the snow cones.

It was so hot.

Thank you.

Our next item, and I don't see any proclamations or recognitions on our agenda, so we'll move on to matters

from the public not listed for public hearing or matters previously considered by the board or matters that are pending before the board.

And I believe I see that we do have some signups.

So I will turn this over to Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, who's going to read the rules and announce the speakers.

During the 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 of up to three minutes to speak at each Board meeting during matters from the public.

A sign-up sheet is managed by the clerk's office.

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

The green light will go on when you begin speaking, which begins for a lot of time.

The yellow light indicates you have one minute to finish speaking.

The red light indicates your time has expired.

and you will be asked to end your comments.

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

When addressing the board, state your name and if you live in Albemarle County, your Magisterial District.

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.

Do not speak from your seat or out of turn.

All comments are live streamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website.

Welcome and if you'll adjust the mic, there you go.

Thank you.

Does that work?

Janie Holbrook, Whitehall.

I need your help because I really want to believe that Eastern will be extended to 250 in Pros-A.

But I can't shake the feeling that the proposed partnership is really about checking a box to justify the development of Oak Bluff at maximum density.

The Kimley-Horn Risk Assessment in May seems to have overlooked the community concerns that make this a very high-risk project.

First, what's the expected cost under a PPTA?

Lance Sturry is quoted in a July Crozegazette article saying that a year ago, the county was comfortable with a $23 million estimate.

The only way to get to $23 million is to strip out all of the contingency and all of the inflation from the VDOT estimate of $39.5 million.

The cost of the 250-240 roundabout in Crozet went up 53% between fiscal year 24 and 25.

And the exit 107 park and ride went up 25%.

Even with a shorter construction time frame, there will be inflation.

But let's ignore that.

There is a 5.7 million gap between Mr. Stewart's number and the 17.3 million in identified funding.

There's no ongoing revenue stream to fill that gap or to repay financing.

No rational road construction company will bid on a project requiring a huge subsidy.

So we're back to Riverbend, the only potential partner with something to gain.

Can Riverbend increase the cost of market rate homes at Oak Bluff by an average of $50,000 to cover the funding gap?

Of course not.

So there was no offer of cash under Project Heron, just project management and a lot of dirt.

Enough dirt, in fact, to pose a very serious regulatory problem in a floodplain.

Here's what residents of East Crozet worry about.

After green space from three surrounding neighborhood HOAs has been taken away, and the entrances to Oak Bluff have been built, the county will let River Bend walk away with a choice of reasons that the bridge can't be completed.

VDOT, FEMA, Rivanna Water, DEQ.

And funding risk?

I was advised that the 17.3 million in county funds comes from the Transportation Leveraging Program.

Eastern is one of six listed projects and the only unranked tier two priority.

Can each of you put your hand on hard and say that you will vote to allocate the majority of program funds to Eastern for the next two years?

The finding of public interest doesn't address the reality that project risk is really borne by the residents of East Crozet.

Will the county mitigate some of the risk by getting required approvals on the bridge design before approving Oak Bluff?

Isn't that the right thing to do?

Imagine Old Trail without Old Trail Drive because that is what the county has allowed to happen in East Crowsay.

Development is not supported by infrastructure and realistically never will be.

And if you want to share your written remarks with our board clerk, you may leave them with her.

Thank you, Ms.

Holberg.

Next we have Carol Fairborn.

Fairborn, pardon me.

if you adjust the microphone so we can hear you.

Hi, my name is Carol Fairborn and I live in Crozet.

My comments relate to the upcoming presentation on the finding of public interest on the Eastern Avenue connector from the PPTA.

Since I live within the geographical area, which would benefit from this connector, the potential for a PPTA initially gave me hope that the county is now going to address Crozet's severe infrastructure problems.

However, I worry that the connector may remain more of an empty promise rather than a reality because many questions exist regarding its cost estimates, funding, and environmental issues.

As a tax-paying constituent, I now share with you my questions on this project with the hope they will resonate with you and you will ask them of Mr. Stewart today on my behalf.

My first question is on cost estimates.

Last year, VDOT's cost estimate for the connector rose to $39.5 million with the unfunded portion at $23.3 million.

And earlier this year, a county rep said the county does not have the funds to complete the Eastern Avenue Bridge over Licking Hole Creek.

So where do things stand today on the latest cost estimates for the connector and the unfunded portion of the connector?

My second question is how much funding does the county have available for this connector?

Is it $17 million?

And how will that be funded?

My third question is, will the plan rely upon an estimated $8 million from VDOT revenue sharing?

What are the criteria for securing those VDOT funds under this PPTA?

Is full project funding required, including the county's matching funds?

My fourth question is about the fact that building the bridge over Licking Hole Creek will involve highly sensitive environmental issues as it will be located within a 100-year FEMA floodplain.

What will happen if the plan is not accepted by FEMA, the Virginia DEQ, the Rivanna Water and Sewer authorities, and or by VDOT?

And what will happen to this entire project if the bridge does not get approved?

And my last question is for all of you.

Will enough of you supervisors actually vote in favor of using county funds for this connector, knowing it may possibly defer projects from within each of your own districts?

In closing, Crozet's existing road systems are unsafe, inadequate, and not designed for our current population.

Can the Crozet community please get honest answers to reassure us that this project is not simply a ploy to justify future high density developments in Crozet?

We are firm believers that necessary infrastructure like this connector must come first before additional high density developments are approved.

I would hope each of you would agree that this belief is logical and valid and that your future votes will responsibly reflect this necessity for adequate infrastructure to come first in Crozet.

Thank you.

You want to leave your written comments with the clerk?

That would be fine.

She's right over there.

Good afternoon.

I'm Bill O'Malley.

I'm also from the Whitehall District.

and I said this question over earlier.

Didn't know whether I'd be able to make the meeting, but I shot over here.

And that question should be asked today.

How are you and the rest of the board?

This is to Ann, I send it to her.

She's already responded, but I wanna make sure, how are you gonna mitigate the risk in the event that FEMA does not approve the bridge connector design?

I think some of you have used hope is not a plan.

in the past.

And so otherwise, this just looks like a hopeful plan signed off by Mr. Richardson.

And the community is going to be left with more homes approved, more density, more traffic, without a connector, and more safety issues.

There are safety issues every day.

The public will be watching, along with the details of the RFP,

Crozet citizens, we want the Eastern Avenue connector.

We badly need that connector.

We just don't need it at all costs.

And when is the county going to address the appearance of a quid pro quo issues related to Project Heron with the Crozet community?

Also the site plan issues, we await your reply.

How many more times do we need to write you?

Thank you.

All right, we can move on to item number eight, the consent agenda.

Are there any items that need to be pulled?

I'm looking.

Does it look like there any?

All right.

So we have a motion by Supervisor Mallek and a second by Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Aye.

We'll now move on to item nine, which is an action item, the Public Private Transportation Act, Finding of Public Interest, Eastern Avenue.

This item will be presented by Mr. Lance Stewart, Director of Facilities and Environmental Services.

Thank you, Supervisor McKeel, Board Lance Stewart, Director of Facilities and Environmental Services.

Glad to have the opportunity to brief you today.

Great.

Hopefully that all shows up on your screens.

Again, thank you.

It's been since March that I was last in front of you about this project.

At that time, we asked you to adopt a set of guidelines.

I'll be walking through some history.

Thank you.

And I'll be sharing the podium today with consultant Brian McPeters, who's been helping us with

County with this project for a number of years to advance the work and we're really lucky to have him here with us today.

So this project has been a very important piece of our transportation plans for the development of the Crozet area since we began planning for the growth of that area.

So as early as 2004, it was in the initial Crozet master plan and also the extension of Eastern Avenue included in 2010 and 2021's versions.

Also in 2020, shortly before the last master plan, we went to Kimley Horn to do an exercise to determine the most efficient alignment of the road and bridge.

So that was presented here to the board at that time with a recommendation that one of the

Three options looked at was the most appropriate in terms of both alignment, environmental impact, and lowest cost.

That was followed later by a basis of design report that basically summarized the findings of preliminary design that was being done, talked about the environmental compliance requirements that we would need to meet, whether

No matter how we go about procuring this design and construction, we'll still face the same requirements.

Also assess the structure of the bridge, outlined in high-level detail some of the risks associated with it and provided us a cost estimate of at that time 17.4 million and a very high-level schedule.

and subsequently after that, VDOT did allocate in out years in FY25 and FY26, I believe a little over $8.1 million towards a revenue sharing project.

And since that time, since 2000, 2001, you know, we've experienced a pretty significant uptick in the costs of construction for this kind of work.

It has quietened.

It's that slow down and some of the individual things like steel and concrete are less expensive now than they were during the peak of the pandemic.

Nevertheless, VDOTs updated their estimates based on trends that they were seeing statewide and last year officially increased their estimate to $39.5 million, meaning that we needed to cover a larger match than we had expected.

Previously, we'd been working with a $23 million figure.

But we came to you in March having spent some time looking at alternative means to approach this project to help with its affordability.

And we prepared an Albemarle County-specific set of guidelines for the Virginia Public Private Transportation Act, which, as I noted earlier, you authorized in April.

That's a very complex process, the PPTA, not just the finding a public interest, which we're here to talk about today, but the entire effort is going to be something we haven't done before.

Luckily, Kimley Horn has done this before.

They've worked on a number of VDOT PPTA projects.

both as the owner's rep for VDOT, where they're assisting them like they're assisting us now and developing the finding public interest, helping us develop an RFP, and in future helping us throughout the project.

So Brian McPeters has been one of

Project.

For a good while, Brian is here with us today.

I'm extremely happy to have him on board the team.

His participation and leadership in the drafting of the finding of public interest was essential.

So Brian will do most of the speaking for a while, and then I'll return towards the end and collectively we'll try to answer any questions you have.

And again, this is just a briefing.

It's actually

Not an action item.

That was an error in our process that we didn't catch until the very end.

Thank you, Lance, members of the board.

Those of you who've had the pleasure of presenting to you before, good to see you again.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today.

As Lance mentioned, my role over the next few minutes is just to give a kind of build some common ground on where the project is, what the project history is, and then I'm going to walk you through each section of the finding of public interest.

The draft of that was in your packet previously that you probably had a chance to review.

Just to be sure we're all familiar with the project, we are talking about the extension, call it that gap of the end of Eastern Avenue on the north side of Licking Hole Creek in Crozet, the preferred alignment that Lance alluded to that was selected in 2020 by the Board and endorsed by the Board, I guess I should say, does cross-licking hole and corrects to Quarry Farm Road, which then connects to Route 250.

The project's about 3,000 linear feet long.

It does include a bridge across Licking Hole Creek, which we'll talk more about in a minute.

It is more than just a line on this map.

This map makes you think maybe a planner or perhaps a county staff had just drawn a line and said we need to connect from A to B.

Not the case.

The county is part of that basis design report invested preliminary engineering funds with the help of Kimley Horan, also reviews by the Virginia Department of Transportation.

We've established the typical section.

We established what the alignment looks like.

We had estimates of quantities.

We even conducted environmental analyses, including wetland and stream delineations.

We know where the jurisdictional wetlands and streams are, which means we know what the jurisdictional and wetland impacts are likely to be.

And we actually did conduct a floodplain analysis.

Whenever you cross a floodplain on a bridge, you have to deal with the floodplain.

The question becomes, is the bridge X100 feet long or Y100 feet long?

That's run through an analysis that ultimately would result in a process through a, if you impact the floodplain and can't avoid impacts through a certified letter of map revision.

