Board of Supervisors Regular Second Meeting   11/20/2024

Thank you for not starting without me.

I'm pleased to call to order this regular meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors on the 20th of November at 1PM in Lane Auditorium.

I'd like to note at the dais we have Supervisor Mike Pruitt of Scottsville District, Supervisor Beall of Pistole-Curtley of the Redanna District, Supervisor Dantham McKeil of the Jack Tuit District, Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District, Supervisor Anne Malek of the Whitehall District, and myself, Jim Andrews, representing the Samuel Miller District.

Quorum is present.

We're also joined by our county executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our interim county attorney, Mr. Andy Herrick, and our senior deputy clerk, Mr. Travis Morris.

Thank you.

Also, let me please welcome the Albemarle County police officers present, Officer Andy Munty and Master Police Officer Dana Reeves.

Thank you.

Board, our first item, of course, is to adopt the final agenda.

Samu?

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

Yes.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

Lapisto-Cartley?

Aye.

Ms.

Mallet?

We will now turn to item five, brief announcements by board members.

Thank you.

Thank you.

On Monday the 18th, I attended an exhausting but very informative conference sponsored by Senator Dave Morrison in short pump and it was nine hours of bringing together all the different stakeholders and legislators, et cetera, working on energy issues going forward, particularly in the legislature, but also dealing with the

ten-year projected doubling of electricity demand and rates for residential users by 2035 due to the extra demand and investments needed for data centers.

So there was a lot of hair tearing going on, but I have files saved that I will forward to everybody so you can see the slides and do the best catch up.

You can.

And there'll be more.

This is, I think, trying to

have a better organized and more common understanding of where the red lines are before the legislative process this year.

So it was interesting that the number one takeaway when Senator Marsden did his introduction was local authority is a given.

And that was really nice to hear.

So at least we didn't have to fight that battle this time.

But I'm sure it will come back in another way later, but there'll be more to talk about soon.

Thank you.

Just a couple of things.

I just really want to point out some items for the public.

Our packet today was one of our quarterly reports by our facilities and environmental services folks about the work that is happening in Albemarle County.

What is happening and what our staff are working on.

This is a great way to find out.

You can go to our board packet and take a look at it.

It's actually on our consent agenda.

And I just want to send out a big thank you for all of the work that is represented in that report that we have today.

Another shout out, I just want to recognize

and Jeff has already talked about this several times publicly, but all of our employees, both government side and school side, should have received an announcement that our Albemarle Employee Care Clinic is coming soon.

Two facilities, one on 29 North, I think 29 North, and Pantops.

Everybody received a card in the mail today if you're an employee.

You would have received a card at some point, maybe not today, maybe yesterday this week, but it's really a great awareness tool for our employees and this is going to be a great option.

This certainly helps to take us down the road in my opinion of being an employer of choice.

for our employees, so great option.

And the only other thing I'd like to point out, and I just realized it today, one of our officers pointed it out to me, I've received several emails and questions from constituents

who have received a fine for the school speeding zone and they have questions about it and I just realized and thank you very much Abby that if you go to our website

you can find under, if you go to government, it's right there, school zone, speed camera, Q&A.

So there's a question and answer document and many of the questions that I'm receiving are answered on that document.

So just something that we can send to our constituents that I think will help inform them on how that camera zone works and what it's all about.

Thank you.

conservation alliance over at Darden

this weekend and wanted to share a little bit about it for others in the community who might want to be involved in the future.

So this was a volunteer work day this Saturday, and they brought together a wide range of volunteers, people from other nonprofits who were allied, to learn how to cut down and mitigate porcelain berry and Asian bittersweet, which are two

Stringler vines that actually harm our overall tree canopy.

People who are interested can find additional workdays in the future by going to the Rivanna Conservation Alliance's website.

There is also a whole non-profit that is just dedicated to this called PRISM, which is the Piedmont Regional Invasive Species Management.

I also want to give

a shout out to our staff that I know I believe this was actually a discussion point during during the budget Jesse with Parks and Rec who is an essential partner in this who really makes the whole operation run I would also like to remind everyone also this Saturday was the beginning of regular firearm hunting season for deer in Virginia or in Albemarle County it actually does vary by region

I would encourage people who are hunters and want to make sure that they know the right thing.

There's a lot of regulations that go into what kind of hunting you can do.

But generally speaking, this is the beginning of what we call deer season, and it runs until early January.

This is important even if you are not a hunter because it brings up a lot of basic safety concerns.

Make sure you're staying on trails if you're out in the woods.

Make sure you're wearing visible clothing.

Make sure you should always be keeping your dogs curbed.

County, but this is an especially important time to keep your dogs curbed.

I would also remind folks, especially in the southern part of our county in the rural areas, this is a time that people are much more likely to encounter stray dogs because there are some people with dogs and not all of these hunting dogs have perfect recall.

So make sure to get familiar with your neighbors, figure out how to communicate when you have a dog on your property.

That is not yours.

And lastly, I do want to just highlight one thing.

I was late here

What we are going to do about illegal immigration in the United States, some of these are significantly going to implicate the role of local government potentially.

I would raise this to this board as something that we need to be thinking about proactively and know how we are going to respond if there is a question or a call that comes from the federal government about how we should be involved in immigration in Albemarle County.

and that is where I'm going to leave that because there's a lot more research and learning that I need to do on this subject.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Over the last week, some of us, a lot of us, some were handful of us attended BACO and I'm not going to report a whole lot there.

I think we can all share that in conversation.

Following that though, I did go to the Virginia Governor's Housing Conference

and there was some good information in that that I will share out as well.

But also during that conference the NACO, the National Association of Counties, Community Workforce and Economic Development Committee had their monthly call and there was a report in there that I'm going to send to the board

that's just based on what local governments can do and innovations that you can do related to affordable housing.

And it's kind of an overview.

It has good information in it, but it also calls out some solutions that have been put in place around the country that ideas are examples of things that I had not heard of.

Some I had, some I had not.

So I thought that was useful.

But also on that call, one thing that I thought was, and it probably came up because we had something at TJPDC on the

Hazard Mitigation Plan, but they were talking about homelessness on that call and making sure that you have a homelessness plan or have that figured out in any sort of disaster and emergency planning situations, especially as you have more climate type of events, like what's going to happen there.

And it wasn't just honed in on.

folks that might be experiencing homelessness at the time of the event, but what are you going to do because homelessness is created from those events?

So it's a two-pronged kind of approach.

So that was something I'm just calling out because that's not been on my mind when I thought of it, when emergency planning or hazard mitigation has been in front of this board.

More to come or other items I'll share out in the email when I send that report out from the NACO group.

Thank you.

And I will be, I think, maybe adding some things when we talk from the board later in the afternoon.

But following up on the VACO, I just want to congratulate Supervisor Malick, who was the president.

Now the past, the past president of VACO ran a meeting and did his all proud.

It was, it was well done all the way, all the way around.

also will later report on the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority's final meeting of the year yesterday but I wanted to shout out that at the meeting yesterday the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority Board of Directors recognized service of Mr. Lance Stewart who is of course retiring and his service on that board has been very helpful over the years so I want to make sure that's noted.

Does anyone have anything else to add at this time?

OK.

Thank you.

One thing just to follow up.

Thank you, Supervisor Pruitt, for reminding me because it was out of my brain about deer season.

So for those of us who live in the rural area, a reminder for hunters, there is no going on private property without permission.

and Rivanna.

You may not bring your vehicle onto private property.

You may not bring your weapon onto private property.

You have to walk the half mile to my house without your weapon to say, may I look for my hands?

Or, otherwise, you will get a very bad reaction from me, which has happened in the past.

So words to the wise, be respectful of the people who live in the community where you may be hunting.

We have two families who hunt with Beau on our property.

It's very important for them, as well as for the management of our herd.

People need to be respectful of others.

Thank you.

So we'll move to, from the public matters on the agenda, but not listed for public hearing.

Our matters previously considered by the board are matters that are pending before the board.

We do.

We have two signups and I think everyone is in person.

No one is online this afternoon.

I will read the instructions.

During the time set aside for minors 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 might ask others to raise their hands in recognition.

Speakers may not share any unused time with another speaker.

Back and forth debate is not permitted.

Do not speak from your seat or out of turn, and all comments are live streamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website.

Good afternoon.

My name is Neil Williamson.

I come before you about an item that's going to be on your agenda this evening, but I'm not going to be here at the evening session regarding AC 44.

I have been following this for, okay, since the beginning of time, and I am once again speaking about the Free Enterprise Forum lasagna plan.

Now, this board has taken a position of not trying to reinvent the wheel, but going ahead and looking around the Commonwealth at different ideas.

However, at the same time, this board has enshrined a binary choice, rural area development area.

And your rural area is greater than 95% of your land mass, and this board has also regularly stated there is a housing crisis.

I ask a simple question.

Your AC44 comprehensive plan, what is it doing to help alleviate the housing crisis?

Staff in your last presentation indicated it is a one-to-one trade for density in the 2015 plan.

So that means we're not really increasing the density.

There was no discussion of the lasagna plan thus far.

It's based on a plan that exists in Loudoun County, where there are four, not two, but four opportunities.

There's an urban, suburban, transitional, and rural.

other localities across this great Commonwealth of ours have different percentages of, quote, development areas or growth areas or whatever they're going to call it.

Faqir, which is often bandied about as being hunting country, etc.

I think it's something in the neighborhood of 52% is development area.

Now, I'm not suggesting that it has to go that direction, but as Supervisor Pruitt raised last meeting, when do the supervisors get to talk about the map?

Just like the kids show.

It's the map, Dora.

Use the map.

There's a whole lot of yellow on the map, and that's good because the market wants yellow.

They want single-family homes.

But if you try and find a lot for a single-family home today in Albemarle County, it's not there.

consider moving away from the binary choice, development area, rural area.

Order the lasagna.

Thank you.

Next speaker is Emily Dreyfus.

Neil, I was busy making notes and lost my place on the agenda.

You might want to pull the mic down just a little bit.

Oh, not a bit.

Yeah, there you go.

Thank you.

My name is Emily Dreyfus.

I live in the Rio Magisterial District and I'm here on behalf of a coalition of organizations that is very concerned about affordable housing.

I will email this later if you haven't already received it.

The undersigned organizations representing thousands of county residents, faith-based communities, housing providers and advocates ask that you initiate a rigorous approach to affordable housing in Albemarle County.

There is a wide array of critical unmet needs and we hope you will exercise your leadership to enhance the well-being and quality of life for all citizens.

We must all anticipate decreased federal funding and a shift to increase the responsibilities of local government, making the affordable housing shortage even more urgent.

We stand together to ask that you do the following.

A, improve funding.

First, establish a housing trust fund with at least $10 million in dedicated annual funding specifically for affordable housing, up to 60% area median income for rental, and up to 80% for home ownership.

funding for a new construction preservation of existing deeply affordable housing is paramount, including the successful redevelopment of Southwood.

The housing trust fund was unanimously supported by the board as part of the housing Albemarle Plain, which was approved in 2021.

Number two, improve the ASERP program, Elmar County Emergency Relief Program, to provide substantially more funding and provide more relief for each household.

The current limit of $800 per household is inadequate to pay even half of a family's average monthly rent.

The county's robust investment to expand resources to address affordability and community development needs will require using every funding opportunity in the toolbox, including possibly increasing property taxes.

If necessary, please don't shy away from taking those steps.

B, Strengthen AC 44.

Please ensure the county's comprehensive plan includes ambitious new approaches to address housing needs, including upzoning growth areas, developing a specific plan for future expansion of the growth areas while avoiding sprawl, strengthening inclusionary zoning and robust and affordable housing incentives and allowances, including incentives to reduce the impact on climate change,

Manufactured Housing Preservation, Landbanks, Land Trust, and other options.

And we also ask you to exercise more discretion over parking minimums.

Our signers are the Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless, Charlottesville Albemarle Affordable Housing Coalition, Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition, Community Climate Collaborative, Impact, Livable Seville, and Virginia Organizing.

This brings us to the Consent Agenda, and I have not heard of any items to be pulled from the Consent Agenda, so we have a motion to adopt the Consent Agenda.

So moved.

Second.

Mr. McKeil.

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt.

Aye.

County.

Mr. Andrews.

Yes, Mr. Galloway.

Yes, Mr. Piso.

Yes.

Or our first item, an action item this afternoon is s e 2024 dash 22 30 65.

Gables Run Road Homestay.

And this is being led by discussion by Scottsville by Lisa Green,

Thank you.

Welcome.

Good afternoon, Board and Chair Andrews.

I'm Lisa Green, the Manager of Code Compliance.

Thank you for your time today.

For your review, a special exception, SE 202400022 3065 Gables Run Homestay.

This application requests a special exception from County Code 18-5.1.48 to allow the property owners, Michael and Cheryl Trice, to operate a homestay in an accessory structure on their parcel, which is less than five acres in the rural area district.

The 4.229 acre parcel is located south of Milton along Gables Run Road.

It features manicured lawns and trees and includes the primary residents of the owners at 3065 Gables Run Road, outlined here in blue.

The property also has a pole barn, outlined in green, and a two-story detached accessory structure built in 1992, which is the focus of this special exception, outlined in red.

The lower level of this accessory structure serves as the garage while the upper level is a one-room studio.

The nearest neighboring dwelling is located over 650 feet away from the proposed homestay in all directions, and the surrounding properties consist of a mix of forested land and mowed fields.

The parcel meets all of the requirements for homestay use with the exception that the parcel is just shy of five acres in size.

