Joint County/City Planning Commission Meeting   10/29/2024

for those of you who don't know me.

I've been in this community since the mid-90s, but I've only been in this position as director of planning for 10 months.

So I'm excited about this.

I'm excited about having this joint meeting with our community.

Apparently, we haven't had joint meetings since before the pandemic.

So it's nice to have everyone here.

And I'm really excited that we're having this joint city planning commission talk about this very important topic.

I haven't changed, of course, this is an existential issue that we face as a community, and we have to do something that's broader than just our individual jurisdiction.

So I'm excited to have this opportunity.

Very excited to hear what the planning commission has to say.

For tonight's meeting, we set aside roughly about two, two and a half hours.

In a second, I'm going to ask Chair Missel to convene the County Planning Commission and Chair Mitchell to convene the city's Planning Commission.

You need to, bathrooms are back towards the main foyer right there.

I think the ladies is in the one and the men's has just passed.

with the big glass wall that's beyond.

As a joint public hearing, we're here for the time for the planning commission to speak.

We won't necessarily be taking comments from the general public either online or here in the room.

Mead.

Awesome.

Thanks, Michael.

So I will officially convene call to order the Albemarle County Planning Commission meeting for October 29th.

And I've been told I can simply acknowledge the members of the Planning Commission present.

So we'll start with Mr. Bivins, Mr. Moore, Mr. Firehawk, Mr. Clayborne, Mr. Carrazana, and yours truly.

And I don't believe we've got eight more houses, but we've got Commissioner Rutger, Commissioner Stosenberg, Commissioner Grazio, Commissioner Soli Hates, Commissioner Yoda, and Commissioner Schwartz.

So we are in order.

You are high, my hater.

Michael asked me to prepare a few comments.

I have about 25 minutes of comments to start with.

No, but I'll just kick it off.

First of all, it's great to see you all, to meet many of you for the first time.

You know, we oftentimes get in our little silos where we're working.

on our own projects and our own spaces, whether it's the University, the county, the city, or others.

This is obviously not one of those subjects that we should be siloed in, right?

This is, I think, the resilient together is truly a perfect conversation, a perfect title, and I'm really looking forward to having that conversation together today.

I will just say a couple of things just from a matter of structure.

I think we're thinking that this is really just a workshop format, so relatively straightforward and informal.

I think staff would prefer us to wait until after the end of the presentation to ask questions.

But if there are maybe minor clarifications that we have throughout the process, we're fine to do that.

We can ask that.

And then just to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to share their comments.

Once we've heard from staff and really just first a shout out to the city, the county, the university staff who have put this together, I should have said that at the very beginning.

No pressure, but I'm sure this is fantastic.

So thank you for leaving us through this.

What I'll probably do is just start by calling on people or asking if somebody wants to pick us off and then maybe we'll alternate City County just to show how we're joined in this conversation together.

And we'll do that kind of formally up front and then once everybody's had a chance to say a few things, we'll open it up to more of a workshop sort of back and forth banter process.

Does that make sense to everybody?

Okay.

All right, well, I'll stop talking and turn it over to you all.

Thank you, Commissioner Missel.

Thank you all for being here this evening.

We appreciate your time and interest in the topic and we're pulling together a project.

So maybe I'll just introduce myself and Emily first, and then we'll do a round of introductions of our project team just, you know, with us.

in support of this effort.

I'm Gabe Daley.

And I'm Emily Irvin.

I'm Gabe's counterpart in the city.

Thanks, Emily.

So just a kind of agenda for the presentation.

Portion nested within the broader agenda that Mr. Missel just laid out for us.

We're going to give brief introductions to other members of our Resilient Together project team who are here from City County, UVA.

We're going to give a bit of context for why we're doing this work, for some of the local impacts of climate change that we're experiencing and how we expect those to have effects in our community.

We'll talk a bit about the Resilience Together project itself, where we've been with that and where we're headed.

We'll speak about the Climate Resilience Cohort, which is a kind of centerpiece of the Resilience Together project, the bit of a project within a project that's funded through an EPA environmental justice grant that we were able to receive.

We'll speak about next steps in terms of our work this fall, next spring,

and then we'll get into some conversation.

We'll leave some room for questions generally about what you've seen and then we'll get into some conversation about inviting your input on a couple of example strategies.

So we're heading into the next number of months really doing strategy development and we thought it would be hopefully interesting, fun and useful for the planning commissions to give us some feedback and have some conversation about

A couple such example strategy options for building resilience in our community to toxic climate change.

So that'll kind of close us out for the evening and have a little bit more interactive element.

So we introduced ourselves.

Also want to introduce Julia Montieth and Serena Garia, who are, we asked to sit up at the front with us in case you have questions about UVA and kind of how UVA is playing in this process, things that maybe we can't answer about the project as a whole.

But Julia, the Office of the Architect at UVA, core member of the project team,

and then Serena is our public engagement coordinator for Albemarle County.

And so I wanted her to be able to be here to speak as well to some of the community engagement aspects of the project.

And then also would like to just point out our friends and colleagues on the side behind a couple of members of the County Planning Commission, Crystal Riverhold, Director of the Office of Sustainability at the City, Greg Harper, Chief of Environmental Services at Albemarle County and Jamie Powers, Climate Action Project Manager.

Great.

Hey, everybody.

Thank you again for having us.

We're really excited to be here at this first Joint Planning Commission meeting in quite a while.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about our regional hazards and the impacts we expect to see from climate change.

We think it's important to sort of set the table for this conversation and revisit and have a common understanding of what we're really doing here together this evening.

I'm going to talk about how central Virginia is being impacted by climate change and how we expect to be more impacted in the future.

So many folks think of climate change as a future hazard.

I do think as we witness impacts and natural disasters around the globe and around the country and most recently in our own state and our neighboring state, it is really becoming more

present for people because we are being impacted now and we will continue to be more impacted in the future.

So I'm going to walk through the hazards we expect to see here.

Both the city and county have done climate risk and vulnerability assessments.

And so I'm going to go over our hazards because, remarkably, they said nearly the same thing.

Anyway, so one of our most

I think one of the impacts that we have recently felt is the incidence of extreme heat is increasing in our region.

So in this context, extreme heat is a technical term.

It refers to a day where the temperature gets above 95 degrees Fahrenheit in a given day.

So our historical average was we experienced about five days of extreme heat every summer.

I think we saw more

Days than that this past summer, I think we can think back to some really periods of really hot days and think about how that is starting to impact our community.

By mid-century, we expect to see nearly a month of these extremely hot days each summer.

And by 2075, we could see nearly two months of these extremely hot days.

And so this project is contemplating how we will adapt our systems to be better

So another impact that we expect to see in our region is increased instance of drought periods between rain instances of rain.

We were in a drought period before Hurricane Helene visited our region and we had nine inches of rain in just a few days.

Before that, our area had declared a drought watch.

And that has a relationship with another hazard that we expect to see, which is increased flooding.

So even though we will have longer periods between rain, we will have more intense rain events.

So we expect to see increased precipitation and increase amount of precipitation in any given event.

And when you have dryness from periods of drought, and then you experience a particularly heavy or intense rain event, the ground is not able to absorb that moisture in the way it is when it is more evenly moist.

And so then you get more flooding.

The way that these hazards interact together exposes our community, our area to this increased risk.

So when all of that is taken together, we see that our seasons are changing.

And so that has an impact, especially on our natural environment.

We are adapted here in Central Virginia to experience periods of cold in the winter.

You can see that our

Historical data shows that over the past 30 years, our average has been more than two months of days over the winter period where we get below freezing.

And so that's really important for keeping pests set bay, invasive plant species.

That is our ecosystem is adapted to that.

And so as we experience overall warming and we see

We have fewer of these days where we get frost.

You can see this data shows by the time we get to the end of the century, we're predicted to see less than a month of days over the winter where it gets below freezing.

So that has this knock on or secondary impact of increasing the risk of pests and disease in our

in our region.

And so everyone kind of hates when I show this slide because it's a visceral reminder, but we'll have more times of the year where these invasive pests that harm both our natural environment and pose a threat also to humans, longer periods of the year where these are active.

So ticks and mosquitoes are active for a longer period of the year.

are ecosystems that are adapted to periods of cold or not as able to fight off disease invasive species, that thing, that kind of thing.

One climate fun fact I always like to share when I'm talking about this slide is poison ivy actually really thrives when there's higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So when you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, the toxins that are in poison ivy are actually more concentrated and stronger.

So another knock on

So one hazard that we did not really contemplate when the city and county were doing our risk and vulnerability assessments back in 2022.

is wildfire smoke.

The county's risk and vulnerability assessment does consider wildfire and there's a small increased risk as we move into the future.

But neither of them contemplate smoke.

And I think everyone in this room can probably remember last summer and fall when we had smoke from Canadian wildfires, smoke from other fires in the region that were really impacting our community.

And so children,

Older folks, folks with pre-existing conditions, our homeless neighbors, folks who work outside are particularly impacted by this decrease of our regional air.

So a couple of concepts that we wanted to make sure everyone has a shared understanding of.

I'm guessing that these are familiar to many, if not most folks, but we wanted to put it out there.

There's a couple of technical terms that we work with in the climate action space.

One of those being mitigation, the other one being adaptation.

Adaptation resilience are often put together so you'll see us use both of those terms.

Sydney County both have climate action plans.

Those Climate Action Plan and UVA has climate targets, including a strategic plan to reach goals for reducing emissions.

So those plans are all focused for all three entities on what's called mitigation or reducing the severity of climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

And then what this project is focused on for city, county and UVA is how do we adapt?

Because we didn't take strong enough action as a global community.

20, 30, 40 years ago.

So there are some changes that are baked in that, as folks know, we're already starting to see the impacts of.

So as we engage in mitigation work, how do we also adapt to and build resilience to those kinds of impacts from a changing climate, from intensifying weather events like those that Emily just described?

There's a lot of overlap between the two.

So this is just a few examples to make the Venn diagram manageable.

We started listing out more and realized it would be actually overwhelming on a slide.

So there's lots that's not not stated here, just to give examples, but there are some actions that we can take that are really focused on the emissions reduction side.

They don't have much to do with adaptation resilience.

And likewise, there are some actions we can take that really focus on

the adaptation, the resilience side don't really do anything for us in terms of emissions reduction.

But there's a lot that we can do that covers both that's integrative.

And so that's something that we're thinking about as we move into the strategy development for our climate resilience plans is how can we prioritize the kinds of strategies that will help achieve both results?

Recognizing that there may also be a need to do some better on one side.

So the next few slides, we wanted to tease out a little bit more the almost like a chain of events or a kind of flow chart from these increased likelihood of hazards or increased risks.

I mean, weather events and trends.

And like, how does that actually lead into harmful impacts that people in our community will experience?

So we're gonna walk you through a couple of flowcharts to illustrate how that might look for just kind of two hazards together.

And we've got some additional ones that we can include in a slide deck we share with you all afterwards.

but for the sake of time we'll just use one.

To tee that up we wanted to show this chart which comes from Noah and I think gives a helpful visual for overall what we're trying to do with the resilience work.

So the chart on the left shows you know an example of you by the way you could look at these charts

Leveled, or a family system, or really any kind of system, but here we're looking at them from the perspective of a community system in the context of climate change.

