Board of Supervisors Strategic Planning Work Session   9/8/2017

as a

the beneficiaries of that and the figuring out what they want their neighborhood to be like, not having somebody else from outside who doesn't live there impose some kind of rigid structure on them which is going to cause the project to fail.

And we've learned enough about failure in other projects and other places not to want to replicate that.

So I'm very impressed with the effort, this appreciative inquiry

I think that's what it's called, which is underway and the engagement that so many families have.

It's changed the whole world over there.

That process alone will reduce county services need, I'm sure.

I put a three by additional employment opportunities because the employment opportunities there need to be for the residents who were there and a lot of them are in businesses already and probably it will blossom terrifically once

Let me say that that is exactly the type of input that we're looking for.

The increased tax base might be a byproduct of the other two's success, but I put a four on that.

So I said 1344, just as the way I was putting it down there.

So this is a long 15 years of seeing success happening here.

And I'm very, very concerned if there's now going to be an outside effort to try to make it conform to some piece of paper, some planning rules on paper.

I just want to be very watchful of that and I don't think any of us have the background or the information yet and probably the residents don't either about what sort of neighborhood service versus community service business is needed there.

Yeah, I was going to say that as we look at each one of the terms here, these are very value laden.

They sound neutral from a governmental standpoint, but they're actually loaded with significance.

I would flip the objective of reduction in county services, which is a negative stated goal from the standpoint of a community, and talk about increased self-sufficiency, economic self-sufficiency, which automatically carries with it, in all likelihood, a reduction in demand for county services.

Increased tax base doesn't speak to anything to me.

I think we're looking at a much more diversified tax base in this location because with the growth of small businesses, which is part of what is the objective, especially along old Lynchburg Road, the tax base will grow.

The properties themselves, because of enhanced value, no longer being trailers,

will have a benefit in terms of the tax base.

So we're gonna diversify and deepen the tax base.

There will be employment opportunities, but they will be also diversified employment opportunities.

And we hope some of those employment opportunities are going to be locally based so that people will not need to use public transportation and automobile to get to work.

High quality, affordable housing.

High quality is an extremely value laden term.

What does it mean?

Does this mean it has to be an architecturally designed?

One of the things I

I think I would flip it around and say organically developed appropriate affordable housing units because this community needs to develop organically to the lay of the land.

There was a lot of discussion two days ago with Habitat.

by two planning commissioners and two supervisors about trying to ensure that a landscape architect comes in and actually Dr. Hurt in the development of this project did end up putting the trailers more or less topographically appropriately in place.

And so one followed just high quality affordable housing units

That doesn't mean that necessarily fit with the actual topography that's there.

And so what I would urge staff to do, as Ann has so eloquently said it this morning, is to look at this project as one that is organic.

It's going to be evolving.

It's going to evolve in stages.

It's not going to evolve consistently because different members of the community are going to want different types of housing units.

and the challenge will be to figure out where to group them.

Do you group them in a mixed housing configuration with a single family housing next to a duplex, next to a maybe a three unit condominium?

I don't know how they're going to do it.

And that's very much, as Mark and I have discussed this morning, is a work in progress.

But I think we have to be very careful here.

I don't think that's your intention, Megan, in what you've presented here.

But I think we have to be careful that we don't come across as being directive and asking them to fit into our governmental box.

The board was very clear in saying that with Southwood this is our beta test for affordable housing because we could not prioritize it in the top tier because we had so many other priorities and I think there is a trust and confidence element there that letting them try to formulate

a plan that's going to work with the neighborhood and then come to us and for us to be creative and reflective enough to see how that's going to work within the configuration of the topography, the history, the culture in this location and let us run with it.

But I don't think you intended to do this at all, but left with these kind of criteria, we're asking them to fit inside a box.

and I don't think that that's going to work for them and I think it's going to end up creating frustration and confusion.

We have the opportunity in this project to do something that will be a nationwide project.

that people will come in throughout the country to see this project.

So let's permit them to do it right here with, once they get that formulated, then bring that county staff and community development and let's see how we can implement it.

Madam Chair, I was just going to comment on that.

One of the primary reasons for the resolution that was brought to the board last August around this was to acknowledge that this is different.

This is not a developer coming up with a project that fits within our current regulations and asks us to consider the merits of it.

It was specifically intended to be a collaborative approach.

I very much appreciate the input that we're getting and I know there's going to be more of it but the staff is genuinely interested in wanting to understand how it is that we can work in this collaborative way because this is outside of our normal way of doing this type of development, having the type of relationship.

One question, just leave a question.

So the process, the best process going forward would be a phase of rezoning that is the bubbles version, not the super details version, whatever you call that.

What do you call that?

Okay, so then there can be phase one, two, three, four, five, six, A, B, C, D, down to a J and things will develop along block by block and that allows them to have some success and that success then says to other families, oh I want to do that too and then there's another block that comes along.