The accessory structure was built prior to August 7, 2019 and meets the primary structure setbacks.

The only exception, the special exception is only required due to the property being less than five acres.

If the special exception is approved, the owners would then apply for the homestay zoning clearance and move forward with the remaining approval process.

The property is currently in compliance with all zoning and taxation requirements.

The proposed structure for the homestay has an entrance directly off of Gables Run Road and located near the primary dwelling on the parcel and as you can see here includes ample on-site parking.

The next few slides are photos of this site.

This photo is of the primary dwelling shown in context to the proposed homestay use.

Another photo showing the property from the center of Gables Run Road looking south and here you can see the on-site parking for the primary residence.

This photo is looking west.

Here you see the lower level of the garage entrance of the accessory structure and the on-site parking area for the proposed home state use.

After reviewing the relevant factors, staff believes that utilizing the studio above the garage of the two-storey accessory structure as a home stay on the owner's parcel would not adversely affect the surrounding neighborhood or public health safety or welfare.

The home stay is considered an accessory use to the primary residence on the property and aligns with the comprehensive plan.

Given that the parcel is just under the five-acre requirement and considering the size of the structure, the dwelling is compatible with the surrounding neighborhood.

Staff has analyzed the homestay use with the context of the property in the neighborhood and therefore recommends approval.

Thank you.

I will go through order.

Thank you very much.

Please refresh my memory.

I think we've had a few, but not many.

Thank you.

Supervisor Malek.

No questions.

Thank you.

Supervisor McEel.

No questions.

Thank you.

Got it.

I have no questions.

Does it have a kitchen?

OK.

Thank you.

County.

Any additional questions?

Additional comments.

Great.

I would like to move the board adopt the resolution for S. Did we open this for public care?

Sorry.

I'm just no, this is just a special.

Oh, sorry.

was startled that we were already taking this step, and that's why I paused.

Thank you.

Ms.

McHale.

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt.

Aye.

Mr. Lapisto-Curdley.

Aye.

Ms.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

That was easy.

But we'll move on now to a presentation on the five-year financial plan.

This is being led by Mr. Andy Bowman, our Assistant Chief Financial Officer.

Welcome, Mr. Bowman.

I am going to be the primary staff presenter today, but I do want to recognize, I'll say others will introduce themselves along the way, but I do recognize the four staff currently in the Office of Management and Budget who've done so much of the analysis and coordination, keeping it low profile as they prefer to do to in the corner of the auditorium.

But I just want to thank that team for all of their work to do this.

I'm the voice and the translator and the storyteller today, but so much of the good work is based on the hard work those folks do every day.

So today is a work session on the five-year financial plan.

No action is requested from the board today.

As I like to do with the board is to frame how does this conversation fit into all of the long-range strategic planning the work the board has been doing.

So this slide recaps where we've been this summer and fall, starting with the adoption of the budget calendar, and also the Board's first public review of the strategic plan execution and reporting report, also known as SPEAR.

I highlight this because we've been very intentional in the last two years since the Board adopted a strategic plan to tie the budget and our long-range plans and strategic plan together very tightly.

and so though they can sometimes feel like two different processes, strategic planning and financial planning, they work best when they feel the same.

We were here in October with Dr. Bailey reviewing the Economic Outlook Report.

And there's another update on performance.

Jessica Rice, our director of our relatively new county government HR, was providing reports on the work they've been doing and the status of some of the strategies we've implemented, such as the compensation and classification study.

This conversation is going to continue on December 4th in a joint meeting with the school board, really providing an opportunity for the school board to tell their story with an emphasis on the capital program and for the board to engage on that.

And then we'll be back in February for the annual recommended budget process and the work sessions that follow.

So looking at today, there's just really two items on the agenda and kind of desired outcomes.

The first is, you know, taking the board's direction from the strategic plan, walking through where we are, how do our revenues project out based on the economic outlook report, what we're seeing to date, and then how do the expenditures align in the strategic plan to what that looks like.

At the end of the presentation, we want to make sure we're leaving as much time as we can to get feedback from the board in terms of, you know, what does the plan do well and what may be missing.

That's a question the board can take in a lot of different directions, but it will be helpful to staff to hear things if there was something the board was expecting to see, but did not.

Or perhaps something seemed about right, but maybe there's a future policy discussion that the board would like to have in the future.

All of that can help us give feedback, not just for this budget process, but for one of those long range discussions that we have.

So before we dive into the plan itself, I want to take a moment and get us just grounded in long-range financial planning.

This is part of the board-grouped county financial management policies.

And really, it's just a good check to make sure that we are planning for and going through the plan and exercise.

Sometimes it's the exercise itself, not the plan, where we have the value of are our plans aligned, whereas we open capital facilities, are we able to operate them?

What are some of those strategy and policy discussions that can emerge?

I recall several years ago when we were in a five-year plan session, the board really had a lot of discussion around revenue diversification.

And that led when the state authority changed around food and beverage and transit occupancy taxes, the board was well positioned to take action in response to those.

So, again, the policies can be just as effective as the dollars when we think about that plan.

And that goes to my next point about this is not only about the new dollars and what gets added to the plan.

Currently, we have a general fund budget of more than $400 million.

And as the board evaluates in the budget, it's not just looking at what the additive things are doing.

It's looking at what the base of funding is doing.

How are we performing in our services?

What are those policy levers and recent investments made?

And what are those results we have seen?

Wow, this is a long-range discussion.

This does lead into the annual budget, but today is going to have a different look and feel than it will in a March work session.

Usually when I'm before the board in March, it's usually changes that will happen almost immediately in a matter of months.

This is a much longer frame of time we have.

Of course, the current year is important, and so is the next year, but this is a much longer time horizon we look at.

finally the assumptions this is the best we know as of today on November 20th and this will continue to evolve and that's okay because again it's the exercise of planning as we think about scenario budgeting for as things get a little better as things get a little worse and how do we respond to those accordingly

I also need to give a lot of credit to the Board of Supervisors because you all understand five-year financial planning very well.

This is a slide the Board has seen a few times in recent budgets that looks at across the last three fiscal years what have some of the cost drivers been, including those that will be upcoming in fiscal year 26 circled in red.

The Board may recall, and I'll share for the public, in fiscal year 24 the Board of Supervisors took about $4.9 million of funding and applied that one time into the capital budget to support one-time needs.

then in fiscal year 25, some of those prior commitments were coming online.

That 4.9 was available for county government and public schools to support those operations.

The board did something smaller but equally impactful last year when the board generated revenues to fund initiatives such as the Burkmaar Ambulance and the HEARTS team.

Those things started mid-year, but the board knew starting mid-year the full funding for those would need to be available with the revenues that were generated.

So again, this is one I share, but the board has really demonstrated a strong grasp of how this planning goes into driving forward their strategic plan.

So with that, I'm going to jump to the bottom line summary of where we are.

Let's take an overall look at the plan.

And that is a reflector on this chart here.

This looks at the county's general fund only.

It does not include the school fund.

It does not include the capital funds.

What we assume in the general fund, as the Board knows, is two of the largest transfers that are made are to the public schools for operations and to the capital and debt program for those expenses.

In the plan, those are made by formula.

So there would be work need to be done to balance the CIP as there would be the school budget just like there is every year.

So when we look at those gap numbers at the bottom, that really reflects a county government gap knowing those other formulas are being made.

The second observation is that blue line and revenues, which is the bottom line.

I'll talk about this more in detail, but we can see that is a fairly steady upward trend that we've had.

And I'll talk a little more detail about some of the assumptions behind that.

The red line on the expenditures, the first place I go in the five-year plan is the out years when I look at that.

We can see that there are some significant gaps in the out years.

That is a common for our past five-year plans.

That is common when I look at other localities.

The point is not to balance fiscal year 30, but to begin to put us in a position to make those decisions about how we can do things differently.

Just as I'm sure five years ago, we had an unbalanced budget for what we project fiscal year 25 would look like.

We now have a balanced budget.

County.

So this is an iterative process we continue to improve on.

Final observation I will make though is that the time being of some of those first years and a lot of plans we look at this this time of year, it's common to have a gap in the first year, fiscal year 26.

But sometimes we see some of those obligations where things really ramp up our year in 2 and 3.

So in this chart, if we kind of pay attention, if we have no gap right now in fiscal year 25, then we go to 3% and to 5%.

In some of our past plans, we see that trend occur more in year two to three versus years one and two, which signals to us there are a lot of the expenditure pressures and obligations coming sooner than we would in the plan.

We're going to talk in more detail what those look like through this presentation.

So to begin at a high level in the revenue side, I'm going to recap the economic outlook report that the board received in October.

Four main takeaways that our staff had.

First is that Albemarle's economy continues to be very strong and performs well.

The other key takeaway is that we also follow state and national trends.

So whatever is changing in the state and national, we need to keep our eye on that.

Many of Albemarle County's revenues are backward looking.

We receive our consumer taxes based on past activity.

Business license is based on the prior calendar year.

Reassessments are of January 1st.

So if there are sometimes there are things changing right now, it can take a little bit of time to show up in the county's financials.

So the national economy with some rise to be is partly sunny, partly cloudy.

There are certainly lots of indicators in both directions, but the threat of a recession is not as great right now as it looked perhaps one year ago and two years ago.

County.

That's not to say that the impacts are the same for everyone, all industries, but this was a just where the outlook was.

While we there may not be a session doctor really did recommend it's prudent for us to plan for some cooling that will show up in late 24 to 25 followed by moderate growth.

And they can that final point of the economics and that timing may vary just because they slow down in one revenue may not impact us in the same way as an

So to kind of take Dr. Bailey's economic health report, look at our historical financials.

I want to show a picture of how we've kind of put together at a high level what our revenue outlook is.

And I will caution the board, this is probably the busiest slide.

You've seen it before that I will show the entire budget process from now through May.

So we're going to do the busiest one today.

So we're going to get this out of the way and if y'all can bear with me for a moment.

This is a graph of all general fund revenue changes since fiscal year 7 to the present and a future projection.

If you look at those vertical lines, which are varying heights over that more than 20-year period, that is the change year to year in how those general revenues.

That's the overall economy.

That is tax rates.

That is changes in state funding, revenues that may have been added, discontinued.

It's all in there across all of those years.

What we have going through the middle of that is a red line all the way through, which say kind of through the good and the bad.

What is an average annual growth that you would see in the long term?

And that's about 4.7 percent.

but as you know the board can see as we look at this chart 4.7 is all over the place when we look at what has happened in history.

So to talk through the story of the last 20 years or so we have in the pre-great recession and I'm starting to fiscal year seven because that is when the county began annual real estate reassessments.

To go back further we see more of a choppy trend when those were done every other year.

So we see a very strong revenue picture prior to the great recession

But we see a very long period of not just the Great Recession, but that initial recovery that heavily impacted the real estate markets, the housing industry, the labor force.

And so that was a very deep prolonged impact as the majority of the revenues in the county come from real estate and related functions.

So we see a growth averaging a little over 1% from that period with that orange line that's highlighted there from fiscal year 9 to fiscal year 14.

County.

That number is actually below zero.

There was negative revenue growth one year.

From that time period in fiscal year 15 up into the there was a much steadier pace of growth averaging a little over 5% which was you know at or above or

Fiscal Year 20 was actually on pace to be very similar to Fiscal Year 18 and 19, but as everyone knows in the fourth quarter of the pandemic began and those revenues began to drop very fast and very sharply.

Since Fiscal Year 20 through 24, it's been a very different picture where the bounce back from the pandemic happened and it happened stronger than we've had in any period in revenue history that we've had in the county.

What we can see now is in fiscal year 24 as we finish that year and we head into fiscal year 25, we see that slowdown occurring.

This is one if Dr. Bailey was here with the board, she frames this really well as we think about what that more than 4% growth looks like in fiscal year 25.

If you experience that coming out of the Great Recession, that would feel like things were really taking off.

If you experience that coming off the time of the pandemic, that feels like a slowdown even though it's not in a recession.

on the board's consensus agenda today was our first quarter financial report and I can report that in fiscal year 25 revenues are trending very close to where we projected to the budget.

So that's good.

We're not seeing a further slowdown, but I'll also share that in two of the last three years, the board has approved a media revenue update to apply those revenues and staff is not anticipating bringing that forward because right now things are following so closely in fiscal year 25.

So for what that outlooks in the future, really looking at fiscal year 26 and 27, there is a bit of a slowdown knowing that if something happens, we'll see a little bit of a dip.

It does not look like a recession that took place either in the Great Recession or at the start of the pandemic, but it does represent some economic slowing that then rebounds into the out years.

When we look at the out years, if you talk to most financial analysts or economists, they would say that to predict beyond two years is a very difficult thing to do.

What we have done to assist the board is just to plan that average growth continues in those out years and knowing that we have time to adjust those strategies there.

So as we think of that blue line on the summary chart, that is really those green bars reflect where that is of the relatively steady economy, but anticipating a little bit of the dip.

But just as we continue to work with Dr. Bailey and her team on a quarterly basis, as we have quarterly updates to the Board of Supervisors, we'll continue to watch this closely and be nimble as things change.

So that is the revenue side of the equation.

And what we'd like to do next to staff is to walk through how our expenditure is tied to the Street Tube Plan.

Andy, thank you very much for the tee-up of today's work session.

And more members, you've seen this slide, but it designed in different ways.

you will recognize the four, I'm sorry, the five balls that represent your strategic goals that encircle the middle goal which is goal number six and that is workforce and customer service.

