Board of Supervisors Regular First Meeting   9/4/2024

County Board of Supervisors on the 4th of September at 1 p.m.

in Lane Auditorium.

I'd like to note at the desk we have the Supervisor Mike Prude of the Scottsville District, Supervisor B. LaPistle-Curtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Diantha McKeele of the Jack Jewett District, Supervisor Ann Malick of the Whitehall District, and myself Jim Andrews representing the Samuel Miller District.

Quorum is present.

Lowes Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District is currently unavailable.

We anticipate a request for him to join the meeting evening portion of this meeting and we'll act on that request at that time.

We're also joined here by our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson and our welcome interim County Attorney, Mr. Andy Herrick.

also our senior deputy clerk, Mr. Travis Morris.

And I also, of course, want to welcome Albemarle County police officers present, Master Police Officer Chip Riley, Police Officer Trent Cole.

Thank you.

I don't believe there are any official changes, although the packet had some minor amendments in the packet materials online, but no changes to the items on the agenda themselves.

If there are no other changes or anything, then we look for a motion to approve the final agenda.

So moved.

Second.

Ms.

Lepisto-Curdley.

I. Ms.

Malik.

Yes.

Ms.

McHale.

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt.

Yes.

Board, that brings us to item five, brief announcements by board members.

I don't really have anything.

All right.

Thank you.

Supervisor Malek.

Thank you.

I would if you don't.

I'll link that with you because that's more here.

Okay.

Mr. Henry, are you going to do cease the day later?

I didn't want to stomp on anybody.

Sorry for that.

I should have cleared that out ahead of time.

So we'll start with easy ones.

Fall festivals at Crozet Park.

September 7th, the Dog Festival, which is lots of fun for people of all ages.

October 12th and 13th, that would be President's Day weekend, Crozet Fall Arts and Crafts Festival, the 42nd, I think.

October 26th, the Crozet trails crew 5k run, which is raising money for the bridge over Lincoln Hole and lots of other trail projects and December 7th, the winter brews festival, which was very well attended and had lots of local craft brewers attending and sharing their goodies.

So the sees the day is the veterans outdoor day.

the eighth annual.

It will be September 22nd from noon to five or 1200 to 1500 hours if you are so inclined.

It will be at Walnut Creek Park.

It's a wonderful day for active duty, retired veterans families to come and convene to meet each other to

have a chance to visit tables of many different agencies who are providing services to all that cohort.

There's Fishing in the Lake, Other Recreation, Picnic by Mission Barbecue, Favorite Veteran Supporters, Paddleboard and Kayak Demos by Rivanna River Company.

So hopefully it will be a day like today rather than 95 degrees and we will have a wonderful turnout for people there and there will be more publicity on which to register.

and now my screen has gone weird, so hold on one second.

Related to one of our upcoming recognitions.

Here we go.

Walkout on Veteran and First Responders Suicide is being sponsored at North Fork Research Park.

It is Thursday, September 26, 5.30 to 7.30.

I'll share this information with the clerk so people can get it there.

Come by after work and grab some food and walk together to honor those who serve and raise awareness.

about burnout and the issues of veterans, retirees and active duty, as well as all of our first responders who have such an elevated stress level with their daily work and to give them support.

And I will stop there.

Thank you.

Yes, just one thing today.

Excuse me.

Java will once again be offering their wills for seniors program.

It is a free program where you can make an appointment, go drop by Java, and they have attorneys and specialists who are available to help you with simple wills, durable power of attorney,

and Advanced Medical Directives.

So great opportunity.

Again, it's free.

And the date is October the 9th from nine o'clock to three o'clock.

And you just contact Java.

And I'm sure their website has the all the information you need to sign up and make an appointment.

Thank you.

Yes.

So this is the time of year where it starts getting nice and we start having all our major outdoor events every weekend.

So I actually have a few additional ones to add.

And these are coming up later this month.

First, I'm going to go in reverse order through September.

Look out for the Loop DeVille.

This is actually starts in Charlottesville at the Ragged Mountain, excuse me, at the Rivanna River Company, but goes throughout the urban ring as we celebrate kind of the

the natural or the incredible trail network we have of the Rivanna trail that circles the whole through the county in the city.

And there will be a lot of, I think, satellite events, including, you know, in my own district at decipher brewing of people celebrating the the trail network and having individual walks along there.

September 21st is going to be the Charlottesville Subroso Festival, celebrating Latino culture in our community.

That is going to be at one to ten at Ting, Ting Pavilion.

That is a new location from where it was last year, so be mindful of that.

And additionally, in the realm of things that have moved to Ting recently, Charlottesville Pride is also this weekend.

and that is going to start at 12 with a drag show running from 430 to 630.

I think Charlottesville pride very thoughtfully explained all ages are welcome, but drag has inherently adult themes.

So exercise your discretion when choosing who to bring.

And speaking of gay stuff, I also should just take a moment of some personal privilege to mention that last meeting I did call in from my

pre-wedding.

What's the word for it that we trip you go on after a wedding?

A honeymoon.

Yes, my pre-honeymoon.

I called in from my pre-honeymoon.

I was married over the weekend and my husband is currently moving into my house and there are boxes everywhere and I will be starting a new job in two weeks.

I mentioned that not to solicit a bunch of congratulations, although feel free.

but mainly to emphasize that if you have our constituent who has sent me an email or a voicemail, perhaps someone who is an equestrian and wants to know more about horse trails at Biscuit Run and whether or not that's something we could do or you want to know more about ranked choice voting where you have concerns about traffic around the Peabody School, I'm not ignoring you.

I'm just working through the stack a little slower because there's a lot of major life transitions happening right now.

and I appreciate your patience.

Also, I do want to just take a moment of personal privilege to acknowledge a major, a major story that has concerned me personally that broke kind of through the diligent journalism of Aaron O'Hara Charlottesville tomorrow that I think speaks to a broader concern that I hope the board is prepared and frankly, the Commonwealth is prepared to address moving forward.

and that is the redevelopment and Cavalier Crossing and kind of the broader trends that that portends.

For those of you who haven't seen the reporting in Charlottesville tomorrow, Cavalier Crossing is a

It's what we call naturally occurring affordable housing or NOAA is kind of our term of art we use in the county.

This is something that is not subsidized, but is just at a low prevailing rent normally because it's an older unit.

This was historically student housing, but it is now, frankly, not.

It is used by a really broad cross section of the community and heavily poor and working class folks and is in my district.

It was sold earlier this year to a boutique private equity venture that specifically engages in vulture capitalism.

Rent seeking opportunities where they find low rent neighborhoods that are in high opportunity areas.

They put a fresh coat of paint.

They maybe give you a new microwave that has chrome finish and they quadruple your rents over it.

That is exactly what's happening.

There are rolling evictions.

This is also not a new phenomenon.

This is, we've recently worked with Habitat and PHA in the city to see if it was possible to put together something to acquire the mall side apartments, which are a subsidized unit that was, or rather that RA low income unit that was recently sold.

And we weren't able to succeed on that.

So that is also likely going to face similar redevelopment.

This is the exact reason why the city just pulled together everything they could to be able to buy the Carlton Mobile Home Park.

This is also the exact reason why we are currently engaged in a decades-long venture with Habitat as our primary partner to redevelop Southwood.

And frankly, it is something that will continue to happen because a significant amount of our affordable inventory is created through the low-income housing tax credit by tech.

You might hear that.

and there's so many units, hundreds and hundreds of families that are li-tech subsidized that are all about to expire.

What happens when a li-tech developer has their units expired is they sell them to a private equity firm to redevelopment and multiply the rents.

We are fighting both in the city and the county to kind of increase supply.

But we know that every time we do that, it raises kind of people build a new unit because they think they can charge new units.

And you get that higher rent ceiling with them.

The logic there is that it opens up things further down in the income ladder.

But realistically, when you're looking at new developments that deliberately try and last for 15 years before they need redevelopment.

We're seeing that income floor catching up constantly, and we don't have the tools to fight this kind of business model, a business model that is fundamentally immoral, it is unneighborly, it is un-Christian.

It does not add value.

It does not build new units.

In fact, in this particular case, it is removing existing units because they're expanding the number of bedrooms per unit and they don't fight our major housing shortfall.

Bonaventure, this particular firm in Cavalier Crossing and its kind of ilk don't really do anything for our community.

They're just rent seekers.

They are vulture capitalists that want to slap down a fresh coat of paint and we don't have anything to do about them.

We don't have the money to buy things out from under them and we don't have the legal tools to stop them.

think we need to be very insistent on asking Richmond for additional legal tools in this realm.

Specifically, one of the most popular things I have ever heard talking to tenant organizers is rent stabilization.

This is different than rent control.

This is making it so that you cannot on lease renewal significantly increase the amount of rents that are charged between terms of a lease.

Rarely, we also see in other jurisdictions a rent control or a rent stabilization policy that would apply between redevelopments and apply a larger cap increase, but making it so maybe you can't charge when tuple the rents when you slap down a fresh coat of paint, but we'll let you charge double.

that would significantly help us restore our naturally occurring affordable housing.

But it is not a tool that we have because Richmond holds those kind of actually meaningful tools very tight.

In the meantime, there's really frustratingly very little we can do.

And that is where my head and my heart is at right now.

Thank you.

And I will continue with just the announcements that we're making and

The one that you mentioned earlier that just to make sure everybody's aware that the hazardous household waste collection days are starting next Saturday, the September 14th is the electronic waste collection.

That's the one that requires a registration, which you can do at the www.revanna.org.

But there's also Household Hazardous Waste Days, September 20th, 21st, and then Special Collection Days, September 28th, furniture and mattresses, October 5th, alliances, and October 12th, fires.

Excellent.

Okay.

Thank you.

Our next item is proclamations recognitions.

We have one of the regular agenda as well as one on consent as a reminder for the public board policy as a request for proclamations that don't have a recipient coming to the meeting or considered appropriate to consent.

And this does not in any way diminish their significance to the board.

But we do have one for presentation today.

So this is a proclamation recognizing September as National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

whereas in 2022, more than 49,400 Americans died by suicide with an estimated 1.6 million suicide attempts, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC.

in the last two decades, youth suicide has reached its highest rate in more than 20 years.

From 2007 through 2021, suicide rates for Americans ages 10 to 24 rose 62%.

and whereas Albemarle County joins in observing National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month by raising awareness to foster a culture of understanding and empathy and encourages community members to become better educated on suicide risk factors.