That's covered both by Albemarle County, but also by FEMA that you work through.

It's a fairly normal thing in the process for us not to have completed the CLOMAR regardless of the delivery methodology of this project.

But we have conducted the analysis that would inform that, resulted in a fairly minor increase in the floodplain, minor increase being something that we'd be accustomed to routing through the FEMA process and being approved.

Of course, no one here standing up for the diocese today can tell you FEMA will approve it, but we do understand the process and the impacts that would walk through it.

So that's the project.

Why are we here?

We're here because we've identified this project as a potential public-private partnership project, right?

The state code then establishes the steps that the Albemarle County Executive's Office has to walk through to be able to procure to the next phase of actually soliciting requests for proposals or requests for information from an actual P3 partner.

That Code of Virginia section requires basically that the FOIPI do six things.

We have to talk about what the benefits of the project are.

We have to identify what the amount of funds the county, in this case, the public entity, is willing to convey.

That does not mean, by the way, that at the end of the day and the RFP, the numbers will go over in a second, is what we have to offer the concessionaire.

And I'll explain that when we get to the cost section.

It just kind of establishes a ceiling of a number that would work through it.

We have to document why a P3 would be beneficial to the county and we have to compare it to other project delivery methodologies.

We have to do a risk assessment and understand this is where you hire engineers because we like to look at the problems.

We like to come up with solutions to problems and understand how they work and we'll go over our process for that.

The code restablishes us to

It's an evaluate and codify the project risk level and we'll get into that a little bit, whether it's a low, medium or high risk project.

And then lastly, we have to explain if we're not choosing what most folks that you're familiar with public procurements

Low Bid or Low Price.

If we want to choose best value, meaning we come up with a scoring system in the RFP that the offers are aware of and may not be the low bidder, but technically could be a better proposal and the advantage of the county.

We have to explain why we would select that process.

So we're going to go each of these sections in detail.

First, we'll start with the proposed project benefits.

As part of the alignment study that Lance alluded to prior to 2020, we did a traffic operations analysis and looked at the short-term and long-term impacts of connecting that missing connection across Licking Hole Creek on Eastern Avenue.

There's some basic things we can say it does, right?

It increases access.

It provides a secondary emergency access route for EMS services in the county.

But it also pulls traffic off of Route 240 on Crose Avenue, and then that would have some benefits to occur on safety crash problem that's evidenced both the signal at 240 at 250 and at the three-notch and 240 project that's already known as a problems and challenges in the area from your conversations with VDOT.

So those are the benefits that work throughout.

It is important to note that Eastern Avenue's benefits are in this concept sketch are localized kind of in the cozy area, right?

We're not making improvements to 250 or the interchange of 64, but we are enabling kind of that sub area network to have some beneficial improvements based on that missing connection.

So we've talked about the benefits.

Now we have to talk about how much money the county would be willing to offer maximum, right?

To the concessionaire, to the public private partner.

You have $17.3 million identified in the capital improvement plan.

That's what the FOIPI document says.

Now, in case there are folks that would be interested in pursuing a potential RFP, that does not mean that the RFP would say Albemarle County would offer $17.3 million.

Why is that?

That's because we've got to be able to compensate for county costs, permits, consulting fees.

We also have to think about risk and contingency and throughout.

So the actual number offered to the concessionaire could be less, but the FOIPI documents kind of that ceiling number that's up there.

When we talk about cost estimates, you can see the 2023 VDOT cost estimate.

If we bid the project,

in 2023.

Bea estimated it to be $28.3 million.

Here's where the hard part comes.

We're not bidding a project today.

And the transportation market in Virginia is if you're a contractor or an engineer like myself, you have great job security.

It's a great time to be doing what I do.

The negative to that comes with there's a lot of work to do, which means the costs are higher.

So it's just kind of how the situation works.

VDOT's current inflation methodology grows that $28.3 million if we bid the job today, which we're not doing.

And we bid it in 2031, we bid it 39.5.

Where does 2031 come from?

That's VDOT's process from design two years, buy right away and move utilities for two years, and then construct it, right?

Typically, VDOT would program a project and it would take approximately six years from when it starts in a normal process to work through.

All right, third section that Floyd P. has to talk through.

We now have to compare a public-private partnership to other delivery methodologies.

So, Kimley Horn and county staff put our heads together.

We identified three potential project delivery methodologies, three ways to deliver the job to work through, and then we evaluated what the pros and cons of each of those individual methodologies would be.

Those three ways to deliver the project.

Number one is the one that the estimate was based on originally, right?

A design bid bill, DBB.

That's probably what county staff and your procurement staff are most accustomed to doing.

Basically, you hire an engineer, an architect to design the project.

They put all the drawings together.

They put all the specifications together.

The county then advertises a bid and contractors submit bid and you take the lowest responsible bidder that comes through.

The second methodology would be a design bill.

This is a slightly innovative delivery methodology.

The difference here is, instead of hiring Kimley Horne or a firm like Kimley Horne to do all of the design work, you hire a firm like Kimley Horne to do like 30% of the design work.

to establish the sandbox or the corral in which the contracting team will play in, and then you hire a design builder, a contractor and engineer under one contract.

So the engineer now works for the contractor, and they compete in a bid best value methodology to give you some value of having the contractor at the table through the design.

The obvious benefits of that

We now can talk about transferring risks to the contractor.

Cost increases from time, schedule, other things that a design bid build would not do.

The design builder now kind of incurs on their side.

Now, keep in mind, we talk risk transfer, risk is not free, right?

Risk comes at a cost, right?

So that's how that, but we do get that priced up front and have some controls over it.

Both options one and two would require the county to have all of the ultimate bid price in the inflated year, that 2031 number, essentially in the bank.

Nothing really starts on one or two, unless 100% of public funds are present and in the account.

Option three, what we're really here to talk about today, the P3, the public-private partnership, right?

We now can close that gap potentially with private funds.

We don't have to have 100% of the public funds available for the total cost of the job.

It brings with it the same benefits as a design bid build.

We now are hiring the contracting team to do the design work, to do the permitting work, and the contractor to build it.

They're all working on one team.

And that'll be as your flancel come back up in a little bit, he's going to talk about the request for proposals.

That's the document that the county will write and will kind of establish the rules by which the game is played, right?

What we're asking for, what the contractor can do, what he can't do, what innovation is allowed, what innovation is not allowed, that works through.

Because of the cost of escalation and the time it would take for a design bid bill, for example, to purge the system, the P3 does offer the opportunity to deliver the job sooner.

And based on the inflation, right, delivering the job sooner, it cuts off that inflation.

The dollar today buys more than the dollar six years from now.

The next thing the FOIP asks us to do is go through a risk assessment process, right?

This, by the way, is not unique to a design build.

We would do some version of this risk methodology practice on any project that we deliver for you, from the sidewalk job to a complicated bridge job across a creek.

What we're really trying to do is identify and work together to think about what might go wrong.

And quite honestly, when you look at a risk matrix on a project like this, or even the simplest project, and you get engineers in a room together, we come up with all kinds of ways for things to go wrong, right?

But it's not just about being negative.

We're looking for ways to understand what might happen in the future so that we can then plan, right, and mitigate and respond.

And this process continues throughout the life cycle of the job.

So you can see the VDOT methodology that's on the graphic on the right.

Basically, we rate a risk based on its impact of occurrence.

If the risk were to occur, what is its impact?

Some risks that happen have very little impact, right?

Other risks have extremely high impacts, right?

And then what is the probability of that risk actually occurring?

Have we taken steps that have mitigated that risk such that it's no longer a tremendous amount of concern, then the probability might be lower?

and that's how we rate and work through.

And we worked through that process as a team.

You can see the members who were present in that risk assessment workshop, County consultant, Kimley Horn, as well as VDOT participated.

VDOT does this same process, by the way, on all of the projects, the hydraulic roundabout that you actually mentioned that Kimley Horn is actually working with the department on.

We did the same exact thing on that project as well, right?

The same with the designed build bundle roundabouts that are under construction as well.

Currently.

So it's a pretty normal process.

It's a healthy process that works us through.

We look at the entire project delivery lifecycle.

We're not just thinking about construction and what we're going to dig up in the field.

We're actually thinking about procurement.

We're thinking about public involvement.

We're thinking about how the design works.

We're thinking about construction risks.

At the end of the day, that resulted in a risk matrix, right, that's going to guide us through the process as we go through the lifecycle.

Most importantly, in the next step,

If the county executive signs the finding of public interest and we start writing the RFP, the RFP is informed by that risk matrix.

If we had a risk event on that risk matrix, we're going to write something into the RFP, the requirements to establish that sandbox or that corral in which the P3 offeror team is going to have to live and play and the things that they'll have to hold up to throughout.

And then we'll reassess as we go through.

when we get the offers in, we'll reassess the risk.

When we sign the contract, we'll reassess the risk.

When we're building the job, we'll reassess the risk and replan and work through.

This is just a sampling of some of the risk events.

That's what's in the text that you see that we identified as a team.

The colors generally correspond with that severity index score that you saw on the previous slide.

And certainly in questions, I'd be welcome to discuss any of these.

Given this project's uniqueness for Albemarle County, right?

When you start something new and you try a different way of doing things, it's going to come with some unfamiliarity and some risk, right?

That's why the county has partnered with the Department of Transportation as well as hired outside staff to be able to facilitate that of having a knowledge and experience to go through it.

All of that is to say the project team established a medium risk level for the project.

Had you done this before, had you done innovative delivery before and hired design-built teams on lots of other projects and you were the Virginia Department of Transportation, for example, it's very likely the risk on this would have been deemed to be low.

This project has all of the same project risks that any transportation project would typically have.

It's crossing a stream, building a bridge, having to deal with FEMA.

There's really not anything unusual about that.

In fact, it's a new alignment project, which from a Ridway transportation construction project is actually easier because I don't have to maintain traffic and work alongside of you while you're driving through my work zone.

Then finally, we have to talk through the procurement methodology and why best value and why a design build.

So why would we choose best value and not lowest price?

Well, if we choose best value, it allows for us to basically establish a way to track, to evaluate the transfer and mitigation of risk, right?

If we just get the low bid, the challenge we're working with is that contractor, if he's responsive, if he did everything we asked, then we have no way of scoring his qualifications.

We have no way of scoring whether he's done a P3 before.

We have no way of understanding the financial aspects of the public-private partnership.

What are the strings of the finances that are coming alongside on the offeror side?

If it's just the lowest cost, we're missing a piece of the puzzle to understand.

So what we will do in the RFP is we will establish a scoring process that speaks to the procurement risk associated with the P3.

They will enable us then to evaluate transparently, by the way, because once we're done, that public record of that is essentially open and we have to bring that back to for you, for you to award the contract, but it's also after everything's signed becomes a public document that is available for public review and public consumption.

But that best value procurement methodology does that.

And the design bills I mentioned in Albemarle County done by the Virginia Department of Transportation, those are all best value contracts.

They were not lowest price.

So, filing new ground perhaps for the county, not filing new ground in the region, in the area.

Thank you, Brian.

Now you see why I asked him to be here today.

Extremely good.

So before you on the screen is a flow chart, basically, and what that flow chart outlines is the how our guidelines that were adopted in March work and how we work within that process.

there's the little orange we are here logo so we certainly are if you look at where we are in that process we're very early in it so we have identified an opportunity we've developed a five finding of public interest for consideration the next step would be authorization execution of that document by the county executive

And then Brian has laid out the steps at a high level for developing our request for proposals, which will be work both on his side and both on our side, including support from our attorney's office, certainly.

and then we get to the point where we issue the RFP.