Board, you went away approximately two years ago and you looked at updating your strategic plan

and that is a significant task in this organization where we're trying to identify a handful of five-year objectives where this board and staff work together to identify what are the areas where we need to focus our capacity.

for the next

the capacity that the board and staff identify in our budget to connect to these opportunities and these problems that we hear and face and work with partners, work with our city, work with our community to try to address every day.

I want to take a minute and I want to hone in on and highlight really three of the six goals that are red circled.

At the top you see safety and well-being.

At the left you see education and learning and then in the middle and this board was instrumental in saying let's make sure that we identify our workforce for the work that we do in this organization and let's highlight the importance of our workforce because

without a strong workforce that we're able to recruit and retain, we're not going to get the work done.

And we've been in situations before where we've struggled mightily to recruit and to retain high quality staff.

These three goals, I would suggest, are the foundation.

They stabilize the other goals.

And you will see a lot today with Andy and Jacob's work, really an accounting

of significant investment in these three areas.

Where I draw the thread through all of this is an investment in infrastructure.

And Andy is going to talk more specifically as we go through this, but this is investment in infrastructure that in some cases has not taken place in decades.

Examples would be the regional jail renovations, and these are renovations just to bring the jail up to a basic minimum of acceptable

County, New York, New

of functionality to be able to deal with today's demands.

Schools, three new schools in the next five years and that's after I believe approximately two decades of no new schools but continued expansion of schools.

but board the infrastructure investment doesn't stop there.

If we look into the middle with our workforce and customer service several years ago, this board was instrumental in putting together a public safety pay plan.

That's a part of our paying classification infrastructure where we can be more competitive in recruiting and retaining

but both police and fire in public safety.

Two years ago, you supported modernization of the classification and pay plan for the balance of the organization and you received a report last month.

from our Human Resources Department on how we're doing in a number of areas with key metrics.

We also have investment in key customer service systems, both in community development, also in finance, in the Department of Finance, and also key critical investment in IT systems.

County.

These systems, these upgrades, this modernization will help our organization keep pace with the volume and the complexity of work that's coming at us in a number of departments, and it will provide our employees with an ability to measure, to look at metrics, to make adjustments where necessary, and monitor customer service.

And that's what we want.

but Board, you hear me say with regularity that we can do anything you want.

We just can't do everything you want.

You've heard me say that.

And in the spirit of strategic planning, we're going to be able to identify more opportunities and we're going to identify more problems than we have revenue capacity to be able to deal with.

And so I think as Andy has teed up,

the near-term obligations.

You hear me talk a lot about out-year obligations.

Our out-year obligations are more closely aligned with fiscal year 26, which is where we're going, and then fiscal year 27.

And we see those gaps.

And we're going to be creative.

We're going to be aggressive as we begin to go through the budget process and to begin to develop our budget with an eye on trying to do as much as we can with what we have.

but I believe what you're going to see today is you're going to see significant investment in the areas of safety and well-being.

This has happened over a number of years.

These are strategies such as pulling down federal dollars, competitive federal dollars to be able to pay for local operational needs in the area of fire service, but it also pulls down

and I appreciate the board's attention today to these three areas in particular.

Thank you.

What I'll do next is I'm going to walk through these six goals and there are 23 objectives under them and really connect what are the actions in the five-year plan that are tied to these.

Some of these items will be new funding planned to be added.

Some of those will just be acknowledging there is recent funding and it's in place and the results of those have not yet been seen in full.

There's also those things where there's just staff effort.

We have resources in place.

It's how those are directed and how that time is prioritized.

So to begin walking through this, I'm going to start with the goal of workforce and customer service because it's the county executive talk to how integral it was to driving all of the other objectives forward.

So the two objectives here are shown on the slide in orange.

The five-year plan does include compensation and benefit increases over the next five years.

We've also included, as supervisors acknowledge in their comments, we are planning to implement and open the Employee Care Clinic two locations in calendar year 2025.

That is a strategy not only about supporting the workforce and helping retain staff, providing access to service.

There's also a way of looking differently about how we can manage our health care costs, as that is a significant cost driver in our society right now.

Third, I will mention is that we have included an assumption without naming them specifically that there will be some physicians out there that we can't simply, you know, re-engineer ourselves out of or improve a process.

I think a good example of that is police officers and child protective service workers.

There's an immediate response and a call that takes place that, you know, over time as our community grows, we'll sort of be there despite all of our efforts where we may have opportunities to re-engineer other types of positions.

So that is acknowledged in this request as our community grows.

Moving to the rest of workforce and customer service, one of the big emphasis has been modernizing our processes and technology.

We have what we call the core systems modernization project where to date we have implemented a human resources system.

In January a community development system will be going live and in April the financial management system will follow after that.

That is going to improve our reporting, provide data, change our processes in a lot of transformational ways.

Not just how we do our jobs, but the customer service impact as well.

Staff also has its eyes beyond the core systems modernization project.

This is probably more of a CIP impact than an operating, but in the upcoming horizon of five years, what are other end of life systems that we need to plan for so that we don't run a risk of lapse of

County Executive and knowledge to that re-engineer of operations.

And I'll say this is not just a talking point, this is a commitment that has been made in the budget.

The County Executive as part of balancing the budget in fiscal year 25, we included $250,000 of savings that would be captured over the course of this fiscal year.

with a plan to increase that number to another 250,000 for a total of 500,000 by the time fiscal year 26 gets here.

We're currently evaluating that and we'll bring a report to the board back that is part of the recommended budget.

That is an effort to really capture and acknowledge those commitments to improving organizational performance.

Final objective here is around really in the CIP about the space planning strategies.

The board has included funding around that in the CIP and that would be recommended to continue.

Moving to the next goal, which is one of those circled and red at the start and some of those large budget drivers, is safety and well-being.

The first objective I want to focus on here is supporting community safety through highly responsive services.

We've had a lot of recent funding here with the harsh team expansion that would be expanding this year.

The harsh team, the first iteration of that was recognized recently by the board nationally for the work that they have been doing.

We've increased police officer staffing.

We have, I apologize, my acronym alphabet soup up there.

Albemarle, Charlottesville, Regional Jail is on the slide for that renovation of that facility that is decades old.

And also added in the current fiscal year, not yet providing service, but working through the training aspect of that as the Burkmaar ambulance, serving one of the busiest call areas in the county for emergency medical response services.

We look at new funding in the five-year plan.

A lot of this is driven by prior commitments.

Next calendar year we anticipate the general district court being opening and continuing the phases of that project, so that has both the operating impact and also the security impact we need to plan for as the courts expand.

We would anticipate increasing police officer staffing in the next five years.

The Area Fire Rescue, we've obtained successfully in partnership with our finance and fire rescue departments four FEMA safer grants, one of which has been fully picked up, but there are three remaining, totally 57 firefighters, and we'll speak a little more of that later.

The last item I want to note in our planning is just really acknowledging the changing landscape and our volunteer fire rescue stations.

We received a request over the years and this is just acknowledging that the landscape is changing and we want to be trying to position ourselves so that if there's every time when volunteers need assistance, we're able to position and provide an opportunity to not have a disruption of service to the community.

I want to go into this a little more detail just to kind of give some historical perspective on how this is evolving.

of just when those requested and received.

So starting back around the turn of the century and in 2008, there were a total of five requests from volunteer fire rescue stations for supplemental staffing.

Kind of the general logic behind that is volunteers have said if the county is able to staff Monday to Friday during the daytime, volunteers can cover nights and weekends.

So several of those took place during that time frame.

And then we went through a very steady period in the volunteer system where no request were made for about a decade.

Now there were certainly other investments the board was making at that time with the other fire stations and the urban ring.

but since 2019 the last six years we've seen a change where we received four requests from stations and two of which were not just the daytime staffing but also for nights and weekends.

So I want to be clear at this time we have not received as of today any request for other staffing but just looking how things are changing in recent years compared to that prior period it may be appropriate for us to plan if needed to support those volunteer stations and the services they provide for fire in that service.

continuing the safety well-being.

We have the human services aspect of this where their board has continued the community assistance program.

This was started up with ARPA funding as a short-term measure and increased funding has continued in the Department of Social Services for that, as well as the human services navigator position.

The last objective here is really around coordinated planning.

This is not as much of a dollar as it is a staff time commitment where we are currently underway in an organizational wide coordinated effort for continuity of operations planning to make sure we're prepared for whatever that disruption may be.

The third goal I'm going to touch on, the last of the three that were circled in red, is education and learning.

This is, as I've said before, this provides school funding based on the allocation of local tax revenue formula just as we would in prior years.

I will acknowledge as I was meeting earlier today with both my counterpart with the school's budget director and their chief operating officer, one of the things that has on their mind in the five-year planning is the operating impacts of their projects.

We have included in the CIP a high school center too and two elementary schools, one in the southern end and one in the northern part of the county.

and the school division historically has expanded programs such as most recently as a Crozet Elementary and those operating impacts were able to be picked up as part of the funding formula.

But to open a new school, two of which would open in fiscal year 27, there would be a much larger fiscal impact that they would see with the operating cost of the school being anywhere from a million to two million.

That's a very approximate number, not a number from the school's perspective of the magnitude.

This is one of the things that is on their minds, too.

How do we plan not only for the current year, but where we're headed with those obligations coming?

On December 4th, we'll have a meeting with the school board, as I mentioned, to really talk about that capital program and seeing some of their long-term pressures and giving the board an opportunity to engage with them.

So the fourth goal, or halfway through the sixth, I'm going to hit on is the resilient, equitable, and engaged community goal.

This is one where a lot of this goal is not so much in the new dollars heavy, it is about implementing with the resources and the policies and the staff that we have.

That includes climate action, but I'll acknowledge that in addition to our current ongoing funding for climate action, the past, the Board has added one-time funding to support initiatives.

Staff anticipates that some additional funding would need to be out of that, but that would probably start in fiscal year 27, and we'll continue to monitor that.

The final point I'll make on the slide, I could tie this project to multiple objectives, so to me just to acknowledge it without worrying about what the best objective is, the Northern Convenience Center is included in the five-year CIP and then there would be the related operating costs just as the Southern Convenience Center opened in recent years.

These next three objectives, again, to continue the theme of this goal, was really about implementing what we have with the community partnerships and engagement, the community response readiness, and the stream health initiatives.

The next goal I will go to is infrastructure and placemaking.

The Board has made significant investment through the creation of the broadband accessibility and affordability office, and they are currently working with our federal, state, and local partners with the funding in place to implement that to make progress on the broadband improvements that have taken place in recent years.

We also have a goal really about partnership, working with our water partners at the Water Sewer Authority and the Service Authority around that objective, so no dollars associated with that one that are new.

A little bit more on this slide.

We have some really about the public works function and improving that in the enhanced maintenance.

Our Department of Facilities and Environmental Services were before the Board in recent months to talk about the litter collection program that is funded by the disposable plastic bag tacks.

Again, that's another example of revenue diversification the Board took on in recent years and that has restricted uses which include the litter collection program.

and also continuing to implement the recent youth funding for the entrance corridor and right-of-way programming in our facilities team.

Another theme of just kind of the changing landscape is transit, which comes up in our recent youth funding.

The board has supported not just the operational increases to Cat and John, our two primary transit providers, but exploring the microcat program that has been in operation for approximately a year.

The coming months, the board is going to get an update on how that service is performing, the usage and everything that goes with that.

And that was a two-year grant that was operated by the City of Charlottesville.

And we'll look to every option we can to extend or expand that grant as we can.

But there will be a time in the coming years where that will shift from a more of a local cost than it is presently due to that two-year grant.

also in the CIP continuing the transportation leveraging program where the board is able to put aside local funding, support transportation projects and leverage funding from the state moving into quality of life which is the six goal we'll cover today we are including the implementation of the conference of plan we have the funding in place and the staff time as that continues to work through the process

We also have funding with economic development.

The board has invested one time funding into the economic development fund, also with the acquisition of Rivanna futures project and the staff support for the future of that strategic property and the art of the possibility in that area with our partners.

in the past the board has, like climate action, like housing, like other areas, the board has invested one time funding into economic development.

And this contemplates in the plan that at some point we would look to make sure that we have a blend of both ongoing funding into that plan and one time.

So the next objective is in the area of parks.

This really is taking the current CIP and bringing that to life as Biscuit Run is scheduled to open on December 14th, just a few weeks from now.

And that will continue with other improvements in that park and the CIP around those athletic fields and also the athletic fields at Darden Tap Park, which are by the board and currently under construction.

So at this point, I've covered 22 of the 23 strategic objectives.

I'd like to slow down a little bit now and spend a little more time.

It's kind of an example or a case study around the housing and Albemarle.

I've talked earlier about when we look at a strategic objective, we look at where does the funding provided to date?

What are the results?

What are the new funding?

How is this connected?

What are the policy tools that are out there?

and to go into a little more depth on this particular topic, I would actually like to invite a cacidemic or chief human services officer to walk through this to see how all this may play out in a little more detail.

We did not do this for all 23 objectives, but we wanted to take some time on this one.

The final comment I will make because it connects to the agenda item following me is the expanded tax relief and the elderly and disabled.

The board has given us direction on how to expand that program.

We have built that into the five-year plan knowing that we'll also have a discussion after this meeting.

But I just wanted to make that acknowledged to connect two agenda items together.

Thank you, Ms.

Thank you.

Can you drive from that?

Yes.

Thank you.

Kaki Demick, Chief Human Services Officer, pleased to share with you a little deeper dive into the board's investment in affordable housing over the last several years.

To frame that conversation, just a reminder about the significant housing needs we have in our community.

In March, I'm certain this is higher now, but in March of this year, the median home value was $522,000.