Elavate local suicide prevention resources and promote the desing stigmatization of conversations around mental health.

Whereas the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline

plays a helpful role.

The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline plays a helpful role in suicide prevention and mental health support by offering immediate confidential assistance 24-7 to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress with a simple three-digit number for people to call, text, or chat online.

and whereas Albemarle County has played an important role in suicide prevention with the school board adopting a resolution to promote secure firearm storage for responders.

launching the Human Services Alternative Response Team Hearts and the University of Virginia convening the Community Safety Working Group.

Whereas there are many local organizations including Moms Demand Action for Gunsense in America, Students Demand Action, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Region 10, and

the National Alliance on Mental Illness, dedicated to saving lives and bringing hope through research, education, policies, advocacy, and resources for those who have been affected by suicide.

Now, therefore, be it proclaimed that we, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, do hereby recognize

September 2024 as National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

Signed this fourth day of September 2024, Jim H. Andrews, Chair, Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

Ms.

Ms.

Malik.

Yes.

Ms.

McKeil.

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt.

Yes, thank you.

And I believe we have Kathy Pales of Mom's Demand Action for Gunsense in America here to accept the proclamation.

Thank you very much.

And again, my name is Kathy Pales.

I'm one of the group leads of the local Charlottesville Albemarle group of Mom's Demand Action.

We thank the Board of Supervisors and a county of Albemarle for today's proclamation, recognizing national suicide prevention awareness month.

Mom's Man Action is a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that can protect people from gun violence.

Most people who attempt suicide do not die unless they use a gun.

Across all suicide attempts without a gun, only 4% result in death.

However, when a gun is involved, that figure skyrockets to 90%.

A gun leaves no room for a second chance.

Three quick stats.

The US gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times that of other high income countries.

Having access to a firearm triples one's risk of death by suicide.

Nearly six out of every 10 gun deaths in this country are suicides.

Many of us who are involved in gun violence prevention work have firsthand experience with this difficult issue, including me.

I lost my mother to suicide by gun six years ago.

Fortunately, there are solutions.

We have extreme risk laws, also known as red flag laws.

There are secure gun storage education efforts.

There are also waiting periods for the purchase of a firearm.

Thank you for mentioning 988, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

I encourage anyone who's listening or here today, if you need assistance or know someone who is at risk, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Thank you.

And I believe Ford will have additional comments of Supervisor Lapisto-Pertley.

Oh, she also has the motion here to give you.

Thank you.

Comments?

This is something that I personally have not been touched by, but I understand the pain that it brings to so many people, especially when that happens with young adults, very tragic, very sad, and you're right about regarding guns.

There's an easy access to guns.

It shouldn't be.

And we need to protect, especially our young adults and children from things like that happening.

Also, I think more needs to be done in the mental health areas also to help people.

So thank you very much for

appreciate you for all the work you do.

I remember I'm old enough to remember when a mom's demand action started.

So five years ago.

No, that's not true.

But thank you very much for for being here and for raising this issue with all of us.

Appreciate it.

Yes.

Thank you all as

My colleagues have said for leading the charge among all the local and national groups on this issue, the lethality of the chosen weapon is

something we can't get away from.

And the availability of an unsecured weapon in the home when they're young people there really makes it so much easier.

And I know that's a challenge that our schools and others are trying to remedy.

The 988 and the Hearts team receive so many calls locally and nationally, but this really brings attention to the fact that we need many more treatment beds in our CSB and across the Commonwealth, particularly for people who do need help.

And we have

often no place to help them get that help right now.

So those 16 beds at Region 10, which were added within the last 10 years, are full all the time.

Yes, thank you for joining us today.

And certainly the numbers in this proclamation are shocking.

are really sad.

And I think there are very few people that haven't been impacted negatively in some way or another by suicide, whether it's a family member or a friend or children of a friend.

So it's really, really important that you all and other groups keep sending the message of where to find the services.

and how people can go about getting the help they need.

And I'm really proud of Albemarle County and our hearts team, the school board and all the many organizations and nonprofits in this community that are trying to support people.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for being here and for your advocacy.

I think I've said this before, but kind of bears repeating that it should be concerning to us as a community, as a culture, that one of our most

well manned, well staffed, energetic group of advocates in our community is full of people who have been touched by gun violence.

It shouldn't be that way.

We shouldn't have one of our most vocal groups of people involved in politics be involved there in large part because of the harm that they've experienced firsthand.

But as the situation that we live in, that's the country that we live in.

And so for that, I just want to extend my condolences and my gratitude.

and I also just want to point out all the good work you do.

I know I've been to plenty of events that moms and through their Be Smart program has offered a lot of really

instrumental tools for people who live in households with any number of other people in them.

They often will have free gun locks at events that they come to.

Um, and at least once or twice, they've had a raffle for one of these fingerprint gun safes and have helped me price a fingerprint gun safe.

And I was surprised by how inexpensive they are.

Uh, instant on your fingerprint, uh, $99 normally on the market.

Amazing.

Thank you.

And again, I just add my appreciation for your heartfelt message and the statistics that you grimly report, which I think we all need to be aware of, and the services that are provided in 988.

And I understand also www.988lifeline.org is available on the web for those who access it that way.

But this message needs to be spread far and wide and appreciate what you're doing.

to do that.

Thank you.

And board, this brings us to item seven from the public matters on the agenda, but not listed for public hearing or matters previously considered by the board or matters that are pending before the board.

We do.

Neil Williamson, will you please come forward?

And I'm going to take the prerogative of the vice chair to simply say, I believe you know the rules.

Thank you Vice Chair and welcome in room County Attorney.

Good afternoon.

My name is Neil Williamson and I serve as the president of the Free Enterprise Forum, a privately funded public policy organization focused on Central Virginia's local governments.

The late great rocker Tom Petty once penned the line, the waiting is the hardest part.

perhaps appropriately, that single was on his hard promises album.

The community has been waiting on Albemarle County to continue to act on one of their hard promises, affordable housing.

I appreciated Supervisor Pruitt's comments this afternoon.

One solution that seems to have slipped through the proverbial cracks is allowing residential uses in commercial office space.

The Free Enterprise Forum has been privately and publicly pushing the concept for well over a year.

Rather than requiring a commercial owner to rezone an entire property, such as owning ordinance change would allow a portion of the parcel to develop as residential units, while another portion continues to function as commercial office space, creating new housing without costly rezoning.

Across the country, municipalities are recognizing the need to adapt to the new work from home realities.

Some are using tax dollars to encourage the conversion of now overbuilt office and retail space into much needed housing units.

The free enterprise form is not advocating for such financial incentives.

Instead, we are advocating for government to get out of the way.

and allow residential units to convert in commercial and office.

Last year, when we pushed on the issue, we were told, get a board approved resolution of intent, then staff can work on it.

For six long months, we worked with staff.

We worked individually with each of you.

And in February, we got a resolution of intent.

We're ready to go.

Since then, nothing has happened.

Now, we are being told there are lots of resolutions of intent.

That doesn't mean a priority.

Based on our discussion with private private property owners, we believe allowing, not incentivizing, not investing, simply allowing housing in office commercial zoning could produce over 100 units.

While we recognize 100 affordable units will not solve Albemarle County's housing affordability crisis.

It will make a difference to 100 families.

based on the lack of action so far this year, I have to ask, does this board of supervisors consider 100 affordable units a priority?

This is something you can do without action enrichment.

You can do this today.

Please let me know what I should tell those families who are seeking Albemarle affordable housing.

I really hope it's more than just wait.

Thank you.

This brings us to item eight, our consent agenda.

I'm not aware of any request to pull any items.

So the floor is open for a motion to adopt the consent agenda.

So moved.

Second.

Lepisto-Curtley.

Aye.

Ms.

Malek.

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel.

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt.

Aye.

This brings us to board our action item for this afternoon, SE 2024-14, which is 6316 ST's Lane Homestay, presented by Ms.

Leah Brumfields, your planner too.

Thank you, board.

There we go.

And as noted, my name is Leah Brumfield, Senior Planner 2 in Zoning.

And I am bringing before the board special exception 2024-14 for an accessory structure at 6316 Estes Lane to be used for a homestay.

The parcel is 26.87 acres zone rural areas located in the Whitehall district.

The parcel currently contains a single small family dwelling built in 2021.

and a pole barn used as a farm building.

The structure proposed for use as a homestay is the single family dwelling, but it would be converted into an accessory structure if this homestay special exception is approved.

has noted in the applicant's request, attachment B of the packets, the owners will continue living in the existing dwelling until their new house is built, at which time the existing dwelling will be converted into an accessory structure by removing kitchen fixtures, at which point it would need the homestay special exception.

So by right, because this parcel is over five acres in size, it is permitted to rent up to five guest sleeping spaces within a single family dwelling or an existing accessory structure built before August 7, 2019.

The applicants are requesting to hold a homestay in an accessory structure that will be in existence if this is approved.

Oops, sorry.

as the owners do reside on the parcel and the property does meet setbacks for the structures.

The use is by right.

The only exception required is for the use of the accessory structure.

after all of the permits and building is approved.

The owners would be required to apply for a homestay zoning clearance.

And during that process, the structure used for the homestay would be inspected for building and fire safety and abutting owners notice would be required.

And the property would be inspected for entrance requirements and all of their regular homestay requirements.

Currently, the property is currently in compliance with zoning and taxation requirements.

So, as we noted, the applicants have said that they built the existing small structure marked on this plan in a blue star, which is only around 880 square feet.

was built due to construction pressures in 2021, which was forcing them to be unable to build their longer term intended larger dwelling.

However, they would like to now build the larger structure, shown the plan here with a green star, and they would like to convert the existing structure into an accessory structure to use as a homestay.

The applicants have also noted that the property does contain sufficient development rights to retain the dwelling right now, but they would incur a cost of developing a site plan for the property and probably increasing the driveway standards to meet requirements for the site plan and they do not wish to do that.

Here you can see an aerial of the site.

The existing dwelling, the 880 square foot structure is shown again with a blue star and the site of the proposed new dwelling that they will be building if they can have this approved as an accessory structure is shown in the green star.

This is a photo showing the location of the proposed dwelling.

It's currently being used as a dressage field for horses.