There are a lot of individual steps that follow and I won't go into those.

I can just say that it will probably be to manage expectations and minimum of a six month process between the issuance of the RFP and when we might come back to you and ask you to authorize and the county executive to sign an agreement.

and that would be very, six months would be very quick, particularly considering we're new at this.

I think developing the RFP is going to be harder than it sounds.

The one VDOT uses is over 300 pages long, the template and it's very complex.

So much simpler chart here is just covering the near term pieces.

So, of course, came to you earlier on the P3 guidelines.

We're here today presenting and explaining the finding of public interest.

presuming the county executive has your support, he would then have the option to execute the finding public interest, and we would be targeting issuing an RFP this fall.

And that is the end of our prepared statements.

Thank you both for the presentation.

While you're there though, can you just clarify to us, because we were caught a little bit by surprise, that this was advertised as an action item.

So what I'm hearing is that we will not actually be taking action, but giving direction.

Okay.

Move forward or not, but not a formal vote.

Yes, that's correct.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And thank you for the presentation.

I know a lot of my peers on the board have been staring down this issue and this project for a lot longer than I have.

Well, thank you.

Thank you both for the presentation.

I know that, and I'm sure there may be a few other supervisors that share this sentiment, but we've been pushing for private public partnerships for a long time and not just in transportation.

We have established some P3s in other areas.

So the process seems to me at least from my own observation to mirror the same process you're talking about here, whether it's economic development, whether it's a project between the school division and a private building where the school division is playing out, Southwood in a lot of ways.

kind of started out in that same kind of P3 and I was thrilled months ago to find that we could get into that PPTA for transportation projects because it's an alternative tool available to us to try to get more done in a county that is behind in trying to get transportation projects done.

So this is all welcome news to me.

And I have been on the record stating that about P3s since my time on the school board.

And I'm sure Supervisor McKeel and I were both pushing for those type of projects when we were on the school board.

And that was a long time ago.

And Supervisor McKeel has a longer history of that.

I don't really have any questions.

I understand the process.

Over the years, we've had plenty of, so I appreciate this though, because it's specific to a transportation project.

But I got educated on it back in April when this came forward.

So just been watching for this to come forward.

I feel like this project is a good one for us to get done.

And I'll speak a little bit about that.

And I don't know if this will address some of the questions that came up in public comment or not, but at least provides how I think about it.

and I say it full well that our VDOT representative is in the audience.

So I'll mind my P's and Q's and not just take shots at VDOT.

But VDOT contingencies, especially when you're starting to get out of the gate on any project can really be kind of the black cloud that comes over the parade and rains on everybody.

and use the pedestrian bridge that we're trying to get done from Pantops over to Woollen Mills.

I mean, the contingency on that was huge, huge.

I understand they can't just act like not every single, they got to cover all their bases and there's a lot of different projects in this, in the Commonwealth that have to be, you know, have to be done, but the contingency really is a hurdle in almost a lot of projects.

So how it played out with the pedestrian bridge and your pedestrian bridge over in,

Stonefield that we finally got done.

The contingency, BUMMAs blew that out of the water.

But the idea is that we went and had to get a raise grant to a planning grant that we're attempting to get for the pedestrian bridge so that we can really get a better handle because VDOT will look at that and go, all right, the contingency is not what we thought.

Here's what the real contingency is.

So I've learned over the years of working on transportation projects that you really can't say

You can.

You can identify at a given point in time, oh, we're going to use revenue sharing, or oh, this is going to be a smart scale project.

But there have been enough things that don't win smart scale, or they don't get all the money they need through revenue sharing, that you have to find alternative ways and or commit yourself over multiple years from those polls to get a project done.

The Berkman Drive extended is another great example of that.

It has taken us forever to get the funding finalized for that, and it's taken a few iterations of the revenue sharing from that plot to get it done.

You know, I appreciate anytime citizens from a specific locality hone in on one particular project and have questions about, well, what about this?

What about this?

What about this?

The answer a lot of times, and I'm happy to share as much as I know being on the MPO with Ann over the years,

that you have to look back to the history of how projects have gotten done, especially over the last 10 to 15 years, of how this stuff has to move and you have to be ready to do it.

And it's usually driven by our transportation priorities list.

And then what we agree to on a board to say, well, this comes first or this comes second, et cetera.

So the contingency funding and whether or not the boards committed, this wouldn't be in front of us if we weren't committed to trying to get the project done.

I'm on the record back in February when the, I forgot the name of the development was approved.

because one of the things that had folks concerned was that these connector was never going to get done.

And I couldn't, I'm sorry, I just remember February.

But at that point in time, I made a public statement about trying to find alternative ways to get this done in the face of the new estimate that had skyrocketed the project.

So, you know,

I can't control what people think and feel about what I say or about votes I take.

But when I state things up here, I do it in good faith to say I mean it.

And then it's up to voters to deal with me whether or not they feel I follow through in what I say I mean or not.

And I'm comfortable with that.

You know, the fact that this is outside of my district

Yeah, we could take votes on this project and try to get this vote moved forward.

I'm happy to do that.

I do that on a lot of other transportation projects as well.

So happy to say that this is a project that I'd like to see get done and that this is a creative way to try to get there.

Great that the public will be watching.

You know, I would just add to that, don't just watch this item.

Watch our transportation priorities list conversation.

Watch when we're talking to VDOT when they're here giving quarterly reports.

Watch when we're doing smart sale applications on everything else.

There'll be another project at some point that I hope comes to us under this, under the PPTA.

All of that information helps because you can't just say, to understand how transportation projects get done in Virginia, you need that wider

context to understand how this stuff occurs and what room we have to maneuver in.

You know, the unfamiliarity with P3s is a risk assessment.

I mean, I think we've had some good practice in the county of doing P3s.

So our ability or un-unfamiliarity with it might be true because we've never done one for a transportation project before.

but, and I'll use an affordable housing parallel here.

I really see a lot of things that we can get done in affordable housing in the same way we get economic development projects done.

And while we may not have done it in affordable housing before, okay, we're unfamiliar with that, but we have other good procedure and process to look at that says how it could happen under this area.

So I appreciate your point though about it, why it might be considered a risk here, but I'm comfortable to say, all right,

and I know full well, every time a P3 comes up there sometimes is suspicion about, I think I even heard the phrase quid pro quo thrown out there today.

I don't know how to get away from that thought because of the way that the negotiations have been and if you're working here, it's just how it is, but I know with Southwood that people thought that it was just a quid pro quo to give the rezoning they needed, even though we were in talking about how we could make the partner and make the project work.

There's really no way for me to say, oh, you know, I mean, I could speak and say platitudes, I suppose.

But the best thing that I can say to that is that, you know, I think, I know that we operate ethically and legally.

and I don't think any of us are willing to step outside of the ethical or legal lane regarding anything related to our elected office and our actions must stand and prove that and I'm happy to allow that in response to those who feel that it can be a little shady or out of the sunlight if you would and I hope I don't see attorneys getting nervous in the room so

I can't control litigation.

Litigation in this society and at this day and time can come for any, for any reason.

And I simply offer my previous response on the view or the presence or if folks think we're doing something improper, I offer the same response here.

And if folks feel that we've done it and they have to litigate, well then, okay.

But I'm gonna feel confident going into it that we've done what's legal and ethical.

Best Value.

This conversation has come up in a lot of different areas over whether or not you would, I wish we could always do a Best Value.

There have been so many low bid items that you have to take that end up biting you in the, but I'm sorry, it was... Dear year.

Dear year.

meaning that you didn't get the bang for your buck, the longevity didn't happen if you know it's the classic thing where you're whatever you have a warranty on breaks the day after your warranty expires.

Low bid stuff has proven and historically have proven to be problematic where best value you you really wish that could be the basis on which you could make all decisions on.

So

And then whether or not, you know, I get it, we've had, we've certainly have had to deal with projects where other agencies or other authorities or other powers to be have to sign off on the project.

And, you know, you work to do your best to get that approval.

End of the day, whether they do or they don't is really out of our control unless we just punt.

We put something forward.

We know it's going to get approved, but we don't have the time or the energy with everything that we're trying to do to be putting forth effort on things that we're not trying to get accomplished.

and it's just the fact in our county.

So happy to have this here today.

I'm certainly thrilled that it's here.

I'd like to get this one going and moving so that we can really understand how it works so that unfamiliarity piece becomes less of a risk and that we can start seeing what other projects in this county could be on the horizon for us to use this mechanism to get things done.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

And thank you very much for the presentation.

I'm willing to take the risk on the P3 because we've had it in other areas, but not in transportation.

I'm willing to take that risk because our funds are limited without raising taxes a huge amount.

And this is a project that needs to get done.

I do like the idea of supporting the best value.

To me, that is extremely important to support the best value as stated by Supervisor Gallaway.

Too many times when you go with the lowest bid, that's what you get.

And we need to go with best value.

In projects in the past, we've gone with revenue sharing, smart scale.

We need to look at things that are different, which is going with the P3 and doing things that maybe we haven't always done, but that's okay, because that's how we find out what we can do.

So I am in favor of going with the P3.

I'm willing to take the risk.

I think the best value is extremely important, and I'm going with that also.

So those are my comments.

Thank you very much, and thank you both for your presentation.

Brian, it's good to see you here again.

Have you been through?

He's been through three of our matters.

So I have written down a bunch of questions as you presented them, so they're a little weird out of order, but let's run through that, and then I will take up the least amount of time in that way.

There will be a decision about an RFP or an RFI.

I think I'll allow him to correct me if I mistake this.

I think requests for information is really more of a feeling out thing.

If you're not sure if the market is there or that your model that you're considering will work.

For instance, we have a septic to sewer program that we started with ARPA funds.

And that was that procurement of services started with a request for information, relatively simple documents saying what you'd like to achieve, what resources you have, and seeing who responds with interest to say, we'd be willing to work with you.

This is what it looked like.

And then generally that

Kidd either moved to and directly to a negotiation or it could lead you to no enough to issue more articulated requests for proposals.

Okay, good.

Let's say that's a

You've accomplished a lot of the elements of the RFI already, it sounds like, because you're very aware of what's out there.

All right.

One of you said the benefits are localized to Crozet, but I will draw a different parallel because during all from 2000 to 20

15 or whatever the ribbon was cut on the Burkmaier extension.

That road was seen as an important element to get traffic off of 29 in the same way that this element will help to reduce traffic on 250, which does then benefit all the three traffic going through.

So try not to cut yourself, don't short yourself on that because I think it has a bigger if or impact than you might know.

Some

speaking about unfamiliarity with the P3, but so many other counties have done this for a long time.

And I know that you all have done a lot of research to benefit from what they've learned.

I won't call them mistakes, but what they have learned to make sure that we don't do the same things that won't help.

One of the questions heard was, how do we mitigate the risk in case FEMA denies the design?

And my follow-up question to that is, what does that timetable mean?

How quickly does the response go to FEMA?

How quickly do they respond back?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So the decision on FEMA and the crossing up Licking Hole Creek, by the way, common to any bridge you would construct that pretty much does not exist in this instance.

You have a floodplain and a floodway, right?

We're not in the floodway.

We're in the floodplain where the water would kind of, for lack of a better term, stack to.

The analysis we ran in 2022, I talked about it being a negligible increase.

We're talking .24 feet, .2 feet, something in that rail realm.

Could you say that again?

I didn't hear you.

It's about .24, .2 feet, right?

So three inches, a little less than three inches, right?