44% of renters in our community spend more than 50% of their income on housing.

That is severely housing burdened according to HUD's definition.

And 16% of homeowners spend more than 50% of their income on housing.

We have a generalized need based on a study that was done some time ago that we need about 10,000 affordable units by 2040 to meet the demand.

I was a significant portion of those for folks who are below 50% AMI.

The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission has launched into a new regional housing needs study which will refresh these numbers and I fear that that number will likely be higher.

Thank you.

The Board has invested in the last five years $17.744 million in affordable housing, which is a very exciting investment.

On this page includes Hickory Hope Apartments, which is the Piedmont Housing Alliance apartment set in

right on the edge of Southwood, and the middle reflects Vista 29, which was previously called Premier Circle, Permanent Support of Housing Projects, which we celebrated the groundbreaking of on October 30th.

And finally, there's the picture of the former picture, I guess, that's more fully invested in housing now.

of Southwood with a particular deep investment by the board in Cardinal Hill Apartments.

Thank you.

So those investments shake out over the last five years as listed.

That includes a substantial portion of ARPA funds in addition to general fund investments.

Since 2022, you can see that this affordable housing investments have significant impact on a number of folks, including folks with new affordable and some deeply affordable rentals.

County, maintaining some rent affordable rentals, supporting owner occupied units, safe shelter for domestic violence and people experiencing homelessness, housing navigation and counseling which are important services available for a community that is stressed as much as we are around affordable housing availability and of course the adoption of the developer incentive package with a focus on tax abatement.

The tools that Albemarle County uses to address affordable housing needs are robust and complicated.

And so I wanted, I think it's useful to serve lists and identify them all.

In terms of rental assistance, we have mainstream vouchers from HUD.

We have and support the Scottsville school apartments, housing choice vouchers, family unification vouchers, project based vouchers, permanent supportive housing, and housing for special populations.

We provide down payment assistance.

We have housing development policy which focuses on density bonus and affordable housing thresholds.

We have shelters that we support for people experiencing homelessness and domestic violence.

We provide emergency financial assistance.

Housing Repair and Preservation, primarily through contracts with AHIP, which is the organization that does the most of that work in our community.

We support a community land trust navigation services through the Financial Opportunity Center.

We leverage other people's money as often as we can, and we have supported construction with financial support, including grants for non-profit developers and tax rebates for all developers.

This is simply one sort of deeper dive into an area in the strategic plan that the board has made some significant investments in.

Thank you.

To this point, we've covered the entire five-year plan on both the revenue side and the expenditure side.

But before we turn it over for a board discussion, which is the most important part of this work session, I thought I would summarize some staff fundings we had looking at this just to help frame all of this information.

really that summary of the revenues is that outlook is partly sunny, partly cloudy.

There are always signs on the horizon that can be troubling, but we are also seeing positive signs as well, and that's something we'll continue to monitor.

The expenditure drivers really are aligned with the strategic plan.

We did not cover every single dollar that would be in the five-year plan, but the overwhelming majority of where the funding goes, and especially where the new increases go, are included on the previous slides we've covered.

As I mentioned last year, earlier in the presentation, our out years are increasingly out of balance and time in planning on the county side, but not losing the take away of those prior commitments and obligations.

Year one, year two are greater than recent plans, and those prior commitments are really driven by the strategic plan as we discussed, the opening of new facilities, the public safety investments with that.

Andy, thank you.

And board, I've got two slides that I want to go into a little more detail about and it is specific to

County Executive.

I found it very interesting when Andy went back and looked over the course of several decades.

Number

that we've received from our volunteer fire departments in Albemarle County.

They have saved Albemarle County government millions and millions of dollars over the course of decades in their service to this community and I really can't think that it can, I don't think it can be overstated the significance of the service that our volunteer fire departments have provided

all across Albemarle County.

Every volunteer fire department is important to the community they serve and these men and women have been absolutely amazing.

With that being said, this board has noticed over the course of in recent history a struggle in this county for our continued service delivery of fire rescue services across Albemarle County government.

County government took on as a funding strategy, the strategy of going after federal FEMA safer grant dollars strategically

and we now have been successful.

These are competitive grants and we now have been successful in four separate rounds of funding through the federal government and you can see on this slide that that adds up to 57 full-time staff across Albemarle County over the course of several years and board what this money does is it pulls federal money in

leverages federal money that has the effect of lowering the local cost, specific to our fire departments picking up more of the operational burden Monday through Friday, days, nights, and weekends.

This federal money comes in, it's front-end loaded, and then it slowly goes away over

over the course and life of that FEMA grant.

There's a lot of work on behalf of our finance department and our fire rescue department to make sure that we stay copaesthetic with all of the requirements with this federal funding.

And we've been successful now on four separate rounds.

And this feathering in of federal money, it delays the full impact of the local obligation

over time.

You can see, with this effect of the four grants, as they've been obligated to us in different cycles, that over the course beginning next year, all the way into fiscal year 30, that we've got a local obligation that will start in this coming year at 2.3, and it will top out in fiscal year 30 at $6.5 million.

The strategy has paid off quite well for the county as we've continued to work in partnership with our local volunteer fire departments in trying to make sure that we're able to serve all 725 square miles in and out of Mark County.

I just want to highlight the significance of the federal money, our ability to be competitive with it, our ability to stay in line with federal requirements.

County.

But as this board knows, several years ago when we went into this, we knew with our five-year financial planning that as we reached fiscal years 26 and 27, we would feel the financial obligations begin to be a reality for Albemarle County.

The next thing I want to do, again, with safety and well-being, I want to move away from the federal FEMA safer grant money and I want to step back just a little bit and I want to highlight more in this area of the obligations that we're now facing, not just in fire rescue, but across

Public Safety.

And this is not all inclusive board.

We've got obligations outside of this, but what we've tried to do is capture some of the most significant cost drivers in this goal.

And this, frankly, we see a lot of service delivery to our community on a day-to-day basis.

I've mentioned briefly the regional jail,

System upgrades, the debt service and operations associated with that will begin in fiscal year 26, just under one million.

And by 2030, it tops out at two million.

The courts, operations, facilities, and security.

When I came in 2017, the staff briefed me and said that the county and the city had been in discussions since the early 2000s about the need to invest money

and to upgrade our court systems.

I'm proud to say that when I drive up there and go by there that we see our work, we see it and it's becoming a reality right before our eyes that we're going to open this shortly.

Next year we're going to need almost a million dollars in operational funding for security and operations.

and that pretty much is level over the next five years.

The Hearts expansion is a great example of, as calls for service both in fire and in police have gone up significantly over the last three years, someone could ask, what are you doing to curtail the cost

of police and fire services with the call volume increase.

And I think our investment in the hearts team is a great example of us trying to do more to address issues upstream with the increased calls for service specific to mental health distress.

And this board doubled the footprint with creating a second hearts team

in this past year.

You continue to be committed to our workforce, and that's evident by the, I think we're in about our fifth year of the Public Safety Pay Plan, and we've experienced an increase in the strength of our applicant pools, and our retention rates have remained very strong.

I talked earlier about the safer grants, we've talked earlier about the Burkmore Ambulance, the fire pharmacy,

Board, you took a tour of the Public Safety Operations Center within the last six months up at Fashion Square Mall where we are now into a five-year with an ability to renewal for an additional five years for the space up there and embedded in that space is a fire pharmacy where we are now dispensing

our narcotics, our drugs to all of our fire rescue crews across the county.

This is an unfunded mandate that was handed down both by the federal and state government and due to some cross-departmental work we've been able to step in and take this over.

Also North Garden, they came to you last year during the budget process and that was the driver behind the fourth FEMA grant.

Board, when we examine this goal, this is so much of the obligations that we have committed to in order to keep our community safe and also to address the well-being of our community as things in our community has changed through COVID and after COVID.

Thank you.

I'll now turn it over to the board, really for their reaction.

We've provided some guiding questions about just, you know, what is the plan doing well and what they've been missing?

This is not to say that we would solve everything today.

There may be future policy discussions, areas to explore further.

It was really the time for the board to kind of see how that financial picture and the strategic plan line up and have the pace that moves forward.

Thank you.

We will go through all orders.

Great provocative presentation.

Thank you very much, Mr. Bowman.

I really appreciate it.

And Mr. Richardson, very much this whole plan.

I think it's very well laid out in black and white, frankly.

The question is, the funding and such, you've addressed all the pertinent

needs things that we're focusing on.

I do have just a couple of questions.

On slide number 26, affordable housing tools, down payment assistance.

Are you referring to rental or purchase or both?

Oh, and also Ms.

Swords for Purchase.

Thank you.

The other question I had regarding on page 14, Goal Safety and Well-Being Community Assistance Program and Human Services Navigator.

certainly the community assistance program refers to the Albemarle County emergency relief program which was funded by the board last year with two hundred and sixty thousand dollars I believe not of general funds last year and but it provided emergency relief support to community members that we're facing a shut off notice or an eviction notice and so it was a one-time

Financial Relief Program.

There was some additional dollars that came into that last year from ARPA funding, so we ended up, I think, with closer to $480,000 that was distributed during the last fiscal year.

And it was renewed in the general fund budget for this year, so we had $260,000.

in the coffers for this year.

The board also made a decision to move $170,000 of additional money into that relief program two board meetings ago.

So the money starts with $260,000 and then has at least in the last two years gotten an additional infusion for emergency relief.

Okay, you said for evictions and what was the other one?

Shut-off notice is gas and electricity.

Okay, thank you.

Human services navigator is somebody who's not tied to a mandated social service program, but somebody who can simply provide assistance to somebody, a family in need or an individual in need who doesn't know where to go for help.

So a connection for how to navigate through the mental health system of care.

So they're not connected to one of our mandated programs, but there's somebody who shows up at the front door to the social services department and says, I'm confused, I need help.

while we have 170 staff in the social services office, they're all dedicated and tied to a very specific mandated service.

So we haven't had a lot of resources to be generically or generally helpful to people in need in our community.

Okay, so we have funded that?

Yes, indeed you did.

Okay, thank you.

If I may just clarify, just because there's a lot of history around that funding on the community assistance program, in the current budget there's $260,000 and that is ongoing funding.

Thank you and thank you again staff for helping us to avoid surprises.

It doesn't mean that we don't get challenges and the drug box issue that you mentioned is the perfect one which has thrown all 96 counties in Virginia into complete and total disarray.

And imagine the challenges that we're facing

take that down to a 5,000 person community who doesn't have an extra hundred grand lying around to be able to do something that should never be happening to begin with, in my personal opinion.

The only good news for some of those other communities who are still thrashing about is that the inaction is postponed until April 1st.

For us, we had the ability and the wherewithal to be able to

meet the obligation and be ready for it, but it still is going to be just an example of the other punishing things which are happening, and I'm very, very concerned about the security of 29 locations as opposed to one hospital.

But that's for another day.

So I don't know that there's anything missing, but I will just add a couple of personal things for thinking about.

sort of my number one mantra is start what you finish.

I mean finish what you start, start what you finish what you start.

So we hit the county has invested significant dollars across various CIP items and over several years many of them and some of them are sort of nearing the end and just need to be finished before we start

New projects that end up diluting the ability of other ones to be finished.

So I hope that we will think about doing that in order to, and especially when we're facing what may not be very easy to deal with budget situations going forward this year.

But I certainly appreciate all of the effort to get us started today on good footing and we'll look forward to the months ahead.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you.

And thank you for the report.

Well done and very informative.

I do have just a question on slide six.

And this is really probably any more for the public to understand this slide.

But when we're talking about the gaps that we're looking at, the revenue gaps,

in twenty six of three point one percent.

I'm not going to read them all, but in twenty seven to five point two.

That's correct.

Yes, so they're representative of each year.

Yes.

Okay, that was just for clarity.

And on 16 and 17, let me go back and find my pages as well.

16 references, Climate Action Plan, and then we have on page 17, of course, our stream health initiatives, which we've been really needing, you know, wanting to get to for a good while to complete, but mitigating communities' capacity to respond to disasters.

Could you just, perhaps, I know the community is very

County.

Could you just help out a little bit on clarifying exactly what this might mean?

So I'll speak to a little bit about what is currently funded.

In the environmental services portion of facilities, environmental services, I have staff who handle a number of programs from water protection to climate action to other items.

with climate action funding.

There is ongoing funding to support some of the partnerships.

There have been grant programs that have been awarded out for some of our community partners.

There's also been one time funding that I know has been used for purposes such as low income weatherization in partnership with Albemarle Housing Improvement Program.

County Office Building.

They've also taken initiatives like the chargers that are out in the parking lot of this county office building, getting a grant from Dominion to reimburse us what's implemented.

So those are some of the initiatives that have been implemented that and this is contemplating that some of those have been funded with one-time money as they were one-time expenses.

Just contemplating that there may be something different after fiscal year 27 that we may need to be positioning the board for.

I was just making sure that Ms.

Okay, all right.

Good enough.

I was looking at body language there.

And the only other question I have is about the, I guess it was slide 26.

We talk about the community land trust and we certainly, with our affordable housing tools, we certainly hear a lot from the community and is that in your wheelhouse?

I saw Andy looking over at you so I started to look at you.

Well, there's Stacey's over there, somebody else.

Okay.

All right.

Anyway, just trying to look at when we have the request from the community about completing our affordable housing policy.

that we've approved and how this plays into that.

Can you just speak to that briefly?

You understand my question?

I don't think I do.

Okay, that's okay.

So we hear from many community members that we need to have a land trust or something similar to that.

And we have passed an affordable housing policy.

our housing policy.