I will say that the board probably should remember or just not remember but understand that this is a planning process which starts at that 30,000 foot level and staff teases our thoughts and imagination with things like this so I

I appreciate that because reading this stuff it makes me think of one the additional employment opportunities we talked about this Wednesday and that is access to things like that so you know obviously a big thing about bringing transit through and other things I think we need to measure that to some degree maybe not the employment actual jobs that are out there but the ability for people in this community to be able to access the jobs that they are seeking

With the reduction of county services, I would, it's up to the board as a majority to give direction, but I think we should track it to some degree, because it will be successful.

This is not, we're gonna see a reduction, and I think that's a factor that I think we need to celebrate when we are at the end of this project, or when y'all are at the end of this project.

And so on question two, I have a more, I guess, personal view of this because Alex has made a very good friend in Southwood.

And so I've been over there a couple times and she's a very energetic, intelligent girl.

And that's largely because of like the Boys and Girls Club and things that are there.

It's something that I think staff and the board should consider is that you have emerging community members living in that community that are looking for that sense of belonging, that sense of place, community, keep using that word, but if we build some sort of center or encourage some sort of center that fosters that,

I'd like to see it.

Good point.

Well, just to buy on, the high quality affordable housing, just I'd emphasize that in the same way we're talking about being creative in many other ways, that affordable not be in terms of

how much has to be subsidized in kind of the traditional way we do affordable housing but look for some of the new ideas that are happening around the country that make housing affordable because they're so energy efficient because they have solar panels because they have garden spaces people can

to grow some of their own food, the internet connections so that they can have a home business and sell things online or work from home on part of their time.

So I think that affordable housing is kind of a box that we're talking about that I think we should really think about what would make this just a good place to live, living in a house that's a third smaller than a traditional home because it's

Just on that narrow point I'd like to see that but I also think in terms I like always like the idea of tracking the cost of community services and seeing what works and what doesn't work I think that's a little awkward in this situation because

Part of the goal is to integrate the community into the general community and so to have this, I kind of don't like the idea of Southwood necessarily being here's the clear cut line and this is the number of people and these are the residents and across this line are the non-residents of Southwood.

I think there's a subtle discrimination, that's maybe a strong word, but a separation if we isolate the community so much that they're our test case and we're all like watching this through the bubble of terrarium or something and seeing it as separate.

I think though what Brad was getting at, Norman, was not to put them under the microscope but to say because of the opportunity to actually achieve measurable results here, it will behoove the county to develop tracking mechanisms to actually see those improvements and outcomes.

And with those improvements of outcomes, that becomes an increased attraction nationwide for other communities to undertake a similar effort.

And I think what Brad's talking about is a high degree of confidence.

that there will be those achievements so nothing would be set up to make people feel awkward about it and actually the residents as they come to realize the success of the changes that will probably enhance their sense of investment in their community and the uniqueness of the changes that have been undertaken through the auspices of

I asked the question right in the beginning, what does reduction in county services mean?

The reason why I did that is because I look at that and health, safety, and welfare is the most important.

Safety of our residents.

And so I read that as

our residents of this area are going to be safer than they were before.

And so I just look at that whole sentence in a much different way.

And so if we wanted to measure something, and I don't know how, I understand how do you define this specific area and what are you,

defining and what are you looking at and what are you tracking specifically.

I would like to make that emphasis on safety because that's what we want.

We want our residents to feel safe in their neighborhoods.

And if the police are going in there all the time, it's not that safe for the police and it's not that safe for our residents because obviously things are happening in their lives that they would rather not have happen.

Can I just respond to your point and that is that in Sunrise Community, which was also a trailer park that was renovated in the city by Habitat, the statistics are there in terms of the police reports of the number of visitations that had to be made by police officers responding to demand calls and those numbers dropped significantly as a result of moving from a trailer park environment

to a participant based built community along with an apartment building and Habitat does have those statistics available and again that's part I think of the Brad was urging us to do is to have overall a profile of those kind of statistics that will demonstrate success in this community in terms of quality of life

for residents.

Nothing's worse than living in a community and having police sirens awaken you at one and two and three a.m. when you've got to get up at five to go to work anyway.

I don't think I need to belabor this a lot.

I agree with what you've heard.

Certainly for me, affordable housing is critical.

I didn't go into this approving this project thinking I was going to be increasing the tax base at all.

That was not my intent.

My intent was to give the people of Southwood affordable housing

I struggle with high quality because I'm kind of like Rick, I'm not sure exactly what that means.

What I want there is what the people in that community want.

and that may be very different from what I would envision.

So it gets to Anne's point really well.

Increased tax base, again, reduction in county services is gonna be an outcome.

And I'm not gonna belabor it anymore, but you all get the point I think.

And I think we basically answered the second one.

Let me quickly go through the centers.

I think what I heard was a lot about what the residents want and really focusing on the neighborhood and the Southwood residents.

And so as we're helping them develop their rezoning package, we want it to be the most flexible and provide the uses that would give the residents the services and things that they desire.

Is that correct?

Okay.

And so as we move through the types of neighborhood centers,

You know, a neighborhood center really is the type of center that serves the immediate neighborhood.

I know it's a little hard, but as we're developing the bubble plan, helping them develop the bubble plan, we really need to know what kind of size and scale we're looking at here.

And I want to get some feedback on, is that, do we have an envision here, or is,

We really want that to be habitat and resident driven is what the feedback.