And in the back, you can see the line of trees that you can see in the aerial here.

I know I knew that the board are probably interested.

This is the existing pole barn.

It is used for largely farm equipment and some old garage type windows and things like that.

So as a summary, this request is for an accessory structure built after August.

Oh, why keep touching built after August 7 2019 to be used as a homestay.

The parcel is 26.87 acres in size retains unused development rights.

but the applicants have indicated they do not wish to subdivide the parcel due to the existing lines and easements and the preference to keep their parcel.

Since this request is for an accessory structure, the belt line rights are unaffected and the conversion of the structure from a dwelling to an accessory structure is by right and had the

880 foot structure been built before August 7, 2019.

This would all be by right as well.

So looking at just the use of an accessory structure outside of any other situations, staff does not believe there's any adverse impacts to the surrounding neighborhood or the general public health safety or welfare.

The homestay use is by right accessory use.

And due to the size of the parcel, proposed size of the existing structure and a footprint significantly smaller than the existing pole barn, the structure is consistent with the surrounding neighborhood.

Thank you.

We'll go through our order for questions.

Thank you for your presentation.

I just had one question.

they're asking for an approval of this in their their the home they want to build is under review.

Okay, well, that makes sense.

for whatever reason.

As a building permit, it would just need to come in.

It would need to meet compliance.

It's not a subjective decision.

OK, OK.

So they would not be allowed to use it as a home stay prior to their permanent home being built.

Is that correct?

They would

Sorry, let me let me clarify the the structure that they're in right now, they could use that as a homestay while they're living in it.

So if there's an additional bedroom, they can rent that out or they could do unhosted stays on weekends.

But but that's by right to do a single family dwelling homestay on a parcel, because they're going to be turning it from a single family home into an accessory structure.

That's why the special exception is required.

Thank you.

I have no questions about the permit, but two questions that you can answer now or later, which is, since they have development rights, they could just assign on the same lot, undivided a second, one of the development rights to the other house and leave the kitchen in, correct?

Yes.

And secondly,

It used to be that fewer than three houses, you did not have to have development standard driveways.

So I just want to clarify, has that changed?

So they do not have public frontage on a public road.

They have an easement to begin with.

They have an easement.

Yes.

Okay.

Supervisor McKeon.

No questions.

Thank you.

No questions.

Thank you.

And I believe my questions were answered and they were more out of curiosity.

So I appreciate that.

Yes.

And this I thought I was way out in the country, but these folks are really way out in the country.

And it's a lovely spot.

You know, the dirt road at the end of the dirt road is the description of

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

Ms.

Lepisto-Curtley.

Aye.

Ms.

Malek.

Yes.

Ms.

Aye.

Yes.

Thank you.

Mr. Chair Lee is here.

So our next item is the board to board quarterly report from the Albemarle County School Board to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

And we will be having staff from the division coming down.

I think they're filtering down the news that it was were a little early just got out.

So good afternoon, Chair Andrews and board members.

I'm Albemarle County School Board Chair Judy Lee and I'm here with Vice Chair Dr. Acuff.

and we are pleased to update you this afternoon on the beginning of the 24-25 school year at ACPS.

So first, I just wanted to start by correcting some information that was submitted about our enrollment this year.

It was incorrect in two ways.

The first is that as the year is only now nine days old, it's far too premature to be looking at enrollment figures.

So they will continue to fluctuate broadly before the 30th day of the year.

and on top of that, unfortunately, the number that was included was also inaccurate.

So it indicated that enrollment had dropped this year with all of the caveats that I just gave it being day nine only.

We've actually so far seen a small increase in enrollment and slightly more students than we had projected.

So as enrollment continues to stabilize at the beginning of the year, we'll share more at a later date.

But I just wanted to correct that information that had gotten out there.

Thank you.

I also want to update you on transportation because I love good news.

Perhaps the most exciting update is that ACPS started the 24-25 school year with 100% of our bus routes covered.

However, covered does not mean that the Transportation Department has optimal staffing.

We still lack some important office staff and enough drivers to unstack those routes, several routes, which require drivers to make return runs.

So you may ask, how did we energize our recruitment of transportation staff?

Thanks to the partnership of the ACPS Transportation, Human Resources and Communications departments, ACPS ran an intense recruitment campaign starting in March that resulted in 92 applications for various roles in the transportation department.

in addition to recruiting bus drivers for the empty routes, the transportation department also hired an additional full-time trainer, a new area transportation supervisor, a program manager for special needs students, and a new router.

We currently have a starting salary for bus drivers of $23.56 per hour, which is higher than other bus drivers in the area.

We also offer CDL training and assigning bonus.

In addition to the staffing already in place, ACPS currently has 15 full-time drivers, three part-time drivers, and three transportation assistance in training.

Our Department of Transportation plans to use these new hires to start unstacking routes, which will help reduce the ride time for our secondary students.

in addition to continuing to recruit bus drivers and transportation assistance, the transportation department is still looking for an additional area transportation supervisor, a lead bus driver, two dispatchers, one router, an assistant director and an operations manager.

So anyone listening, please apply.

We are

Happy to have you.

Another priority, high priority of Jamie Gelnder, ACBS's new director of transportation is retention.

So we are really looking to retain a higher percentage of our transportation staff so that the task of filling so many positions will not be so bad next year.

I also wanted to give an update on SOLs.

I know that people in the community and the board of supervisors are interested in that information.

So on August 19th, you may have seen that the VDOE released data on the 23-24 SOL pass rates.

The good news is that the division saw gains in overall pass rates in math, reading, writing, and science SOLs for students in grade three to eight.

According to the 2024 assessments, 75% of ACPS students passed the reading test, which is an increase from last year's 74% and above the statewide average of 73%.

Another positive note is that ACPS also saw improvement in pass rates for the vast majority of our demographic groups that have persistently shown achievement gaps, including our black, Hispanic, multirace, students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged learners, and English learner populations.

Although we have seen SOL improvements and the trend lines are moving in the right direction, persistent achievement gaps remain among these groups, and we are continuing to do good work on that.

Pass rates for our Black and Hispanic students from economically disadvantaged households, students with disabilities and English learners continue to fall below this division-wide averages.

For example, while 75% of students overall pass the reading SOL, only 50% of Black students, 49% of Hispanic students, 44% of students with disabilities, and 50% of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and 30% of English learners met that benchmark.

Math scores also improved with 72% of students passing the math SOL from 69% in 2023 and above the state average of 71%.

As with our reading results, some of our demographic groups showed achievement gaps.

Our focused efforts based on the bellwether audit for our reading and math curricula two years ago, increased tutoring, and the implementation of our new literacy curriculum

will result in continued improvement.

We will also be adopting a new math curriculum during the course of this school year, and I believe Dr. Aka will be talking a bit more about that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Lee.

Good afternoon, Chair Andrews and members of the board.

I'm going to talk to you about three topics.

One, cell phone use and policy.

Two, our literacy and math curricula.

And third is a new partnership we have with community schools, communities and schools of Northern Virginia.

You've probably first cell phones.

You've probably all read articles, seen it on TV, read even books about how social media generally, including cell phones, impacts students' emotional development and interferes with learning.

In fact, there was another piece just last week in the Washington Post citing a fall 2023

Pugh Research Survey of high school teachers, in which 72% reported that students getting distracted by cell phones is a major problem in the classroom.

And the NEA, the country's largest teachers union, reported educators widespread spread frustration with cell phone use and encourage local policies to restrict

in the latest thing I've seen that at least 30 states have some sort of statewide policy on cell phone utilization.

Including now, Virginia, on August 15 pursuant to Governor Yonkin's executive order 33, the Virginia Department of Education released draft guidelines

for Self-Free Education in Virginia Schools.

These guidelines define a cell phone-free education as the elimination or restriction of cell phones and other personal electronic devices in public schools from the time the first bell rings in the morning to the dismissal bell at the end of the day.

Well, before the governor's guidelines, ACPS had a cell phone policy called Away for the Day that provides that student cell phones and other smart devices be turned off and put away during instructional time.

For elementary age students, this translates to cell phones being turned off and stowed away for the entire day.

That's easy.

However, current ACPS policy differs slightly from the VDOE draft guidelines as we allow our secondary students to access and use their cell phones and smart devices between classes and during lunch periods.

Additionally, exceptions may be made by teachers for students to use their cell phones during class if it's relevant to the day's lesson.

The challenge for our policy or any cell phone policy is that restricts access as enforcement.

Another challenge is that many parents believe that students should have access to their cell phones as a security measure in our schools.

To find an more enforceable ACPS policy, we're doing two things.

right now.

We're doing two things.

One is we are piloting yonder pouches at Walton Middle School for the 24-25 school year.

If you like me, I didn't even know what a yonder pouch was.

It's basically a sleeve to insert your phone.

There's a magnetic lock on it.

It was originally

developed to keep cell phones from going off during concerts and other events.

But so far, about 34 states have brought them into the schools to regulate cell phone use.

Under this pilot, when a student arrives at Walton, they'll deposit their cell phones and other smart devices in a yonder pouch, which will then lock and they can't access it until they go to an unlocking device.

Some school divisions, I know, have unlocking devices in the classroom, like if there is an emergency, you have to get a cell phone.

I don't think that that's what we're doing, but I honestly don't know.

This year,

This year we are also implementing a cell phone policy enforcement committee to evaluate the effectiveness of our cell phone policies and procedures to guide any necessary adjustments, additional resources and professional development to ensure that our practices best serve our students and staff.

So far, there's not a lot of good research on the impact or effectiveness of cell phone restrictions during the day.

Most of what we know is anecdotal.

Teachers do report greater attention.

and also greater social interaction among the kids.

I mean, kids during COVID in particular got used to looking at their phones.

And you can see them even in cafeterias or lunchtime, you know, looking at their phones instead of talking to their classmates.

So that's another benefit.

But the data is not robust at this point.

And certainly it does not solve all social media issues, which is serves.

Oh, we have

We have show and tell.

You've seen them before.

I had the enforcement committee will be made up of students, parents, caregivers, educators, counselors and other division leaders to provide a variety of perspectives to this work.

And the first meeting if you care to join is tomorrow night.

Second, I'm going to talk to you about updates on our literacy and math curricula.

With the passage of Virginia Literacy Act in the 2022 General Assembly, Virginia is taking a lead nationwide to improve early literacy outcomes.

for Virginia's Young Learners.