Yes.

Is that better?

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That helps tie the two things together.

There is a community land trust already in Albemarle County.

County, and the board has supported the community land trust on a number of occasions with grants, generally either through the ARPA competitive funding, but also through the traditional ABRT process.

One of the, always one of the questions is whether we should run it or whether we should support somebody else who's running it.

And I think that that's an open question at the moment.

and certainly if we decided we would run it we'd need staffing.

Indeed we would.

And I think those were my questions just for mainly public clarity.

I don't specifically see anything that's missing.

I think you all have done a really good job.

I'm sure at two o'clock in the morning, while I'm sleepy tonight, I'll think of something.

That's always the way it works.

But thank you very much.

This was a great presentation.

Thank you.

And it starts our budget discussions in a really informative way.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I am someone who believes in

County, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New

somewhat significant increases in real property tax or very substantial cuts to government services that would be frankly very challenging to identify at the scale that would be needed to close the cap.

And that is a pattern that is going to repeat, excuse me, at least until 29.

I believe that when we take a look at the five-year budget planning, the financial planning looking at the revenues and expenses that we're seeing some challenges this year

and in 27 that we've not seen in past years.

And so we're going to continue.

We're early in the process.

We don't have our revenue assumptions nailed in.

That will happen over the next 30 to 60 days, where we get into some detail about what revenue assumptions, both through reassessment and natural growth, what that looks like.

But when we go back to Dr. Bailey's presentation back in October and then we look at the early work,

that Jacob and their team have been doing, I would tell you that what I see is a significant challenge in balancing and maintaining all the obligations and maintaining all the services with the revenue that we see coming in the door right now.

Thank you so much.

I think it is very easy to look at this report.

And I certainly, like the immediate response, the one word kind of descriptor I would give to this report is grim, right?

It is very challenging and it reflects, I think, serious realities that the community is going to have to grapple with over the coming five years.

I would, and I must remind myself of this too, remind the public to temper this with the realities of the spending we are facing are because of the

County.

So it is not grim.

It is the tradeoff that we have bargained for as a community.

These are these are the costs that are reflective of living in a kind of high quality and

County, all our rural areas, which is not a thing that is guaranteed, which is not a thing that is legally required.

I like to throw this out sometimes because I think it's important to remind ourselves.

We think of timely fire service and indeed coverage by a fire department as something that is expected, as something that is required, it's not.

There are plenty of communities throughout our country that do not have fire services.

becomes a cost that is borne otherwise by the community and not just through losing their house to fire, but also this is something that was quite quite directly put on my plate recently when I had a constituent reach out because she needed an affidavit saying that she had fire protection for her insurance company because they were going to significantly increase her annual fees.

So while we do ask

and the public to help pay for this through taxes.

It's important that we remember that this is coming at an offsetting benefit.

This is coming through significantly decreased insurance fees for our residents throughout the community, especially for our rural residents.

I also do want to just note

County.

Real estate property tax

lobbyists, specifically people who reflect the development industry lobby and the housing lobby, will often suggest that the costs of real estate tax increases are going to be borne directly by renters in rental property in a kind of one-to-one relationship.

County phone.

That was what that vibration was.

I am skeptical of this.

That is a direct one-to-one relationship for rentals, especially for larger multi-family rentals.

This is something I would like to be better equipped to understand, though, if that question makes sense.

So a better understanding of how directly property tax increases, real estate property tax increases,

translate into higher rental prices for renters, especially in larger multi-families.

Because I think this is something we need to be prepared to answer.

I've mentioned this before, but also as we are looking at potentially having to seriously consider an increase in real estate property taxes, I would be more curious.

reassert my curiosity in what processes we have that can limit the burden of real estate property tax increases on lower income homeowners, such as in the form of a tax rebate after issuance.

I know we have very limited authority currently before taxes are assessed, but I do know that some localities rebate partially taxes for low income homeowners.

That would make me, frankly, much more comfortable

being free with the lever on that, if I knew that I could mitigate some of the harms that face lower income taxpayers.

Those are the main questions I have.

Newton confirmed, because there's a term of art and I've talked to constituents who get these things confused.

We just spoke about the community land trust, which is through the Piedmont Housing Alliance, and it's frankly, at this stage, I think a very small operation, and that we have supported in the past, but do not have, to my knowledge, ongoing funding commitments at this time.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

We do not have ongoing funding commitments at this time, but we have supported in the past.

This sounds like, but is importantly distinct from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which we have and is funded at about a little over $2 million in ongoing funds this year and has previously been funded in $5 million increments and that there's significant community pushback to change some of our governing documents and increase the funding for.

Those are distinct things.

Community Land Trust, not something I think the board is trying to take on right now, but Affordable Housing Trust Fund, both have the word trust in them.

That was a statement, not a question.

Thank you.

Those questions about the ability for the county to do a low-income rebate that nexus between property taxes and rents, we can take those as follow-ups of staff to report back to the board.

I'll share for public transparency whenever there are a Q&A with the Board during the budget process.

We also published those full responses on the website so that we can see how that dialogue is continuing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just to build on the final point about the trust fund, which Supervisor Pruitt explained the difference between the two.

We do not have a trust fund in place.

and I'm tired of it.

It's snuck into our language though.

We have a contingency fund or a housing fund that we put dollars in.

It is not a trust fund.

There's a very specific reason why trust funds are used around the country for affordable housing.

It's not indifferent from economic development funds that allow you to build revenue off of it.

housing, a contingency fund, a fund that we just dump money into a drawer for a specific use does not allow us to invest and build revenue from.

And that is why it is such a critical tool, especially when you get upwards of 20, 30, 40, 50 million eventually into a fund like that.

It starts to produce revenue for itself, then you don't have to pull property tax or other tax revenue in.

It starts to offset that.

So I've been becoming concerned over the last year or 15 months that we've started to use the word trust fund.

We do not have a trust fund in the county.

It's not on our housing tools.

The speaker pointed out it was properly endorsed when we voted on Housing Albemarle.

So at some point, just when I look at a five-year financial plan, and there are tools out there that help us attack an issue that we think is a crisis, but also helps us diversify revenue

then we should be having that conversation.

We should have had it already.

So that just, sorry, that was a trigger more from building off of Supervisor Pruitt's point than response to the five-year financial plan.

But I hope that that point is understood.

And if there's no disagreement about it, then we have to start having, we have to figure out what we're going to do about that.

You specifically asked what is missing or, what was the other one?

What does the plan do well?

My guess here, if I point out anything that's missing, it was just missing in this presentation, because knowing your team, I can't imagine anything is missing.

You guys do a thorough job in figuring out, especially on the five-year financial planning stuff.

So I just want to start off by saying, I suspect it's out there on a couple of things that I'm going to say.

Well, I didn't hear about this today, but I'm imagining that it's been discussed.

I'll just go through my notes now.

For page 8, your revenue graph, which goes from 07 to present, do we have, I mean, we balance our budget.

So when we look at a revenue, when we look at that type of graph, it's not just a trade-off to say, well, that's also the expenditure graph over that period of time, because the revenues coming in in a year could

could go beyond your costs.

You make a good point because this shows the actuals and actuals can vary from the budget.

But we could take a follow-up if it would help the board to prepare.

I think it's trickier to do a graph like this for expenditures, but part of it for me is really looking at the nosedive there during the Great Recession.

But expenditures and revenues are different animals.

And we always look at historical trends on the revenue side.

I don't recall us ever really looking at this type of, at least this time frame, for expenditures.

And I think that may be helpful for us to understand.

How expenditures work?

How costs?

I mean, our services, what we're paying for, how that changes over time.

We could put something together.

Because certainly, well, the majority of our costs, roughly 75%, are our personnel costs right now for a county government.

But there have been changes over time where the board has made investments in things such as water resources.

certainly calls to services such as we talked about the evolution of the fire rescue system.

We have new functions.

There was not once upon a time the broadband office.

There are examples out there, but I think the point to and expenditures is, you know, I'll play at this out an example.

In fiscal year in 22 and fiscal year 23, there were very strong revenue growth.

One of the strategies the board took, you know, coming out of the pandemic was taking that growth and applying it to one time sources as you can.

So I would expect part of the expenditures wouldn't necessarily correspond to that year, but say as fiscal year 23 ended strong, the board said, what can we invest in a one-time nature into capital, into housing, into economic development, into broadband to drive forward those strategic initiatives?

Yeah, two budgets ago, what you're saying is how we kind of pocketed some for the following year, which was a good strategy.

Well, thank you for that.

for fire.

There's a lot of focus on FEMA and what we've been doing in fire and safety.

This is not for today, but I suspect this has been building in my brain as we, you know, this is the kickoff to the budget season.

So when budget rolls around, I'd like to see

not just through FEMA, but in total, investment in development area fire services versus rural area fire services.

This was triggered by our conversation, the last board meeting on COMP plan, about how if the development area is going to be tasked with taking on all of the growth

that there is a difference in opinion about what service delivery is.

I think in this public, in this budget cycle as, as public safety rightly is going to be a focus that we need to see historically or at least over the last five years how we've invested along those lines which seem to have heads nodding when we were talking in the COMP plan a few weeks ago.

And I'm not trying to

Telegraph, any sort of viewer opinion on this, but it's information we need to start looking at in that way.

It may just still be, you know, before we raised the real personal property tax last year, we were debating, well, should we do North Garden or should we do an ambulance?

And that's right there.

That's a rural service versus a development area service.

And we had to raise revenue in order to do both.

And that's

County.

So continuing coming out of that that that I think we need to just be mindful of that as we as we work in the budget for this.

Now the, because we've obviously invested in FTEs for fire specifically beyond what was funded through the safer grant.

So that part to me is like, I don't want to get, I don't want to get lost in thinking that's all we've done fire personnel is just the safer grants.

I mean, I get why it's here because it's delaying the cost and the burden down.

But I think that the whole picture, you know, for myself, not to mention everyone watching her as they start to

County.

So I think we need to tune in on this.

We need to understand what the total investment has been.

Because the FEMA safer grants, if I got the chart right, there were 47 FTEs went to rural area, 10 went to development area.

So right away, you know, that's not a proper way to think

outside of the safer grants because we've had not the volunteer issue and when we've added staff in the development areas, that number is likely very different.

Because I think the safer, obviously we've used the safer to help us accomplish the rural piece.

So I don't want the argument or the face of it to seem like, oh, it's so heavily slanted because it would be wrong to just look at it from that standpoint.

I think what's missing in the plan, or at least what was presented, goes to portion of the comment in the trust fund piece, but revenue diversification, financial tools and planning that allow us to build revenue for the county, not just through tax increases or property value increases or even economic development or local economic activity.

What in-house

which we have started to do over the last couple of years to build some capacity, build some revenue based on our own financial standing, the fact that we're a triple, triple A, et cetera.

In today's consent agenda, you had the discussion piece of the current portfolio statistics and what was built out of that.

That's revenue.

So, you know, I don't know that five years ago, I'm assuming this is coming from something we've started to do.

I can't remember, I don't think this existed five years ago, like this report at least wouldn't have existed.

But if we're starting to build some revenue out of investments, then I'm not hearing a lot of discussion about that strategically to go, how can we continue to do that, not just

be satisfied with what we're currently doing, but to continue to grow, because $3 million, that's quarterly earnings, by the way, on that particular investment pool.

So if there are other ways, whether it's this portfolio or not, to help us get a couple of extra million dollars every year, that goes a long way to some of the things that this board sometimes would like to do, but doesn't in the face of bigger priorities.

The emergency assistance fund would be a great example of that.

if you could build an extra 500 grand out of an investment portfolio that could go to something like that and it's because those smaller budget items sometimes get lost when they're up against the Giants.

So I'm just saying that I expect that you, like I said, that's probably just missing from the presentation.

Sure.

Jacob Sumner, Chief Financial Officer for the county.

To President Galloway, thank you for those comments and picking up on the work that our Office of Investment Management is doing, particularly in how we are structuring our investments and utilizing those funds we have on hand.

And that is a relatively new initiative.

Really in 2024, we took a very strategic approach of moving our available cash into more

Fruittful Investments, still maintaining our liquidity, still maintaining our safety, but being able to leverage those dollars in larger returns.

Now, one thing that we are very cognizant of, and as we see the interest rate and environment fluctuate over the years, that we tend to see those revenues as one time in nature, unlike some of our other revenue streams that are pretty consistent

University, our investment income can fluctuate based on the economic environment and the interest rates.

But that is something that we're looking at specifically for helping with our one-time costs that may relate to capital or some other program like that.

And I think, obviously, how you're treating it as one time in nature, initially, is right.

But when we're five, 10, 15, 20 years down the road, you know you're going to start looking at that and going, all right, there's a base here that we know we're going to get.

And you could start treating that base as ongoing in your revenue projection.

And then any fluctuation can be in whatever cushion beyond it.

I mean, I'm not a financial expert, but that seems to be reasonable to think that you could start saying, OK, that's probably going to be there every year.

but thank you.

Alright so this is then the bigger just this is more commentary so I'm not looking for any reaction here today but this is more kind of giving you an idea of which this individual supervisors thinking as we go to budget season in terms of priority.

Having gone to VACO, the NACO stuff, of course the housing piece but even going back to the national conference over the summer

affordable housing is just in every conversation.

It's not just in a housing conversation, it's in everything.

I've heard more about affordable housing in economic development meetings than I have in housing meetings over the last six months.

And it's starting to occur to me, you know, when I look at our strategic plan,

and I look at our circles and I think these are the right three circles, education and learning, safety, well-being, workforce and customer.