Over, yeah, and likely, I don't know this answer completely, how far away that, we would be able to, we have that in the model, right?

It's not anticipated that that impact to the floodplain is going to expand further, right?

Upstream, we do have to document all that.

We've done that analysis, right?

If for some reason FEMA was to say no and increase the floodplain's not available,

then likely that leads you to a potentially longer and taller bridge, right?

The floodplain controls the elevation of the bridge and it controls the length of the bridge, right?

The longer the bridge is where you don't have fill in the floodplain, the less impact you have on the floodplain.

So now we're getting to a dollars and common sense and benefits discussion, right?

The process to walk through that, that we would envision as of right now, we've not drafted the RFP, right?

But where county staff and Kimley Horn said is that we would probably give the Clomart to the concessionaire, to the P3 offer.

And that's because if we take our design we have right now, and we route it through the Clomart process, which takes anywhere between eight to 12 months to get a final answer.

If they come back and change anything, say they want to move the road over significantly, or maybe they want to move the road over three feet,

Maybe they want to move the bridge pier line, the structure that holds up part of the bridge in a different location because they're worried about the size of a crane they need to pick a beam up, right?

They'd have to go through the Clomart process all again, right?

Okay, so then you said that would be put into the task bucket of the D3 person, the builder person.

Yes, they would have the same process, same people to walk through.

And then the way the floodplain works is I can't go into the floodplain and build an obstruction or place fill until I have the Cloumore approved.

So they won't basically be able to work inside the floodplain of any significance.

They could work on either side.

because one thing in the P3 or a design build project does for you, right, is we get the contractor on the ground, able to start work a lot sooner, right?

As soon as he has plans that are to a functional enough stage, that in this case, the county would review and approve from an ENS standpoint, they can actually kind of start work on the low risk stuff to save time.

Okay.

and you have the very latest.

Elevations.

So you have all that.

That was all in development in 2020 and 2021 when the work was done.

Generally speaking, given the surrounding topo and terrain from experience, right?

Not speaking to this unique location.

I find it unlikely that that floodplain is going to be significantly different.

Where we've seen what we call effective models differences is in urbanized areas where perhaps at a different time and a different place many years ago, when rules weren't rules, things were done and the floodplain was never updated.

That's where you would typically find

more surprising things, but we certainly from a risk standpoint can get that effective model verified versus what we have.

Correct.

Got it.

Okay, so the three inches sounds pretty good, but we'll find out.

Then, okay, I wrote it down.

Now let's go down here.

I got more.

Hold on.

So one of the questions was, where will the money come from?

And I understood from Lance's presentation that there already is in the bucket, the 17.3 million that is in the CIP plan.

Okay.

And then the gap would be what the possible partner D3 person would contribute.

Now, revenue sharing dollars is another question.

So that's a great question.

We wrestled with this question with all the Christmas at the risk assessment workshop staff's current position.

and the consultants would be that if we want to utilize the revenue sharing funds that are there, right?

Number one, we can't yet claim reimbursement for them.

So any funds extended through the RFP process wouldn't be eligible for reimbursement.

It's also likely, likely the use of those funds would probably draw out the schedule of this project fairly significantly.

So as of right now, we're proceeding forward that it is not a B.fund funded revenue sharing program.

So yes, if that were to be county staffs and the executive's direction, the funds would go away.

That said, the agreement is still currently in place, right?

And that decision has not been codified in such an executable math fashion, but that's the conversation.

and there was a spirited conversation in the risk workshop over that.

But if we wanted to go that route, if we felt it was necessary for the P3 to move forward, the schedule would get lengthened out, right?

Just from the amount of oversight and steps that would go through.

because the revenue sharing timetable was like 2029 going forward for that state money to be available anyway, as I remember.

So that's the postponement.

And the math that you all will have to do is the potential cost increases.

for the Concrete, etc., greater than what we could possibly get or save.

So I understand the process and speeding it along reduces the contingency need, etc.

I'm all for the best value if you're keeping track of feedback on that because we have had a really bad experience already.

It was many years ago, 2008.

Streetscape, number one, did not have a best value, did not have a completion date, and for four months in the winter, a four foot by four foot by eight foot deep hole was left in the middle of the four-way stop because the developer went and the project person went to some other job where they did have a completion date fine.

So I'm grateful to know that in the ensuing 13 years that has never been done again.

We've always held people speak to the fire as far as completing the job to make sure we're not left holding the bag with a little bit of yellow tape around a very, very scary situation.

So I absolutely support your effort to do all of the different parameters to make sure that the project that is designed can be

and Forrest and delivered in the way that you all project and we all support.

That's all the questions I have right now.

All right.

Thank you.

I'm going to turn back to Supervisor.

Yes.

So because you were first out of the gate.

So I appreciate it.

So a few comments by my peers.

got some juices flowing.

So Supervisor Gallaway was talking about how we do have some existing experience with other types of public-private partnerships, which made me, I guess, want just a little bit more texture on the shape and nature of the risks that you do see when we talk about risks, when we say that they're our highest risk.

I imagine the main thing we're talking about is here just like,

What is that standard form term sheet that we come to the table with looks like?

And it's mostly a question of we don't know the transportation specific terms that we might be expecting, basically like who would hold the risk for cost overruns or who would hold the risk for

DEQ denials.

So those are on the procurement side, like prior to what I'll call pre-award.

I think the most discussion we had in the risk workshop on this risk item, we're thinking after reward, right?

We're going to publish an art just to kind of entertain the idea for a second.

Let me kind of paint a picture.

We're going to publish an RP that's going to have a set of written words with it and drawings, right, that are

I hate percentages, because everybody has a different definition, but 30% complete, say, right?

Those words in that document are gonna tell the design builder what's in his camp.

And it's also gonna say what's in the owner's camp, right?

So questions we have to work on in the next few months, for example, is who's gonna own the risk of FEMA approving the plumber, right?

That three-inch raise.

What if that became a deal killer?

What would happen?

We'd need a longer bridge.

Who would pay for that, right?

We're gonna have to wrestle through that.

I think those to your point are things you're used to doing, right?

One of the challenges we will have, and I think you're better suited for this for how you deliver your transportation projects, i.e.

lump sum versus some localities that would do you get a price where you pay by ton or pay by a cubic yard.

The biggest challenge I've seen on my other clients, once we sign that contract, we're bound to what that, what we call the technical requirements are, right?

So if we decide to change something and ask for something,

perhaps on a unit price contract, or even your typical lump sum job, if we want to add an additional under feet of sidewalk to tie to some place that didn't exist when we bid the job, not that that ever happens.

But if we did, right, then we are very easy way to get to what the cost of that is, right?

In the type of game that you're playing or project you're playing or delivery method you're playing with an innovative delivery, Design Builder P3 in this case.

You're now going to open yourself up to what I refer to as commercial liability, right?

The design builder is going to go, well, you know, I had a bad week.

I lost the X thousand dollars because I made a quantification error and you're going to get a change order for something that should have been, I'm making up numbers, a thousand dollars for $10,000, right?

And it will be very difficult.

to unwind that knot, so to speak, to get to a fair number.

So that's just one example from an unfamiliarity that it does.

I don't wanna tell you that signing that contract ties your hands, but you are basically saying, hey, P3 Offer, this is the device I want or the end product I want.

Here's the rules of which your design is gonna be governed by.

If we go outside those bounds and say, now I want a different type of car or a different type of product,

The ability for us to negotiate in a way that is, I won't say reasonable, but it doesn't open us to all of the liabilities the design builder was carrying becomes problematic, right?

So staff now has the challenge of when a

Public, individual comes forward and maybe is pointing out something or a challenge of how we go about doing that.

It doesn't mean it's not doable.

It's just not as easy as your normal typical process.

We lose some flexibility in the contract, using VDOT's contract as a template.

Again, we hold very fast to what the contract said they had to do.

But when it gets into the details of everyday delivery, I've just seen some of my similar clients to Albemarle,

Struggle through how to respond and to organize and keep to what you kind of said you were going to do.

Whereas, keep in mind, on a design to build, there's a set of drawings that are very easy to know what it is we got into, right?

In this case, we're going to have some drawings that aren't 100% complete, and we'll have words that we have to talk about interpreting.

That's what your staff is going to be working on in the next process and the next step, right?

Why we're not advertising an RFP tomorrow.

because that's very important, right?

Thank you.

The one other thing I did have a question on that occurred to me when Supervisor Mallek was talking about the distinction between RFIs and RFPs and kind of shaking that market opportunity using RFIs theoretically.

I might have assumed that we are going to be dealing and receiving bids primarily from repeat players that the county is quite familiar with, but it occurs to me with a more novel funding mechanism that maybe that's not accurate.

I'd say that's one of the areas we're being new to this is a risk factor.

We often, these kinds of projects are done, say, as part of a toll road.

And so there's funding that will come in that can belong to the long-term operator that's other than Bea.

This is really unique for us.

We think there are potential partners out there.

We hope that there are.

But one of the risk factors is whether we develop an RFP, whether we'll even get a response.

or we might have to revisit that and try again or try another way.

I'll add that.

If you look at BDOT's design bill shortlist and selected, right?

Not a design bill job, but it's sort of a design bill job.

From the jobs Kimley Bourne has been involved with in the county for my 20 years of working with you.

This is a fairly sizable project.

I would anticipate if folks were going to respond, you're going to see some different size contractors.

And I think if you're wondering who those potentially are, those list of who plays in that space, it is likely a lot of your normal contractors are not going to be familiar because they're smaller.

It doesn't mean they won't be involved.

It just means it won't be their name on the contract.

I think there is space out there.

I think Lance alluded to it, right?

It's no different than an IFB.

You could publish an IFB tomorrow for a million-dollar project and get no responses.

I think the market in Virginia is very interesting.

I will tell you, there are people outside of Virginia looking at Virginia because our neighbors are not performing like we are on the transportation space.

I think it's a good time, right, in that sense.

But yes, I do think it's viable based on this.

Just if we were bidding this job in an Albemarle County project, we would probably see different bidders, names on a design bid build.

And when we add in the wrinkle of the P3, I think you would expect potentially different lists of folks that would respond.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

In an effort to save a little bit of time, I'm just going to sort of cut to the chase for my thoughts.

I really am wanting to move forward with this particular project.

I want to just commend, number one, you two gentlemen, for the presentation.

Would you make sure that we have a copy?

I always ask that, so that's my routine.

And I just want to say also that I really appreciate our entire team for being so forward thinking with this.

It really is appreciated.

I can remember when I first joined this board, the very first thing I believed that I asked for was a work session on PPP3s and PPTAs, and I never got it.

And the reason was because, and this administration was not in place, but the reason was all those years ago, there'd been one PPT3 project that had played out in the state as a disaster.

and only one.

There have been many that were successful and everybody was running scared and we couldn't get any momentum.

Now I think they're much more proven.

People are accepting them better and there's not one disaster playing out in the news every day.

Having said that, I really appreciate the not the lowest bid.

If you want to talk about the best value, there was an example you all will remember very recently in my district that was not a transportation, it was an ACSA project where we had to take the lowest bid and it was a disaster.

Anytime we can get away from just having to take the lowest bid, I am hardly in favor of.

I've seen that just play out very badly.

in the past.

And I don't want to keep going on, but the project really is very important, I think, to the community and to us, regardless of what magistral district we live in.

So with that, I guess I just need to make sure, does anybody else have any other questions before?

I just want to make a point that I think is important and follow up to the response to Supervisor Pruitt about you said after the award is done and kind of the messiness if there are changes.

Well, that's the same if it were a different type of project as well.