These are just some small examples of Commonwealth Drive is one of them or Carlton.

Carlton is another one.

probably not so much asphalt because one thing that people did say was in the heart of the neighborhood on Hickory and where the Boys and Girls Club is now is not a place where people want to have people from outside coming in to shop.

That's their neighborhood and their Boys and Girls Club area and where they want their kids to be safe walking across the street.

Now there is in one of the very bubbly plans I've seen sort of a commercial something along

Old Lynchburg Road in an area where it would be less desirable to have houses.

And a question I have because it just came up yesterday was is there a place in the Old Lynchburg Road area somewhere where a HUBZone could be created and therefore be a place of employment and also for fostering one of our businesses who really would like to come to someplace in Omaha County to grow?

a hundred more jobs but I don't know enough about those that category to know whether even this location would be a good one but I just we have to leave that envelope open so that we can see what happens and not try to say I mean in the first six years I was on the board there was lots of

pulling and tugging and process going on because the rules that had been written for a particular permit said 1500 square feet of this and 3000 square feet of that and all of a sudden the business on one side or the other either grew or shrank and then it didn't comply with what the rules were.

So if we could learn from that and say let's just step out of the way and say yes in here there's going to be some business and let it evolve as long as it meets the building code and the safety stuff, I hope that we can just step out of the way.

I think as far as scale, I guess what I'm asking for is how much of the bubble area should be designated for those types of uses that we want to see.

Again, I think the operant adjective that I'm hearing is prescriptive.

And I think when we actually look at the site itself, there is a center there today.

The center exists with the community center, with the educate department of school board center.

Habitat's offices are directly across the street from the community center.

So there is a center there and rather than prescribing that there be a center that fits a preordained concept of a commercial business services center.

I would urge us to realize that in this location given the culture that we're working with and the adjustment within America of that culture that if there's a desire on their part to set up a shopping business complex along Old Lynchburg Road that becomes the equivalent in

our terms on Route 29 to a strip mall type of situation where you have a variety of different businesses located there that are accessible by car or bike or walking and then within the community itself you have an expanded Boys and Girls Club, you have the school board

facility for in-community learning.

You have a community center.

You will probably ongoing have given the build-out of this facility over a decade a habitat office

and there may be other things that come in.

Maybe the Habitat office over time becomes replaced by a bank.

Wouldn't that be wonderful in that community that there's a desire to start saving.

They have the capacity, and some of them do already, but in a more significant way to be saving money and utilizing it within the community.

I don't think we need to beat to death the idea that we're not being prescriptioned.

I think they should have a cafe and have some commercial businesses because that's what a community has.

I think they get that.

Oh, I agree.

I don't think the direction is to specify, oh, you must have 50,000 square feet of X, Y, and Z.

It's more of what kind of opportunities should or could they be providing for their residents, and how that gets

Scaled into rezoning.

Does it have to be in the rezoning?

Well, the types of uses that ends up being in the rezoning.

Are we answering your question?

I'm concerned that you look concerned.

I'm looking at that and saying I don't understand what your questions are really.

I'm sorry.

We want flexibility.

I'm hearing from the board.

Adaptation that this community can, to some degree,

Because we need to help them get the plan that allows them to have the most flexibility and so that's why hearing what you've told us so far gives us direction on

Well the one I guess last question I had about the reduction in timeline would be you know we're looking at making the most innovative and creative use of our current

Zoning Ordinance in our current zoning districts and trying to help them determine which one to rezone to that would allow them the most flexibility for what needs and wants and desires that the residents have.

No, it's designated as urban density residential.

Would there be a rezoning?

So we've talked about doing a C-1 along Old Lynchburg Road commercial with a special use permit for R-15 for residential and then the rest of the property be the R-15 zoning strictly residential

and then we've also talked about plan residential district but that would require a more detailed plan which we don't really want to do here.

They can apply for special use permits for other uses that they might want to have that aren't strictly residential.

Major goals is to have room from the residents perspective is to have room for the people who are there to live and have their grandparents and grandchildren and everybody else living nearby so they can continue to do the familial things that they like to do.

But also I think it's an incredibly entrepreneurial community and so I don't want to have something that we're putting on saying making it harder for the people who

have their home occupations and all that kind of thing already, and who, based upon the way they like their neighborhood to be, might want to have the cantina on the corner by somebody's garage.

If we can just let go of this a little bit.

and think back to what took 100 years for Crozet to develop but it was a building at a time and everything was all mixed up and that's really putting what old towns have because they had the time to have it happen.

We're trying to sort of allow this to happen in 10 years and it's really hard to mentally get it all together.

It's what the Crozet community's been struggling with for two years is

The developer says, what would you like?

And we're all going, we know what we don't want.

We know what we like when we see it, but it's hard to describe.

As your official timekeeper, we've already spent almost an hour.

We're actually, you know, we've spent the appropriate amount of time on this topic.

This was the big topic for today folks.

Could I just add before we finish that I would urge also approaching this project with the degree of imagination and creativity that we're bringing to Rio 29 and looking at form-based code, looking at performance measures,

I'll just say that that is a longer process and would require more resources than what we're currently working towards, trying to look creatively at our current ordinance in order for them to get the uses and

We'd be using our current ordinance for setbacks and heights.