I think you've got the right three highlighted.

I have an agreement with that.

What I'm starting to go, oh, I didn't realize, catch on, I made an error in judgment in my opinion of, is that affordable housing falls under quality of life.

Housing likely should be under, housing in general should probably be under quality of life.

The affordable housing issues that we're dealing with are not quality of life.

They're public safety and well-being.

So we're treating it.

I'm really cognizant all the time of our strategic plan, how it aligns to our budget.

and then when I tell folks in the public, if you want to see what's really prioritized important to your elected officials, see what they choose to do during budget time.

And that thread to me is very important for what I think I do as a supervisor, and I think all of us think that way.

So if affordable housing remains linked under quality of life, as if to say that if you're spending 60% of your income towards housing costs, that you just have a lower quality of life and that that's not a public safety issue or a well-being issue,

That's wrong.

And I got it wrong when we did our strategic plan.

So what I'm saying is that we can't go back and redo the strategic plan.

We can have conversations about strategic plan and whether or not what I'm saying is correct or not and debate that during the next strategic plan if I'm still here.

But the idea is that this budget time, affordable housing, and for folks that are struggling and suffering from that,

That is a priority to me that raises to the same as not being able to provide fire service in areas.

I'm just letting it known that as a supervisor, that's a priority going into the budget season, and I will be looking for ways just like I've had priorities in past budgets.

to help address that.

Other supervisors, I mean, we all have our priorities.

So as part of the, as part of, in addition to the five-year plan, I'm just trying to telegraph so you're not caught off guard in two months or three months, like, well, where'd that come from?

If it didn't link so intricately to everything else, then it might stay under quality of life.

But the fact that, I mean, it hits our local economy.

Big Time, if folks can't be housed.

The Economic Outlook Report that we received from Dr. Bailey was saying that poverty has decreased in our county, which means that we've forced people out.

You just can't see the wealth that we have here.

You can't see

were up to, what was it, $500 and some thousand dollars for area?

All six counties in the TJPDC are over $400,000 right now in median housing sales price.

So we're not just forcing people out of Albemarle, we're forcing them out of our entire region.

And we have two choices, we can accept that or we have to do something to offset that.

And to me that goes right to budget because public subsidy is a big portion of how you hit affordable housing.

I'll continue some of this conversation point as we continue to work through the comp plan.

But I would think that all of us should be seeing it as something that goes, all right, we have to really address this in ways in our budget.

We have all these tools.

It is known nationwide that there's no one thing.

It takes all the tools we're doing.

It takes more in those listed tools.

And there are a lot of tools not on our list that we don't have yet.

And all of that takes resources.

So in line with what I believe would be important for public safety relative to not just fire, but police, climate resiliency and dealing with emergency and assistance planning that affordable housing needs to rise to that level.

And we just have to deal with that in our financial plan and our budget.

So that's a little bit of a soapbox, but thank you for letting me say those things.

Thank you.

where to start?

I'm going to sort of build on some of those comments and then come back to mine.

So I get a little less worried about which of the six circles have read around them and I do see a quality of life.

County, the housing, but I also see in safety and well-being the things like the community assistance program, which had the funding for eviction and cutoff services, which is related.

In that regard, I did have a question, and that was we had a comment earlier about $800 is not enough.

Is that what that refers to as far as what we provide?

Please question for you about the $800.

Sorry.

Well, I'm going through different comments, but I did have questions that relate to them.

And so we were talking about what's in housing safety and well-being versus in quality of life.

But there was a question raised in a public comment earlier about $800 not being enough.

And I didn't know when we talk about our community assistance program, is that what that's referring to as a limit to how much we provide an eviction or

College.

So I will acknowledge that there are two ways to operate an emergency assistance program and there's no data that supports one over the other.

One way is to use

All of the funds you have available to solve someone's problem completely when they show up, which would likely mean that you would spend 100% of your funds in less than the first quarter.

But you would solve a problem for the people who walk through the door.

The other method is to titrate out how much you provide over the course of a year, so that you have money for someone who is in an emergency in June.

and that's the method that we've chosen to use as our administration for ASERP.

And so that means based on the number of folks who ask for assistance, we identify the amount of money that we think is the average amount that we ought to provide per person.

If we also, if we had all of the applications for assistance at one time, we could then assess them based on vulnerability and make those decisions, but we don't have that either.

Okay.

Thank you for that clarification.

I certainly understand that one of the biggest problems we face is not having the crystal ball.

Yes, it would be nice if you all can work on that.

just again bringing things back to comments that have previously been made about the trust fund.

I know that we're not really going to discuss the trust fund extensively at this point, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of setting aside something along the lines of 10 million.

as to whether or not that's a per year or that's a fund, and if it's a per year, certainly the needs that we're seeing are great enough to probably use it up every year, so I'm not sure how it grows from there, except to the extent that might be used as a loan fund or something, but that's a conversation for a different day, but I wish I understood better the comment about how this grows.

Minor thing, again, we talk about cost and benefits and it's helpful to me to see where sometimes we get these savings and I really appreciate the fact that you highlighted those as you went through.

There is a new one course coming that's the implementing the Albemarle Employee Care Clinic and I don't know whether that is an additional perk primarily for the benefit of employees or for the benefit of our healthcare expenditures.

You're exactly right, Chair Andrews.

I think it's both an offensive and a defensive move by Albemarle County government.

And I'll remind the board that we are in partnership with the Albemarle County Schools on our health care plan, okay?

So that's important because together with Albemarle County Schools, we're probably approaching 36, 3700 staff.

and so we've got a nice base of employees plus covered lives and this is not cutting edge but I think it's best practices.

When we were doing our initial work on scoping the cost and the operational steps to put an employee health clinic

in play.

We went across the Commonwealth and we talked to consultants and we were surprised at how many local governments in Virginia have already done this.

And so it's two things.

It's on the health care side and Mr. Sumner has been working really hard to put this together so he can backfill anything that I don't say that I should, but we're removing barriers

for our employees who need to access healthcare.

We are getting with the proper pushing out of information on hours

and location and the availability of the services.

We are able to get employees and covered lives and families into a clinic that's focused on our work population and getting them in, getting them what they need and get them back to work.

It's very convenient

there.

We're removing the barriers and we're getting people in and out.

It's not to replace the primary healthcare doc.

It's not to replace the specialist, the internist.

It's really to remove barriers.

The second thing it does is it does help to hold down cost.

It's intuitive when we think about it that when we put a clinic in place that would almost be like an urgent care type of clinic, but it's an in-house program and we're going to offer these opportunities, these services at cost, that we get our people in early, we get them seen, and we're able to catch things that maybe an employee otherwise would not go and have checked out.

County.

So you're going to see, you've seen healthcare clip since COVID at about 10 to 12% in terms of the inflation associated with healthcare.

What we hope is going to happen over time is we're going to see that begin to slow down just a little bit.

So we're hopefully going to get people who are more taking more ownership in managing their health, managing their numbers, because we're removing the barriers, we're making it as

and I applaud the effort.

I think that's exactly the kind of thing we need to make sure that we keep things under control and improve our future prospects.

I'll go back to the questions that you asked, of course.

What does the plan do well and what may be missing?

has done an excellent job, especially the way it ties into the strategic plan and is in format and presentation a consistency over the years so that I can go back and look at how this has compared in previous years, which is something I think it does really well, but it's also something I'm going to highlight that's perhaps missing or could use a little bit additional information.

So on slide six,

You have the sort of the grim picture, if you will, that shows the mismatch between revenues and expenditures.

And I guess I would note that, you know, in our current budget, essentially the same side appears, I think it's page 29 of the existing budget book,

but in an earlier year version and there are differences and some of that you know it is in our existing budget but still it may be the carryover before we decided to put in for the additional safer grant bring on the additional people for both North Garden and Semmel Trail so there are expenses and needs that weren't in that.

that said this is where people will start to look and say okay this is this situation how does this compare the previous projections where where did things change and some of that is going to be reflected in a rapidly increasing health care costs that you mentioned just a minute ago and other inflation factors perhaps that weren't anticipated in those numbers

Thanks.

I believe it was at one point last year we did a comparison to prior five-year plans and how that compared.

And I know one of the insights I quote Dr. Bailey, who's with us a lot too, is that exercise of planning, things will always change.

And this is one for me as a kind of, you know, still a budget analyst in my younger days in the heart of coming out of the pandemic and how we were able to

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

We have additional comments.

Yes, I'm going back to page 26, down payment assistance.

I have concerns regarding that if we don't already have a list of people ready to

going to homes because this is for ownership.

I know we've been focusing more on rentals and assisting people with their rentals being able to get into a rental.

If this money were used for emergency relief or for rental down payment or if it's down payment assistance, is it specified for a specific group or is it just

in general.

that go more for, this is just me, emergency relief or rentals, because I'm not sure how viable our down payment assistance for ownership has been in the past.

It hasn't been.

So I don't have a lot of hope for the future, but

The down payment assistance program that we have supported in the past is actually operated by Piedmont housing alliance and so they have a balance of funds that have been previously allocated to them for down payment assistance that they make available to the public based on area median income so it's means tested by income

and if folks qualify, they can take advantage of down payment assistance from the county, usually as an opportunity to match down payment assistance from another source.

The amount is quite low that they provide based on the agreement that the county established with them many years ago and is less and less meaningful as the housing prices goes up.

So I don't think there's a shortage of folks who would be interested in qualifying.

Their ability to use that down payment assistance to actually get into a home is pretty limited.

Okay, then that's fine.

I'm just, I guess, more concerned really about emergency relief and for getting people into rentals, like with the down payment on rentals, something like that.

So, thank you.

That's all.

Thank you very much.

I had a couple of follow-ups.

I think that originally the down payment assistance fund built up when developers were allowed to buy out their obligation to build a unit and we lost the $150,000 unit and got $16,000 in cash.

I've never been in favor of that and I don't know if that's where that is in the whole housing stuff.

I think that it's still a live opportunity, so something else to work on in the future.

Just going down, there's things that notes I made as others were speaking and asking.

The slide 17 mitigation of risk.

what jumped off the page to me was when we have emergencies back to the derecho in 2000 whenever that was 11 there was a discussion in the after action reports about of scaling the capacity of some of our public buildings fire station schools in the rural areas schools in the I mean Albemarle High School was the only place that had the capability of taking

are people when we had the 12 days of 96 degrees and no power after the derecho.

and there were many people who just were too far away, too old, too frail, would not go.

And so there was a thought at that time about diversifying the availabilities of shelters.

So that's what jumped into my mind was were we doing some risk mitigation by improving the ability of our fire stations all around to be able to provide that kind of assistance even for people who need water.

and don't have any opportunity to get it.

So that's just something for the list going forward.

Let me zoom down here because there were a couple of other questions.

The 2007 spike that someone commented about the dive in investments in the recession, the 2009 budget zeroed out $100 million in capital.

that we're still not recovered from doing.

Whenever I see that graph and the fall, I realize how it may have been a survival mechanism at the time, but all it did was just put us in a so much bigger hole as we go along.

I'm looking forward to what I think is coming, which is the difference in responding to the growth area investments

for fire and rescue, for example, as opposed to the rural areas.

I'm looking forward to that information because just in making a rudimentary list,

looking at the fire stations.

We have 11 stations and their staff who serve the growth area and four who serve the really area and all of those except for very recent investments.

We're all built with donated dollars.

So that's a pretty good split already I think and I'm looking forward to how those play out.

and I agree with the comments about the affordable housing.

It is almost like the workforce umbrella that we talked about fitting in all the other buckets.

Affordable housing fits in all the other buckets too for our own staff as well as for our workforce in the community.

having lived in Massachusetts for many, many years where their primary thing at town meeting or whatever was just to throw money at something.

I have learned the hard way that we need bona fide solutions for housing.

We don't just throw money at it and expect it's going to go away.

If it was easy, somebody else would have already figured out how to do this.

So I'm looking forward to figuring out what all the other communities are doing and what we are doing that we might be able to do.

to be able to make some bona fide full statements going forward.

Thank you.

One quick one and one longer one.

We were discussing the potential cost savings around the clinic as a way to offset the kind of growing cost that we've seen in healthcare.

And you mentioned something that you've addressed with this board before, which is that

especially since COVID but generally health care costs on our insurance plan have increased significantly year to year and because we have such a large workforce that's pretty significant costs that we have to anticipate.

So we're at a point in the year where I would say, whether it be with real estate assessments or other things, we're planning what the plan year 26 rates could look like.

So at this point, we'll look at the performance of that fund, how it relates to the policies of that.

There would be, as we've seen for the high in cost, the next couple of years, what we typically see in other localities is not a one-year blip.

It usually takes a few years to work through that before things return to a normal trend.

I thought that would add.

I would just add that in the five-year plan as that is also tied to our employee compensation but in our workforce goal that is built in.

I think as you look further out in the five-year plan it's going to be harder to have more of an articulate

And I apologize I said I'd have to but you just made me think of another very quick question and this can be a yes or no.

Yes, that would be included as part of Go One with all of that and the benefits that go with that as most of our benefits grow on salaries with the exception of health insurance.

That's very helpful to know and to think about as we plan forward.

The one other thing is I think we had kind of a fundamental like substantive question that arose between comments from two different supervisors that I just want to dig into a little bit more with Ms.

Demick's help.

which is Supervisor Galway painted a picture of a affordable housing trust fund that has an element that is self-watering, right?

It is able to perpetuate and sustain its own investments.

And Chair Andrews questioned how that would work absent just annual reinfusion of the same amount of funds.

and specifically mentioned one of like a small handful of ways I know it could happen.