So you could have a community that's kind of chugging along, business as usual, gets hit by some kind of acute hazard, maybe a hurricane, intense flooding, maybe a heat wave or a wildfire, and there's going to be some kind of shock to the system, some harm in the short term that comes from that.

Sometimes that community might bounce back, but it's also possible that, you know, the initial shock is so intense that even after a period of recovery, there's a permanent loss.

The community doesn't quite make it back to where they were before.

On the right is what we're looking to do with this climate resilience work.

Okay, so if we can make investments to build resilience now, you know, before the next big azure shock to the system, there will still be short-term harm, sorry, short-term adverse impacts.

But hopefully, because the investments up front, we can bounce back and be better off, be stronger as a community.

So to make that a little bit more concrete with a couple of examples, I'll walk you through this one briefly.

Emily talked a few minutes ago about the interplay between drought and intense rainfall and how those can lead to increasingly likely put a flooding.

and but it's not just the hazard or the extreme weather event, right?

There's also ways in which some community members might be more exposed to that.

So we know there are some buildings in the area that are in the floodplain, right?

So that's something that might increase a household or person's exposure to flooding.

We also know that having a lack of stream buffer, right?

Increases likelihood of that flooding, I mean inland and the intensity of the flooding.

There might also be vulnerability that's more specifically at the household level.

So not so much exposure to the hazard, but a more vulnerable situation for the family who's living nearby.

So maybe an older building less able to hold up against intense rainstorms.

just this was, there was no adverse impact particularly, but recently I had a small roof leak from during one of the rain events, actually the one that preceded Helene the week before that, but had a small roof leak from that.

So thinking about things like that, but if it's worse for someone in their building.

And then when you combine those three, the hazard itself, potential and additional exposure,

Cost of Repairs that could be particularly financially challenging for some folks, maybe help impacts from exposure to moisture and mold, things like that.

So Broadview, what can we do to build some of those, build resilience in advance, make those investments from the chart on the previous slide?

Well, we might do something to address vulnerability at the household level.

So I think about the work that Albemarle Housing Improvement Program does in the community.

We can also think about a lot of work that happens in the county around stream buffers and financing to help landowners

So putting all that together

leads to something that I think Emily has alluded to previously with the fact that we share similar risks and vulnerabilities for us, for our region, why work together.

The impetus for this project came out of a conversation between myself and Emily's predecessor at the city who reached out to me and said, hey, you know, we're doing these climate vulnerability risk assessments.

We're starting to see more of these impacts.

you know should we be thinking about working together between our two jurisdictions and University of Virginia on a resilience planning process for the community because you know the

Extreme Rain and Flooding Event or the Heat Wave doesn't particularly care where the jurisdictional boundary is.

So that was kind of the impetus for this project.

And Emily's fond of saying that, you know, knowing your neighbors is the best first step, right, for building resilience for emergency preparedness.

So we've been working on this partnership for quite a while now.

and it's been fruitful in terms of the kinds of feedback that we've gotten from our colleagues, from subject matter experts in each of the institutions and also from the broader community that surrounds us.

I think I'm turning it back over to you.

So I will share, Crystal and I were at a conference, USDN, our Urban Sustainability Directors Network, in Minneapolis last week, and we were there, some of our colleagues from Asheville were also there.

And they were telling stories about coming together with their neighbors after Haleen, and I

felt, well, first of all, very humbled that we're having this conversation as our community.

But also, it was sort of reassuring to me that we're coming at this work with that spirit of getting to know your neighbors as a foundational step.

We're trying to live that and model that in working together on this project.

and if we can just help to strengthen relationships within the community and like strengthen the webs and networks that are already holding our community in place through this project, we will really be actually building and modeling resilience.

So just wanted to add that.

Anyway, that's that's what we're doing here.

No, but so after we

Gabe said, why do this work together?

And so we did come together to start saying like, how can this project unfold?

How can we do this work together?

So UVA came into this conversation early.

Gabe and Serena did some very important foundational work.

And what we're trying to do here is really use this project to convene a community conversation about building the resilience to the impacts of climate change that we're going to be experiencing.

and strength in our community, really in a holistic way.

So our vision for this project is a strong and safe and healthy community for everyone who calls Charlottesville and Albemarle home now and into the future.

And so there are some specific deliverables that will come out of the Resilient Together project.

Those are climate resilience plans that will be adopted by each jurisdiction.

We're going to develop them in parallel and then for ease of

local government processes.

We will have two separate plans that are adopted.

We'll talk a little bit later in the presentation about how that interacts with existing projects and documents, comprehensive plans and things.

But what we also really want to build through this project is an implementation framework.

We don't want this to just be another plan that is really difficult to implement, but

I threw the project and I hope with just systems that we help to build through doing this engagement and intense work together, we are really building a framework for investing in our community and making it more resilient.

So this is our project outline.

We put this star here.

We are here.

We are going to talk through where we've been and look forward.

But the Discover phase, which we kicked on a little over a year ago, we wanted to share some of the information that we have shared with you all this evening about our hazards and risks with the community.

And also hear from the community how they are being impacted.

We've had a series of staff workshops.

We've done a lot of community engagement.

I'll talk in a little bit more detail about that in a moment.

The defined phase is really making sure we're solid in what we heard from the community before we move on to the real exciting meat of the project, which is designing the strategies that we'll employ in our community.

And then the decide phase will be really creating those plans, going through the bureaucratic process of having them adopted.

And then do is where we really implement the work and that's kind of

will be ongoing into the future.

And I'll talk later about how we have been learning from peer communities and how some other communities are moving from planning into implementation.

So like I said, we kicked off the discover phase, the first public facing phase of this project back in October of 2023.

We had a number of workshops, a few of them right here in this room.

We gathered staff from across the city, the county, and UVA, and also some of our regional quasi-governmental partners, the Planning District Commission, the Rivanna authorities, the Soil and Water Conservation District staff from those organizations also joined us as subject matter experts.

We had some workshops with community organizations.

We were at a number of community events.

trying to just get the word out about how we were thinking about this and how our community will be impacted.

So we also got some feedback that there are many members of the community who have been asked repeatedly what they want and what they need, and there's a little bit of engagement fatigue.

So we also tried to learn from other planning, recent planning processes like AC44 and Seafield Plants together to integrate some of that community input into what we have put forward.

in the defined phase.

So the defined phase, we started over the summer, we are just getting to the end of it, although we're going to talk about, Gabe mentioned our climate resilience cohort, which is a very important project within the project.

And we are trying to, since that piece of the project is funded by a federal grant, it took us a little bit of time to get through the grant machinations to be able to get the cohort off.

So we've

We want to share our draft principles and goals with the cohort and with staff before we call it final.

So we're just wrapping up define and transitioning into the design.

So also during that time, we have been researching and refining a list of potential resilient strategies that could work in our community.

Of course, we are not the only community doing this.

We are trying to learn from larger communities, areas that have done this before.

The federal government, through their climate resilience toolkit, gives us a great database of strategy options from plans from all over the country.

and we have been really like combing through those lists to create a draft list of strategies that are suitable for our area based on our hazards or geography, the size of our community, the fact that we're a Dillon rule state, all types of, you know, the local context, what we can do in our community.

So it's been wonderful to collate what we have heard from the community into some concrete outputs.

And I hope that you all had

an opportunity to look at the report that we put published as part of the packet for this evening, but so we distilled what we heard into these nine themes.

I know a lot of you all have been doing engagement around major planning processes recently, so probably I hope this doesn't surprise anyone in this room, but this is what we heard from the community that they really care about.

And I do want to clarify, when I'm talking about reliable systems, that includes infrastructure or food systems, sort of those community systems and hardened infrastructure systems that really support the day-to-day life and work.

and so from there we took the themes and we drafted these six guiding principles and these again are in our report I don't want to necessarily read them verbatim but we felt like these six

items really rose to the top as things that we need to keep as our North Star as we move through this project.

And then also these seven goals seem like really good broad outcomes that if we can work towards these goals throughout this process and project and as we move into implementation, we will really be building resilience in our community.

And so what I wanted to say also is

Mr. Barnes said at the outset of this meeting that climate change is an existential issue, and it is, and it is a threat multiplier, but it's also a symptom of a deeper problem that because many of our systems are built on extraction and exploiting people in the environment.

And if we reexamine some of those ways that we interact with other people and with our environment are the place we live in here, we will really be

helping to address some of those underlying causes that cause us to be less resilient.

So we really do believe that if we can kind of embody the principles and work towards those goals, we will be working together to really build a community that is truly resilient.

So strategy development, this is the exciting, we're standing on the precipice of this part of the project.

It feels exciting.

So we have been working to define this locally relevant list.

We also don't want to reinvent the wheel here and we know there's a lot of excellent plants that exist through the region, all three entities.

So we are also beginning the work of comparing our draft list with what is already planned for or happening in the community because if we take existing plans and structures and either strengthen the connections on them or

or, you know, use them as a foundation to build upon, you know, that is, we'll be taking advantage of our existing systems and not reinventing them.

So as we move into this design phase engagement that will be part of this next phase, we want to ask ourselves these three kind of foundational questions.

So like, what are the midterm outcomes?

What are the impacts we're looking to see

and then when we think about the answer to those questions, what is locally relevant?

Because this is so place-based, it's really important that the strategies that we develop work for this community because what works in other places may not be what works here in Charlottesville.

So I alluded to this, we've been doing a lot of learning from other peer communities.

The staff involved in this project, we're all members of these networks of folks doing this type of work at the local government level.

We have great connections with, we hold, we actually included a link to Fairfax's Resilient Fairfax Plan in the packet.

We hold this up as such a great example.

We have a great relationship with some of the staff in Fairfax who are the lead on developing this for their community.

They've been very generous with their experience and expertise and that's been a great resource to learn from folks who are further ahead in this process.

I mentioned we've been relying on this federal tool that is helping communities be able to do this resilience planning work.

The EPA has regional plans for resilience for each of the EPA regions and they support communities building out from there.

So we've been doing a lot of learning from those who have come before us in this one.

Cool, thank you.

One point that I would love to call out on that last slide.

If you remember from a little while ago, Emily had said that we're really aiming for our resilience plans to be structured and written to help guide implementation when they're hot off the press.

They have also really successfully transferred from the planning process into a program for resilience building.

So the climate resilience cohort, something we're really excited about, as Emily said, project within a project.

We just had our kickoff workshop with the 10 sub-grantees of this cohort yesterday.

So we're excited about that.

We had an afternoon with them, got to onboard them onto the project.

I think given the topic that we're discussing tonight, our folks will appreciate that we had to reschedule that workshop from a month ago.

We were supposed to do it on September 30th.

The night before, one of our colleagues said, hey, you know, do we have any contingency plans regarding the hurricane or not as intense anywhere near as intense impacts here as in our neighbors to the south.

But you know, hey, what should we do to be prepared about this?

And so we said, well, if this public school districts close

You should probably postpone our workshop because folks might have unanticipated childcare issues and also a barometer of maybe there are some, you know, roads out there that are not safe to cross.

So we ended up postponing the workshop and due to scheduling with 10 organizations ended up being a month later, but we found it, you know, telling and perhaps a bit ironic that we had to reschedule the kickoff session of a climate resilience go work due to a climate change exacerbated storm.

So we're really excited to finally get together with folks yesterday and kick off this key piece of the project.