This is important because data from surveys such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows reading proficiency nationally for fourth graders is abysmally low.

I mean, it's about 37%.

And if you break that out demographically, this is national data, it's not necessarily ours.

But if you break it out nationally across demographic groups, you'll see reading proficiency ranging from 18 to 57%.

So nowhere is it where it needs to be, in my view.

Research also shows us that students who are not reading proficient by the third grade have poorer grades throughout school, have higher rates of absenteeism, have lower rates of going on to college.

So a focus on early literacy is keenly important.

through the Virginia Literacy Act, the Virginia Department of Education will support school divisions through a multi-year effort with tools, resources, technical assistance, and all-important funding.

Beginning in 2024, the school year, every student in kindergarten through grade five will receive one core literacy instruction in scientifically-based research and evidence-based

A scientifically-based reading research and evidence-based literacy instruction as defined by the VLA.

Students in kindergarten through eighth grade will also receive evidence-based supplemental and intervention outlined in an individual student reading plan if they don't meet literacy benchmarks.

Last year, we convened another committee because two of educators, parents, literacy specialists and division staff to vet the six VDOE approved literacy curricula.

after several meetings and a lot of feedback, they selected HMH into reading as our new literary curriculum.

HMH is Houghton Mifflin hard court.

They do a lot of educational materials and partner with research entities to make sure it's very evidence-based and focused on kids.

HMA into reading program focuses on the five pillars of literacy, phonemic awareness,

phonetics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

It's also notable that it provides a wide range of materials to give students many choices, and it's implemented across disciplines, math, science, social studies.

There's reading in all of those.

So it is not just a one-shop

attempt to promote literacy.

Over the summer, division staff are trained on these new materials, and this program is being fully implemented in our classrooms this fall.

HMA into reading facilities, facilitators and trainers will make several visits to ACPS to support our educators and ensure full implementation of the program.

following our shift to this new literacy curriculum.

We are anticipating DOE's plans

plan to release direction related to new elementary school math curriculum in January.

We'd hoped it would be before this fall, but it'll be the next school year when we can look to implementing it.

We will use a similar procedure or process to selecting materials and then training I hope would be next summer.

In addition to planning for new elementary,

math curriculum.

Our math curriculum coordinators are now working to redesign our middle school math curriculum to allow students to gain the skills necessary so they can take Algebra I in eighth grade instead of pushing it to high school, which

often interferes with their coursework to get into college.

The third thing I'm going to talk about is communities and schools.

Community schools, as many of you probably know, is not a new concept.

It basically recognizes that schools vary by neighborhoods and needs, and it is important to engage the community and organizations to support the full range of those needs.

communities in schools as a nonprofit organization or CIS is a nonprofit organization focused on that model and employing evidence-based methods to help students.

overcome obstacles to succeed by collaborating with parents, educators, community-based organizations, school and district leaders.

CIS has affiliates in 27 different states across the country and 3,500 schools, and they touch more than 2 million students.

This year, ACPS is partnering with communities in schools of Northern Virginia, one of seven CIS affiliates in the state.

which will, with the addition of ACPS schools, will be working with 21 schools in Virginia.

CIS Nova's board chair, they have a lot of very illustrious people working with them in Northern Virginia.

The board chair is Sean Millican, former head of Global Social Innovation at PayPal.

It has a trustee council that has governors from both sides of the aisle.

The first CIS location in Virginia was in Richmond quite a few years ago now.

But it has also the financial support of Mackenzie Scott Foundation, the Ballmer Foundation, and Amazon, among others.

So they're a really good organization to partner with.

The CIS NOVA partnership with ACPS will launch a three-year pilot focusing on four schools, Greer Elementary, Journey Middle, and Albemarle High School, which means all of Lamb's Lane campuses, 3,000-plus students, will be part of this collaboration.

and as such it will address and as well as Red Hills, almost 200 students, which means it will be addressing the needs of students in the urban ring, as well as one of our more rural and smaller schools, more isolated schools.

The pilot will employ five site coordinators, two at Albemarle, one at each of the other school, three schools.

In addition, CIS will employ one division

program, division-wide program coordinator.

Once the coordinators are in place, they will compete a needs-based assessment for each school and they will determine how they can best help.

SISNOVA plans on focusing

supporting students' basic needs, encouraging daily attendance, which is a significant issue.

Red Hill, for example, I think they're, maybe it's a year or so old, but 21% were of absentee rate, which is pretty high for chronic absenteeism.

Also supporting our social-emotional learning and providing college or workforce support for graduating seniors.

In conclusion, we're proud of our progress as we kick off this school year, especially in areas like transportation, SOL improvements, new curriculum implementations, our efforts to address challenges such as cell phone use in schools, staffing in key areas, reflect our commitment to enhancing student experiences and outcomes.

and the partnership with communities in schools.

Nova also marks an exciting step forward and providing additional support to our students.

We appreciate your attention and we're now ready to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you both.

And we'll go through our order.

Thank you very much, Dr. Egghoff and Ms.

Lee.

Really appreciate you both being here.

Our unwavering support is always there for the Albemarle County Public Schools.

You guys do a great job.

I will say spending my years in

I love your cell phone policy and I think that's really going to assist middle school I look forward to it being going into the high schools especially because that's that's where you have a large problem.

has a lot of children who don't interact and need to talk to each other and socialize.

because then they're talking to other people.

They're interacting with other people.

That helps them.

So that's huge, and I really, really support that.

Early education, as you know, is very extremely important.

That sets the foundation.

We all know that our parents are our first teachers.

Unfortunately, not all parents have the the time or the ability to assist their children.

So early education is very extremely important.

So big support on that.

I was surprised to hear because I read the report that the population had gone down.

And now you're saying no, it has gone slightly upward.

Do you know about how many

Again, it really fluctuates.

Okay.

I'm not sure where that number came from, but it was incorrect.

Well,

We add 200 to 300 students a year, generally.

And kudos regarding having enough bus drivers or at least to be able to cover all the earth.

the Routes.

I appreciate that very much.

Yes, yes.

Thank you very much for your presentation.

Thank you.

Thank you and so much good news.

Congratulations on many fronts.

So I would just encourage as you need to fill more driver situations to provide your route improvements.

The workforce center over on Glenwood station has links to

the driver training at PVCC with Workforce Dollars from WIOA, Federal and State.

So please avail yourselves of those people who are there to help you so you don't have to reinvent the wheel and do it all for yourself.

You mentioned new positions and things for dispatchers compared to before.

Is that because there are new systems now?

You said you had maybe they're just opening.

They're just opening.

Okay, so they're not new.

knew things, but just that was my misunderstanding.

And I was struck by, and I'm sure it's correct, it's just that, oh, there isn't enough data to be able to make a database decision about the cell phones or something like that.

And I'm thinking, okay,

If you look around the room and you see kids talking to each other, that's enough for me, because I know it's not going to get you a Pulitzer, but for heaven's sake, what I've heard from even people, parents and whatever is after the initial disgruntlement, kids are actually coming home now and saying, oh, it's so much more fun.

and they're not just feeling isolated.

So well done on that.

And hopefully those pouches will really work.

There was radio thing where people, the security person checking people in was saying, you'd be surprised how many things are being put in there, you know, a deck of cards or a stick of gum or whatever.

So people to try to smuggle something in.

So I know there will be work for you all to do to make sure that this is actually properly carried out.

Well done.

I look forward to learning more about your success with the new curriculum.

Yes, I do have a couple of things.

And I want to just comment on the fact that I'm thrilled to hear about the phonetics, phonetical training.

Anyone who has sat in this room and listened to me attempt to pronounce names who learn to read by sight and not phonetically understands the importance of phonetics.

I'm sure we can get you a primer.

I'm just saying.

Anyway, that's great to know that was just in the side.

Down a little.

It was down a little bit.

It was more than 150.

That is down from your normal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So so teachers, yeah, you're keeping them.

That's great.

You're stabilizing.

That's perfect.

That's what I wanted to hear.

And about 20 of them, I think were Albemarle alum.

Oh, exciting.

Yeah.

You all are, and I just thought about this question because I just had a discussion with several of the leaders at the NAACP.

You all are going to the historically black colleges and are you all offering, what do I want to say, early

County, New York.

Early positions offering early positions to those folks like we used to years ago.

And I see Matt's coming.

Yeah, we do.

That's great.

Because you know, Matt, when I was on the school board, that worked so beautifully for us.

So I had someone from the NAACP ask if the school system was still doing that.

I think our percentage of Black

That's the highest I've ever heard.

That's wonderful.

Now if you can just keep them, because it used to be we would hire and then lose and then hire it.

It was like a whack-a-mole, you know, but anyway, that's wonderful.

All right, great.

Another thing I wanted to ask about was the Amar County Public Schools Foundation.

The work of your foundation is continuing and

or gaining traction.

All right.

Where would I go to find out information about the foundation?

It's within the website of your school system.

Okay.

All right.

So I have to look there.

That sounds good.

I was thrilled just to say thank you because I know you're sending your director of transportation to Champaign, Urbana to the, I think there are 22 people going on that trip.

to include folks from Charlottesville, Albemarle, the University of Virginia, you guys.

So that it's going to be, I think, a really great trip.

That's a trip you went on several months ago.

Yes, and we're repeating it.

But I'm just thrilled that your director of transportation is going because it's such an interesting model to look at for transportation.

And of course, that particular community is a university community of about

University, I mean, it's really a great model.

So anyway, thrilled to know that you all have someone going.

I'm just looking at my notes here.

Oh, I saw this.

There was a news report.

I don't remember if it's on CNN or what it was on, but I was watching it about junk bees that are being charged to families that are purchasing school lunches through these payment platforms.

and I was just wondering if you all have a sense of, so your payment platform that you use for your school lunches, whatever that platform is is not charging junk fees.

And I see Matt shaking his head.

No, because this is really making the rounds right now.

So we're in good shape.

Glad to hear that.

Thank you very much.

And the only other thing that I have is, um,

We have obviously lots of proposals that come to us in the way of developments, specifically housing and almost always one of the criteria that they look at is the impact for schools.

and I've talked to Kate about this before and you're all spreadsheet which is what they always quote and they and I will I just want to read to you because I think it would be interesting for you because you all don't read what's in our packet and I get that you shouldn't I don't read what's in your packets either but this is a this is a proposal that we have in the Scottsville district that's coming to us this afternoon

and it says, schools living in the development area designated for Mountain View because it's in the Scottsville district, right?