I can think of if the fund is structured as a loan fund as opposed to a grant fund which is how we currently disperse.

If it is the identified place where we put money from proffers, if it's the identified place we put money from cash in lieu, if it's the identified place which we put recordation fees which is actually a zero-sum thing because we're already using recordation fees but I know some look how they do that.

and if there is a principle that we reserve that we take interest on.

I think you're right in terms of the self-watering aspect.

I think the definition for trust fund includes lots of varieties of ways that people support affordable housing.

So there are trust funds that are self-watering that are often based on a significant principle that then generates interest that is either used in all the ways you described as loans that come back or as significant investments in affordable housing.

But the primary sort of baseline definition for a trust fund is that there's a dedicated source of revenue for it.

And so technically we meet that definition because of the way we have funded this with our cash and lieu payments.

County, and

is that money that you stash in support of building a balance that then could be revenue generating or invested or do you spend it?

And we have had a sort of backlog of requests for affordable housing funding in this community in the last five years that sort of demanded use of whatever available dollars we've had.

So we did take a look at housing trust funds and different examples of housing trust funds throughout the Commonwealth and other states.

and as Ms.

Dimmick explained, there's kind of a basic definition, but there's to a housing trust fund, but there are multiple ways in which it can be implemented in localities.

With several of the attributes that are in the sub-bullets that you see on the slide that are different depending on the location and the locality and the needs of the community and how those priorities are set.

And so as we did a survey and looked through some other examples, we'll see differences in housing trust funds and really how they're utilized for eligible projects.

Some of them can be for construction or rehab.

Some of them are just for preservation of affordable housing.

There's different examples of the beneficiaries of the trust funds.

Who's eligible to participate?

Who's able to receive the funds from the trust?

The distribution of those funds is also varied from locality to locality, whether it's a loan-based structure or whether it's grants-based structure.

And really, what Supervisor Galloway was talking about earlier is really the funding source.

There are multiple ways to fund housing trust funds, whether it's an initial endowment almost, and then the source of the ongoing funds is that the interest growing up on that endowment.

County, Charlottesville,

County.

So there are, the takeaway from this slide is, yes, there are elements of Housing Trust Fund that are in multiple localities, but it's very based on those localities' needs and their priorities for the community.

And so I think as we continue these conversations about Affordable Housing Trust Fund, I would look that as we have conversations around these different elements and what that looks like, and I do believe that

County.

Thank you.

One very additional short question to follow up on this.

I believe we talked about this very briefly during budget, but we are talking about

I see us currently grappling with the goal of how are we going to get that initial amount of seed in an affordable housing trust fund that can help it sustain itself.

That's kind of how we structured this.

We, in the past, have always funded our fund, whether we call it a contingency fund or a trust fund.

We have funded it primarily out of direct general fund revenues, which is out of our operating budget.

When you compare it to how Richmond structured it in the past and what I know other localities do, have done major infusions out of capital or in the form of a bond so that they can pay down the initial costs of filling up that pot.

over time.

So it's not a massive 10, 20 million dollar line item that comes up on a budget.

Is that a feasible way we could approach this?

Do we have room left in our capital debt service to even accommodate something like that?

That's a great question and a great suggestion.

And I think it goes right to the conversation about the different funding sources.

As you alluded to, if you take on long-term debt to have seed money for a program like that, it really impacts our debt ratios and our financial policies.

And it works towards that conversation where we're putting our dollars with a housing component, but also with a capital component.

those are complex conversations that revolve around multiple priorities and really structure on the strategic plan.

But that is another tool that is not listed as a funding source on this slide, but one that we can look at and provide more information on.

I appreciate that.

I also just kind of wanted to make sure that view was put on the record.

Thank you to the board for all your time and input.

Welcome back.

Our next item is another, an action item, but an action item to schedule a public hearing to consider adoption of an ordinance to modify real estate tax relief for elderly and disabled persons.

And this is being led by Jennifer Matheny from Chief of Revenue Administration.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Andrews and Board.

I'm Jennifer Matheny, Chief of Revenue Administration.

It's my honor to be with you this afternoon to request the public hearing.

Be scheduled to amend Elmore County's Chapter 15 of Taxation, specifically to modify the real estate tax relief for the elderly and disabled program.

I appreciate this opportunity to be with you this afternoon.

On is what most of you know is my favorite topic.

I have about ten slides to share with you regarding our program.

This agenda will provide an overview of what we'll go over to request this public hearing.

Staff is requesting the Board consider modifying the program criteria for Texture 2025 prior to the application and program information being distributed in January.

We feel this will simplify the application process and avoid changes later in the tax year after approvals have been issued.

Based on the application cycle for existing applicants, this program undergoes that three-year review process that we talked about previously.

And for tax year 2025, it will generate a larger three-year review than our other years.

And we kind of call this our bubble year just based on when people started in the program.

So we will have at least 500 full applications that we have to process in 2025.

And so our hope is to get our information out with the updated, if it's approved, changes so people don't get a letter with one approval that we then in April or May are sending them another letter.

We feel like that's going to hopefully simplify it.

So we'll do an overview of the current program, look at the proposed program updates, and then request the public hearing.

So let me start by reviewing the current program.

I do want to share that my team and I believe this program is definitely one of the most important offered by Albemarle County.

We find assisting these applicants rewarding knowing we're helping them be able to remain in their homes.

Most of the participants in the program would not be able to afford these taxes to be able to maintain the home ownership in Albemarle County.

And we get to witness firsthand how this program is life changing for those individuals and what a positive impact it has on the community.

So with the current program,

The applicant must be at least 65 years old or totally and permanently disabled.

They do have to own the property as January 1 of the tax year.

Applicants' property cannot be used for business that they're seeking the relief on, and then we have certain income and financial net worth criteria that they must meet.

Currently, the net income maximum is the $88,800.

and the financial net worth is $305,000 maximum.

This table shows you those thresholds for the percentage of relief based on your income.

And I want to point out that the net worth does not exclude applicants with greater than 10 acres.

So if I have 15 acres and I apply and I'm approved for tax relief,

then I will get tax relief on my residents plus 10 acres.

Then I'll pay taxes on anything over those 10 acres.

But we do have people in the program with greater than 10 acres.

So now let's look at some statistics from 2024 program.

When the income and net worth limits were raised last year, it allowed more people who applied to be eligible to participate in the program.

So 95% of the applicants met the criteria and were approved for tax relief.

That's up from 94% from the previous year, 2023.

I did want to highlight, though, from 2022 this approval percentage was 89%.

So these changes truly are making a big impact in what we're seeing.

And it's a positive impact.

The data I provided to you for this meeting was before the deadline was completely processed.

If you remember, first time applicants can have until October 31st.

So I had to get some numbers to you slightly before all applications had been processed.

So you'll notice these numbers are a little different than what you saw on the information I provided.

We have 857 households participating in the program.

That's the biggest change.

We had a handful of applications in process.

And that's a total dollar amount of $1.9 million that was awarded in relief.

The average income

For this year's applicants was $33,359.

And the average net worth is $54,500.

Those are both averages.

But I think this definitely indicates that the program is currently designed as helping those that are most vulnerable.

To illustrate that point further, 74% of the applicants did receive 100% relief.

and only 6% of those applicants were at the 50% threshold.

You've seen this chart before.

I just wanted to share it again.

This is updated with the 2024 relief numbers.

And this orange line shows you the average tax bill based on the 2024 average assessed value in the county of 436,300.

This chart reinforces the current program design is helping most of the participants that need the help.

They're below the average.

And this is looking at only people that received 100% relief.

Again, indicating that we are helping those who are most vulnerable.

So let's look at proposed program updates.

Based on feedback from the board in the winter and spring meeting sessions, we're recommending changes to the existing ordinance from that feedback, and we've developed those changes to expand the program, and we've always kept

these three important points in the forefront of what we're looking at to expand.

We want it to be reasonably understandable.

So for that we're looking at increasing an income limit and increasing the financial net worth.

We want the changes to be proven in financial management and would be included in the fiscal year twenty-six recommended budget and what we're recommending

were expanding the relief by about $120,000 anticipated.

And this can be implemented in tax year 2025 with minimal administrative and system impacts.

We can make this happen easily for 2025.

This recommendation that I'm sharing was included in the draft of the financial plan that Mr. Bowman presented earlier today.

So for the past three years, the Board of Supervisors has tied the income criteria to 80% of the area median income for family of four.

The metric tied to the affordable housing policy using the same approach for county year 25, that limit would increase to $97,650.

This again expands the program in a manner that's reasonably understandable

It can be implemented with minimal cost and our current tax system can, we can flip those limits and make that happen quickly within our system.

It continues to impact the total participants.

It has an increased cost, but it's reasonably predictable as we've been monitoring this over the past few years.

It would increase the greater band.

We're widening those amounts in terms of the income, so there would be more people within those bands, and estimating that expanding about $60,000 in relief.

Currently, the financial net worth is at $305,000 based on the update from 2024.

We are proposing that we increase that for county year 2025 based on inflation that we've adjusted since the 200,000 that was effective in 2007.

The past two years updates were an initial step to increasing this.

And having received some data on this from moving to 312, this is still much unknown, but the staff has more confidence in our ability to

predict how much expanded relief we could expect from this change.

We would anticipate for fiscal year 24, this expanding about 60,000 in expanded relief, which is totaling the 120,000 that we're projecting by making these changes.

And again, it's easy to understand.

It's staying with that same

Park.

We're just increasing the limits to expand the relief that we're offering.

Our intent is to bring this back to the board on an annual basis to maintain 80% median income in rate of inflation.

We talked about that last year.

and this concludes my formal remarks.

This slide highlights what changes were recommending for calendar year 25 for tax year 25 to be considered for public hearing.

The green represents the current program and the blue represents our proposed changes.

Thank you.

We'll go through our order, of course, recognizing that the motion will be to schedule a hearing as opposed to actually approving anything tonight.

Thank you.

This slide will be fine.

So the income level goes up more than the net worth goes up.

So am I just not understanding something?

Is it possible that someone

It is possible.

You can't be over the net income limit or the net worth limit.

Those limits would eliminate you from the program.

Is that what you're asking?

is a different math to get to each one, and that's why they're different.

That's correct.

So, but income is a component of net worth, right?

Or not?

No, not if you've spent it.

So it wouldn't impact the not qualifying with the net worth if they were one of the lucky ones who had gone to 97.6 on the income side.

So my question is, are there completely separate categories, income and net worth?

Yes.

So the income increase does not impact their net worth numbers because that's something else other than income.

Okay, okay.

So the net income limit, we're increasing that based on the average median income.

And so then when you apply for tax relief,

We do have to have supporting documentation to verify your income.

So that can include tax returns if you file tax returns.

A good percentage of the applicants in this program do not file tax returns.

Then we'll, for that income, we'll also ask if there are any W-2s or your benefit statement, you could have done an IRA distribution.

Any kind of pension, railroad pension, we look at all that.

and adding that up to get to your total income.

The net worth are the assets you have and we're tying that number to inflation and recommending that go to 312,000 where it's currently at 305.

And for that we ask for the same things.

We're not the same things but the same type of verification.

We're looking for bank statements, investment statements,

We get, you know, sometimes it's property that they may own in another locality.

But it's asset-based as opposed to income-based.

That's the most essential thing.

I was trying to mush them together to think that one was going to lead to the other and it doesn't.

So thank you very much for that.

Slide five.

That is possible.

I did look at this before today's meeting.

I was curious as to what these applicants look like.

And I can say on that tale from six, two, and one, the youngest person is 84 years old.

And in each scenario, except for one, they were married and their spouse is now deceased.

And they've owned these properties a really long time.

is great.

And so one of them, they own a property that does have more than 10 acres, so they're on here is 100% relief.

And that's what that was designed for, to keep some guardrails.

Right.

Great.

Well, thank you for all your work because it's explainable and it's really helping the people who need the help and I'm so grateful for that.

Thank you.

Thank you for this.

And I guess, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I'm taking away from your presentation that you were really comfortable that what we have here before us is actually reaching the people that need to be helped in our community.

Yes.

And you have a comfort level that

Yes, to the best of our ability.

The staff is really good at picking apart anything that doesn't quite seem right or if there's issues and they'll always escalate them to me.

or my deputy chief and ask us to look at where my whole career was in banking and so was my deputy chiefs and so we're bankers by nature so when we'll see someone we'll be like oh wait you know that seems odd and there have been things we have had a situation where someone applied and said this was their primary residence but then when we got their bank statements all their purchases were happening in North Carolina

and so then we're like we need more documentation on this something doesn't seem right that you're in that North Carolina residents that often and so

My team does a phenomenal job, and I have some very experienced people on my team.

They've been with the county 29 years and at least some 10.

It's a very experienced group who is really good at noticing when something doesn't quite add up.

Because from that checking account statement, we often see where

Yeah, and that's very helpful because we want to help the people that need help.

Absolutely.

That's right.

That is exactly right.

Yeah.

And so some people, many of them, it is just a Social Security statement and showing what their benefits are.

And you see that when you look at their

And not so much about us proving the public hearing to go forward in another meeting, but do you feel like you are able to, that you're able to reach out to the community or advertise in the right way?

Do you think the right people are hearing about this, I guess, or is there something that we could do to improve

from some of the local food bank areas into different neighborhoods, and so I get the flyers to the right person, and then when they're doing those boxes, they'll get those in there for us.

We distribute them to churches, and

We've spoken at Java.

My staff and I have gone to Java meetings and made presentations.

And I think this 857 is reflective of our efforts and the efforts that you all have.