Yep.

That seems pretty simple to me.

I'm not in favor of that, getting into a special exemption world.

That doesn't serve either party's interest.

Residents are eager to see something happen, and that's what we're trying to work towards.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, we just wanted to clarify the resolution and the wording in it, and you've done that.

Thank you very much.

Quick deep breath.

Alright.

Here comes Mark.

I'm going to try to go through this pretty quickly here.

This is about one of your strategies that's a little bit on the open-ended side here and being an engineer I always like Stephen Covey and focus by begin with the end of the mind.

So with that looking at what is your strategy by January 2019 increase the support for planning efforts and improvement actions to address the neighborhood level needs.

Well that's obviously pretty open-ended.

So for today what I'm really trying to focus on is to examine what our current efforts have been in this regard in defining our expectations for success, making sure we're on track.

For staff right now we've been looking towards the comprehensive plan which is the board's policy in this direction.

and I'm not gonna read the goal, but I have put it up there and also put up some of the indicators that we have for success from the implementation chapter of the comprehensive plan and that kind of gives us some of the measures that we look to when we look at this strategy and whether we seem to be succeeding at what it's trying to accomplish.

Doing that and looking at that strategy, breaking it into the two parts, increasing the support for planning efforts,

We all recognize that the planning efforts are just a means to an end.

Having planners doesn't necessarily accomplish the board's purpose, except where those are the limiting factors for that success.

So what we're looking at is refinement and prioritization of urban needs would be a typical thing for the planning efforts and prompt identification of emerging issues.

Are we doing that?

Are we doing it at an acceptable level?

and then as far as improving actions to address the neighborhood level needs those are the obvious ones that you all see all the time infrastructure needs, service needs and then the one that we see is kind of an emerging area is the partnership needs what we just talked about here with Habitat and we're recognizing that those partnership

needs create a new resource demand that we haven't really fully recognized.

Habitat, all the successes we're having working with them, it is taking a lot of staff effort on our end to be able to put that in place.

So that's another potential need out there.

With that said,

In looking at defining those expectations and measuring success, I have noted that we've done a lot of things.

We've got a conference plan update in place now, and if you go to the implementation chapter of it,

It does a pretty good job of defining a lot of those measures of success that I've shown and that's what we've been using.

We've got master plans adopted for the development areas now, including those for the southern area that we got into the 2015 comp plan update.

So we've got that in place.

We've got the community advisory committees in place and they seem to be functioning pretty well and supporting the implementation of those master plans.

So that seems to be working well.

We're seeing partnerships strengthen the Southwood going on right now.

We're seeing funding, the NFE, being provided for the neighborhood needs.

We're starting to see that get into place there.

We also see we've hired a new neighborhood planner to assist with those efforts trying to help with those CACs and neighborhood needs there.

All that great stuff as far as from a staff perspective.

What we're also looking at, are there possibilities with additional resources?

And yeah, there are.

We can accelerate some of the master plan updates.

Later on this morning you're going to have a discussion about the Pantops master plan and recognizing that that was last done, last updated in 2008.

as they're looking at some of the other master plans out there.

Is the board seeing a need to be a little more, to accelerate those efforts?

Refinement of neighborhood expectations and prioritizations.

One of the other things we're looking at right now is developing

a inventory of the infrastructure and services that are being provided in these neighborhoods and then trying to overlay some prioritization with that so that you can get some kind of a gap analysis to figure out where is it based on our priorities and that inventory we need to be focusing those infrastructure needs on those infrastructure needs where we need to be focusing on those service needs where we need to do a better job on

developing partners to work with us on that.

And then of course as always is expand funding for neighborhood improvements.

That's always out there as a possibility but really we see that

An important part of that is making sure that we have those neighborhood expectations well defined.

Mark if I could just ask you in light of our previous discussion would it be helpful for the county to put more of an emphasis in planning formulation on the applicants and then at the same time getting greater clarity as you did today from the board about the direction of the implementation process

earlier on so that your staff is not belabored with a series of meetings where, in a sense, you're spinning circles because the people that are responsible for doing the formulation are not feeling that there's enough clarity, that they want to know where the board stands.

In other words, bringing the board earlier into the formulation process

and providing your staff with a clarity on how to proceed and then in turn put more responsibility on the applicant to actually formulate by the contours provided by staff and the division provided by the board and to fill in the dots

and therefore come back with that kind of a plan.

Well, that's a great question, Mr. Randolph, because it really comes back to defining those expectations of the board.

If we seem to be falling short of those expectations for the board, then yes, we probably should be putting more effort, more resources to that on the front end.

Frankly, this is all about we're looking at that January 2019 date for this and you don't want the board feeling surprised or let down at that time that we haven't accomplished what you wanted us to with this strategy.

That's the clarity we're looking for today.

In a nutshell, looking at this, do we seem to be on track?

And then I really had two questions from that.

if I can make this thing work.

Are our current efforts, do they seem to be meeting your, for planning efforts, do they seem to be meeting your expectations?