Walton Middle School and Monticello High School.

Based on the 2023 Almar County Schools Long Range Planning Advisory Committee recommendations, Mountain View Elementary School and Monticello High School are over-capacity

Walton is under capacity.

Mountain View Elementary School is well over capacity and will be 200 students or more over capacity in the future years.

Now, on the surface, that's an accurate statement.

will have a new elementary school with a capacity of 550.

So I'm just seeking, and we go through this, the Planning Commission, every meeting when we have a development, and it's not our staff's fault.

It's not your fault.

Just trying to figure out how to, because they always go to the spreadsheet, trying to figure out how to make everyone aware that

They're not just schools that are being dreamed about in the pipeline.

These the schools that are actually approved and funded that are going to be built so that staff knows that you see where I'm going with this.

Yeah, but and I just thought it was worthy of you all to just because we happen to have one in our packet today of hearing what the language is.

as I recall the other the other case that you mentioned to me was an expansion of tandem perhaps and it was justified it would put a lot of take a lot of pressure off of right school we hear that a lot yeah oh approve this private school because it takes pressure off of the school public schools because all of these schools are at over capacity

And you want those kids.

Right.

Exactly.

We want as many.

Right.

So anyway, this sheet, if we can sort of clarify it a little bit.

And I really appreciate the time.

And thank you very much.

It's great to see you guys here.

And maybe we can at some point think about a joint meeting in the future to talk about some data and what our data looks like.

in the magisterial districts and the school districts and share some information.

I haven't done that in a while.

Yeah, it is always hard to get a date on the calendar for all of us, but it would be fun to get together and share some data.

Yes, so first I want to join all my peers in just saying how grateful we are to hear the good news about the bus driver situation.

I know, you know, however long ago it was like a year and a half and change when I first started canvassing for my own campaign.

I could not convince people that I did not have control over bus driving.

And it was the issue that knocking doors.

So I'm going to say that Dr. Haas passed his CDL physical yesterday.

Yeah, it's good to hear.

So thank you so much for the work that's that's gone into that.

I am going to be very interested and I'm curious what

what on your end is going into kind of capturing data from the teacher experience of implementing the Virginia Literacy Act.

This is something I'm somewhat attuned to.

I don't profess to be very familiar with what's in there, but I was friends with a lot of people who were involved in the sausage making of the most recent update to the act.

So I'd be curious to hear

And I'm curious what you're doing to make sure that Richmond hears what it needs to the expert and the person leading the charge is Dr. Chandra Hayes.

And she I'm calling her up here.

Well, and to say expert, I'll take that.

I'm Chandra Hayes, the assistant superintendent of instruction for Albemarle.

I'm one year two now.

But I was fortunate enough to work with the group last year was as we were adopting HMH and going through the

changes from the video we with the Literacy Act.

And so some of the things that we're doing to get information from our teachers.

One of the processes that we did when we were adopting the curriculum is made sure we had a teacher representative from each of our elementary schools on the on the committee, so we could constantly get feedback.

We also have set up

it's not a position, it's a teacher in the building that serves as like an HMH champion and they are responsible for providing feedback to the team about what they're hearing in the schools, what are some challenges the teachers are having and then taking information back.

At the central office level, we have a team of staff members that are working to kind of work through the act.

Unfortunately, sometimes things change.

We have a plan and sometimes things change and so

what we do is just come back to the table figure out what's the best course of action so that our teachers are impacted as little as possible but to make sure we stay compliant and so we use some of those different channels and those those building level meetings our division level PLC meetings as well as having those conversations with our HMH champions and reading specialists to see you know get the feedback and not only on what we're using internally

But what information is coming from the state?

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

And just as I this isn't for you.

Sorry.

I wanted to just say as one other thought, I had the opportunity to chat with

one of my husband's y

and they have also recently implemented these yonder bags as as public policy and just got a little bit of student perspective on how they work.

And I came away with kind of two thoughts.

First is boy howdy.

I wish I had had the idea to put a magnetic lock on a Faraday bag five years ago and have a startup business because it sounds like whoever whoever got this idea has made buku money on local government contracts.

And I am jealous of them.

I'm sorry.

home.

And the other, the other thing is just how, um, how kind of grim it is.

And I know we've already touched on this, but she was telling me how many of her peers hold their bags with them at all times because they're almost a comfort item.

How frequently you'll see people phantom swiping on their bag.

Um, it's dark out there, y'all.

It is sad.

And honestly, like, I will say, as an adult, I wish I had a yonder bag.

I mean, obviously I can get one, or I can put my phone in a different room.

Thank you.

Again, I've had my congratulations on the successes that you've reported with the school buses, with the additional achievement on SOLs and the curriculum changes that you propose.

All sounds great.

With respect to the cell phones, we had our reclamation on suicide awareness and mental health issues, and I cannot help but connect these two issues

and I hope that your policies can help students regain sort of a sense of equilibrium with respect to their use of social media.

Anyone's use of social media because it's an isolating in terms of physical immediate contact with your surroundings.

So I also, as a physicist, applaud the idea that you'll get algebra back the eighth grade.

I do think that's necessary for competitiveness in the science and engineering fields and something that I would hope our public schools would not fall behind other schools in terms of the opportunities that students have coming out of the public schools.

So I applaud that.

and those are my comments.

Thank you.

A couple of things I forgot.

Just in general with the cell phones, I think the result will be, as a grandma, increased resiliency on the part.

I mean, boredom is not a bad thing.

Boredom is when people invent things and you don't have to be constantly entertained.

And there seems to be a whole generation of people who think that

is dangerous, but I agree.

I argue the other.

So I think that hopefully kids will realize and adults as well will realize that being disconnected is worth it in the end.

So questions to leave with you.

I hope that you will see, but I have no idea that traffic around the school zones will

Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls Falls

feeding lunches for people without fee, as Green and Flavanna are doing for everybody.

Just, I don't need an answer, but I think that there is still a stigma involved in people being, children being chased down because their account is empty and, you know, given some peanut butter sandwich which you can't eat because they have an allergy or something, it's just too much hostility that's involved generally.

I think the secret is dollars, but it's interesting.

We met Miss Lee and I met with our student school board representatives.

Just was it this week last week?

I can't remember what day it is.

And one of the issues that one of the high school seniors from was he from Western?

He did raise the idea of lunches for everybody.

And we talked about how he would write a proposal and how we meet with our legislators in the fall and that he could survey his colleagues on that.

I believe currently that we have nine schools that have universal.

It's simply based on the poverty level of the schools.

Those are federally funded programs.

It is a choice.

And I think most people in education would agree that we should just have universal free meals.

And we have nine schools in the county now that do qualify out of 24.

But it does come down to a significant... We would need to leverage significant funds locally to make that shift to free meals universally.

those are.

And so in other words, I just the comparison among localities.

But for socialization and getting good local food into your school systems, it might be a real boon to have the numbers who were eating higher.

This is just something that popped into my head as chair Andrews was discussing the connection between mental health and and cell phone addiction.

I know there's kind of an early stages class action at nationwide around.

Social Media Addiction that is seeking to certify members of a class that represents teens and school-aged children who against social media providers like TikTok and Instagram.

You already have.

I thought I remembered something on this.

Thank you.

Thank you for the presentation.

Excellent.

This brings us to our next item, which is a presentation from United Way by Ms.

Ravi Prospero, President and CEO of United Way of Greater Charlottesville.

I see you're here.

Welcome.

Thanks for having me.

It's good to see everybody.

Would you adjust your mic so we can hear you a little better?

Yeah, thank you.

I'm tall.

I'm sorry.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Barely.

Barely.

I still need to speak up a little bit also.

You're so spoken.

maybe I need to take my hand off.

Okay, how's that?

Okay, I have a PowerPoint.

I don't know if it is.

Okay, thank you.

Sorry, hold on just a second.

I can find out.

It would be, it will be better if I can show the PowerPoint.

So that's a tag.

Well, again, a flash drive.

It's a tag.

Okay.

It's nato-fanatic.

I didn't invent it.

County.

I think it's a great argument about getting rid of the code machines at the age of cafeteria and a lot of people said, Oh, well, we can't do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was a huge.

Fair.

We could take a five minute recess.

Yeah, because I could be a man.

We'll take the five minute recess and come in.

Excellent.

Take the pressure off.

I'm good, sir.

Okay, I'm just glad we got it sorted.

Oh, and this is working now too.

Okay, all set.

Well, again, thank you for having me.

And I'm going to try to be efficient since we are a little behind schedule now.

This is just our annual update from United Way on the impact and activities that we're having here in our community.

And specifically today, we'll look at some data and impact for the county of Albemarle.

So a little overview of what I'm going to cover, United Way Vision and Impact.

We're going to talk a little bit about the crisis and early childhood education, about our early education focus in the county, and then financial resiliency task force, which I've talked to some of you about the past progress on that, our family investment program and driving lives forward and our small business grant making.

So United Way focuses on three specific areas, financial stability, school readiness and connected community.

And the headline here is really about creating resilient communities to making sure local residents have access to economic mobility, making sure our youngest learners zero to four have access to quality education.

And lastly, connecting and convening community leaders around shared priorities, which is what United Way is really providing community here.

not just in Charlottesville but across the state and in of course our country.

We've done a lot of work to convene in the areas of early education as you'll hear today and also financial stability so bringing community stakeholders together around these important issues.

2020 for example of impact.

So one of the biggest things for you to remember today from this presentation is that we have a severe shortage of early childcare slots, meaning there are a lot of children who need early education, but there are not slots for these children for all kinds of reasons when there are teacher shortages in our community.

So we don't have enough teachers trained to be in the classrooms.

The pay for teachers has historically been relatively low, not even a living wage.

So it's been difficult to retain teachers.

And we lost a lot of our centers and family day homes during COVID and we're still recovering from that.

So if you look at the numbers there, the greatest need that we have right now for Albemarle County is what we call infant and toddler care.

929 kids are right now without childcare.

So that's the data that we get from based on birth rate statistics and Virginia Department of Education.

So it's severe lack there.

And then for children,

three to four.

There's a 304 slot shortage.

And what that means for local economic development is, you know, young parents don't have childcare, they can't work.