So it's a partnership with 10 community-based organizations that serve disadvantaged or vulnerable community members to help really ensure that the voices and voices of folks are really brought into the project.

This came from a highly competitive EPA Environmental Justice grant that we applied for as a team of Albemarle County with the lead applicant for that.

So we're kind of the administrator of the grant, but it's a key

and we're providing some grants to 10, like I said, community-based organizations to partner with us in the work.

One of the things that we know that I'm sure you all know is that, you know, local governments can have a hard time reaching a lot of folks in a community, right?

There's, you know, there's folks who are often more able to or tend to come to, you know, public comment sessions to workshops that

of Operation.

And we can sometimes have a hard time, you know, getting a broad swath of community perspective.

So the intention with this grant is to help leverage the relationships that we have with local community-based organizations and then the relationships that they in turn have with the folks that they serve directly.

I'm going to start saying CBOs.

I know we have lots of acronyms in local government

So this was, we got the grant through funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.

I've covered a couple of these elements.

And actually, kind of an example of adapting and being playful with how we're implementing the project.

Originally, we said, let's give an equal $40,000 to each organization.

And then we thought about that a little bit further.

and we wondered if that was the best approach and we ultimately decided to pivot where each organization is getting a certain chunk of the money to be part of the planning part of this process, helping us develop and vet the strategies that we've been talking about that will go with our resilience plans.

And then there will be an additional pot of money that folks will be able to be granted through a second round to do implementation projects.

and the change that we made rather than giving each organization connection.

Maybe it's the clicker.

We're giving folks the option to pool funds.

We know that some of these organizations, which we'll show you in the next slide, are in collaborations with each other already or have collaborated on various projects.

And so we said, well, you know, why don't we give them the option?

Partner in that.

And so we'll see what kind of projects come out of that.

We'll be facilitating a kind of participatory design process with them a little later in this first year of the grant to come to arrive at the projects they'll be doing.

So we're really excited about the 10 that we've got.

There are some of these organizations that we as the local governments have worked with in the past.

We know the kind of community service they do.

And there's also some folks that we've never worked with where we're cultivating with them.

And so we're very excited to be able to kind of have that mixture and also get a sense from yesterday of some of the relationships among these organizations that already exist as well as some of the new ones

that we already saw being fostered.

So I've alluded to what the kind of timeline and elements of this grant will look like, but just to put it on the page for you and talk through this briefly, basically there's two parts of the grant.

The first part, part one or planning, is overlapping with the remaining phases of the resilient together kind of planning portion.

So part one here will end when we have adopted resilience plans for our entities.

And then part two will kick off.

And that will be where that second pot of money will come into play.

And these organizations will be able to implement pilot projects to hit the ground running with implementing the resilience plan.

So we're excited about this.

and that kind of feeds back into just a few words that I'll say about next steps.

Wanting to come back, Emily showed the kind of side-by-side tiles of the Resilient Together project phases that discover, define, design, decide, and do or implement.

And so just to revisit a little bit, kind of more of a fun image of that for you here, but just to give you that sense again, so we're in between two and three, kind of right on the cusp, right there.

and one of the pieces I'll just call attention to again, Emily foreshadowed this and I think now that we've gone through the climate resilience cohort, I'll say, so that's this piece, those themes, guiding principles, long-term goals are what we've penciled in based on what we heard through the project, but that we wanna make sure that this group of 10 organizations also have the opportunity to weigh in on that before we put it into an ink.

So, looking ahead towards number three, number four here in the design and design phases of the project, in the design phase, we will be taking that information that we've distilled thus far, right?

The goals, the guiding principles, themes we heard.

Strategy Options, and putting that together to help bring strategies into the fold that will help us meet the goals that we have.

And then the decide phase, that's where we'll actually be doing the work of putting everything we have on paper, figuratively speaking, but literally in Word documents where we're kind of structuring the information into a plan that we can then request our elected bodies to adopt and that we could be able to

There will be a number of elements of engagement, community engagement in the design phase, so also to kind of

briefly called back something that Emily said earlier, where we got this feedback about some of the engagement fatigue in the community.

And that feedback that we received was that while there's, while there may be engagement fatigue on kind of general information questions of like, what's working well for you?

What's, you know, challenging in your neighborhood?

What needs do you have?

that there's quite a bit of appetite for really creative design thinking, getting together to craft ideas.

And so this phase will have quite a bit of engagement both through those 10 organizations in the climate resilience cohort, and as well as broader community engagement that we're going to be doing kind of in strategic geographic locations across the city and county to try to get as broad swap of the community as we can.

We'll also continue to meet with staff and subject matter experts from

and

involved, and so C-bill plans together, AC44.

Yeah.

So, well, one thing I kind of wanted to back up and say.

So the city of Charlottesville is part of the global covenant of mayors for climate and energy.

So we have a commitment to develop a climate action plan and a climate resilience plan.

and when we, so we have already adopted our climate action plan and you all likely remember that we went through the extra step of having that be adopted as one of the functional pieces, a functional plan underneath the umbrella of our updated comprehensive plan.

So it is our hope and intention to be able to do that again

for the Climate Resilience Plan.

So we really would like for this plan to become one of those functional plans that is part of the broader umbrella of the comprehensive plan.

And speaking of that comprehensive plan, we also know that a lot of our final strategies will cut across more chapters than just the Chapter 7 related to environment, climate and food equity.

So I think we'll hit a lot of chapters.

And so just

And on the county side, we've actually had the sort of fruitful opportunity to be doing our resilience planning in concurrence with the AC44 Comprehensive Plan update.

Michael Barnes

We also have the opportunity to go to some of the engagement events that they've done through AC44 where we heard a lot of themes that are relevant to the kind of work that we're doing.

So that's been quite fruitful for us.

There's elements of both climate change mitigation and adaptation resilience that intersect.

the AC44 draft plan and we know that the resilient community chapter will also explicitly integrate some of the smart goals that we've been developing on the county side with respect to our climate action plan or mitigation plan and then involved goals related to this resilience project so we see those as as threading together quite nicely.

So let me maybe pause at this point and just check in with Commissioner Missel.

You had mentioned wanting to have a little space for some kind of general questions.

So the next two slides are our kind of potential strategies that we put in the agenda that we put in the memo to you all to take a look at in advance.

And so I just want to check and we could go straight into those and invite discussion, but I didn't want to bypass if you would also like to have an opportunity for general Q&A.

Yeah.

Thank you.

That's a great question.

I think it'd be great to have maybe, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes if we need it for Q&A right now.

Just because if everyone else is like me, I've got a bunch of questions that I'd like to throw out there.

But why don't we start?

I'll just start on this side.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sharon.

Thank you.

Thank you for the

and I understand how the Climate Action Plan that you developed that we saw in 22, how that fits into this and because there were certainly a lot of potential deliverables there.

You wouldn't have to do it down, perhaps the planning commission.

I was struck in your introduction when you laid out and you just sort of completed the circle on that on your 10 partners.

And while I can appreciate your 10 partners and you sort of describe them as being their subgrants, 10 community-based organizations that serve disadvantaged community members.

And while no one in my city is going to talk badly about organizations that treat.

Disadvantaged members of our community.

I'd like to have, of course, I'd like to have a bit more shape down on what does that mean, because if I look at some of those individuals from where I stand in other hats that I've worn, I don't know how effective they are doing what you want them to do, because I will just place that there.

The other thing I think is sort of, is it was a question of if you're just looking at how do you bring together a group of people who are going to help you think through the design of what this might look like?

who will be the individuals who will have to adopt this.

And so I don't see anyone here that says, why aren't we bringing in sooner?

And I'm sure there are people saying, you know, they have a mistrust for the poor, proper people, but they're the people who are going to do it.

The county in the city have no have no levers.

to make those entities do anything, except that they want perhaps a different, a different bit of shading on there.

I don't mean shading as in trees, but a bit more density or something on a piece of property.

That's where perhaps the leverage comes there or the conversation comes.

But if you're thinking, this is a positive for our jurisdiction.

But I feel as if there's a significant gap in not being able to include some people who are in this form, who are actually going to be the ones who have to build this into their process.

The other piece that I would also suggest is from being inclusive.

This is an opportunity, we hear this at times, certainly at our CACs, those of us, I can't speak for the city, but for the county, as a community advisory group, so I always mess those up, and someone has to always help me through that.

There are opportunities for our young people in school who are absolutely dreaming, accidentally, about how do we do this?

and so I think there would also be an opportunity for you to reach out to the various schools here and so perhaps bring a couple of them on here, the students.

Any questions specifically?

Why don't we go over to Michael Joy?

Well, I had a comment.

Well, there's two that I want to throw out.

And the first would be, I know that we're working towards a roadmap to complete this study.

It's sort of just kind of a third way in the process.

But it'd be interesting as you're sort of helping what the deliverable is, is to understand that

So, that was just one comment to, and then the other one, you know, trying to just look at the climate action plan and it may be redundant with that but, you know, what conversations are being had with some of the, you know,

Recognize we need to connect with some of our state level agencies and our utilities and we are working to build some of those connections and we actually have gotten some advice from our friends and Fairfax about how to go about engaging the utilities, engaging our state agencies that may have, you know, something to add to this or

We need to know about how they operate to really, you know, work around them in our communities, right?

I know in the county, especially P.Dot has a lot of heat impact.

And so we are working to make those connections.

And we are also working to try to work through our colleagues to connect with, so we've had

conversations with our economic development folks, how can we really connect with the business community because they do have important input on this project.

So we hope that to do some business specific workshops during the design phase to try to get interest from across the, you know, there's a lot of people who would love to connect with developers in the community, right, to see how they're thinking about this project.

So we're

ideating how to best be able to do that, we have can be hard to get engagement from folks.

And so we are trying to be really intentional about the asks and so that we can be prepared to have the feedback that we're able to get from different parts of the community, have it be the most impactful for us and the best use of their time.

One thing that may be helpful is as this thing comes to fruition and you have a final report is to imagine that report sort of being sort of shared with a larger regional area where they could then adopt components that's sort of making it almost like a series of plugins that could, you know, different areas which may not have the municipal oversight or the

A little bit.

A little bit.

I have some questions about the potential strategies, but we'll save that for afterward.

In the meantime, the first comment is I appreciate the long-term goals.

It's a really nice list.

I put a check mark by all.

And I do also appreciate that this is meant to be more about adaptation.

This project's focused rather than, say, mitigation, which is why I was kind of

Had a huh moment when I saw that the primary resilience strategy is greenhouse gas reduction, which is mitigation.

And I mean, we could be carbon neutral tomorrow in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and it's still going to be 30 days a year that are over 95 in 2015.

I mean, I don't want to say like we shouldn't do some things, we should, but I feel like if we let that take up

the air in the room of the primary strategy, then we're going to miss out on the sort of social things and the actual adaptation things that are much more necessary.

So that just feels like, you know, some of the some of the other pieces around communication, collaboration around strengthening our backup systems and electricity systems and water systems.

Yeah, maybe just briefly.

And recognizing that we're just entering into the strategy development.

The reason we made that the first guiding principle of how we think through this is certainly not to have that take up all the air in the room of the actual strategies that go into the plans, but recognizing that with each increasing year of emissions, we're making that problem worse and

Awesome.

Yeah, to build on that, I'm looking at the

The goals, I mean, maybe it's a matter of just prioritizing.