Do we seem to be falling short any place?

Is there some place that we should focus more of our efforts?

Are there things you're seeing?

And then the second part of that question is are the implementation actions that I showed in that previous slide, do those seem to be meeting your expectations

Are there other things that we need to be putting more focus on?

I might have missed something.

I apologize.

But are we predominantly talking about the master plans, the Rio and the hydraulic and the Southwood?

Well, not necessarily.

Not necessarily.

I go back to the strategy that's up at the top of the page.

As you can see, it's worded pretty open-ended.

and I'm just trying to outline through this slide what we seem to have done in regard to success with that strategy.

This is a check-in, a moment for clarity.

Do we seem to be on track?

Do we seem to be falling short any place?

I guess I'll answer that with a question.

This chart with the sort of different possibilities of things we could be doing has helped me to figure out what the next step would be because I really haven't known how we would carry out those four bullets at the bottom particularly.

but these are ways to certainly look at them that's good and I also know that in the last year we have made a wheelbarrow full of demands of updating and all that stuff so I know that your available time 60 hours a week has been focused on

working with Greg to get the codes done and all that kind of thing.

I guess sometime in the next six months or so that's going to be wrapping up.

Some of those 55 things you've been working on will be coming to completion during 2018 anyway.

In my brain I'm looking for beyond that task.

going forward.

Yeah, I think you're right on track because what we're really trying to ask here is we're starting into the budget cycle for FY19 now and looking at these.

We look at acceleration master plans.

So that's a, we're resource limited right now.

If I heard the board say,

We really need to put more effort on that.

I would probably be advising you, we're still looking at it, but I'd probably be advising you we need additional neighborhood planners to start working with those CACs to try to get on that effort.

Same way with improving and expanding partnerships.

We're kind of resource limited.

Southwood has taken about twice the time that we estimated it was going to take for staff.

The second one will be easier.

We're getting that.

Refinement of neighborhood expectations and prioritizations.

One of the things we've laid out is the idea that we could contract out some services in helping us to do this, do this inventory and then working with the community to try to develop a prioritization.

That seems more of a one-time effort at least to get it rolling.

Ongoing it may be different but a requirement for some one-time money to get that inventory developed and then start trying to prioritize it.

and then the other thing is just the amount of improvements you're seeing out there in your neighborhoods.

I know each and every one of you is certainly hearing from all your constituents about that.

Do we seem to be addressing the needs at the current level or do we need to put, we've got this whole list of things through the comprehensive plan for the implementation for improvement, infrastructure and services.

I have a question, but it's an example of something that I know is challenging for staff because there's only so many hours in a day.

In my little world over there on Old Lynchburg Road extended in Sunset, we have a whole plethora of different projects coming in, and we need sidewalks, and some of the developers are putting in sidewalks, some of them are putting in asphalt paths,

then there's a gap and there's this puzzle of connecting all these different things and I know that our transportation planner has been working hard and trying to get all these things together but that's something that there's only so much time I guess to reach out to these developers, figure out exactly what they're willing to do and how those match together and trying to make them work

as a bike pet.

So is that something that you feel like you're already got staff for?

Yes, that's it.

If it was just looking over at Sunset, we could easily handle that.

But if we're trying to

looking at that and trying to determine how does that, how's the priority on that versus doing improvements in Four Seasons or doing improvements on East Rio.

We need more, we need better information right now than what we have.

I think it's a timing issue because you gotta get to those developers before they get the development in to be able to work with them.

I would say that not specifically reflected in the context of this priority is the need to address our capacity in transportation

Management.

So that's not necessarily reflected in the bullets it has there, but whether it's bike ped, transit, or overall transportation planning efforts, that you should expect to be seeing some of that reflected in your upcoming conversations around five-year, two-year, and one-year budgeting.

So I just want to make sure that not everything that is a priority is captured in these specific strategic areas.

It strikes me, Mark, that you've illustrated a problem we dealt with in the Rural Road Improvement Program, and that is

The board established criteria to prioritize on an annual basis which projects are deserving of resurfacing in the rural area.

It sounds to me like it would be helpful for staff to have the board provide criteria for these kind of neighborhood improvements.

So that they can be prioritized on an annual basis with staff so that you know what is the most compelling project and which is the least important of those projects.

So I think that that's something that is doable.

and I think it would be helpful for everybody especially for members of the community because they would know that there is some objective criteria that this is not a will-o'-the-wisp decision by the board or magically Tinkerbell spreading gold dust and all of a sudden their project is getting funded and another one is not.

That would be a forward step.

The other thing I do want to point out is that we did talk, I'm thinking the funding side of this, we did talk about NIFI is a one-time funding project based on fiscal year 16 surplus.

We've raised considerable expectations

now out in the CAC communities, and they've developed, in some cases, laundry lists of projects with very high price tags attached to some of those projects.

So I think, you know, you're going to need clarification from this board that in terms of neighborhood improvements, how do we go about approaching them?

Are we making NFE a permanent, ongoing county program?

or is it going to be consistent with the original parameters, which was that it was a one-year surplus-related program.

Because otherwise, we're eating into the CIP here.