And so it's one of the things United Way is highly focused on, you know, getting on top of and getting some more slots created through various different programs that we have in place.

You likely heard of the relinquishment of the Head Start grant.

It's been in the local media.

United Way has been working with MACA through that process to support them in whatever ways possible because that was a huge loss of our community of 205 childcare slots to very low-income families.

So those families that are 100% or less a federal poverty level put that in perspective for a family of four.

They're earning well under 25,000 a year.

Again, with 205 slots being lost, we convened a group of community stakeholders, including Dr. Haas from the county school system, Dr. Gurley, a couple other nonprofits that are interested in early education like CHIP and ReadyKids, and then some community advocates and funders.

who work on how we might go about having a community response to Head Start.

We've had several meetings throughout the spring and we've actually decided that you're not away ready regions, which is the program we run under the Department of Education will be applying for the Head Start grant in January here for our community.

And currently we're looking to apply for at least 150 slots of which probably 40 to 50 will be in the county.

That's still under discussion with the Albemarle County school system, but that's our vision for that.

The other thing United Way did is provide 45,000 in teacher stipends to teachers that were formerly working at MACA that worked to work with CDI, which is the firm that came in to run Head Start in the interim until a new grantee is decided upon.

The stipends were to help level their pay.

A lot of them took significant pay cuts to be able to stay on with CDI.

And so we did individual stipends to those teachers with the goal of keeping them in the teaching profession.

until we can get the other Head Start grant basically accomplished and get that program going here in the community.

I feel like if you have a question, do you want to wait till the end?

Is that better?

Or do you want to ask as I go through?

The other big program United Way runs is what we call ready regions, Blue Ridge and mixed delivery.

So we, you can see up there the 21 counties that we oversee.

So it's a Thomas Jefferson planning district and then Staten Augusta, Waynesboro, Harrison, Bergen, Winchester over in the valley.

Currently we place 514 children.

in quality early education of which 42 children were in Albemarle County.

That means they're going to full day childcare.

So we're paying Monday through Friday, six, seven in the morning until six, seven in the evening, depending on what the family needs for full-time care, which makes a significant impact in our region.

It's a grant that we get from the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation that's around eight to nine million a year that we administer right now.

The other significant program we operate is in 134 classrooms our part of this is our quality observations so you can see the breakdown there of how many classrooms were involved in that but basically we send observers into the classroom to ensure that the teacher-child interaction is where it needs to be that it's appropriate for the age of the child and then we do scoring every year of those centers to make sure they're meeting quality benchmarks so that we know those children are ready when they get to kindergarten to learn and compete

with a more economically advantaged peers so that observation program is significant.

All that data gets fed back up for Virginia Department of Education and then we get an annual report so we can go in and help classrooms improve quality.

Another program that we operate that impacts the county is coordinate and enrollment go to grow.

We used to have paper applications that would be basically at the local schools when you needed early care and today we have a really robust online program with wraparound services where a family can go online and apply

for childcare based on where they live and what kind of wraparound services they might need and what kind of hours they're looking for and what kind of transportation needs they have.

Over 1,800 families have used the system.

It's doubled since we launched it in 2021.

It's been an incredibly successful program and so successful.

We've now launched a sister program in St.

Augusta, Wainsboro, and we're looking at Harrisonburg as well.

So we're hoping to bring more coordinated enrollment online throughout the 21 counties that we serve.

And then Early Learners Scholarships is a longstanding program that we've had with the county.

It's a very successful program.

Way before there was mixed delivery and a lot of state funding for early education.

This was a program we ran successfully.

It's a $161,000 investment that the county makes contractually with the United Way each year.

The cost of childcare has gone up significantly.

So we're at $22,000 to $24,000 per child now, which is just the cost of a college education, state education now in the state of Virginia.

Do you have a young child or if you have a grandchild and your family, you'll know how expensive it is.

So we're actually serving less families now than we used to be able to.

So 10 families were served this past fiscal year.

72% of those represent single parent households.

And again, 75% of the 1200 slot shortfall in Albert County is for infant and toddler care.

So just want to reiterate that that's a real area of need that we have right now.

And Alice, I've talked to many of you about Alice over the years.

I know Danganthe and I've had several conversations.

And this is just an example of an actual family that we serve this past year and the kind of challenges that they face to kind of articulate what that means.

So Alice's asset limited income constraint, but employed.

So this local single parent is a case manager at a local Charlottesville nonprofit.

They have a rental in Esmont and they qualify for childcare subsidy in the state of Virginia.

They had two kids with rising cost in childcare.

and subsidy didn't cover all of their childcare.

And in the middle of all this, she lost the transmission on her one and only vehicle and the quote she got was $3,000.

And so in this, again, very real scenario, something we actually walked through with the client, what does she do?

And we try to help those clients make those tough decisions every day at United Way.

She can take an Uber to work.

That's one way that she can try to get around it.

We know if you live out in the outline part of the county, there's no public transportation.

So you really just can't work if you don't have transportation and Ubers can be really expensive.

or you can get the car fixed and take your 18 month old to childcare out of childcare and over to your moms where she can watch your child for free but she's 30 minutes away in Buckingham and she also works and she has to leave at three o'clock each day which means you have to cut your hours back at your job.

Again this particular person now runs our family council for our region talking about the needs of families and childcare

We ended up working with this family and giving her two full-time scholarships for her children.

And so she was able to afford to fix her transmission and able to keep growing her career.

And she's back on track.

But again, I illustrate this just to kind of make this work a little bit more real today when we talk about the data and we talk about Alice.

That's a scenario and we have many, many others just like it.

For our community, we kind of define just so to give you sort of an idea for income, a minimum of 150% of federal poverty level.

So for a family of four, that's about 46,000, up to 300%, which is 93,000 for a family of four.

And it gets to be that high if you have two children, specifically if one is under the age of five and needs full time childcare.

And so that's the real cost of being able to afford the basics like housing, transportation, childcare, food, you know, that kind of thing.

That is what it costs now to live in our community.

like I said, they work hard, but they make less than they need for basic basic expenses, including insurance, for example, health insurance.

So that's where the Financial Resiliency Task Force steps in.

I've talked to you about this in the past, but this is a referral network of several nonprofits you probably recognize all working together.

We formed this partnership five years ago, and we essentially put families through a referral network that Network to Work uses with their software system that they developed very successfully to help people with workforce development.

And the idea here is a family enters that it makes a three-year commitment, and they're working to improve really three things.

Their annual income through training opportunities, workforce development opportunities,

Their credit score by paying down bad debt and their debt-to-income ratio.

And a lot of time, our families come in with really high debt, expensive debt, and it could be auto loans, it could be student loans, things of that nature.

And the idea is that when they're done in this program, they've reached a more economically stable place.

And that's always the goal for all of our families.

and one of the programs that we run successfully along with the FRTF is what we call our Family Investment Program.

This past year, we had 18 families purchase 18 homes or 18 families were able to purchase homes.

All of these families were mostly from Southwood all through the Habitat Pathways Program.

One of the things we see with a lot of our families is they're not prepared to purchase their home at the time that they're ready.

And it takes usually about two to three years to help them get their credit where it needs to be to pay down their bad debt.

And one of the struggles we see with these families is that they're going from a 350 lot fee in Southwood to about a $1,200 mortgage.

And so it's affordable by our affordable housing standards.

But if you're thinking about affordability, it's still a big increase over a lot fee for a trailer home.

And so often they're still struggling to make ends meet.

And so they've really been able to take advantage of this program with match savings being another primary example is that they say we help them save in the ideas that they have money there for any kind of issues that might come up or sort of as a safety net.

and this is our fourth year of running this program, the family investment program, and we're getting ready to open it up to other nonprofits like the IRC and international divers.

And then lastly, our Driving Lives Board program.

We're in our third year of offering this program.

The idea is that we get people into affordable vehicles, so they're gently used, not more than five years old.

We get them at an affordable interest rate.

We work with Virginia National Bank where we raise the funds, they administer the loan, we try to give them very economical interest rate, and we also try to get them that good credit by making on-time payments.

some of the challenges with transportation there's many but one of the ones that we see is that the cost of insurance can be as much as a car payment so that's an area that we really struggle in our region so we try to build in a six-month program we're hoping to cover the cost of insurance the other piece is putting down payment down so we can lower a person's payment most families when they get over 300 a month start defaulting and not able to make their payments so we're looking at all the ways in which we can lower those payments and then the other big piece and a ridge was here he talks about it all the time one of the biggest barriers to work is

having an older car that breaks down like I showed in the Alice example and not being able to get to work.

So a vehicle repair program.

So this year we'll be joining forces with Network to Work and doing a program together where we each raise $100,000 and we invest in vehicle repairs for local families that are coming through Network to Work or United Way to keep people on the road and keep them safe.

And then lastly, our small business grant making.

This is another area where the county has really stepped in and leaned in.

This is the second year of working together.

The county invests $50,000 to economic development.

We do 50,000.

The city does 50,000.

We had over 20 people apply this year.

These grants are 10,000 apiece and it's to build out capacity for local businesses for those individuals that are socially disadvantaged.

It's been an incredibly successful program.

One of the stories that you see there, this is Alan Shortbread.

He is a county resident, has a business in the city.

He got his grant, was able to pause for a moment on how he wanted to market the product and he was able to get his product into Whole Foods and double his net income over the grant period, which was just a huge success for him.

but we have many other stories like that where just a small amount of money sometimes can allow a local business that's trying to grow and scale a chance to be able to to be able to increase their revenue significantly so I've been really pleased with that program and then we also do the Minority Business Alliance with the Chamber of Commerce so in our fifth year of offering $10,000, $5,000 grants

Last year, there was a pretty well-known story that was online and in the local news about Khadija's kitchen.

She got her food truck stolen and she had gotten a grant and the grant for 5,000 replaced the food truck.

So this is really specific, very tactical things that people need to be able to stay in business and grow their business.

And it's been a really great and highly successful program.

So we're grateful to the county for that support as well.

And that is it.

Thank you for your support and investment and being patient.

Thank you.

Very interesting presentation.

We'll go through our order.

Thank you, Ravi.

I really appreciated that.

I'd like to get your PowerPoint, because everything went so quickly.

The only person I know that speaks faster than Supervisor Pruitt.

appreciated that.