So I don't want to make it sound like the situation is unique.

You explained it.

spot on for how it would exist in this situation.

But if we get a smart scale project approved and we want to add 100 feet of sidewalk, there is no way that's going to be an easy process.

Fontaine Avenue would be your most recent example of what happens when design things have to start changing and what you have to do.

I appreciate that.

Thank you very much.

So with that, I'm going to turn back to Lance, what I'm seeing, I think, of my little count is right in my head.

We have a unanimous agreement right now on this board that this is a good plan and to move forward with what you're suggesting.

Do you need anything else?

Nothing at all, Supervisor McKeel and board members, thank you for your patience as both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Mitt Peters are outside consultant walk through this process today.

Ms.

Wall and the team as well as myself, we sit in and we looked at this several weeks ago as Mr. Mitt Peters mentioned earlier in his presentation and it's compelling.

that we need to move forward with this and I appreciate the board's patience today.

Several smart scale discussions ago, uh, uh, Ms.

McDermott is sitting there and he will remember that we pulled this project off of smart scale and I choreographed to the board at that meeting on that day.

We're pulling this from smart scale for

for Cost Implications and we've got to find another way to get this done.

Ms.

Mallek was sitting right there.

She remembers it because she checks in frequently to ask, where are we with this as she should?

So thank you for your patience.

We are early in the process on this and thank you Lance for your leadership and Mr. Mick Peters as well.

So we're good to go.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

We really appreciate the presentation.

It was very informative.

Great questions.

As always, we learn a lot.

Board, the next item is a presentation on wild land fire prevention strategies.

OK.

Good afternoon, Madam Chan, members of the board.

My name is Dan Eggleston, Chief of Fire Rescue.

We're here today to discuss our wildland fire prevention strategies.

This is a topic that was requested by you to come back to the board, really resulting from the wildland fires we had on March 20th earlier this year.

During our presentation today, which I'm joined by Chief Policia here, which is going to do the presentation for you, we'll step through a number of things, including our risk assessment that we have conducted, as well as after action report from our March 20th wildland fires that burned hundreds of acres and stressed our fire rescue system.

We'll talk about enhanced preparedness and mitigation strategies, and then really we're going to conclude with an opportunity, and this is really the only action we require from you as

Consensus on whether or not you're interested in and for us to come back with some suggestions to perhaps simplify and enhance our burn ordinance.

This is something that some of you have been interested in looking at for enhancing and we have some ideas for that.

Before I turn it over to Chief Policia, I just will ask that, you know, as we start stepping through some of these strategies for mitigation, it's really a mindset change.

And one of the best examples I saw was a day after the wildland fires on in the county, I drove up

Taylor's Gap Road.

And there were charred remnants of that fire that went probably 15 feet in the air on trees.

But the homes along Taylor's Gap, which they all survived, were mainly there because they had defendable space.

They had green grass around those homes.

They had yards that were raked and did not have any debris.

and that gave our firefighters a fighting chance to save those homes.

I think because of some of those homes, our loss of property and no injuries or loss of life that day were diminished because of the help.

So many of these strategies that we're going to hear today as a result of really asking and helping to educate homeowners on how they can protect their own property.

So today, as I mentioned, the presentation will be done by Chief Policia, who leads our community risk and resiliency division, which was formerly known as our fire prevention division.

That division has expanded its scope quite greatly here in the past, mainly to focus and work really alongside not only our emergency management division, but human services to really get at some of those risks that we see in our community.

So there's a strong relationship between community risk reduction,

our emergency management as well as our human services.

I will brag a little bit about Chief Policia.

She's celebrating her 30th year in the fire service.

And I will say that she's considered by many of her peers as a subject matter expert in the fire service.

So we're so lucky to have her as part of our team.

And I'm looking forward to her presentation.

You might adjust your mic so we can hear you clearly.

Thank you.

Okay.

And while I'm doing that, thank you all so much for having us here today.

Can you hear me?

Speak up louder.

Yeah, closer and project.

Okay.

Like I said, thanks again for having us here today to talk a little bit about some strategies that we could use in the county to put us in a better posture in terms of our risk to with wildland fires.

One of the things I thought would be important was to sort of set the stage on why there is an increase and why we're seeing that.

And the two big drivers of wildfire risk are climate change and urbanization.

That's nationally the trend, not just here, but that's what we're seeing here locally as well.

The reason that climate change impacts wildfire risk is the rising temperatures, the longer dry spells between storms, and the lower air humidity.

lower air humidity, all of which dry out the soil and dry out the vegetation that acts as fuel when there is a fire or when there is a source of ignition.

In terms of wildland, urban interface is a term, people call it wooey.

It's a term that's used in the fire service to describe

this migration of building into more rural settings.

And it creates for us a couple of challenges.

Mostly it's a challenge because human behavior tends to be the top cause of fire.

So 85 depends on who you ask, but 85 to 90% of wildfires are caused by human behavior.

And so that's typically why that urban interface is challenging.

It's also because it presents more complexity with land management strategies.

So that's the other reason why WUI is a challenging thing for us and why we're seeing more and more increase in wildfire risks and how we manage them.

Historically, big swaths of rural land, tracks, you could not be as concerned potentially and let things burn in certain ways.

The forestry department does that, but

but it's far more challenging with more urbanization and more building that's taking place.

So, when we look at some of the recent assessments that have been done in this area, the state does a statewide hazard mitigation assessment and as part of their planning process, theirs was concluded in 2023.

TJPDC also does a similar plan and process and theirs was completed in 2023 as well.

and as you all know the county's climate vulnerability and risk assessment was done in 2022 and working closely with our climate program staff

We've had conversations and Gabe Daley and I have worked really closely.

And he acknowledged that this plan does fall a little short.

It maybe underestimates the growing risk.

And we certainly saw that on March 20th.

And some of that risk planning is based on historical calls, right?

So if you haven't had them, that doesn't necessarily mean the risk isn't there, but just because you haven't had them, but that's how the risk

All of these plans do point to the need for and all have identified the need for an enhanced wildfire prevention posture.

So just to circle back to what Chief Eggleston mentioned, and I know the county executive shared all this information on the April 3rd board meeting, but this was a rare, you know, it was a red flag day.

And we have roughly one of those per year.

I think we've had seven in the last 10 years.

Excuse me.

Bless you.

But this was a red flag day for us and, you know, those are issued when the drought conditions are when we have drought conditions, drought conditions with very low humidity and high or erratic winds.

and this is just a summary just to recap what we saw on that day.

I think it was a bit of a wake-up call for the community if I you know that's really where I think you know for us it it was certainly the first time we've ever had every single piece of apparatus that the county owns in use out trying to put this out and pulling resources from around the state but I think for the community as the chief mentioned there were

You know, lots of homeowners in the rural parts of the county that were scared and were aware of the risk, you know, front and center.

And after action review that we did of the event sort of highlighted these main areas of improvement, if you will, the need to

The biggest challenge that was identified was really the fact that the concurrency of those three major incidents, those three major fires happened at the same time, and so that caused this massive resource depletion.

pulling in mutual aid resources from around the state was challenging.

It took several hours for them to respond and that coordination and communication is challenging.

We know that it's, you know, but in the heat of the moment, it's very frustrating.

And so that was something that we evaluated.

and then also the evacuation and notification process.

We identified some gaps in our notification systems and also the need for more public education, specific public education, targeted public education, which I'll talk more about.

So what have we done?

What steps have we taken, you might ask, to be better prepared since then?

Well, one of the things that we've

Taken huge strides forward with is our analytic capabilities.

We hired a performance analyst who has been working very hard at building some products for us that will help us to make more real-time decisions.

And one of those is a situational awareness dashboard.

And we're sort of building that as we go.

In fact, just yesterday, he started working on flooding as one of the layers, one of the focus areas.

And so on this situational awareness dashboard, we have different topics and different pages, if you will.

And so that's giving us the ability to look at

In real time, what's happening?

What are those changing conditions that are contributing to and maybe help us get a little bit further ahead of or upstream of an event?

I'd like to mention also that the Environmental Services Division that the climate folks have recently purchased a data set that will make a huge difference risk factor.

We're excited about that.

And we're like I said, we're working really closely with the climate team.

And so that will also be data that we can pull into what we use to make decisions.

So those are some of the short-term actions that we're taking.

Oh, sorry, we're also doing during peak periods of

Wildfire Risk, our fire marshal has been doing a daily wildfire threat analysis and that's a daily report to all of us chief officers so that we have a sense every day of what's going on and what kind of conditions are out there.

Those are some of the short-term

efforts that we've made.

The longer term effort, the bigger project, if you will, is to conduct this comprehensive risk assessment across the entire county.

And some of that resilient together, that initiative has been doing a lot of that work, but it's not targeted specific work around wildfire risk, right?

Like they're looking at all of the environmental impacts of climate change.

But that is, that's working in conjunction with them.

This is just a sample of what the situational awareness dashboard looks like.

It's pretty tiny, so I know I apologize that you can't probably see it in great detail, but it highlights

The historic call data, and it also ties in the precipitation in max temp each day.

And so we can look at this and see what, you know, this time of year, what we could potentially expect, although, as we saw in March, that was a, you know, an outlier.

Again, if you just use historical call data, you're going to

probably get caught, you know, caught behind the eight ball.

So this was developed primarily for the Office of Emergency Management, but also our department wide use to provide kind of a comparative analysis of historical call data.

This is just an example of what the daily wildfire threat analysis looks at the different sources that our fire marshals will check every morning and then provide this

So, looking forward at some future preparedness that we could do, and that's, as the Chief mentioned, I think the biggest area of opportunity is how do we leverage and get the bigger, broader community to be thinking about fire as a problem and how to mitigate the problem that could be wildfire.

We have a great relationship with the Department of Forestry, but they have very limited resources.

We know them by name.

We're very, you know, we work very closely with them.

Some of the strategies that we've identified is there's fire adapted communities is a sort of big umbrella term.

I'll talk a little more about that on the next slide, but

developing and implementing an enhanced wildfire training program for our personnel is one effort that we've identified we need to do and we're working on that.

Evaluate and identify some essential equipment that we might need for wildfire management.

It's not a lot, but we're working on a plan for that.

And then work with the Department of Forestry to develop a fuel management plan for Albemarle County.

Look more comprehensively at the county and how the strategies of land management around

fuels, fire fuels.

And then, as the Chief mentioned, updating our open burn ordinance, Chapter 6, Article 4, to address some of the gaps that he mentioned.

Just to mention on this last slide, we were really fortunate to have hired several firefighters from the West Coast, including a national wildland firefighter who we hired in our last class, all of whom have experience and they've all stepped up to assist with some of the training and equipment identification of needs.

So what has fire adapted communities?

It's a model that has been adopted sort of nationally across a bunch of different organizations.

Lots of partners were involved in this plan.

And it's not intended to be prescriptive, but rather it serves as an example of some of the most common actions or programs that a community could undertake.

Really, you should design your programs based on what you find in your risk assessment.

To fully achieve this requires a long-term, very collaborative process.

And so one area you see the arrows pointing to, one area that we could focus on is the resident mitigation, and that's FireWiseUSA is a program that's nationally adopted by the National Fire Protection Agency, US Forest Service, all of the key players, key national players.

And so, Firewise USA, it started in 1985 after a really horrible fire season.

That one was one of the worst in history.

The U.S.

Department of Agriculture teamed up with NFPA and created this program.

And it basically provides this framework to help neighborhoods or communities get organized and take action at the community level to reduce wildfire risk.