This is going to be a piecemeal consumption of the CIP, the equivalent of kind of putting ants around the cheese.

A lot of ants.

A great way to understand that every single magisterial district has a list as long as you're armed.

Most of it has come out of the master plans.

The younger neighborhoods master plans haven't had the chance to get such a backlog and a lot of their older communities everywhere which were built

certainly Canterbury Hills and my Tabor and Park neighborhoods that were built without sidewalks in the 40s and 50s and now that over the last 20 years neighborhoods have been built in the interior so that all the 5,000 people a day going up and down Park and Tabor in an old neighborhood where there are no sidewalks to get to the newer West Halls and that kind of thing has created absolute misery for those older neighborhoods and putting sidewalks in there we discovered to our sadness is an astronomically expensive

I think the great benefit of the NIFI project as we've had it, as messy as it is, is that people have really come to understand, yes, all these things would be wonderful, and we're gonna try to figure out how to get that big mass of traffic to come in some other way, but we're not gonna be able to snap our fingers and say, yes, Park and Tabor are gonna have a sidewalk this year, next year, or even five years from now.

But in the districts is where those discussions should be happening.

in my opinion.

So I would love to see, and I think every one of the Magisterial districts has a great long list of investments, but I think keeping, rather than having the board have to pick and choose between one in Rio and one over here and one there, if there's some way to say a project in each district is somehow winding its way to the top,

depending on the prioritization of that district and the needs of it.

I think that will help people to feel that things are being spread around properly.

Every single one has both urban and rural so we have

The Equal Challenges, all six of us.

And I think it'll also, having to face those realities at the citizen level really gets people together to say, okay, well, if that's not gonna happen, then we're gonna go find a way to make it happen.

And we're gonna find the money for Western Park somewhere else and get it going instead of waiting for the county to do it in 15 years.

That to me is a wonderful byproduct of these discussions is that people say, oh, well, we can take care of that.

And I mean, there are a lot of things I've marked local on this chart here, flowerbeds and all that kind of thing.

Those are things that local groups love to do and are very engaged in doing in other places.

in a way.

Something really quick here on deciding who gets what when.

I think one thing we have to remember is the timing of when these developments are going in because a lot of times we can save money if we have one little section to connect or if we can work with the developer and say we need you to do it this way because this next development next to you is going to do it in some other way.

So I'd like to get the timing of the development somewhere in that prioritization, because I know we all have those problems.

Mark, I want to get back to your questions.

Well, thank you.

I was actually going to jump to that, because based on what I'm hearing and what you're trying to feed back on is the current planning efforts

There's more that we could do in a special focus on identifying and prioritizing those infrastructure needs is important to the board.

I would also add planning to that.

That's good.

That's the feedback I wanted.

And then with the other one are the implementation actions meeting the expectations.

I believe what I've heard from the board is if NIFA's done nothing else, it's helped

that some are going to make it and some are not and that's a fact that people just have to face but you're going to get a hundred wild ideas and five or ten or fifteen or twenty really really great essential ones and then we have to pull it prioritizing the health and safety ones first for sure as you already do but I think your implementation actions is

based upon the budget we've given you, you're going gangbusters.

But the implementation actions also relates back to what Liz was saying about working more closely with the development community as projects come online to try and make sure we're not missing opportunities to working more closely with potential partners out there, a garden club for your flower bed, for example, to find those opportunities where

The Lions Club was all set to buy and plant and water and care for a hundred great big trees for Jarman's Gap only to find out that all the utilities had been spread out into all those yards and so

The longtime dream of the shaded sidewalk went down the drain.

Very discouraging.

But that's just one example.

They had thousands of dollars saved up.

They were ready to go to town on this.

One thought I had about this is, and it's just an aside, if sidewalks become such a compelling imperative in communities such as off of Old Lynchburg Road and on Old Lynchburg Road and Crozet and other areas, it may be the time for the county actually to think about creating a public works department.

that is involved with sidewalk construction because then we can get into an analysis of whether we're better off utilizing the private sector or whether we can drive higher efficiencies in doing it ourselves.

and because the crazy quilt pattern of having private sector put a sidewalk in and then we have earth there and a trail it's embarrassing I mean we're a county that if we're expecting to put affordable housing in the location and the as was indicated the board two days ago that the bus stop is a fifth of a mile away

We should enable people in the affordable housing to access that bus stop in a safe fashion, getting there through a paved surface and not have to walk through weeds, trash infested weeds.

If the private sector is not going to be able to build it for us in a cost-effective matter, we may need, given the scale of the infrastructure requirements out there, to think about that.

Just two quick things.

One, I think we need to remember

that when it comes down to it, the county's going to need money to invest in the infrastructure.

That means that I think the future board will be probably looking at another bond referendum for infrastructure improvements.

One, it's the most effective way of financially going after this, and then it's also efficient, I guess.

We saw that with the school improvements just the other day.

We saw that there was a cost benefit of the premiums related to us going out for bonds and such.

That said, you've got to remember that that's what

We have to put out there that gets the community support.

So like the school's bond referendum, there's going to be a lot of buy-in that has to be done.