It sounds like the communication and collaboration is probably the most important to get what you keep talking about needing more information and creating this, getting everyone involved.

So maybe it's just a matter of visually ordering them so that that's like, hey, we're doing this.

And then working admissions is one of the many that we're working on.

It seems really well thought out, awesome that you all are working together.

I think I was interested in the grant and because it's allowing this other, you know, kind of bringing more people together and maybe finding more opportunities.

Maybe it's with schools like finding money on this, like finding opportunities like you already did, you know, and tying them to some of these

goals.

So that when we get to implementation, it's not just like, you know, it's that each, each strategy might have like, here's 10 things we could apply for, assuming that that's all going to be coming out, hopefully, you know, in the next few years, hopefully more funding for that.

So just encouraging that to be like,

in the lists, like amount of money should be there.

So that I think it also helps when talking to communities, having the money up there so that people can help figure out like, oh, okay.

If we do this, maybe we can't do that.

You know, just sort of like, sometimes we leave that out and then people are disappointed because we choose something else and they don't understand why.

So I hate to say it, but.

Yeah, but thank you.

Thanks Karen.

I guess sort of quickly, I guess I'm a little curious how or to what extent data gathering or analysis of existing data and factors into this.

And we have these vulnerability assessments that sort of get into that.

But I think about the dam study that the county's doing and how there's all these private dams and stormwater systems throughout the county that like

Nobody knew anything about how many culverts are there that are vulnerable, being washed out like that one and Ivy a couple of years ago, and getting an inventory of those as a method of prioritizing the different strategies that we come up with.

Sure.

I'm even the one that was talking about the DM study in drainage infrastructure management program.

So the risk factor is a company, first read is what they're called, they produce data that we did purchase recently.

So the data includes like flood data, both today's risks and risks in 30 years based on different climate scenarios.

Pete, Smoke, other risks like that.

So we are looking to receive and consume and digest and disseminate data to some extent.

We're relying on the vulnerability assessments that we're done, as you mentioned.

And through different programs that are being administered already from the county and city UVA,

like the drainage infrastructure programs.

I mean, those are obviously more data intensive.

So I think, you know, that's my thoughts about, you know, how we're using data.

Yeah, that's great.

Just to say that the one

from them has city and county.

Sometimes you get data sets and there's like, you know, the county's vulnerability assessment has a donut hole in the center.

So for this project, we were able to get both.

And a lot of the data in that data set is much more spatially refined than some of the maps that you might see in the county's vulnerability assessment, for example.

and Roy, I can also share.

So the city has a flood resilience plan that has been adopted by or approved by DCR.

So that has a list of projects in it that we can apply for funding through the CFPF fund to, you know, actually do these

Thanks.

addressing climate change and one of the world's other great crisis, this occurring, which is the policy and extension.

You know, we're massively losing biodiversity in a worldwide basis.

And I know Admiral County has a biodiversity action plan.

You know, I think we stand apart by having that in our county.

You know, to what degree are we, well, first let's say there are some localities have gotten their addressing of climate change horribly wrong.

You look at Chesterfield, for example, who created a massive solar project that actually is going to wipe out several endangered species in Virginia.

So that's how you get addressing climate change law.

So what are we doing in Albemarle County, you know, working with maybe, and Charlottesville for that matter,

That's a great question.

A couple brief thoughts, and I know we want to make sure there's time for everybody.

One of the things that we've talked about in our strategy development is that at some point we'll need to prioritize those strategies.

One of the ways that we want to do that is by bringing in other factors about, you know, what kind of multiple benefits at once is a strategy able to give us.

So there was that slide that Emily showed that talked about kind of climate change as, you know, an incredible challenge and also a symptom of sort of deeper challenges, including, you know, extraction and exploitation

on biodiversity and species extinction.

And so one of the things that we talked about is having that kind of root causes mindset as we evaluate strategies that can be beneficial that we want to prioritize for this work is to actually kind of maybe score or maybe check off, notate somehow, like what strategies are things that, you know,

are really going to be helpful cutting across those multiple challenges that we're facing.

And then what are strategies that maybe, you know, because it's a climate resilience plan to Mr. Moore's point earlier.

may need to include some strategies that have to do with backup generators, for example, for critical facilities that aren't able to accommodate rooftop solar.

But of course, that's something that's only solving one problem and in some ways contributing to the other, so less of one that brings the multiple benefits at once.

So that's one element.

And a second element is I think I've had the opportunity to work on recent

with colleagues in community development on some of the county's current policy making that really try to thread that in ways that maybe other communities haven't been able to quite as well.

So thinking about how we can make sure to prioritize biodiversity protection and even increase as we also promote clean energy in the county.

and Phillip.

So just people, it's not forthcoming, it has come, it is here, it is working.

I didn't, did I not know something?

So that's that.

I, to speak to a slightly larger, and sort of a slightly larger from a greater height, my interest

may be less in the specifics of what we do, but the strategy of how we implement it is at the beginning we talk about we don't want this just to be another plan.

But my concern is in my thought is that we need to be mindful of developing an implementation strategy even before we've got the plan fully formed or else

We're going to find our, we're not mindful of the process of the implementation and how this is going to roll out and what it's going to look like.

I think we could end up in sort of a frozen, constipated space where some of this just doesn't get done.

So I'm a little concerned about that.

And I think that that sort of probably deserves some serious thought on how we can look at that.

And then to follow up on Mr. Moore's comments on greenhouse gases, yeah, I mean, it is easy, it is a measurable, it's easy to measure, right?

But again, it's obligatory.

It doesn't actually change anything about climate or the environment in the city of Charlottesville or Albemarle County, because we're not even a drop in the bucket.

And so, I mean, it's obligatory because we want everybody else to do it, but yeah, oh well.

That's pretty much all I had, but my main concern is that we actually are able to implement this and we spend some time and resources on coming up with a strategy for the capital S strategy.

And if we have to pull somebody in to hire somebody to talk about strategy, maybe we do that.

Maybe I don't know what our internal resources are for that.

Emily Gave, I just want to give you a chance to respond a little bit to that, because I had a similar question, and if I could just kind of riff on that for one second.

In addition to how we do it, how do we measure it?

So once we're doing it, how do you actually then say, yeah, we're doing the right thing, or we need to, you know, kind of change direction in a couple of places here.

Yes.

I mean, I feel like that is certainly something that we have, we are aware of as the project team, and as we work on strategy development, that's a critical spin, right?

And this is also something that we run into a lot in the mitigation side of our work, right?

you know I can say we are you know we just uh on the implementation or on the mitigation side we just gave our first kind of report out on how we're doing on implementing our climate action plan and uh it is hard to measure each item on our work plan that we have been moving forward discreetly with like how many you know how many tons of carbon did we

Reduce, you know, by any given action.

So that is a difficult part of this work, for sure.

And so we, it's something we think about a lot and we'll be thinking about as part of our strategy development.

Yeah, so we do give some service to, you know, measurement and verification as, and building that into

The Dew Phase, right, as we build out those implementation roadmaps.

I mean, one of our, one of our

Guiding Principles is these must be actionable strategies that we developed, right?

So at this phase in the project, we felt like that was a critically important thing to put forward.

This is a guiding principle.

We are not going to develop it.

Like if it is not an actionable thing that has real tangible real world impact, it won't end up in the final plan.

Thank you.

A second piece that we are planning to do, the conversation began recently with it, so I don't have my good.

document to show for it, but is, although you actually showed a bit of it on one of our slides, is actually putting out logical frameworks for all the strategies in the plan.

And when you talk about metrics, when you talk about metrics doing action in the real world, there's always going to be that element where you have the projects you do, the outputs, short-term outcomes, medium-term outcomes.

and then unless you're really lucky there becomes a dotted line to long-term impacts and so you can conjecture about long-term impacts but often being able to measure definitively the through line from one all the way to the very end is something that you know becomes sort of

But that piece of building out the logical framework or logic model, so there's a clear understanding of what is the theory of change of this strategy and how is it going to have the impact that we hope it will, is something that we plan to build out for the strategies in our resilience plans.

I would just add that we're not there yet.

Great.

Thank you.

First, I just want to say thank you, and I hope that this collaboration becomes more of an annual norm than one 75 years.

So I'm sorry I was saying that before I forget.

My first question is not intended for you to answer right now, but something to think about as a process matures.

And what is the cost of doing nothing?

And there's signals of that.

I did a control at F on page 170 of the county plan where I wouldn't read 170 pages, right?

So I found it there.

But that needs to be pulled up to the top.

And maybe it's not always financially, it could be even life expectancy, like we do nothing.

Life expectancy in this region changes from 72 to 69, whatever it might be.

But I do think that economics and health are two really important points that measure the vitality of a community.

So that was my first comment.

And then just to piggyback a little bit briefly on what are we going to measure and understanding where we are in the process, understanding it's premature.

to push back a little bit on the building performance piece, because for my age, I work for the American Institute of Architects, and there's over 1,500 firms across the country measuring progress.

I get the vital reports numbers annually about the impact that it's making.

I think it would be negligent for us not to have that be a key focus area, the greenhouse gases and buildings.

And then secondly to that, just give thought to how we might communicate our progress

to the community.

I think that's going to be really important.

And I'll have the fact that Gates said a theory of change, right?

So maybe that's a graphical image that says, if we test this, we expect these outcomes as it starts to look graphically so we can share it externally and internally.

Because I think you will need a theory of change.

It's such a big problem.

There is no one solution, so you have to have bite-sized chunks.

Test this, it didn't work, so we'll recalibrate, we'll do that.

There's about two comments for now, and I'll hold on to the rest until we get to the other part of the discussion.

Very grateful to be here.

This is exciting.

This is important work.

I'm excited to see it.

This ends my positive things that I say.

Thank you, Ronald.

Next.

I'm very excited to see equity as a piece here.

That was a crucial part of the Charlottesville Plains Together approach we call equity of lands.

I'd like to hear more about how that will be a part of this.

We lean pretty hard on the Virginia Equity Center as a resource on that.

I don't know if you're doing that, but if you aren't, please do it.

They're incredible.

Housing was another essential piece of the Charlottesville Plans Together process.

I didn't hear it, although I noticed some things about the organizations that were listed, the NACRHA, and I had questions about the emergency housing and how you're thinking about that.

regional transit and transit-oriented development.

I don't see that, but that will be my knowledge essential in getting the land use in climate.

Things we're talking about way outside of the chapter, but it's big.

Climate impacts of permitting infill estimates.

Let's go get into measures.

Do we know what will be the effects of doing these changes?

I don't think.

Oh, and just we've been having troubles with legislative authority to release this changing climate.

It's going to take us a long time to fix that, but I'd suggest legislating for four of the parties.

So yes, all of those elements that you mentioned are strategies that are in that draft strategy list, thinking about density, thinking about transportation, thinking about

Housing, those are all things that came up.

We tried to include some of those words in our report to help signal that those were very important things that came up during all of our engagement that we did during the Discover phase.

Of course, housing always rises to the top for many folks.

in this community, I will share.

Also, we are trying to be active at the state level legislatively through our professional networks.

And Crystal and I and Gabe and Jamie and Greg are members of the Virginia group of local government sustainability folks doing this work.

And we are learning together how to think about advocating up

for things that will help us in our jurisdiction.