And I know the work that United Way does and very in Charlottesville and Albemarle County and really appreciative of everything.

Yeah, you bet.

And we'll send this out.

And then I've always offered to meet one on one with anybody here, which it's usually better.

We can get into an hour conversation and dig into data.

So I take notes really fast, but I will look forward to getting things as they're posted in the materials because that will be great.

Absolutely.

We've just started to scratch the surface.

Ridge has actually just moved over to the campus at PVCC and the current CEO of PVCC is very invested in doing more workforce development work and building that out.

I don't have to let Dr. Rihon talk about that, but I know that one of their ideas is to look at where their gaps in local workforce and be able to provide that training in either certification programs or two-year program associate programs.

Long, long list that you have.

So thank you very much.

Supervisor McKinnon.

Great presentation.

Thank you very much.

And I would appreciate receiving it.

That's really good.

Thank you for taking the time to come.

And the need for childcare in preschool in this community is really

Yeah, we are working with a county preschool program right now where they've just applied for the $10,000 grant through the economic development opportunity.

It looks like they'll get funded.

So that's one of the areas we're trying to tackle it from all directions, which is to invest in those businesses and provide support to them as they grow out their organizations.

But thank you.

You bet.

Thank you so much for the presentation.

I know we fairly recently sat down for one of these hour long Q&A sessions.

We did.

which means I did ask most of the things I had burning as a question that might have come up during this presentation then see the rest of my time.

Thank you.

And what strikes me in this incredible presentation with a number of different things that you're doing is we, so many of them touch on education and we just had the representatives from the school board.

And I actually see our Director of Human Services back in the

That's kind of what I was getting to Jim when I was talking about working with a school board about a joint meeting around data.

Some of this would be really interesting.

Yeah, we have rich data now actually all the way up through elementary school from Virginia Department of Education.

So we're now like tracking our students.

We start in early education, but we're able to track them into the early elementary school years and the schools are going to.

So yeah, absolutely.

That would be a great next step.

Thank you.

Yes, I would like to move that the Board of Supervisors convene a meeting pursuant to Section 2, Decimal 2, TAC 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, the Fifth and Avon Community Advisory Committee,

the Agricultural and Forestal District Advisory Committee, the Historic Preservation Committee, the John Board, the Monticello Area Community Action Agency, the National Heritage Committee, Places 29 Hydraulic Community Advisory Committee, the Places 29 Rio Community Advisory Committee,

The Crozet Community Advisory Committee and the Social Services Advisory Board.

Ms.

Lapisto-Curtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Malik?

Yes.

Ms.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Yes.

Good evening.

I'm going to come back out of closed session.

Yeah, of course.

And I do have that physical motion.

That's to you.

Second, we have a motion from Supervisor Pruitt second from Supervisor Malek without objection.

Mr. Piccio currently.

Hi, Ms.

Malek.

Yes, Ms.

McHale.

Yes, Mr. Pruitt.

Yes.

And board, I believe the next order is that if I'm correct, Supervisor Galloway is standing by with a request to participate remotely in accordance with applicable board rules of procedure rule number eight, B1D, enacted pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act Supervisor Galloway.

I see you.

Uh, thank you.

Good evening.

All right.

We have a motion from Supervisor Lapista-Curdley and a second from Supervisor Malek without objection.

Mr. Lapista-Curdley?

Aye.

Ms.

Malek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

I do.

The first motion that I have is to approve the names of individuals who have been appointed to committees.

So I'll read the committee and then the folks appointed fifth and Avon Community Advisory Committee, Nathan Holland and Thomas Thorpe.

Agriculture and Forestry District Advisory Committee, Peter Greenberg Historic Preservation Committee, Marcia Joseph

Natural Heritage Committee, Joseph Reims and Megan Svansky.

Svansky, sorry.

Places 29, which is the Hydraulic Community Advisory Committee, Kendra Walston, Crozet Community Advisory Committee, Sean Bridge,

Places 29, which is the RIO Community Advisory Committee, Audrey Coker, Brian McMillan, and Judy Schuchel, and Social Services Advisory Board, Elizabeth Embry.

And those, that is it.

This is the peaceful currently.

Hi, Miss Malik.

Yes, Miss McKeele.

Yes, Mr. Pruitt.

Hi, Mr. Andrews.

Other motions as well.

We do.

I move to adopt the proposed resolution of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, authorizing the employment of an attorney to advise the board of equalization as prepared by staff.

We have a motion from Supervisor McKeel.

Second from Supervisor Malik.

Are you still currently?

Aye.

Ms.

Malik?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

and the last motion coming out of closed session.

Second, we have a motion from Supervisor McKeele, second from Supervisor Malek without objection.

Peaceful-Curtley.

Aye.

Ms.

Malek.

Yes.

Ms.

Laquille.

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt.

Aye.

Mr. Andrews.

Yes.

Thank you.

No, sir, not this evening.

So next up is matters from the public, matters on the agenda, but not listed for public hearing or on matters previously considered by the board or matters that are pending before the board.

He's gone to get the sheet.

Right.

And everybody's in person.

No one's online.

All right.

So we have three folks that have signed up 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.

The signup 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 your allotted 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 that 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 turn or out from your seat or out of turn.

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

Welcome, Mr. Earl.

Please adjust the microphone.

Good evening, Doug Rowe from Scottsville.

As I'm sure you know, the Charlottesville City Council adopted ranked choice voting last night.

Vote was noteworthy in that both Mayor Wade and Councilman Pinkston stated that they wish there had been more confirmation from the public about how they felt about RCV.

Councilor Pinkston even went so far as to say he wished there had been an advisory referendum before the vote.

but alas, referendums are not an option in Virginia.

But good news, we have the next best thing.

Our very own and capable engagement Albemarle communication staff can conduct an internal poll of Albemarle citizens using online public common portal.

In fact, Arlington County used such a poll prior to their first adoption.

And while I would not say that Arlington's poll was a model, I'm sure that our county staff can use it as a reference and conduct a completely reliable poll.

In most places in the U.S., where we have RCB, it has been decided by voter referendum.

In fact, it's on the ballot in five states this November.

When you think about it, that makes a lot of sense.

Isn't it kind of a conflict of interest for elected officials to decide their own elections?

Shouldn't voters decide how the representatives are elected?

So I suggest you cut yourself some slack and employ the resources already existing on your staff to provide you and the general public an honest, empirical assessment of where the county citizens stand on the question of our CV.

Some say they want it.

Some say they don't.

But in what ratio?

This is the key question.

Don't put yourselves in the agonizing position of not knowing the relative ratio, as was the case with Mayor Wade and Councilor Pinkson and last night's vote.

In the end, they both voted for it, but it was not an easy decision for either.

Therefore, I implore you to grant permission to the very competent and talented communications that we have in this county

open a public comment portal.

Let the county citizens tell you what they want.

If citizens are not strongly in favor of RCV, and by that I mean greater than 60% with a response rate worthy of properly valid statistical example, then don't vote for it.

On the other hand, don't also continue to put off voting on RCV because you don't know how voters feel and you've never taken the steps to ask.

The county communication staffs can do this.

They are built for it.

They just need your instruction and permission.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Kent Social.

I'm a resident of our district.

To give you some background to what I'll be saying tonight, I have a Ph.D.

in applied mathematics from the School of Engineering and applied sciences at UVA.

My dissertation was in mathematical decision theory.

I've also been an election official for about 30 years and have been the Lord Precinct Chief Census Creator some 25 years ago.

I've also been a chief at early elections and recount officials last month.

I think I know a few things about how elections are run.

The ranked choice voting has several problems.

First, a person in a five candidate race that initially came in fourth place could win the election.

Mathematically, this is very possible, since the process disenfranchises many voters, many votes to get a winner.

That is just one problem.

The second issue is, what will a recount like?

will look like.

The last recount started around 7.30 in the morning and lasted all day, and then I end till after 8pm.

That's just counting the ballots once.

The third issue is how you will convey the ranked choice voting system to the public.

When the county went from touchscreens to paper ballots, despite all the notices that went out, people still have many questions.

And now with several localities who have adopted our CV, have second thoughts, why are you going for the latest fad?

Is this a solution for looking for a lucid problem?

You are changing one of the basic freedoms in the voting booth.

However, the real problem is voters' confidence in the election process.

I've probably answered more questions about the voting process with actual voters voting than anyone on this board combined.

Even to this day, in my home precinct of Delore, as fairly educated, voters question the integrity of the process.

During the early election season, voter integrity questions are very frequent.

Many voters, both Republicans and Democrats, as well as independents, question of the vote is really being recorded correctly.

then with R.C.V., you will open up mistrust and misunderstand our election system because of the way R.C.V.

works.

This is not good.

I could explain my thoughts in much more detail, but given the time limit, I cannot explain fully.

The only comment I have is, do not consider to implement a ranked choice of voting until people understand it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Judy Slasho, RIO District resident and RIO 29 CAC member.

At the meeting on August the 21, I brought to your attention the uptick in construction traffic heading and leading Belvedere traveling through Dunlora.

I asked some assistance in curbing the traffic through the neighborhood.

Obviously, safety within Dunlora appears to be a very low priority.

At 10.30 this morning, leaving Dunlora, I encountered a huge red flatback truck carrying huge cement culverts.

I laid on my horn, but the driver was clueless, continuing on his mission to Belvedere.

On August the 27th, I sent the entire board a rather lengthy email outlining several traffic problems.

I empathize with each of you because I not only receive traffic-related emails, but I'm being stopped when out in the community by Dunlore residents expressing their frustration over the construction truck traffic.

I shall assume that everyone received the email since it didn't get bounced back and hope that you took the time to read my comments.

If not, I'd like to highlight a few.

Post-it signs are being ignored by the construction crews.

Why are they allowed to pick and choose the signs that they will abide by?

Would you want to be driving next on our county roads if you knew the driver next to you could choose which sign he or she would follow?

The roundabout in Belvedere has been problematic.

A simple solution would be modify the design.

Road designs around here are constantly being redesigned.

At this point, all I can say is traffic here, traffic there, traffic traffic everywhere, especially on Dunlore Drive and Lawing Run.

A situation that I highlighted was my husband was driving on his side of the road on Dunlora Drive.

A construction vehicle is traveling over the center of the road, much faster than the posted 25 miles an hour.

My husband veered off the road to avoid being hit head-on.