Because you are seeing an increase.

It is definitely increasing.

And Abby is going to get us on 29 News first spot in January so we can promote hopefully maybe some changes.

Even if there are no changes, we can still promote the program.

County, and

and the more we talk about it, the better.

We definitely are seeing an increase in the number of new applicants and that has to be from the outreach and the discussion.

And in my mind, I had Java, so you're already doing that.

and the community, you think about community centers like the ANSI Community Center and that's where we go.

Yeah, we are definitely connected in that community and Ed's a huge champion for everything we do and he makes sure it gets out into the community.

And that's that's one of the food pantries that we send the flyers out through.

Well, it's really hard to reach people now and it's not getting any easier because I don't know if you all have noticed but the news now, our news on television news on weekends has changed to Harrisonburg news.

I'm just saying, it's a different world out there.

I appreciate this.

Sure.

So when we have ideas, we can just send them to you.

If you need me to show up.

We did a community day and that we had great success with that for neighborhood.

And so my team went there and set up a table and talked to people.

I want to just begin by saying how much I know I appreciate.

I'm sure the other members of the board appreciate this program and the work y'all do.

And truly, it is amazing how frequently it comes up by people who don't know the program exists saying, oh, this would be a good idea.

Someone should do this.

And we can say, oh, well, you're in luck.

I remember I was at Supervisor Malik's campaign announcement last year.

And someone in the audience said, well, why aren't you doing this?

And she was able to say,

We are.

We are doing this.

Here's how you can learn to apply.

And that's, I think just speaks to how badly the community wants and supports this idea.

I do want to just have, I have two questions and first one quick kind of policy statement.

One little thing to say from my stump.

and so I'm gonna start with that, which is this is the main, we were just talking extensively about the tools in our housing toolkit.

This is the main tool we have in our toolkit, really the only one I know of, helping specifically the elderly, which is a population that's growing in our community.

I want to highlight that because it is also exclusively limited to homeowners, which means we have a massive blind spot in county policy and how we help and support

County.

We have a community where individuals are much more likely to want to stay in their home even as they have a lot of needs to downsize because they are reliant on support that they get and there is not a complimentary support for renters on the back end.

And I see that as a pretty clear and

Racial Equity Concerns when you're limiting something to homeowners, especially elderly homeowners who we know are disproportionately, significantly white.

So the questions I have.

First, can you remind the board how we are defining disabled for the purpose of this?

Are we using the kind of, I would say, broad-ranging interrogation that the ADA uses?

they have to be, one, they can be qualified in receiving disability benefits that puts you as disabled.

That's one.

Or we can get two notarized affidavits from board certified doctors in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Thank you.

County, New York City.

County, New

I don't want to get into individuals business.

And any time that I have someone, we've had someone apply where we were like we've uncovered something or there's been an issue with the documentation they provided, they were not approved for the program.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think it's a great program.

We have been through discussions about tweaks about this in the past, and I'm thinking that this is not a time to try to tweak, but obviously we have considered whether there would be a limit on how much so that we catch the 8,000 plus, whatever.

County.

But it hasn't been a problem, it hasn't changed, and I'm glad to see that.

We've also talked about the balance between these.

There's one thing that I just wanted to ask, because I was very curious, and this is on slides seven and eight, and I, Supervisor Malick sort of alluded to it, but she went in a slightly different direction.

The fact that you project going up

by income of nearly $10,000 has a $60,000 impact on our budget as a county, as my understanding is what this means.

Yet, next slide, increasing the financial net worth limit by only $7,000 similarly has a $60,000 impact and I just found that, wow, that's interesting and I didn't know how that

is that an estimate?

It truly is an estimate.

And we're basing that on how much we've seen it increase based on the past two years that we've made these changes in terms of what comes to the table to apply.

And so probably proportionally,

I would agree.

The income limit is going to generate more than 60.

And the bottom line is 120 is the only number that really matters for our purposes.

So, I appreciate that.

Yeah, it was an estimate.

And that's where her professional experience in the house really comes in handy.

So another off the wall thought taking to a different extreme based on Supervisor Pruitt's question, it would take a different program, I would assume, for a landlord who certified that they were going to keep rents at a certain level to then have some kind of adjustment for those units.

I mean, it sounds absurdly complicated, but I'm trying to figure out a way to, rather than just handing out money to be able, which is helpful to those people.

and maybe that's the simplest thing.

But anyway, I just, I don't have any more to offer than that.

It's probably better just to put it away.

Now that I've tried to explain it, I'm thinking, you know, I should have just not taken this there.

Thank you.

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

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Mr. Gett?

He's not here.

Ms.

Lepisto-Gartley?

Aye.

And Ms.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you members of the board.

I wanted to go through the November

County Executives Report.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here this afternoon.

And I'll start out by talking about the Albemarle County staff attending community events through the county.

This fall, Albemarle County staff have connected with over 3,000 community members by attending 14 events across the county.

This includes events focused on back to school, culture and arts, sustainability, and other community gatherings.

These events have allowed our staff to gather input, share county initiatives, build partnerships with local organizations, with the support of 26 staff from departments

all across Albemarle County government.

At these events, staff posed a question of the day to engage our attendees.

For an example, at a back-to-school event, kids shared thoughtful ideas about being community heroes, emphasizing kindness, helping others, and protecting the environment.

Also this fall, the Communications and Public Engagement Office launched a new public engagement internship program.

We had two UVA students

that we're here to engage with best practices and principles and experience practical applications through public interactions at events and they analyze feedback that we received from the community.

The internship program will be implemented again in the spring and in the summer.

This is an example of us tapping into UVA and seeing a lot of the students that are there that are interested in getting some on the ground practical experience.

are IT leadership group launch.

The technology leadership group was launched by Information Technology to ensure the county's major technology systems support our goals and improve how we deliver services and operate across departments.

This group brings together IT staff

and department subject matter experts to collaborate on systems upgrades, technology needs, and improving the processes.

Meeting quarterly, the team promotes shared accountability

and streamlined change management, ensuring technology improvements and supports the organization's evolving IT needs.

This is a really good example of us working cross-departmentally, also connecting our internal service departments with really their primary customer and that's the external service departments.

Roderick and his team do a wonderful job and this is a really, really good example.

Board, you've seen this before.

This is our Women in Government Affinity Group meeting.

The Albemarle County Women in Government Affinity Group held its second meeting of 2024, continuing its mission to empower and support women within our organization.

Established this year, the group focuses on fostering relationships

building networking and mentoring opportunities to enrich the professional experiences of women across all the departments.

This recent meeting allowed participants to recognize shared experiences.

They explored mentoring opportunities and again building our strong connections across all the departments in the organization.

So this group represents Albemarle County's commitment to creating an inclusive and supportive workplace, encouraging personal and professional growth with all of our women who are in public service.

So our Office of Management and Budget received the Distinguished Budget Award from GFOA, Government Finance Officers Association.

Earlier today, Mr. Bowman was here along with staff who were in the audience.

Pictured here, Thomas Unsworth, Ryan Davidson, Laura Manzan, Tia Mitchell, and Andy Bowman.

Albemarle County received the Distinguished Budget Award from GFOA.

This is the highest recognition in government budgeting, validating our commitment to transparency and excellence.

The reward

reflects on the use of the budget as a policy document, financial plan, operations guide, communications tool, meeting rigorous national standards.

I'll also point out Tia Mitchell, who presented yesterday at the Economic Development Authority, the EDA.

And I heard last night I got emails from staff that she did an outstanding job in supporting the work of our EDA.

So this is a good group of folks right here.

And they connect to this board, I think, in a really good way.

This is an update from Resilient Together.

Resilient Together, a collaboration between Albemarle County, the City of Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, recently marked its first year.

A progress report summarizing the first year is included in the Facilities and Environmental Services Quarterly report that the Board has already recognized as part of your consent agenda.

In October, the City and County Planning Commission held a joint session where staff shared updates and led a discussion on the project's efforts.

The team also recently launched the Climate Resilient Cohort funded by an EPA Environmental Justice Grant.

This initiative partners staff with 10 community-based organizations to develop strategies that will address the needs of vulnerable populations.

The approach leverages these organizations' expertise and community relationships to ensure inclusivity and resilience planning.

The following organizations are participating in the cohort.

Community Climate Collaborative, Cultivate Charlottesville, Habitat for Humanity, Virginia, International Rescue Committee, New Roots, Jefferson Area Board for Aging.

So we appreciate the collaboration and the partnerships.

Let me, I also had some additional ones that I didn't pay attention to.

Local Energy Alliance Program, Market Central, Piedmont Housing Alliance, The Haven, and Virginia Clinicians for Climate Action.

So thank you for that partnership.

County.

We're offering our employees valuable information about benefits and wellness resources.

These fairs support our employee retention by helping our staff make informed decisions, especially ahead of open enrollment.

We just finished open enrollment.

It's aligned with the calendar year as opposed to the finance fiscal year.

and so really for added accessibility all the presentations that we had this year were live streamed recorded for those unable to attend in person or do you know that we do a hybrid work environment and so employees could have been working from home that day they could have also been in a 24-7 rotation and not been working that day so the videoing

and live streaming and taping these for later also help for more people to participate.

One of the tables at the fair shared information about what to expect from the upcoming employee clinic opening in 2025.

Our board has already talked about that today.

And this is an opportunity for me to give a quick update on the employee clinic.

Leases are signed for both locations.

That's at Peter Jefferson Parkway in 29 North.

The first clinic will open at the end of February with the second

following later in the spring, services will include primary care, physical therapy, a registered dietician, behavioral health, occupational health, strong collaboration between the county and public schools, our county service authority, and we have ongoing communication, clear communication to our employees to keep this front and center so that they will remember and keep this at the forefront of their mind as it relates to a benefit that can help them.

Purpose of the clinic is to enhance our overall health of employees and their families.

These are things that we can measure, Board, and I know you know that, providing dedicated quality health and wellness services to employees and family.

And then, Chair Andrews asked the question earlier, we're also taking this as a big move, I hope, in the right direction to manage our rising healthcare costs.

Mary Stebbins, who is our Director of Social Services, has recently been recognized for her work with the National Association of Social Work Board.

She's been involved with the National Association of the Social Work Board since 2010, contributing to the development and oversight of social work licensing exams used in the U.S., Canada, and other countries.

Her work ensures that social workers meet minimum competency and ethical standards, protecting clients, and enhancing

the quality of services provided by license to social workers.

Mary's contributions include writing, reviewing and improving exam questions, ensuring that they meet rigorous standards and inclusion of official licensing tests.

This role reflects Mary's expertise and commitment to advancing social work profession, providing valuable insight that strengthen Albemarle staff's expertise and reputation.

So it's a real opportunity today for us to recognize Mary and we appreciate her contributions.

I've talked to several board members about our recent recognition of veterans ceremony on November the 11th, Operation Greenlight.

Operation Greenlight is a program of NACO, the National Association of Counties.

County office building was illuminated with green flood light bulbs to recognize veterans day.

American Legion post 74 with support of the Board of Supervisors and County staff held a wonderful ceremony to honor our veterans on Monday November the 11th in Lane Auditorium.

We had our entire local delegation that was present.

We had all of our board members that were not at VACO that were present here as well as city council including the mayor

and it was a wonderful event.

The auditorium was quite full and as I told one board member there were more res honoring all of the branches and services and work than we could almost fit in the auditorium.

I think it's just a wonderful ceremony and I do appreciate all the staff that supported that.

I want to recognize the board did get an email on this and I do want to recognize Lieutenant Colonel Terry Walls who will be retiring at the end of November with 27 years of dedicated service to Albemarle County.

In his career he held assignments all throughout

Albemarle County Police Department.

He was a key conduit to the county executive's office on a number of initiatives, including our work to strengthen our safety and procedures with our board meetings and all of the work that we've done over time to strengthen our safety and security of the building.

are property and so forth.

His most recent position is Deputy Chief of Police.

I'd like to note the photo is with Deputy Chief Wall's nephew, Tyler Walls, who was sworn in as a police department officer in May of 2024.

I'll go off script just for a minute and I'll also recognize

Andy Muncie, who is here tonight helping with safety and security of the building.

And I learned earlier this week that Officer Muncie is also planning his retirement, I believe at the end of November.

And I just want to say that you will be missed in our community and you will be missed in this organization.

And I do appreciate him sharing that with me earlier today.

In fact, I think I sort of tricked him into telling me what was going on.

So I appreciate that.

You know, board, I think I'm ending the presentation and so I'm going to talk just for a minute about customer service in this organization.

I think this board is good at you all have a nice eye for customer service in this organization because this board is a very active board.

You're connected to our community, but you pay attention to the services that we provide on a day-to-day basis.

I think that you've got a good practical application of that with

Smithini who just reported to the board a few minutes ago about the tax relief program and you saw her really speak from the heart to this board about how important that program is to her and how important it is that she conduct outreach in this community and make sure that people understand it.

We've got another gentleman I think that he exemplifies our customer service covenant in this community.

It's Josh Mentor and he is our security specialist and he is at the front door of this building.

He is at the front desk of this building.

and I like what was said on the slide.

He's counted on every day to provide top notch customer service to everyone that visits the McIntyre office building on a regular basis.

This picture was taken earlier this week, certainly Josh didn't know, but we had a gentleman who was here and he needed county services.

in the building and staff just so happened to look out the window and they saw Mr. Mentor go out of the building, go into the parking lot and he was helping this gentleman as he was coming in and leaving the building.

Also,

We staff in this building did not know that we were going to talk about our customer service covenant, which is we want to be empathetic.