And there's several key actions in the climate action plan that are related to state and even federal level advocacy.

Thanks, Louise.

Thank you for being engaged, particularly for bringing this to us early on in the process, as Julian mentioned earlier.

You haven't gotten to the design piece yet, so this is great.

And actually, I mean, a lot of great questions already, some of them were very similar that I had.

But you mentioned something, Emily, early on.

You said you were recently in North Carolina.

And so I was just wondering, were there something that you, and you did mention a couple of things, particularly how neighbors were helping neighbors, right?

I was just wondering, more holistically, were there something that you gleaned there or that you have been taught?

I'm sure there's conversations going on, right?

I mean, this is very fresh, but it's not new, right?

We have experience here in Nelson County, Skylar.

So we have very relevant local experience with very similar type of disasters.

He's wondering if there's something that maybe caused you to pause and say, well, did we think about that?

Did something change?

Or maybe reinforced some of your thinking.

Yeah, so just for the record, I was in Minnesota with colleagues from North Carolina.

I was not in North Carolina to correct the record, but with colleagues from North Carolina who are sharing their experience.

Oh my gosh, it was so interesting.

I mean, it's very fresh for them.

And, you know, one of the things that they shared was it was so shocking to be completely cut off from the internet and communication systems.

And folks had to rely on the radio and not everybody has a radio anymore.

especially one that you can run when you don't have electricity.

And so that kind of stuck with me as we engage with the community about emergency preparedness.

I don't think we, you know, there's a huge overlap with this about emergency preparedness.

So we've been talking a lot with our emergency preparedness colleagues.

They're a really central part of this project.

And

but as we communicate with the community through this lens, you know, having lessons or gathering lessons learned from communities who have been so greatly impacted recently, that was something that really stuck with me, was how hard it was.

So as we develop strategies in our community, it makes me think like, okay, so I come from the engineering world, that's my background before I came to work for the city.

So sometimes redundancy

is considered inefficient, right?

But redundancy is a really important word when we're talking about resilience.

So how can we help to ensure that some of our systems, including our communications systems are redundant?

So we don't end up in the dark, not being able to communicate with each other.

That was something that really stuck with me.

And also, yeah, just getting to know your neighbors.

I mean, people said they really had to come together

Because we can't plan for everything, right?

I mean, what happened in Asheville is not something that any level of planning could have really mitigated, right?

And so the stronger those systems are in place and connections between folks like you showed that graph at the beginning.

I think that's really what we're talking about.

Thank you.

And I certainly, I mean, this, as I said, it's very fresh, right?

So there's going to be more and more coming out.

I think there's lessons learned there that we should draw from.

I'm not sure that we learned the lesson from Nelson and Schuyler necessarily.

We were having a conversation the other day about building and floodplains.

And so did we learn the lesson?

So here's an opportunity that we have.

to learn the entire region, right?

And it kind of answers Corey's question about what's the cost of doing nothing, right?

Awesome.

Can any of you guys outnumber us too?

So I am tickled that we were getting to do this.

I think Julian and I attempted to do this just before COVID fell apart.

So again, glad we're doing it and hope we will do it again.

Let me meander through a thought that may lead to a question.

I'll be quick.

The everything that I've read and everything that I've heard today speaks to excessive water and excessive heat.

But we don't

to talk about the capacity of water on droughts.

And as I read through the Arlington Report, they acknowledged that not enough work, not enough thought has been done on their part as it relates to droughts.

And as I read through our reports, I think we mentioned it three times.

The word drought is mentioned three times in our report.

You guys in your presentation, the first, the second, third slide, you spoke to

Don't worry about travelixing, you spoke to wildfires, good.

I was over at the A-School last week.

I'm just talking about what they're thinking about as late students.

And one of the guys suggested that 99% of all the properties in Albemarle are at least at moderate risk for wildfires.

and so I just want to make sure that we give a little more thought to the possibility of water.

So to that end, I think that there may be value and maybe you've already done it.

There may be value in bringing the water and sewage of the hockey to the table to talk about this because we need to understand what their reservoir strategies are going to be in light of a good job and what their pipelines are going to be and that sort of thing.

That was a comment and advice for us if it's okay just to say briefly that Emily talked about how we've been doing this research of strategies from other places around the country and kind of calling out ones that are locally relevant and then comparing those with, you know, plans that we have locally and cross-referencing those and one of the ones that jumps out with your comment is the I'm not going to

We've looked through a number of those strategies and it's interesting how their plan in particular, some of their strategies are almost written like procedures.

You know, if this happens, if water level gets to here, that triggers something that we're gonna do about that.

And so I think that was really helpful for me to see in looking through what they have in that plan and being able to think about, okay, what is, you know, what do we have here that's already been adopted that's in place?

They're maxing out the reservoir.

They're recirculating the way that water systems are going to work for our entire community.

And they're building out their raw water lines.

So instead of 18 inch raw water lines, they're going to have 36 inch raw water lines.

So the whole system is going to work differently.

Chair, what we're talking about, really what we're talking about, what's the response in case of the emergency?

And so that's more than just water, that's the fire department, that's

I'm not, it's a unified ambulance service here, or at the most, also what we're talking about is how to those entities communicate with each other.

Yeah, I would imagine that, Vivian, thinking my mind is simplifying this into like a checklist of these are the things like its power, its water, its sewer, it's all these other, you know, pieces and how then will you respond in a situation for each one of those?

I just had a couple of really quick questions.

One is, you know, we talked about measurable and I totally get that that's a ways off because we don't know yet what we're deciding, designing and doing.

I would just encourage us to think about measuring even while we're thinking about designing and doing because sometimes, I mean, you want to be at the end, you want to have things you can measure.

So thinking about that from, you know, backwards to forwards may help you with the designing and the deciding and doing.

The other is just thinking about the funding.

So we've talked about incentives.

We will be talking about incentives probably in a minute.

This all is going to cost money.

So, you know, we've been thinking about affordable housing for years and, you know, it took a while to really get to a point where the housing Albemarle, for example, had some incentive in it.

Maybe not enough, but it had some incentive in it.

So as we think through this,

Let's also be thinking about, and I'm going to ask this as a question, are you thinking about how to fund these things as well?

I mean, that's always a question, doing this type of work.

I mean, I would say up to this point, I mean, we've been mostly thinking about it on the mitigation side thus far.

But as we move deeper into this process, of course, that is starting to bubble up and thinking about

How can we use this project?

I mean, this is a unique thing that we're doing here together, two jurisdictions and our university that spans our jurisdictions.

We're working together.

So when you think about grant applications, that's a unique

Structure, a unique way of working together.

So we've been thinking about it in that context, like how can we sort of use this partnership to leverage outside resources?

We have not in terms of like, how much will it cost to build resilience hubs in our community?

That's good to know.

I think sometimes, you know, with with a city council board of supervisors having those conversations early, the plant the seed into the budget process early is really

And I think when you do the brain, the whole thing, it changes the mindset.

This is an added cost.

I just wanted to piggyback on something you said.

So actually, something that Emily mentioned in terms of you want to define actionable steps.

What are your actionable steps that you can take?

along with that, you have to think about what makes them actionable and probably funding is part of it.

All right, that's everyone.

All right.

Thank you.

Before we

Go to the next kind of portion.

Yes, what I'd like to talk about a little bit is beyond what people typically think of as community engagement.

We're doing a lot of work with subject matter experts in our community.

So those are subject matter experts that our staff with the city and the county and with UVA.

And we're learning a lot from them because they're experts at what they do.

So, and that's also really important when we're talking about the systems and those people are running the systems in our community.

I really like the idea, Julian, of going to the schools.

And I'm thinking about how to do that.

When I was working for ZGF in Portland, they had a program citywide where firms sent

professionals to schools to teach kids what architecture is and what architecture and planning does.

And I was thinking we could do something like that along those lines, make it like a classroom environment, make it engaging, because I think we have a lot to learn from young people.

We've also talked about reaching out to the monarchy nation, which I think could be a really

Fascinating thing to do, but also very useful and obviously important in our community.

So when we think about the five minute walk circle, the 10 minute walk circle, I'm thinking about that tonight in terms of the communities that we've already touched and then those that we need to keep building out the network to touch.

Yeah, actually, I have a meeting with tomorrow with the county schools to talk about how to actually bring these types of workshops into the county schools and I think we could probably use that model with the city schools as well.

So, great suggestions, and they're happening.

and I think in terms of the community engagement, we are being really intentional about creating accessible tools that we can deploy across the region using the cohort as kind of a vetting option so that we can work with them and do true human-centered design so that we're not just creating things in our offices and then putting them out into the community.

We're actually working with the community

to think through how we share information, what information we share in order to enable people to come to the conversation as their best selves.

And I think those tools, while we're specifically designing them with the cohort for their community, those tools will be as accessible to the chamber, to classrooms.

across the community so that we'll have the best availability of information and design strategies that really reflect the needs of the entire community.

And that's really at the heart of it, right?

We want it all to be, of course, accessible to you and to the elected officials.

But at the end of the day, we're going to need our community to take action and feel vested in this work.

Thank you both.

So going to close out our portion and just to frame what's next.

We've distilled two potential strategies that are kind of a combination distillation of things that we've researched that we wanted to ask you all we felt like, you know,

What a golden opportunity to have the two planning commissions together with the kinds of expertise that are in the room to hopefully ask for your help thinking through some challenges.

So I'm hoping to kind of shift things here and we're really asking you all questions and interested in your conversation together and the sort of feedback insight wisdom that you have for us.

The way that we thought we could do that is by picking a couple of potential strategies that are

in the mix of consideration that affect likely both the mitigation side and the adaptation of resilience.

And to just kind of put those out for you, I'm going to share a couple of talking points just framing why we chose these, and we're basically asking

and I think it's a great opportunity to give us insight or ideas on how we can proceed with some of these challenges.

I know hopefully you have it in front of you.

I'll put them up on the board and sit down and then I can go back and forth.

But one of these potential strategies that should look familiar in some ways, we have a strategy like this in other documents, but it's one that because of its implications for

in the context of this work of elevating that to protecting areas that provide ecosystem services, land management and ownership strategies such as conservation easements, private open spaces.

So this is a distillation of strategies that other localities are pursuing in their resilience plans across the country.

And the framing that we wanted to kind of put out there for you all to help us think through is that many communities wrestle with attention between development

We're curious how we can take the increasingly extreme weather events that we're facing.

Try to think about a strategy like this, you know, sort of reframing it from like these things that are intention and how do we balance that to are there ways that we can actually regenerate and expand ecological health while also, you know, contributing to affordable housing, you know, developing in a way that brings more economic vitality.

That's something that I think you all go through all the time and through we love your help.

Yeah, actually, I would.

So, one great example of Albemarle County, Charlottesville has

We were actually the furthest southeastern occurrence of a very rare dogwood called Cornus Canandensis.

It was a little dogwood that only gets like, yay.

And normally lives in boreal forests up in Canada.

But there's a little pocket that survived since last Ice Age over 10,000 years ago that's still in Albemarle County.

Despite this, this is a plant, if you know, if we try to grow it, you know, down here at this, this altitude,

At the same time, despite its sensitivity to the climate, it's also a fire dependent species.

And so it lives in the Shenandoah National Forest.

Right now it's being choked out because they can't view controlled burns.