So as we go through these processes, we have to remember that it's, I hate to say it, but it's a sales pitch to the community that this is what we're building up to for you to vote on one day.

the other is clearly with NIFI and some other things this is a wildly complex thing there are projects that are very small that you know we can look at local partners very minor investments there are things that I feel like we need to be planning for that relate with partnerships and and in my world that I deal with the best prepared entity usually receives the best amount of money

And I think that's one tier of this is that we've just got to be really prepared for those opportunities that come up.

And then you would have a third tier of things that you're just not going to get anybody to help us with that we're going to have to do some really hard decision making to actually figure out how to fund these things.

Things like sidewalks, you're not going to get too much money to build sidewalks.

Regardless of whatever matching money we might get from the state, that could be best utilized somewhere else or something.

and we should be looking at service districts.

And I would just like to add, I think that's true from what I've heard, Mark.

I would just like to add that in representing the older, we've also got Berkeley, Hessian Hills, some of the ones along Georgetown, this is all well and good.

But if we don't create the structure in our ordinances,

Right now everything is by complaint.

We need some ordinances to protect some of the homeowners and some of the renters and some of the folks in these older neighborhoods.

That's a whole different issue, and I don't want to take us down into a swirl on that today, but I don't want us to overlook the fact that we do need to look after these high density older neighborhoods, a way of protecting people that are living in those neighborhoods from, I don't want to use the word developer, but from people, because what's happening is, of course, people are coming in and buying up all kinds of pieces of property and then renting them.

they may live in Timbuktu and because we are complaint driven we don't have the ordinances to help the neighbors and the people that are actually living in those homes to get to maintain the quality of those neighborhoods or those homes.

You get what I'm trying to say.

And so what we need to do is not only this but we also need to be looking at our ordinances is what I'm saying.

So what we have, I mean I can give you one example of one person or several people in an apartment in an older neighborhood who have nine to twelve cars that they're parking along the street and now are driving tow trucks.

and parking the tow truck.

So we can't let that happen.

And what happens is there are lots of these areas where, you know, if it's in the rural area and people are on large pieces of property, that's okay.

If you're on a

We can talk about

I don't want to say wind addressing because that's not true.

This is really important.

I really want to address, you said that what you're hearing is that you're not meeting our expectations.

I want to just say that your staff, you have really excellent staff.

It's been a pleasure really working with them for the last three years and nine months.

I think you have competing expectations with the six of us.

So for you to say you're not meeting our expectations is not fair to you and your staff.

I think it really is on us that this board is wrestling with those expectations and that's manifesting onto you and your staff.

So I just want to make sure that

And Brad makes a really good point, because I certainly didn't mean to say that you weren't, your staff was not me.

you see more needs out there.

Well thank you.

Especially with advice on things that aren't necessarily government related like the Cars Brook Lake.

Fantastic.

Thanks, Mark.

This was great.

Thank you.

And you all really have done a lot of work.

You did.

Now, what I have on the agenda is a break right now.

We could take a break.

We could keep going.

It depends on how you all feel.

That sounds great.

So then we're going to move to Trevor and talk about public works, Rick.

All right.

Thank you, Trevor.

You were exactly right, because I agreed very quickly with Mark, because I was trying to... You're right.

Well, we want to avoid having to get into the scenario of doing urban rehabilitation, which generally means tear down houses, so the more we can do preservation and restoration, the better.

Yeah.

And Madam Chair, members of the board, my name's Trevor Henry, the Director of Facilities and Environmental Services, along with Michael Freitas, our Chief of Public Works Division.

We're honored to be here to talk to you about public works level of service.

And it's really interesting that, I think it was intentional by Christy, but it's been a really interesting kind of segue of conversation from Southwood to Mark's presentation on neighborhood level

needs from a planning perspective to now the maintenance and implementation.

And so I look forward to the conversation.

This is something we as staff have been working on for a while.

To Rick's point, just a few minutes ago, we are a public works division, not a department.

And so there's kind of a significant difference in those two things.

Part of what we'll talk about is maybe the growth that we'll see over the next few years.

What I'm hoping to get today, though, is clarity on levels of service as we move forward into the budget cycle.

There are specific goals that are identified by the board to have in place by January 19, and much like what Mark said, I want to make sure that we

So part of it is having that definition of success.

We have some ideas, some recommendations that I think will help us get there, but I'm really hoping to understand boards' expectations and hopefully at the end of the day we will be able to leave here with a plan to meet that.

So clarity on level services that directly input our 19 budget and five year planning process as well as we have some things we'd like to do in 18 that we have funding for that I think are just worth mentioning so making sure we have concurrence on that.

agenda, I'll go through quick.

My goal is to in the presentation to be done in 15 or less so that there's plenty of time to talk about it and answer any questions that you might have.

So to touch on the goal, the initiatives that have been identified by the board,

A little bit of background on the work that we've done in preparing for today.

Current levels of service, this is something that the board has seen, but I think it's beneficial for maybe those that are watching the presentation, just as a kind of a baseline of information, and really the discussion is around the future levels of service and considerations.

So we'll just move right into it.

These are the strategic initiatives that we feel are directly related to public works and our role.