This is a community-driven effort.

It's a mitigative effort that comes from the community, typically to us and forestry as a partnership.

But we're actually in the process of trying to help identify some of those communities and then reach out and solicit some interest.

Benefits of fire-wise communities

They reduce the risk of property damage and loss.

They decrease our resource needs because, as the chief mentioned, the Taylor's Gap fire that the homes, the areas that have that defensible space make it less challenging for us to have to fight those fires.

It empowers and educates the community and it just overall increases community resilience.

Some of the principles, I won't go into this with great detail, but it's about, like the Chief said, creating defensible space.

And you physically walk the neighborhoods, you walk, when you partner with the community, you go to them and you walk and do these assessments.

You look at how to harden the homes, the materials that are used.

You talk about how to plan for evacuations, and you work through and develop a full plan.

How to implement it?

Step one is complete this comprehensive community risk assessment.

We've already begun that work, like I said, and we plan to have that completed by this fall.

You identify and prioritize the areas of risk.

Conduct that outreach to the highest risk neighborhoods to try to seek and solicit participation in Firewise, and then you conduct the Firewise program.

In 2019, this was done as a pilot with the Emerald Ridge community, and I have a copy of that plan, what was done at that time.

I'll leave a copy for you guys.

that you know then we went into 2020 and so but it was it was asked for by them and it was done with Department of Forestry hand-in-hand it was it was very well received we've got interest from another community right now steps three and four will require resources to complete and those are a long-term thing right like

It's going to require, we can realistically right now handle probably three to four of those a year because they're pretty in-depth and you know they take time on the boots on the ground walking the neighborhoods with the homeowners.

And then finally, as the chief mentioned, the burn ordinance.

So in the fall of 2023, we began an effort to revise Article 4, the burning of brush ordinance.

We identified several areas of confusion within it.

Mostly we spend a lot of time researching and conducting this comparative analysis of other localities in Virginia and beyond Virginia, but we also have been looking sort of what's coming down the pipe.

Like the force, the fire service is starting to really recognize the impact of climate change and anticipate rather than react to some of the changes that are coming.

And so we did this gap analysis of the existing ordinance that's been completed.

We've completed the research and the comparative analysis and we've got a handful of recommendations.

We've got several

We've had lots of conversation about it.

These are just a sampling of some of the recommendations that we have for revisions.

But as the Chief said, I guess we're coming to you to say, if that's the direction you want us to pursue a full revision, we're ready to take that on.

So it still needs legal review, particularly around the air quality authority.

That's one area that's been a little bit of a gray area.

So we need to work through that.

But yeah, that's where we are ready to make any moves on that that you guys want us to.

So I think that's it.

That wraps up what we had.

Thank you very much.

Great presentation.

And I'm going to use our usual order and go around, see what questions we have or comments.

Thank you so much for all the information you all brought for us today.

My only question actually kind of originates from very, very early in the presentation where Chief Eglson was discussing the recent wildfires that we had.

and how the availability of defensible land in and around the houses that were most directly encroached on by the fire made them

more defensible.

And that popped in my mind because it occurs to me that that is great, but also potentially at cross purposes with some of our own stated goals in community development around maintenance of tree canopies and trying to preserve as much tree canopy as close into development as possible.

There are several areas where they bump up against each other, not just with the tree canopy.

Defensible space, though, to pick that apart a little bit.

Defensible space is about the clearance around the house, the ground clearance, the types of materials that are used around the ground.

There isn't specific conflict with trees in the tree canopy.

And quite honestly, thinking holistically about

the types of emergencies that we deal with.

We're all for more tree canopy.

If it the heat emergencies, you know, not having the tree canopy attributes to heat emergencies for us.

So it's, you know, which, which flavor of emergency do you get?

So that piece specifically, not so much.

There are several areas where we bump up against some of the building

The trends in building and access is more of an issue for us.

That's really probably the bigger challenge, I think.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Thank you for the presentation.

In terms of the burn ordinance review, I would be, I mean, yes, I think that's favorable, provided the resources capacity are appropriate given

especially as it impacts other departments in their schedule or their work order, if you would, but would agree with that.

My only question is more just understanding.

So the situational awareness is curiosity, situational awareness dashboard.

So it's clear that it gives you the ability to analyze past events and then theorize future events.

For some of the fields, we have three different fields currently populated in that dashboard.

We have heat emergencies, wildfire risk, and then flooding is the new one that we've built out.

And the flooding one is probably the best example of real time.

It's pulling in actual data from the stream gauges that are in the county.

So you're actually looking at the dashboard and going, oh, in an hour we're going to have an issue out on X-Road, whereas without that you're way to the issue

happens, and then you're like, oh, we have an issue out on.

And then the heat emergencies, you know, for us, it's sometimes it's hard to pick your head up and not when you've got multiple calls coming in until you're anticipating.

We've had two falls for heat emergencies.

You know, is this starting to be a trend?

When does it trigger that threshold of this is actually

something to hand off to not hand off to mercy management, but work more closely with them.

That's fantastic.

It's just I didn't really know about that or was aware of that.

And then I'm just going to wrap.

I'm not going to bog us down here.

I just got to wrap my head around your understanding this urbanization and wildfire piece.

It sounds like it was more people since most fires start with behavior, urbanizations connected to more people, more people increases, blah, blah.

So it seems to be the train of thought.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Originally, it was that term was coined when people were building in these really obscure, like mountainside cliffs in Colorado and stuff.

They were starting to coin that and frame it that way.

But at the end of the day, it's about more people, more behavior, more events.

All right.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

I noticed on page five, you talked about human causes, which then gets us also to page nine, changing current rules.

And I guess that would involve our ordinances for local burn laws.

I'm very concerned about the air quality.

We do have local burn laws.

But how does that work with our air quality?

And I know some areas, states have actually banned burning and as our climate changes, I know we have a lot of humidity, which is good, I think, right?

as our climate changes, is that how much do we want to control burning and make sure that it is safe and people aren't?

I will say that the air quality is the one area of the code that's still been a bit of a challenge to pick apart and point to where the authority lies, and so that is an area that we will definitely need to work closely with the legal

to resolve because, you know, in some counties where the health department's embedded in the organization, it's, you know, that that's a little more clear line, you know, line of authority there.

But in the majority of counties in the state of Virginia who have a regional or that's a different entity than air quality

technically falls to the health official.

And so for us, that's the challenge, right?

We don't have a dedicated.

But there is parts of the fire code, statewide fire code, that point to air quality as a piece that we would be responsible for.

And some counties have leveraged that state.

So is that something we can put in our ordinances as we change them potentially?

Potentially.

and gives us the authority to make that band on the fly if we need to, right?

Good.

I like that.

And my last question is regarding communication.

The last time with Taylor's Gap Fire, there was a communication problem with other entities to get help.

The notification piece, what's challenging with notifications is it's a sign up, right?

Like it's an opt-in system and you have to get people

to engage, get the community engaged.

And I'm not sure where, it's probably 5% of the community.

I'm not, I'm looking at smaller than that.

Yeah, we don't have, like that's a, that's a challenge, the notification system that's used in this areas and we don't have enough people signed up for it.

So to make those notifications means going basically door to door in the time of an evacuation or in the time of... Oh, okay.

Yeah, that's what I meant by that.

Well, when we bring in units from another area like the Cumberland County and those other counties, they don't use the same radio system.

So there is that piece as well.

So do you need an upgrade of communications?

No, it was just identified as a piece that we have to plan for and navigate.

And we did anticipate it, but it's logistically getting our radios out to those units when they get here, when you're already spread thin and don't have truly any people left to send as runners.

and regarding notification, you're talking about notification or communication with people in the area where there's a fire.

There's only a small people that are signed up.

You say the notification system that the county uses.

Yeah.

Right.

And I'm wondering if that's something we could work on to improve, maybe to the tell, you know, news agencies and things like that.

OK.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you very much, and I so appreciate all of the behind-the-seeds work that you all have been doing for years on this.

I remember Howard coming years ago and talking about, or Howard Legomocino, Fire Marshal, talking about the burn barrels and how important it was for air quality.

to restrict their use because people were burning plastic milk jugs and other things that were absolutely not suitable and poisoning there in their neighborhoods.

So you have a lot of history in doing that, and I really appreciate that.

And also Emily in high school was a cracker jack soccer player, so I've known him for a long, long time.

She kept her teammates safe on the field.

Let's put it that way.

Thank you.

I spent a lot of

Why it was so much worse off now and so many streams are completely bone dry that never ran dry in 2004 and I'm beginning to think that it's the week after week after week of 95 degrees day after day after day and it never gets below 75 or 80 at night and then the wind that is just even with

an occasional one-tenth of an inch.

Everything is just evaporated before it even gets there and I know that's made your your role incredibly scary.

I appreciate all the things that you're recommending.

I think that with board members help and assistance and also the

BACs and local neighborhood associations.

I will volunteer the early residents' league for you to come and practice your presentation whenever you are ready, because the Piney Mountain is the eastern end of our range, and we have a lot of people who are very tuned in for that and would like to be able to help out and do that.

Job, I really appreciate the things that you were saying about the after-action report and the, I will just, was remembering the February fire that Dan will remember in 2010, when in addition to every piece of apparatus, and there were many fewer back then, every house was empty, but there were hundreds of farm tractors and every bulldozer, every contractor could put on a trailer and take out to for union and other places that were burning up.

Humped out numerous swimming pools into the tankers to get to the fires.

There were 35 fires burning that afternoon, and it was awful and scary.

But the good example is it was the worst day and the best day because there was absolute total cooperation throughout the community.

And all the private assistance was able to be used in a productive way.

And I think that's a challenge that you all have to sort of anticipate that finding out is going to happen again, pretty quick probably, and how

what you how you prepare your line officer on the person on the gate you know to to explain or deal with or there's prior education to the community about don't just show up with your four-wheel drive tractor because we're not going to let you in the fire scene you know even if you try to deliver fuel to the guy at the top of the hill to run his leaf blower to clear his yard you're not going to get there because of the risk I just want to I know that you all will try to

Get as much of that organized ahead of time to prepare all of you because it's really hard to think straight when there's a crisis going on for the community as well.

And hard for them to respond properly when they're told, no, you can't do that.

Sorry.

So that is a real concern.

Something I always am concerned about with the statewide

The rain collection is the total variability.

I mean, Dan's place is getting tons of rain.

The northwest corner is not getting any.

But if there's Gutchland is where the state is taking their rain measurements, that's just not working.

So there may be ways that you can engage the community to have

People who do, I mean, people used to do this.

They used to come in and do stream reports, the Tyler Well and Louisa, all these other things where community members were assigned a task to report in.

There may be ways to take some of the burden off of yourselves and bring the community in.

No, I appreciate you bringing that up.

And you and I have had that discussion before.

And I think

We understand that relying solely on the Department of Forestry risk assessment on a daily basis is somewhat challenging.

That's why Emily and her staff, particularly Howard, has expanded it to a broader view.

But I saw last week a prototype from our analyst in Fire Rescue that he has a system that he's developing very quickly that'll take in a number of inputs, weather inputs, and even some NASA data, as Emily had mentioned,

to help augment what the state provides us.

And I think that's going to give us a much clearer picture across the 723 square miles than what we may get from the state resources now.

So I'm pretty excited about it.

I think it's going to be able to, you and I talked about those points where things may be wet down here in the Crozet, but they're super dry up and green or white hall.

That's fabulous.

Another suggestion that came from other communities was having citizens involved in groundwater assessments because I think it was 2010 when the county wells program stopped because of lack of staff to send somebody out to the beach and scaage to read it.