So you think about this, we have houses that are sort of spreading up the hill into the Shenandoah, which puts those houses at greater fire risk.

But it also makes it more difficult for control burns.

Thanks for that, Mr. Murray.

I think another one that comes to mind for me is pollinator friendly plants, pollinator species broadly and the impact on our agricultural systems.

So this is one, and if it's okay, I'm going to put them both out there for kind of, you know, comment on both.

They have perhaps some intersection.

The second one that we wanted to ask you all to help us think through is a strategy such as use more compact development and other techniques to increase walkability and accessibility, increasing transportation options during climate hazards, decreasing transportation costs.

from Baseline Public Health through more active transportation.

Our sense is that pursuing this strategy appears deceptively simple.

It's something that is prioritized in both of our localities comprehensive plans.

In the city's zoning update, likely play a major role in the county's zoning monitoring

It's also something that seems like many people agree is a good thing to pursue.

And then very often the kind of strategies on the ground to pursue that, like sort of mixed use, multimodal style development, you know, folks are often say, wow, I love that idea.

And then a project is proposed next door.

And it's like, no, no, right.

I'm coming out in force against it.

And so, you know, how can, how can we overcome some of those challenges?

with that, where maybe folks support it in theory and then don't want it when it's when it's nearby because of the kinds of beneficial outcomes that I don't need to tell you all about.

I get how this I'm for the county.

I get how this would work for for the airplane.

I get how this would work in Crozet.

I get at my work in Scottsville.

Which is interesting.

So let me come alongside, at one point we were talking about community hubs.

And my sense of some of the communities, not the sort of development, but the areas outside that there was significant pushback on community hubs.

and so I was just trying to figure out how do we even deal with the fact if if there's an emergency, how do we get those people who can't stay in place to a place of safety?

You know, sometimes we'll say, well, we go to Yancy School.

Well, you got to get to Yancy School.

If we have, and I won't even talk about what happened just recently, remember folks, we had a derecho here.

If you have any recollection what the roads look like outside of our sort of the system, it was a mess.

It was an absolute horror show when that derecho came from here.

Where do you get people to?

Where do you get them to?

And so we, in our conversation, it was like, why not?

Because you put one of those community centers out there, that means there's going to be a sandwich shop.

is going to be the same shop.

That means it's going to be this kind of shop.

And so the whole idea, I think the question is, how do you sort of speak more broadly?

I think it may be helpful if you say, you scare people.

And I don't like scaring people.

But I do think that in some sense, it's like, what will you do if the next time you're stuck?

Remember, we can also remember, we have 22 inches of snow on the ground here.

Not that long ago.

that basically shut us down.

It shut us completely down.

One of the reasons we're a VDOT place.

VDOT only has so many files that it can deploy.

And we are accounting like 460,000 acres.

I'd like to back up to you.

I don't like scaring people.

I don't either.

But

and we decided that we had an alarming amount of experience in this in 2022 and 2023.

Change is scary and I think none of this is going to work unless we've got a significant portion of the people enthusiastically on board.

for all of this to happen.

The community at large needs to have some sort of consensus that this is an important thing to do because change is scary and we're going to change things.

And it's going to cost money.

And it's really, really difficult, I think, to frame the appropriate fear in people's lizard brains for things that are going to happen 20 years from now if we do nothing.

We just don't seem to be good at that.

you know, getting pissed off because we're building a 10 story building next door.

Yeah, that's easy.

But it's right there.

But to have this sort of nebulous and then we've got this insidious group of mouth breathers who are in a position to say, Oh, none of this is actually happening.

And that's getting that's actually getting credence, right?

Where it's a it's complete crackpot and shouldn't get any at all.

But there are actually people running around you think

that this is some sort of, you know, thank God for the billionaires and oil company executives who, you know, or else for, you know, for uncovering this dastardly plot, otherwise the scientists would have gotten away with it.

I mean, you know, I mean, it's, and I think that those are sort of larger communication strategies that we have to have.

And I don't have a solution, but either one of these, we got to say 20 years from now, this is going to happen if we do nothing, as you said.

Well, maybe we need to define that pretty clearly and show how things were 20 years ago, and here's the change you can see.

Yeah, but I think that in implementation, if we don't get people bored that this is real and serious, and it doesn't cost money, and your life is actually going to change because of it on a larger scale than, hey, you've got a recycling bin now.

Just one thing, if I could just add to that conversation, and it is all we know most of the scaring part's okay, but.

Thinking through the opposite side of sort of scaring is education, in a sense, right?

So ways to answer, I think both of these strategies one way, and I know you're doing this, but is actually getting out there and saying, these are the benefits of open space.

These are the benefits of stormwater management.

This is the benefit of walkability.

This is et cetera, et cetera.

So I mean, I think that's just, once you instill that value,

in the residents that oftentimes it is less scary for change because they see the benefit of it from the start.

The other thing that just sort of strikes me in general about these two strategies is, you know, we've talked a lot recently as we're looking at AC44, that 95% of the county is in the rural areas.

And, you know, these are two questions, two strategies very skillfully chosen, I'm sure, in that one of them talks about open space, the other one talks about density.

So, you know, our development area,

We've decided, we collectively decided not to expand it.

So we're looking at density.

How do we create density within the development areas?

So I'll just call that out as an observation and think through this.

Yeah, so bring it back there to some of the strategies.

I think even thinking of an urban

We had some conversation before about the challenges of even getting green space in our growth areas.

Because to get a piece of green space means that rock can have to develop part of it.

So something can be offered back as a green space.

So those are real concerns.

I think some of the way that I think about it too is that we often

and all these conversations is because they hear the word density and they think it's going to be all concrete.

It's going to be all housing, no green space, a loss of service, worse traffic, worse schools.

So I think the infrastructure piece is very important.

But I also think in a very narrow way, footprint is also important.

And I'm kind of surprised that we haven't really looked at some of the particularly sensitive areas, riparian areas,

And instead of thinking in terms of the number of units in those areas, think about limiting the footprint.

Saying the footprint can only be so many square feet in those areas.

And I think that would do a whole lot to really change the conversation about some of these things.

We also have authority to require LID in some of these areas.

and I'm surprised that we're not using that.

So I think that that's, and then these areas, you know, are areas that, you know, are often used for pedestrian infrastructure, they can be used for walking and cycling and mining stuff, provides you that's really funny.

You know, conservation easements don't have to just be for rural areas, we think about them for rural areas, but you know, a lot of, you know, the somewhat of conservation district, a lot of the easements they hold are right here in these parts.

And so,

That's another strategy that we could be doing and thinking about protecting these areas long term.

Yeah, just one example.

We just finished a rezoning, which many of you know about North Fork, and up there we profited 200 acres of open space.

It's an development area.

It's got 3.7 million square feet of entitled development.

but we also, out of 565 acres, carved out 200 as permanent open space.

And to be quite honest with you, that's mostly floodplain and critical spaces.

So where developers can be looking at that and thinking about it, it's not just though, okay, this is convenient, sure, we'll put that proper out there because it makes us look good, but then how do you actually program that space?

And including that in the conversation is important.

Maybe we might have to go into places up for it.

So Rory and then I'll go.

You know, I think it's easy to look at that and say, you know, we should, you should allow more density.

maybe easy to overlook there, but a sort of a critical component of it is that you've almost in some senses done a good job of sometimes of having your new Greenfield developments be relatively dense and even have good connectivity and walkability within the development.

But because they're Greenfield

and they're happening as by and large in that kind of second ring of suburbs around your first ring suburbs that were developed, you know, 40 years ago and are not walkable.

They end up not being walkable to things or accessible to, you know, the urban center.

And so you end up with this density without accessibility.

To zoom out a little bit, the two potential strategies, as I read through them, I got through the packet and the guiding principles and like, okay, these are mostly very good, the long-term goals and like, yeah, right.

And I got to the two strategies, I was like, these are not the strategies that helps us get to those goals.

These are just status quo strategies, essentially.

in rural areas.

The others keep building somewhat dense units in the road areas.

Those are already happening and I don't really see how those solve our problem.

I don't think we're going to land use our way to real resilience.

I think we have to look at what are people's needs

And those needs are going to be food, water, electricity, safe quality homes, communications and connections.

And neither of these touch any of those directly, which is where I think we ought to be putting our energy.

If we talk about the first potential strategy, more conservation easements and private open spaces, I mean, I think there we can look at the rural areas and say, what do we grow?

Who makes a living in agriculture?

How do we do business?

Are there profit sharing and co-op models to get people into those fields so that there's food nearby when we need it, when there's crisis, as things change?

In the urban development area, yeah.

keep building more dense housing and also I think we have to say how do we very explicitly build more housing including social housing and other models of housing so that people who work for living can afford to live there and that's part of resiliency as our community.

There's missing things here that I didn't even see.

Like, for me, if I were thinking, like, all right, what's going to help us be more resilient?

It's going to be more robust electric and water backup systems.

It's going to be a radio in every home.

It's going to be more robust communication systems.

It's going to be third places to build those social networks, you know, we're talking about earlier.

So you do get to know your neighbors and people, you know, down the street.

10 seconds on that.

Yeah.

Charlottesville has got the densest zoning ordinance it can have.

We just spent the last couple of years blogging it to get more dense.

I'm aware.

And getting pushed back by some members of the community for the same reasons I alluded to earlier, look at the longer term picture.

So to us, strategy number two is a non-starter for the city of Charlottesville, because we've already done it.

and it's going to be years before we're going to revisit that to try to make it still dead serve.

So strategy two was easy enough.

It's like, okay, well done what we can do.

We talk about the density, but we don't have a public transportation network.

And I will gently suggest, I don't believe we're ever going to have a public transportation network.

And one of the reasons I say that is the way our two communities are built, I don't know how I can move public transit across those communities in a way to make the dollars work.

So if we took it, and I always get this.

So if I come from John Warren Parkway, up 29, come over to Burk Mar extended, come back to Ryall Road.

I don't have a way to get people there.

I got a lot of new housing up there.

I got a lot of new families going up there.

And then when what comes in and the North Fork and North Point, I don't have any options right now for those, except for micro-cap, I guess, to some degree.

I don't have options for people to not get out of their cars.

and so you've got to help me with not you, but we've got to help you.

I just thought at the start and I didn't know if these were just things to like start a conversation and they do seem pretty like we already agree on all that.

But what I'm noticing because we're both in the room with the city and the county, I think just the creating the larger strategies and the county saying like

We can work on this stuff, the city saying we can work on this stuff, connecting them, hopefully it's, you know, as best we can.

So maybe that's where, like in this whole list of things, it could be like, how does the county sort of fund, you know, to do this, how does the city do this, instead of saying like,

You know, we have, the city has their pros and cons.

You know, there's, there are things to work out in the county.

Is there things and they're not the same?

So how do those two like support each other?

So that these two, instead of being like two strategies, say like, how do these support each other?

Who's doing what where?

So I don't feel like a super pragmatic.

Critical slope waivers.

There's a reasonable argument to be made.

that inside the city of Charlottesville, we should just be like, done.

We're not doing that anymore.

Yes, we're not going to move away from that.

And the idea being that we could get more density out of that.

And in return for that, more people living here and more green space outside of the dense area.

Now, I'm not saying that's a bad idea or a good idea, but what I'm saying is that we would need some coordination in policy and in rulemaking that complement each other.