My husband had the ability and experience to do this.

What if a newly experienced driver was on the road with the same circumstances?

The community would have been devastated if this had been a head-on collision.

How many of you have lived here long enough to remember the situation when a young girl leaving Forest Lake South heading to Albemarle High School after waiting at the lighted intersection to make a left turn onto Rio 29 South?

A truck driver ran the red light, broadsided the young girl.

She never made it to classes at Albemarle High School.

We personally remember this because the young girl's father worked for my husband.

Everyone, emotionally, was affected.

No matter if there are big trucks, little trucks, flatbeds, carrying equipment, the drivers are governed by laws, which include signs to ensure the public safety on our roads,

once again I am asking for your assistance to enforce the drivers of the construction vehicles adhere to the no-through truck signs and find an alternate route to the Belvedere construction site.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Board, our next item is an action item, not a public hearing.

And this is coming back to us, the ZTA 2023-2 personal wireless service facilities led by Mr. Bill Fritz, Development Process Manager.

This zoning text amendment relating to cell towers and the like is previously the subject of a public hearing at our July meeting because the board deferred action to this date specific to today at that meeting.

This is technically not a public hearing, but it will be open for public comment in much the same way.

So Mr. Fritz will let you lead off the discussion.

Thank you.

Thank you for the introduction.

As you said, we were here before you, excuse me, you directed staff to make some changes to the proposed ordinance.

I'm going to go over those very quickly, removing scenic highways and byways as an avoidance area, removing historic areas as avoidance areas, but having some preservation or some allowance to consider significant historic resources, adding biodiversity and forestal areas

and the identified in the comprehensive plan is avoidance areas, clarifying that additions of antennas to existing structures is permitted with the building permit, allowing administrative approval of the most appropriate color for a tower and equipment based on the location of each facility, removing the review of impacts to conservation easements on

on properties adjacent to towers and allowing the agent to determine when a tree survey is required.

So many of those changes were pretty simple and straightforward.

Some of them we have options for you.

So the ordinance that we're actually recommending is this one.

And what it would do is establish as avoidance areas, areas within 1500 feet of parcels with national register

of historic places.

It would remove historic districts.

So it would have to be a place that's actually identified and would establish the mountain protection areas as identified in the comprehensive plan as avoidance areas.

The alternatives that we have for you on the historic resources are two.

One would be within 1500 feet of a parcel containing a landmark and the other is 1500 feet of a parcel containing a historic place.

There are four landmarks in the county.

There are about 65 historic places in the county and they're fairly scattered and evenly distributed throughout the county.

For the forest alternative, we have two options for you.

The first one would be any area within a large forest block as shown in map one that's in the comprehensive plan.

I'm going to show you that map in a minute or any area within a mountain protection area.

So any forest block or the mountain protection area.

The other alternative we have for you would be a forest block that scores a certain point value or higher or the mountain protection areas.

So this map was done in 2009 based on land cover.

The green areas shown on here are large forest blocks.

They represent about 34% of the county.

It may be out of date.

There may have been clearing that has occurred.

There may have been development.

We don't know, but that's the map we have.

So that would be one alternative would be to use this map and specify the large forest blocks as an avoidance area.

The next alternative would be to use this map.

This map scores all of those forest blocks into various point systems and you could pick and choose what you wanted.

The dark green areas, the light green areas, the lighter green areas all the way down to the lightest of the green areas.

So there are multiple scores there.

You have this map in your packet so you can see it in more detail there.

What staff did is we looked at the biodiversity plan and the biodiversity plan and the forest plan.

It's not a perfect match.

So it doesn't pick up all the specific areas that were identified as biodiversity.

What we found with those is they weren't quite specific enough to allow us to identify specific parcels that would be in or out using the biodiversity plan.

But it did show general areas and what we found was a pretty significant overlap of the highest scoring forest areas and the most important biodiversity areas are a large number of the biodiversity areas.

I shouldn't say the most important.

but the large number of the biodiversity areas overlapped with the mountain protection areas.

And that was a fairly easy thing to map.

So we're recommending using the mountain protection areas as a proxy, not only for protecting the mountain protection areas, but for protecting significant forest areas and areas identified for biodiversity.

So that's our recommendation.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Fitz.

So right now what the ordinance says is that the any area where a facility would be skylighted in a ridge area is is an avoidance area.

Okay.

know what that means is that the the mountain protection area there starts at the 700 foot elevation.

So if you wanted to propose a facility on the southwest mountains and it was above 700 feet, it would automatically be a special use permit.

So we don't have any prohibited areas.

It would simply mean that it requires a special use permit and review additional review by the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors.

And could you go back to I think it's the second slide?

Oops.

I think there's four

About 65.

My count may be off.

Are there 65 in our packet?

I think I mentioned that in the packet.

And what we found is that there were

approximately four.

We didn't look at every single site because it would have taken too long.

We found about four facilities that are within 1500 feet of historic places right now.

So those four, if this ordinance were to be adopted, those four would still require a special use permit.

They required one before because they were in a historic district before.

you would, we would still have protections for many, for all areas.

It's just that it wouldn't require a special use permit.

But other than that, this still gives us the ability to look at everything and to make sure that

that's an appropriate placement or that's not an appropriate placement instead of having carte blanche where you just can't go anywhere in that area.

Right.

Right.

And whether or not you meet all those standards that are in the ordinance.

Because.

As evidenced by the number of approvals the board has given.

Correct.

This would this would this would this would decrease significantly the number of

Okay.

Okay.

Just wondering if that has an effect.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

So there were a couple of things I wanted to ask about that I, for some reason, didn't catch the first time I read through it for the previous discussion.

But the sort of general one was about biodiversity areas which are not in forest block.

many of which are wetlands adjacent to our rivers or along in grasslands, many of which are already recognized by DCR.

So one of the things that we recommended in the in your packet was that biodiversity areas could be added in the future if they are better mapped or better defined.

if we could

a parameter that would actually require us to field verify every time.

And that could be that could be rather onerous.

And we would want to analyze that and get that information to you.

But we can't just pick and plug it right now.

It's not quite that detailed.

When we were looking at it, that was our that was our determinations.

I think both at the state level and the local level from the National Heritage Committee, they were very reluctant to put parcel IDs on for wear and treasure things because of poaching, trespassing, et cetera.

So there has to be, but the destruction of that would still result if you're making a bulldozer trail through an area where there's six places in the entire

Commonwealth, and you're just going to throw one away because we didn't take time to protect it.

So this is a great concern of mine that is not, I don't think, addressed thoroughly enough in just choosing the mountaintops for us.

An additive thing would be great, and I know that I was not a majority last time we went through, but I wanted to raise this because it's important.

Certainly the Red Hill Wetlands is an area right off of 29 South,

right on the Hardware River.

It is numerous different creatures there.

I will say one of the things that we noted when we were looking at that, that many of those areas, the wetland areas in particular tend to be at lower elevations, which are not typically selected for wireless facilities or impacted by the installation of wireless facilities.

the grasslands in the area that if they're not required to be screened protected and whatever, then those would be open season basically under this new ordinance.

So okay, let me have a couple of specific things that I just want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting.

So let me do that.

So on your page two, you talk about skylighted when viewed from a budding parcels or public streets only.

That seems to be in conflict.

with on page 10 where it talks about minimized disability from adjacent parcels and streets regardless of their distance from the facility.

So that gives viewshed protection to a wider area.

The difference there is what we were trying to do is better define skylighting.

It's been an issue, a concern of ours for a while, in that if I stand below it, it's skylit.

If you're directly below the tower, it is by definition going to be skylit.

There's no way not to do that.

So we were trying to better define it so that it's skylight when you're viewing, what your viewing position is to determine whether or not it's skylight.

The issue of minimizing visibility, that's an overreaching goal to just minimize the visibility, just period.

Okay, so skylining is a different category all of the time.

All right.

So it's still part of the evaluation criteria.

Okay.

And then the height of the monopole, 10 feet or higher, including, so who's going to decide

How high above the 10 foot line?

That's what they are permitted right now.

They're permitted to be 10 feet above.

So there's no change there.

What is changing is that the definition of a concealment element is changing.

based on guidance from the FCC that we can no longer consider reference tree as part of the concealment element.

So we're leaving the height of a tier two tower at 10 feet.

By removing the relationship of the tower to the trees, you remove the concealment element.

that allows you to make an increase, the automatic by right increase of 20 feet.

That allows you to build a tier two facility at 30 feet above the tree line.

which was what was largely supported in the that or some some wanted to hire but there was significant support for 30 feet in the survey results that we got and for scheduling a balloon test do I understand that now the applicant would schedule it and if you can get there too bad that's fine if not

So the balloon test, many years ago, we changed the ordinance for the balloon test that it's when requested by the agent.

The agent.

being consulted is scratched out on this.

Yes.

As long as you will be there, that's fine.

The last one on page nine, projection.

And six feet on each side.

They can go up to 20 feet on towers.

On each side, based on the FCC guidance, yes, because there's no way for us to, if we limit it to 12 inches, they can go out to 20 feet as the exempt co-location.

Okay, this is tier one, two and three, not co-location.

Projection, no antenna may project blah, blah, blah, blah.

So the 12 inches are all crossed out and six feet is replacing.

So co-location I get.

But this is new to this is on the new tower page that I was concerned about.

And I know that that's been something that's been a negotiating thing in the past, that it looks like it's being wiped out.

And

in your development requirements, one, two, formally C now A. So I just wanted to make sure I was understanding that correctly.

Yes.

Okay.

and he is recommended.

The same outcome.

Better terminology to substitute must for shall.

Okay.

Doesn't mean maybe it means will must.

Just want to must means must more than shall does.

So that's good.

That's that's why we're doing it.

Yes, ma'am.

Okay.

Those are all my questions right now.

Thank you.

Sure.

Bill, so looking at first talking about the historic areas.

Yes.

And it's

says any area within 1500 feet of a parcel containing a national historic landmark.

And then you have there are four in Albemarle County.

And I will say that you mentioned first, Shack Mountain.

Yeah, there you go.

Well, they should know better.

But anyway, if you go down Lambs Road, it's down there on the right.

And it's it's a lovely historic house.

But it does list Shack Mountain, the Rotunda, the University of Virginia, Historic District and Monticello.

Get into what B was talking about.

Right.

Right.