So other places are using agreements with homeowners to permit

somebody or them themselves to just do a laser measurement of the depth of the well.

And they get very broad across the wide area, for example, with ours.

We know that our well situations are starting to really tank now.

And a lot of people's wells are running dry, in addition to the farmers having no water in their streams for their cows and all the cows going to market.

that the having programs where we can avail ourselves of willing residents to be able to generate tremendous amounts of data that will benefit everybody.

And you all, with your analysis, I think would be really great.

So if you need it, I can get you more information about that.

I'm absolutely thrilled with updating the ordinance.

That will be no surprise to you all.

But particularly in items that you all have already researched about having the year round,

No burning before 4 p.m.

for the residential, the recreational side because that the benefit of that is that it gives neighbors a window of daytime when they can actually be in their yard instead of this six in the morning till heaven knows when that seems to be allowed now by our current rules.

So I think

What you have learned that other counties in Virginia are already doing this, that is fantastic and there will be some not having to reinvent the wheel on those approvals will be good and I look forward to hearing more and

Do you have any kind of timetable?

I know I always ask you this.

To be honest, I think there's opportunity to redo the entire thing, but we have some recommendations we could move forward if we wanted to do an incremental improvement to it.

I don't mean to push it back to you all, but I think it is on a little direction, which path we should take.

Do we want to

I think tremendous progress was made a number of years ago with the distances increased that the fire marshals suggested for the urban area to protect those where the houses are so close together and absolutely prohibited importation of logs from other places to burn in one neighborhood as they were doing in Glenbrook for a while and got stopped very quickly.

I guess I can't give you that answer because I don't know how many surgicals there are.

Let's put it that way.

But if it's strictly clarifying the categories, making it really clear on the website, which I'm sure to people who work in the system every day, it's very clear, but to civilians, it isn't.

the differences of commercial versus something else versus something else.

And if you are going to do this, this is what you have to do when you are called X. It's sort of round and round right now.

That's one piece that we identified as a big gap.

I just want to point out, and Emily did a really good job.

We're sort of at a point now, we can bring back some

Modern recommendations to perhaps simplify and clarify the burning ordinance.

One of those is perhaps look at a fall burn ban, similar to what we're seeing in northern Virginia.

It won't go as far perhaps as banning all daytime burning.

But if you want us to also take a more holistic approach and engage with the community and those who will be affected with maybe more restricted, we can do that too.

Because one of the things we want to avoid is making a change on one end and creating a problem on the other end.

Because, you know, for instance, if we were to move towards a more stringent burn ban, then we could perhaps create a traffic and a noise issue if contractors have to haul that material off site.

or Grondett on site.

So we want to be careful as we go forward before we bring some of those recommendations just to make you well aware of the potential consequences.

I think the air quality, the rights of neighbors is something that is not always included in these stakeholders.

And they're far and wide with the way this travels.

And I know with even Canadian fires and whatever, we've seen a lot of health warnings for our area during the last year.

And when you're living in a neighborhood with someone who just burns all the time.

and it is not s'mores with your kids, it's just all day long.

Then that's different and so that's something else you all will have to challenge yourselves on of how to define what these things really are or unless it's created by the state in which case that's a different problem.

Thank you.

And I just have a couple of comments.

I'll try and be brief looking at our time.

I really am impressed with this work and thank you.

And thank you for all the hard work you've done in fighting the fires that we've had.

I watch very often all the just the mulch fires you are all going to that are caused by cigarette butts.

I mean, and I think, Jan, you spoke to my CAC not too long ago and said, you're looking at that to try and impact that.

Just was something simple as to say to the businesses, don't use mulch, use stone.

We could save a lot of these responses if we didn't have all the mulch and more pebbles and stones.

Really impressive.

So thank you for that.

Just a couple of things.

As you're talking, I certainly am really interested in our conflicts, whether development codes, I'm interested in getting this ordinance updated.

I agree that we need to include the community as an educational piece.

I think we can bring them along a lot better if they're educated.

Having said that, we don't have five years

Just saying.

We need to move on this because we've already had one bad experience.

So how you all figure that out, I'm not gonna go into that, but just to say that there are short-term, medium and long-term surgical and big challenges that we can deal with, but I would think about what can we do quickly that would help us as well as educate the community.

To that end, I would love, for example, just speaking for me, to have a presentation to my CAC so they understand.

That would be very helpful.

I would love for you all to reach out to the Albemarle County Public Schools, and I'm sorry, but they have such a convoluted name for this, but I'm the liaison on their environmental and sustainability.

Albemarle County Public Schools Advisory Committee for Environmental Sustainability, connecting with them around this work because the schools have a lot of property.

And I think they're a great source for education to the community.

So thinking about reaching out to them.

Just looking at my notes really quickly.

I think you're, so what I guess I was saying was you're looking at the materials that we use is really important in building and in our yard scapes.

I'm just trying to grab my notes really fast.

We have wet and then we have dry and we have wet and we have lots of growth and then we have dieback.

But we also are getting a lot of invasives, which are very concerning because they are, you know, we all know the fire in Malloy was they said was mostly because of invasives that kept kept the fire going.

So just thinking about that, the only other thing that I would add is

My district, and I know the Samuel Miller district and a few of the other districts, have a lot of woods and property owned by the University of Virginia Foundation.

I can show you in my district, there are properties that have lots of fallen timber, dead wood, they're a perfect setup for a fire, and many of them are right beside neighborhoods.

So all I'm saying is, in your work, don't leave out the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia Foundation when you're talking about this work, especially the foundation, because the foundation is one that owns all of the

Wood, so to speak, right?

So I would really appreciate that outreach.

I'm sure that they would be interested in working with us in some way or another.

And with that, oh, Neighborhood Walks.

I would love to have a couple of my communities be able to participate in a Neighborhood Watch.

So just to hold those thoughts and get back to us.

But so in a time effort here to get back to our end of our discussion, I think I have had heard consensus from everybody that in Jeff, I'm going to turn Mr. Richardson, I'm going to turn to you and say, I heard consensus, I believe.

Thank you.

That'd be great.

Yes, we'd love to see that.

And I thank you.

And I saw lots of your folks in the audience.

So we appreciate everybody coming and attending.

Maybe you could have them just stand up.

Yeah, stand up and come on, guys and girls.

Thank you for coming and thank you for your love.

This was great.

Very appreciative.

So, Board, I always say that I'm your official timekeeper, and I wear the hat, and I'm looking at the clock.

We're running a little bit late.

We were supposed to have VDOT.

At least we were hoping by three o'clock, your presentation.

It's a little bit after 3.30.

I'm going to ask you all, do you feel like you want to take a quick break?

Do we just keep moving?

Everybody okay?

Keep moving.

All right.

So next up is the Virginia Department of Transportation quarterly report.

Ms.

Kerry Shepard, Charlottesville Residency Administrator is on her way up.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the board.

Will you pull up my presentation?

All right, so again, Carrie Shepard here to provide the Bea Dot quarterly report.

So starting with our preliminary engineering slide, the things that have changed since that last came, we do have a planned public hearing for the Berkman Drive Connector Road to Airport Road.

That is tentatively scheduled for October.

That might get shifted a little bit maybe into early November, but right now we are planning for an October public hearing.

We also have a public hearing scheduled for the Route 250 Route 20 intersection improvements.

That public hearing is scheduled for September 10th.

We also did hold a Citizens Information Meeting for the District Avenue Roundabout Project that was held just over, just under two months ago in June at the Holiday Inn.

And then two other things on this slide to note, the Route 601 Old Ivy Bridge, it was advertised and the bid came in too high, so they decided to go back and re-advertise.

I expect that to be re-advertised in a couple months, late summer, early fall time period.

and then last but not least the Route 680 Browns Gap Turnpike Bridge replacement.

We had a public hearing this past month, July 10th.

So we'll be moving forward to putting that transcript together for the comments that we received.

and next to talk through our design build bundles.

So the hydraulic bundle, as you, I'm sure you've all seen the hydraulic intersection was closed, but it was reopened yesterday.

So if you haven't had a chance to drive through it, I encourage you to, because it does look, it looks very good.

They did a nice job.

and then they'll be continuing on next with the pedestrian bridge over at Zand road.

As far as our second Albemarle bundle with the five components, the project was awarded June 18th and geotechnical surveys is underway and right of way is under development.

So that project is moving forward nicely as well.

for our rural rustic projects, Old Dominion Road.

The construction is complete on that.

And right now, the crew is on Sutherland Road.

The stone, the base stone is being placed.

Drove out there yesterday, they're making decent progress, probably a little bit behind with the rain that's coming.

So we'll just have to keep an eye on that, but they've made decent progress up to this point.

As far as construction activities, so we've been planning a turn lane extension

at 240-250.

It's the southbound.

Wright-Turnlane on 240.

Trying to get that done this summer, we had some delays.

We were trying to work with the service authority because they were replacing a water line in the area, so we let them go do their work first.

And we were planning to start construction this past Monday.

However, with the storm coming in, we pushed it to next Monday so that we don't create a mess out there.

Still trying to get that complete before school starts, August 21st, that's our goal.

Should be able to do that pending weather delays.

Also, the three bridge projects that we have ongoing Route 708 Red Hill Road bridge replacement.

They finished first half of the bridge, so there is one lane open, so they've made decent progress there.

Estimated completion is still December.

Similar to Phrase Mill Road bridge replacement, they're still working on that.

Estimated completion is also in December.

And then last but not least, Route 810 bridge replacement.

That is scheduled to be complete later on this month.

as far as our traffic engineering work order updates.

The Plank Road through truck restriction went through and passed.

Right now we're fabricating signs so we can get those up and installed.

Georgetown Road request from Supervisor McKeel to check out the signage.

The signage is still under review.

However, we did clear the brush earlier this week from the sign so that it's enforceable at this point in time.

And I did let the police department know about that as well.

from Supervisor Mallek, Sugar Hollow Road and Sugar Ridge Road.

I believe I've given you updates on these, but the signage was a little bit outdated.

So we will be removing the N35 mile an hour speed sign from Sugar Hollow Road and Sugar Ridge Road.

We will be removing the N30 mile per hour speed to transition to gravel.

So the whole road will just be 30 miles an hour.

It just made logical sense.

So I'm glad you pointed that out to us.

And then last but not least, we've been requested by the community in Batesville to look at a four-way stop at, or I should say an all-way stop at Plank Road and Crake Store Road.

So that's under review as well.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I don't think I have any questions but one very brief comment.

I'm very excited to see Glendauer Road finally populated on here.

I think I've jokingly shared with a few folks that shortly after I came into office, there was a gentleman who lives on Glendauer Road who said, if they ever get a Scottsville supervisor who manages to get this road paid, we're going to make a statue of them.

So I'm very excited to hold him to this promise, which means I'm monitoring the implementation of this pretty closely.

And just to that point,

I know currently it's not an issue, but there will come a time where we'll be breaking ground and working on Glendauer 1, but Glendauer 2 not yet.

I'm sorry, I'm misunderstanding what you mean.

Currently, this is one project, but my understanding of the project as being planned is that you're going to do it in phases with a break at one of the intersections to execute one half and then execute another.

If I remember correctly, I believe that they're in sequential order on the secondary six year plan.

So really the difference phase one and two is really kind of tied to the funding piece of it.

And I imagine if they are in sequential order, we will try to get them done at the same time.

That was a misunderstanding of that.

Yeah, I'll double check, though, just to make sure I'm not misspeaking.