Even before you get to the county, let's go back to what they just told us.

The steep slopes were established because they were trying to provide some protection for Earth.

So if we take them out and we allow people to build them, that means we've got to have an integration to the stormwater management people.

That means we've also got to figure out a way what happens, not that all developers are all good people and good hearted people, but sometimes buildings move.

I mean, we, because I think we're moving towards a going to gross density.

We're no longer going to do that density, which in fact then says to the developer, you're all small people, you'll have really good people on your staff, figure out how to put it there.

But here's the things that you can't mess with.

I think what Phil is trying to get at is the critical slopes thing aside.

What we should be focusing on to enact that second point is building as much as close to UVA in downtown, the employment centers as we can.

And part of that is building a lot more in the city, which I think we've made a good first step to get towards and there's probably

You guys right now are on your comprehensive plan.

And I might throw out there that I think in your method of land use planning, of having individual area plans or whatever you're calling them now for each different place, you end up losing a bit of coherence there, where, for example, you have a ton of pending growth in Holly Mead, because when the place is 29,

Plan was made.

I assume there was lots of greenfield space.

It was, you know, way up 29 and that was in the designated growth area.

So of course you put a lot of growth up there and you end up with developments like North Fork and Brook Hill that are reasonably dense internally, but no connection and almost impossible to make to retrofit.

He met North Point.

North Point, sorry.

Yeah.

The Wetzel property, the Granger property that would have been that are right there already basically connected and would have been honestly better suited for that sort of much more intense growth.

We also need to, I mean, we talk about the Nimbians that we brought.

We had a really great plan for the Wetzel problem.

We had a fantastic plan.

Well, the people across the street just basically stormed the ramparts and called.

Some of us weren't, some people weren't here, but those of us who were on the board, they basically called us everything, but, you know, what was called on Sunday night.

So I think the conversation is when you're talking about how do we have community conversations with folks?

to say that if you want to remember, we all came here from someplace else, unless you have a piece of land that was here from the 1700s, and some people do, but a lot of people don't.

And so how do you have that conversation in this eclectic group?

And I will tell you, I live in a place right now where the senses has changed from old Charlottesville, old Albemarle, to new Albemarle, and they don't want to know their neighbors.

They could give a flip about their neighbor, but yet they expect the services to be like it was in Buchanan, Connecticut.

It's like, that ain't happening, brother.

You're living on the wrong road if you think they're going to come and deal with that.

So you've got this, we've got this interesting change that's happened here, where instead of becoming more community focused, like my colleague to the right one, I'm sensing that there's this

And how do we do it in a way that allows us to be a place that's safe, that's resilient, and that can think into the future of what of what the things that are going to happen to us.

Can I just, I'm sorry, just one quick tie out order for, what is it?

Thank you.

For those of you who are waiting for me to systematically go around, I'm not doing that.

So Commissioner Clayborne asked very kindly, are we going to go around to each person?

So if you have something to say, just feel free to jump in.

The second thing I'll just mention while I'm talking is to kind of bounce off these things as we think about it, tie it maybe back to some of your potential strategies is

is two things.

One is I think your question was about how can our community overcome the challenges associated with achieving these aims in practice so that we can realize the beneficial outcomes.

So that's one thing for us to think about how can our community overcome that.

The second thing is we talked a lot about density and bringing density to certain areas.

We haven't talked a lot about how do we think about infrastructure.

So we have mentioned infrastructure, but if you've got this density and we all want, because people are common, right?

People are showing up.

How do we handle that in a way that's thoughtful and forward thinking in terms of resilience?

I think we have to measure where we are with our infrastructure.

How stable is it?

Where do we want it to get to?

And how do we implement that as part of our development process and increasing density?

I just want to make a quick point.

I haven't made any points yet.

So just for the, you know, so I have a benefit of actually being on your side of the table because I was on the planning commission.

I didn't even chair it in Charlottesville.

So I did eight years there and I'm doing eight years here and then I'm done.

But honestly, too much.

But, you know, if you listen to our, if you're really bored and you are nothing to do on a Tuesday night, you want to listen to us, you'll hear this commission talks a lot about wanting more density.

And this commission also talks about the fact that we're not necessarily supporting expanding the growth theory because we think that that'll just like, it's like going on a diet by loosening your belt, you know, so we want to push

the density into what we do have.

Now, having said that, like Julian said, you know, we get like the stormtroopers coming out and saying, how dare you ruin our community with this, whatever the density is.

Density is a dirty word to a lot of people.

You know, when I lived in Belmont and we got the Belmont loss and one of the things we did was show people pictures of beautiful density to get people to say, oh, that wouldn't be so bad if that lot was developed more densely.

that a couple of single family houses, which was what the original idea was.

So I'm just saying that we're all on that side.

And in fact, you know, we've been saying like, could you please go a couple stories higher?

Like we were coming in and we're like, please go higher.

And you know, we get things like why don't want to put an elevator in or I want to make it stick built and then I can't say, you know, whatever.

So, you know, we're on that side, but I think it's bringing it back to the resiliency part.

You know, one of the things we talked about in our very last planning commission was, you know, how can we, if we want, we're not getting the density that we're putting in our coupling.

You know, we're, people are coming in at less than that.

Some of the complaints we hear is, well, it's your process is so hard, and it takes time, and it costs you a lot of money, and I want to bother with it.

So just come in with buy-right stuff.

So, you know, we are talking about what can we do to incentivize that?

So putting that resiliency lens on it, you know, is there something green that they do that they then get that sort of automatic bump up?

You know, we've done this for affordable housing, but you know, like if you put a green rooftop for your development, if you add extras, water quality treatment for your stormwater, if you make that trail connection, like making those kind of automated things that

Yeah, you can slide on through the development process if you're doing the green things that we want.

We don't really have incentives right now.

We really don't.

I think that you and infrastructure, which is you've got to come up with a way to induce, seduce, or otherwise encourage

You know, that building in those areas that you've designated for higher density.

Yeah, I'm sure you've Charlottesville got that a little easier than you because we got 10, 4 square miles and that's it.

You got to do what you got to do.

So, yeah, but, but things like infusion, you know, is it worth it to build in closer in these growth areas?

And I think that's going to require some investment now.

We're the commissioners.

We're not the board.

And we're not the legislature.

Right.

So the thing is that we're going, you know, we sometimes we talk like we're on the board of supervisors all the time.

Point is that, you know, we are going to, as a county city, have to put money and more money in the game.

We're going to have to actually build, you know, we can just say, please give us a sidewalk.

Please give us a track.

We're going to have to actually start coughing up some of that money, subsidizing some of these things to make this community, the green community that we want, it's going to be more infiltrative, withstand extreme weather, be more drought tolerant, be more water conservation based.

That's just gonna cost money.

I'm willing to pony up, but that's just me.

And I will suggest you should, everybody should be aware that our center of business is actually not where you think it is.

It's where he is.

There are more jobs outside UVA.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

I can't even walk to Hollywood.

Bring it all back to conservation easements and open spaces.

Commissioner Murray made a really good point earlier that like we you get these proffered open spaces and developments and then

They often are the perfect place to use for connectivity, but it's infeasible because they are private open spaces, right?

You guys are going through this now with the Greenway Trail, Biscuit Run Connector Greenway, where these are private HOA easements and you didn't get the connectivity

part of the proffer before.

And that's, I think, what really kills me about this strategy is, like, when they are conservation easements in open spaces, that doesn't even necessarily mean they're providing the ecosystem services you're asking for.

I think that's an excellent point.

I think there's a lot of localities that require green spaces dedicated that are

I think that also provides security for a lot of people because you know developments that you know you have this area that's this big green for a long time and then the developer comes back some years later says actually we're going to put houses there and they said well we were all promised that that was green space well

Either it is or it's not, and it's good to have that sense of security that, you know, this is what it's going to be.

So I definitely agree with that.

It's also worth noting that all easements are not made the same.

The kind of easements that my colleague was talking about, open space easements are not the same as conservation easements.

And so the problem is, is in Albemarle County, and also there's different models of easements as well.

But ordinary people don't have a lot of money.

They depend upon a different kind of easement where the rights are courteous.

And Albemarle did have a program like that called ACE, and then that was limited.

Yeah, exactly.

So the easement program that we do have is unfortunately not the kind that benefits smaller landowners and people with less financial resources.

And then as you score things like easements, we can choose.

We've done, in my opinion, a poor job in the past of doing things like

Looking at, are we really getting the maximum value for these measurements?

It may help with fire, but it won't help with climate.

May I interrupt for just a moment?

I know I saw a couple of hands and I want to hear from folks who haven't spoken, but I also wanted to just call out that Commissioner Firehock talked about a number of items that Serena put on the back whiteboard as potential follow-up questions

for some of what you all have already shared with us.

So you've started to, you know, you pointed out, okay, these are a little broad and you started to give us some almost more like precise strategic pathways to pursue.

Yeah, so in the in the design phase, we're going to serve up some of these great strategies that have been considered by other localities, much like the two that you're looking at today.

And in the conversation, I've just been capturing some of the questions that you all are asking about

How effective would these strategies be?

So when we start to consider, I think in the design phase, you're not only thinking about the possible ideas, but how they'll work.

And if we have enabling authority, what are the funding possibilities?

How are we going to measure it?

That's a design consideration, right?

And what are the benefits?

And then somebody said, how are we going to communicate or get the community behind it?

So these are all considerations that I would want to put forward as we

And we have this framework for each of the strategies and it all makes sense and we don't have to think about it after the fact because it's been considered

at the table.

And I would just add that if it's not clear, the difference

of Between Strategy 1 and 2 is alluding to the fact that the solutions in the county are going to be different from the solutions in the city.

So we have to figure out how to make those harmonious also, right?

But it's not as if you're going to have one plan that's going to apply to the very different conditions in the city versus the county that's going to

Julie, I can't follow up to that.

So, you know, as you transition to the design phase, you know, I think finding challenge and friction about change or what people sort of personal understandings are, or it could be an encumbrance as you try to move forward.

I wonder if there's a process actually more of a clean slate start and that you don't actually look at all of new friction points, but instead

you just worked almost just from scratch and so you actually identify a series of four lenses of what does Brazilian community look like and this one lens could be an urban community.

These are the things you need for Brazilian urban community and then you do here's a suburban lens that shows this is some different variations you know and talk about some ago and then move it to a rural and then move it to a natural and sort of have this sort of series of sort of ideal out

And so I think we're moving in that direction, but I just wanted to make that point.

Yeah, maybe there's an institutional lens or something or a corporate campus lens or something that's one of these guiding things.

And I think then people can sit there.

Michael, I would argue the parts of Charlottesville that actually look more suburban.

They look more rural.

Sabrina.

So you just ask the question, what else is there, do you engage community?

And so I do think it's engaging the development community, right, as part of it.

So I would say as much as we've heard while there's, you're from the community, every time we're going to build something or

But I don't think that's actually what's limiting us, at least in the county.

In a lot of the developments that have come forward, we're actually, and so it's the development community that's the limiting factor, the density in the county.

So how do we enable that higher density?

How do we enable, you know, adaptive reuse and infill projects in the county?

I think the city has had more success with that, but we haven't.

And they're just not building to that density for all the reasons that we hear, right?

Different building materials, fire, you know, fire code, if you have high rides and more elevators, everything else is more money, right?