Awesome.

Good to see you, Kerry.

Thank you.

When you finish, and I'll use the diverging diming interchange, because that one's pretty much completed, do you guys go back after it's in place for a time and just say, okay, did the impacts improve?

Yes, I'm not sure if they've done that yet.

I know that we had to monitor the speed limit through their, when I say speed limit, the timing of the signal based on the speed of the traffic.

So they have made adjustments.

That was right after it was opened.

But they do look at that.

And is that just, is that like information available just to view somewhere?

Probably request.

And it's really a curiosity, not to lead into any issue or anything like that, but those type of big projects that occurs to me that, you know, other than having some sort of official data from analysis, it's just anecdotal whether or not it was worth doing.

So I'm just, that thought had popped into my head

This may be a combo question, and if it's for our staff, I'm happy to have it come back at a different point.

The Highway Safety Improvement Program, it might understand by the consent agenda report that it got the budget, the state got the budget to that.

Previous report, I was thrilled to see the Hillsdale, Greenbrier, the modular roundabout.

It doesn't look like they got forwarded for funding because the other

Projects, and that's fine.

But can you give me some sort of sense as I was thrilled to have that at that intersection?

So from a timing perspective, what does this mean?

Do we have to wait a year?

Is there any sense since the state has come up with a billion dollars and extra revenue that that helps this particular program?

I mean, anything there that I can

Yeah, you can.

So once I saw that that was not funded through H-SIP, we decided to use residency funds to do a study.

We have a consultant on board right now who's going to look at that and look at it specifically for a roundabout.

Different methods based on

The Residency Budget and what we can handle ourselves.

But we do have them looking at that so they can put together conceptual design for us.

Different options like the delineators would be a lot cheaper for us to accomplish versus, you know, the kind of stick on raised.

So they're going to look at that and come up with a design for us.

And then we're going to see what that costs and see what we can fund and make happen.

But I'm feeling optimistic about it.

Awesome.

Because I was just like, oh, a screeching halt.

The residents have really appreciated what you've done thus far, so it would be nice to be able to report.

And I can tell you there's probably been a lot of tutorial searches on modular roundabouts since the last few months, and we've been talking about that at our CAC, and what that means.

That's all I had.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

Yes, I just have one question.

It's actual of your report.

And by the way, thank you very much, Ms.

Shepherd, for your report.

Very good.

On page 14 at the very bottom, it talks about that in March.

the speeding concerns were directed to the police department.

So the speeding concerns would not be directed to CDD or VDOT or anything else just to the police department.

My concern is their website is have a traffic safety concern, question mark slash Albemarle County, Virginia, which is a long, you know,

along to Hughes.

But once you go in there, because I went on the website, it asks the person if you're reporting something, okay, your name, fine, that's fine.

But it asks for the make of the car, the kind of car, the license plate, any other identifying information.

Well, usually when someone is speeding along the road, you don't gather that information to be able to report it.

And even if they did gather that information or report it, my question is, what's being done about that?

I mean, a private person is not going to be able to levy a fine on someone is speeding.

So generally, when we get speeding concerns, it comes through a citizen or a work order through our system or even, you know, in any of you.

And when we get that, we talk about it in our monthly meetings as more of like a generalized area or a specific road.

And when we get those complaints, then we involve ACPD, they initially run radar to determine if there really is a problem.

Okay, so you still are accepting concerns from people saying speeders on this road.

Correct.

So I'll let you look at that.

They could go, it's report a problem, but if you just type in, if you just type that in VDOT, report a problem in Google, it'll come up.

And it's just the typical, and that's exactly where you report everything else, like potholes and stuff like that.

So if it comes in through our work order system, we catch it.

We also, you know, just get, I get emailed.

Okay, it just surprised me that it was as of March this year,

that all speeding concerns will be directed to the Albemarle County Police Department and not you all.

It can come from any source, but the process starts with ACPD.

Thank you very much.

No other questions.

Thank you very much, and thank you for all the good news in the report already.

I was confused by one thing, though, in the chart describing the 240-256-80 roundabout, and then separately was the 680 bridge, but in 2027.

And so I understood that had to be done first before the roundabout was done, but the roundabout's supposed to start this year.

Currently, the dates that I have shown are correct.

However, that might change in the near future.

I'm not sure.

Okay, very good.

I'll just leave it at that and just say I was confused and I look forward to being I'm confused.

That's great.

Every time I watch a European bicycle race, they talk about highway furniture and how in France they have the statues and trees and things and they make the traffic go this way.

It's just so simple to slow people down as a traffic calming thing.

So I hope that it just be not ever consider making a experimental in the existing right of way

Roundabout with your posts.

I'm thinking every day I drive through Ned's favorite intersection at Greenbrier and Hillsdale because it and I'm one of those people that goes 15 miles an hour and makes everybody else mad, but too bad because it's very scary.

I mean, people get tired of waiting and they jump out.

And so anyway, it's such a beautiful wide area and we have the similar circumstances on Foothills Crossing in the Crozet neighborhood where huge intersection and it would be so easy to just

Need a circle in there and get people, because I'm worried about spending time and millions to do designs and a $2 million roundabout.

Yeah, and I think the Hillsdale Greenbuyer is a good example of that, because I think we're doing that in-house, so it's obviously a lot smaller scale than if you were to look at a smart scale.

But also, when we're talking about delineators and we talk about the, you know, the modular roundabout, those are removable.

So another benefit to doing that is if it doesn't work,

or if it causes problems, we can take it out.

Or if it does work and it wants to be a permanent, you want to have that as the permanent solution, then you can look at different avenues for greater funding sources than what we can handle ourselves.

Okay, so you can try it out there and then we'll try it out in Earleysville and all these other places too.

That's great.

Thank you.

And for Frasemill, did they hit a snag or something at the 641, the bridge?

Because that's another place where I go by all the time and there's often nobody there.

So I'm wondering what's going on.

I'm not sure I mean it literally there's been like from a civilians from a distance point of view it looks like nothing has changed in weeks so I'm just curious I will rat them out to you and you can send an investigator out there to find out what's going on and that's all the things I had so thank you very much oh one more thing I'm sorry I appreciate I heard back from Captain Jamerson that their PD is handing over the guardrail at Austin Chrysler's consideration to

to VDOT.

And you and I were out there with him a year ago and the accident last week really scared everybody because the house went, the car went airborne and hit his foundation of his house.

And he's 96 years old and that's just so I really appreciate you giving great attention to making a real solution there because the little arrow signs and things have just done nothing to keep people on the road.

Let's put it that way.

And I appreciate that.

Thank you, Ann.

And I see Kevin has moved up.

Did you want to say something or add something?

Thank you.

I just wanted to introduce yourself.

Kevin McDermott, Deputy Director of Planning.

I just wanted to clarify the question that Supervisor Piso-Kirtley mentioned.

She talked about the link that was in the report.

That was actually in the County Transportation Court of Report.

It wasn't in

It wasn't in carry sports.

That's why she was a little concerned or confused about that.

And just to clarify with the speeding concerns, VDOT and county staff in Albemarle County Police Department have been working together on this process.

And we recognize that the best source for addressing the immediate concerns of speeding on a road really are Albemarle County Police Department.

So we're trying to direct

Everyone to go to that website or to call our Marquine Police Department when they have, when they have speeding concerns that they're identifying, not a specific vehicle, but that there's a roadway where this is happening.

And so that's, we put that link in the report.

Harry's right that we all do continue to work together when those reports go in.

The police will bring them to us.

If they come to us, we bring them back to the police.

Same with VDOT.

So that's really, I just wanted to emphasize that that's really our best, the citizen's best first resource for addressing speeding concerns.

We will work on those together.

And may I add one clarification, please?

Yeah, and that's correct.

And the online does have those, you can put in a make and model of the car.

You don't have to fill everything out.

Thank you, Kevin.

Thank you.

Kevin, hold on just a minute while you're there because I let me and I'll get back to questions to you, Carrie.

I'm going to try to be really brief because I know we're running out of time.

But Kevin, while you're here, I just want to double check.

My understanding is that the consultants report for the hydraulic landslide campus recommendations is back.

That's all I'm asking.

Yeah, when we've expressed that, facilities, environmental services are the ones that were leading that project with our input, of course.

So they were done with our review.

Right.

Thank you.

I'm just excited to see it.

Thank you very much.

Carrie, you weren't here, but I was praising VDOT for your early completion of the roundabout.

People were really excited that it's completed.

Just another comment is that, and I don't know how much you want to talk, I don't expect you to talk a lot about this, but people do not realize how much rain impacts your loss paving.

and the work that you're doing and all of these afternoon showers when you're trying to do paving at night.

Just saying.

Yes.

So people need to take that into consideration because I'm hearing some chatter about, well, there's never any work going on at night and all.

And part of it is that you all are up against a lot of evening showers and rain and you want good quality pavement at the end of the day.

That's right.

Just say it, okay.

The other thing I wanted to ask you about was, does your website, the VDOT website still have a place where a constituent of mine can go to see what is scheduled and when?

He was trying to find when his neighborhood would be on your payment schedule and they couldn't find it.

Well, the only reason I pause is because, yes, that exists, but we did change over to the new website not that long ago.

So our links are still a little off.

Okay.

So actually, now that you bring that up, let me double check our link just to make sure that it's still setting it to the right place.

Yeah.

So, so I've

half of an update on that.

I don't know what the, what the status of the, what was determined in the field yet.

And that's fine.

I just was wondering about the website.

Why don't you send that link to everybody?

Okay.

Cause I think that link would be helpful for all six of the supervisors.

Okay.

Yeah, that would be great.

Thank you.

Later in time to establish that committee to make that determination.

That would be great.

Having said that, Mary, thank you very much for your great report.

We really appreciate it.

All right.

Board, taking note of the time, we're going to be needing to move into closed session, but

My understanding from our clerk is that Supervisor Andrews is going to, we're going to try and bring him into the closed session by phone.

Having said that, what I need to do then is we need to somehow or another pull, get, and I'm looking at our clerk to get Supervisor Andrews so we can invite him in and then we'll do the closed session if that works, the vote for closed session.

Supervisor Andrews.

Okay, we can hear you but barely, but we can hear you.

We're very saddened to have an empty chair here at the DICE today.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Gallaway.

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley.

Hi.

Ms.

Mallek.

Yes.

Ms.

Hi.

Right.

Welcome, Supervisor Andrews.

Yes, I would like to move that the Board of Supervisors convene a closed meeting pursuant to Section 2.2-TEC 3711-Parents A of the Code of Virginia, first under subsection 1, to discuss and consider appointments to various boards and commissions, including without limitation, Agricultural and Forestal District Advisory Committee, Economic Development Authority, Places 29-Parents Hydraulic Community Advisory Committee, and Places 29-Parents North Community Advisory Committee.

Second, under subsection 1, to discuss and consider appointment of an interim county attorney.

Third, under subsection 7, to consult with legal counsel and receive briefings by staff members pertaining to actual litigation concerning a decision of the Board of Zoning Appeals in the case styled in Read June 6, 2026, decision of the Board of Zoning Appeals of the County of Albemarle, Virginia.

Second.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley.

Aye.

Ms.

Mallet.

Yes.

Ms.

Aye.

Mr. Andrews.

Mr. Andrews.

I over-talked him.

I heard him say yes.

Maybe I can text him.

Yes.

Can we hold that up to the microphone so that it can be heard?

One more time, Mr. Andrews.

Thank you.

All right, we will now convene in closed session, returning for our six o'clock agenda.

All right.

Yeah.