What it comes down to.

So having a conversation with them, what would it take

to increase the density.

I think that the generative nature of what does it take or what does a resilient community look like?

That opens up the conversation to developers to say, oh, I think I could contribute in this way to this vision of what it means to be resilient.

So in addition to the density and how we get there, there's unsure.

I think when you do community workshops, you could do a similar framework, but you can start to identify what it looks like for those different constituent groups, and then it doesn't hit one against the other.

Yeah, I think truly, like to your point, you know, a picture does paint a thousand words.

If you can show an example of something that's really helpful.

The other thing on the flip side is, I wonder if there'd be a developer or developers that might think about partnering, and maybe it's residential developers, seems like it's more likely to do that, that could come together and create a pilot project.

and you know, maybe there's some incentive there, maybe there's a market incentive to them for marketing their homes or whatever it is that we are a pilot project, we are concerned about resilience, we're teaming together and this is how we're doing it and that becomes case study and also allows developers to work creatively to find ways to make things happen more efficiently.

The other thing I'd say with development community and we talked about incentives

It's easy to think, and you all know this, preacher of the choir, but you know, we think about incentives as, oh, we have to find the money for this, right?

It's not always that in the development community.

A lot of times it's time.

And so if there are ways that we can think about and ask to develop a community, okay, what is it that would make things more feasible for you in terms of bringing density, in terms of achieving these resilient goals and objectives?

How do we get there?

Other than paying you,

You know, I know they're going to say, well, tap fees, gosh, RWSA, so expensive.

Thank you for that.

How long do we want to go?

Because probably we can talk for about seven hours.

Are we thinking maybe wrapping things up around eight, eight, fifteen?

Is that about right?

Well, do we want, do we want to guess?

I just, I had a comment that I want to throw out before we end, but

So I know Rory kind of touched on connectivity and we have these different parts of the county and city being developed, but you can't get between them without driving.

and something that hasn't come up yet is VDOT and kind of our regional transportation planning and implementation process that is a more or less, you know, oiled machine.

It kind of goes on.

The MPO puts together projects from the jurisdictions.

Federal money comes in and these projects get built eventually or something like this.

I don't know how well it is built.

Things are being built.

and, but the scale of what VDOT is doing in the region is much larger than anything the city and county are doing.

Like I was looking, the last city capital improvement budget has 27 million over five years for all transportation investments and I think about 16 million of them I would classify as benefiting

you know like walking and cycling in the city and you know $16 million if you got spent $14 million on one intersection that has no pedestrian you know benefit whatsoever so and I think they're spending like over a hundred million dollars in projects most of which

do not move us closer to being a walkable, likeable community.

You should speak to that because that's actually

Yeah, I mean, VDOT is implementing projects that are proposed by the county and the city and the MPA.

Well, not the city, but the city implements some projects where it accurately doesn't implement them.

It's cancelled $35 million worth of products, but we

But, you know, the county sets its own transportation priorities beyond VDOT, or beyond smart scale, sort of directing VDOT what to do.

So I think we do sort of have the right people in the room, except to the extent that, you know, nothing any of the planning commissions do matter.

and Mary Lesnuss.

The kind of regional transportation, project implementation process.

One of that is that we don't listen to data.

And so every time this project come out in the county, people are saying, oh, the traffic count is this.

And they always just mean the traffic count cars.

And so we have traffic halts for pedestrians, cyclists, runners, but we don't use them.

And I think we need to start implementing that and making sure that when projects come forth, we say, well, pedestrians are using this area.

I think when you talk about project origination,

And I say it's not a well-oiled machine.

Like, I think that is something that really should have a lot more focus put on it, in particular, putting a resiliency and a climate lens on it.

And a broader, not just looking at where are the V-trans needs on the map, and oh, there's a lot of this intersection.

But, you know,

I know it's getting late so let's offer a couple of points that I don't want to be duplicative of some kind of story to them now.

For strategy one I think the first thing that they came to my mind is

How do we, in that lens of climate resilience and so forth, larger scale renewable energy and the inherent tension that will occur with like land use needs, and that needs to be reconciled.

And so.

Yeah.

But I think that is a key to getting us where we need to be, though, is that something we're going to have to tussle with.

And then on the second strategy,

around compact development.

I want to make sure that as we're having these conversations that for buildings, we need to incentivize resiliency, sustainability, carbon reduction for existing buildings.

A lot of what we've been talking about here is in the rainfield, but the data says almost half of architecture firm buildings right now in the U.S.

existing buildings.

And so it's inevitable that that's going to be a new set of constraints that we're going to have to contend with as we're starting to flesh out our strategies and start thinking about how that might be implemented around natural disasters, hazards, and risk.

A giant number of four points, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.

And so how we start looking at those avenues, what does that start to mean for, you know, infrastructure or site design or

You know, constraints.

So just want to make sure we also don't lose sight of that piece as we get further down the road.

And then lastly, I jot down business continuity for both public and private sectors.

So, you know, we had some rain from Helene.

School was closed for three days.

That's crippling for a lot of families, right?

So in terms of business continuity, how do we stay up and running as we think about site design, building design, planning, zoning, and what does that start to mean, right?

When we talk about

The words you use here, compact development and other techniques.

Can I walk to work when that happens, right?

So I'll end there, because I know people are probably hungry and they want to go home.

I just have a suggestion if it's helpful.

One is I was going to say any concluding remarks from anyone, but that could be another hour.

You guys ever watch Wait or listen to Wait Wait, don't tell me at the end, they're like, you know, this, they go around and everything.

So I'm going to model this and see if we can, if we can do this, just think of your top three items and not like a narrative, just top three items.

So cross-jurisdictional infrastructure considerations, that's one for me.

Two is education, pilot projects and case studies.

and everybody does this as well as you just did.

It's going to be faster than we can write it down.

So I'm going to ask you all to write them down and also send them to us.

We'll have minutes.

Speed around transportation, a unified transportation and a narrative that is about the possibility of tomorrow and a

I just think about, you know, if we got 15 inches of rain in two days, what happens, right?

And so where do people get food and water?

Where do people get electricity?

Where do we have communication and connections to do that?

Chris Firehock?

I'll try.

One thing we didn't even talk about is

regional pathways, regional greenways for connectivity so that people could, because we can still reconnect all this disconnected stuff we have, it is possible.

Just like we've done with Urbana Trail, incentivize green development.

and then I just want to plus one that idea that Michael, you said this about thinking more about not just like the county in the city, but like suburban, urban and rural.

And it's okay that we have different strategies for those different situations.

Sorry, Murray.

I was sorry.

You know, all the time.

and Flood Hazard Overlay.

I think we need a fire hazard overlay.

I think we also need significant incentives for structured parking.

I'll be redundant, I'll just give you one.

And it would be one of the strategies that we could have talked to about today, but I would put it in your mind about talking about it more in the future.

We have talked about it, and that is neighbors, neighborhoods, and how do we make them more resilient by creating unity and connection within them so they can support one another.

Commissioner Bivins talked about in his neighborhood how he's seeing it going the other way.

They're not talking to the neighbors.

They don't know the neighbors.

And I think we can all relate to some of that this changing.

They come in at night to sleep there and you don't see them throughout the day.

And so how do we do that?

How do we encourage that?

I can't consolidate my thoughts.

Okay, one thought, stupid thought.

There was some discussion that these strategies only slightly overlap.

To me, these both strategies are the same.

I don't see the difference between the two.

I'll keep it short.

Well, I got that done so fast, but it sounded profound.

So I have a lot of ideas.

I'm not going to consolidate.

Land value tax, or we could call it a sprawl tax.

We did it for centuries here in Virginia.

It's a way of making leapfrog development financially.

It's not unfeasible.

You just can't do those unpacking spaces.

You have to connect financially.

It's not legal, but it could be legal.

It's a neat current.

It's got recommendations to Charlottesville's legislative packet to legalize it in our region.

I think it would solve our transportation problems as well.

The idea of missing small, we talk a lot about missing middle.

There's an architect named Alfred Thoula, a beautiful graphic showing the missing small, which is in rural uses.

It's just gorgeous, and it's revelatory.

You see, you go, oh, yeah, we could legalize this, and it would be amazing.

Please look at that.

The positive vision for rural areas and then permit that by right.

What do we want to see in rural areas?

Not what we don't want, but what would be good for people with resiliency and then legalize that?

Neighborhood Commercial.

That's one of the few things that fell out between our comments and our rezoning.

We didn't realize maybe commercial was too much pushback, sandwiched anxiety.

That's one thing you can go for in the city.

Perfect candidate again.

They look for places that were historically allowed for commercial use and then legalized commercial in those places.

It's actually kind of preservation.

Right.

Lening land use based on current and future infrastructure.

That's something that Charlottesville did in our comprehensive plan.

Where is the infrastructure already?

Okay, maybe that's where stuff should go.

The limiting dwelling unit per acre measure.

We were getting a lot of great projects killed because they didn't meet the DUA requirements.

So we got rid of it.

It's great.

Bicycle parking mandate, no vehicular parking mandate.

That was relatively easy for anything for us to do.

Transformative, healthy, healthy climate helps out here.

Put the company's plan in the capital improvement plan.

It's something we did in Charlottesville over years.

Staff hated me for it, but it used transformers, including the dollars, go to public benefit instead of to random other directions.

It makes the plan happy.

It makes things happen in the real world stronger.

making a hierarchy of flood resilience and infrastructure, flooding is at this level, this stuff breaks, flooding is at this level, this stuff breaks, A, document what it is, and then B, plan to make it better.

Tobin Hogan has done this, and I think it's a great example.

That's what I've got here.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

The second thing is looking, is dealing with community bringing them along and harassing the, this is, you really need to pay attention to what's going to happen in 20 years if we do nothing.

And third, going back to my original comment, we need to make sure that as we build this plane, we know how to fly it.

and that means implementation strategy as a separate thing that we that we spend time thinking about how it fits.

Yeah, I'll just say, resilience hubs need micro grids, mass phone charging infrastructure and satellite internet.

And I hope you guys go talk to people in Asheville when they're less busy.

I also like the kind of not shaming people I think we have because you know when we're like oh yeah they already know this like just start from like how do you live now you know what's great about it and kind of building up um the partnership of everyone kind of taking their pieces of the puzzle and not the city doing everything the county do you know everyone's got like different strategies and then I think um

Also just sort of using some of the most vulnerable people as a judge of what we need.

I just wanted to urge clarity, simplicity, and positivity in this process.

Just so I think everyone's comments are great specifics, but I think you can sometimes lose sight of the high level ones just to, this is a scary path for everyone.

I mean, it's an existential thing.

I think a lot of people can just kind of hold up and be like, well, it's too late.

You can't do anything.

So I think making it incremental and really simple and achievable.

And I would imagine getting 80% of our region to do like 10% or 20% is better than getting 10%

Well just a couple quick ending things.

Secondly, be thinking about how we can continue to be helpful.

So hopefully this isn't the end of the discussion conversation.

You know, if you have other strategies that you want to bounce off, I don't know how we physically do that or email or whatever it is, but

This is great.

I mean, I think this is really, really fun to see.

And then the last thing I'll mention, at the risk of having somebody in the staff or something, I mean, hopefully we can do this again on other subjects and moving forward.

So thank you.

Next time, somebody has to buy dinner.

Thank you, everybody.