One is by 2019 work with partners to increase efforts to address aesthetic, appearance of entrance corridors and high visibility urban public spaces.

The second one

is by that same timeframe to improve the tearing physical conditions in the county, aging urban core areas.

Defined by the board, I think that work crosses many departments, but again, from an FES perspective, we feel strongly that we're on the implementation side of what these goals are.

The related ones are redevelopment of Rio and 29 intersection.

We think that there's likely a role for public works there.

And then items 2 and 12 on this list really are related to the storm water utility process, the mapping of our infrastructure which we presented on a couple of months ago that is well underway as well as in a separate path and separate project bringing the utility

with that we believe is an increase of maintenance and funding of our infrastructure which also ties to resources.

So we see these all kind of influence what we'll be doing in FES.

As I mentioned, we have been working on this.

I looked at January 2019 and said, okay, we need to be in action by then.

Backing that up means right now we need to be getting input for a budget process so that we have our funding and our resources underway to, again, be meeting those expectations.

But we have vetted this through staff, to the county executive leadership team.

We had a fantastic brainstorming session with staff.

across multiple divisions really helped us kind of hone in on the areas that in some cases validated some of our thoughts and identified some good ideas in other areas.

We briefed leadership council last week and here we are today.

So current coverage, again, I'll move quickly through this.

This is information that you saw in March, but I think it's a good baseline.

When we talk about entrance corridors,

and this isn't to study it, but it's really just to kind of give you a sense that it's really in the urban ring that we have current maintenance of roads.

This just expands into that and you can just see kind of that ring that feeds the transition from the rural areas of the county into the city of Charlottesville.

That is what is in the current scope of work.

Again, just a visual for that.

From a public works perspective as far as sidewalks and streets, this is really the one place in the county that FES currently does have a role in emptying the trash and doing maintenance of the biofilters that are, the in-line biofilters between the road and the sidewalk.

So we do have some experience kind of in this small area, but that is something that I think we're looking to potentially broaden.

and then we also have, we do have two entrance signs in the county, just the two north on 29 and south on 29 at the border.

We have a small maintenance staff that does some work both on facilities and grounds, but really limited to minor maintenance.

The big maintenance on the facilities is contracted, as is the big maintenance in that prior map, those areas of red that are right away that we have responsibility for.

That's primarily contract managed for mowing and landscaping.

Small budget, just over $50,000 a year and it's a frequency really from April to October is when we do the majority of that work.

We did expand with the

with VDOT's Rio work, Rio Grade Separating Interchange, excuse me for stumbling over that, the GSI as well as the Berkmar Bridge and Berkmar Extension and 29 Widening.

Those projects we have budgeted for some additional work there that is effective in 18, but to also mention that VDOT has confirmed a contractor is

When you say the contractor, so is someone from the company actually supposed to be mowing out of Berkmar?

Because it's four feet tall.

So our role can be to push the frequency of that maintenance a little bit.

So thinking about Berkmar for instance, I have a question.

Who takes care of the sidewalk where all the grass is growing up in between the cracks?

Old Berkmar, yeah.

I'll get to that.

It is VDOT.

That's our confusion.

They don't have any money.

I think that is a great segue into the areas of concern.

Can we set you up or what?

There's a difference between the warranty obligation and the quality obligation.

So after they let the trees die, then they replace them, but not take care of them all the time.

I would say the expectation is a frequency of maintenance and care as part of the warranty.

Again, if that is not happening, we have the ability to step in, but I do worry that that

I mean, I thought he said that.

They use local.

I would hope so.

I mean, I'm just saying they're here, and my understanding was they're around, so.

How about find them?

So that is one of the main areas of concerns that we've heard.

I think this picture depicts some of that.

Entrance corridor, medians, ramps have been discussed, overgrown trees along, and weeds along the sidewalk, sidewalks in general, district fair, litter, and then aging infrastructure in general.

This is a corner of Commonwealth and Greenbrier.

I'd say it's an undeveloped lot.

The smaller pictures, you can barely see it, are actually the guardrail, completely covered in everything.

Niffy, the CAC from this area has identified this is one of the Niffy projects and something that we're working on.

We contacted VDOT, we put a work order in.

VDOT cut that grass back a little bit, but it didn't really, I think, get to the level that we want, but this is the kind of thing where, again, the county can take responsibility for, but it's just a matter of really defining that and understanding what the cost of that is.

That's kind of a small example that I wanted to zoom in on.

Part of our discussion, and you obviously cannot see this well, we have some boards that we'll bring in on a break so that you can maybe get a little closer view to it.

But one of the things that staff did was to try to look at the county in general and better define what are the main routes of tourism, what are the main routes throughout the county.

And we used that in our brainstorming session with staff.

And again, it really provides some good ideas.

One of the recommendations out of that was to really think of those routes as gateway routes through the county instead of just calling them entrance corridors.

Entrance corridors have a very specific meaning in the comp plan and in code, but really kind of more broadly thinking of it from routes throughout the county and the experience that visitors might have.

Urban areas should be our development areas, which makes sense.

One of the big things that came out of that was considering a consideration for, and I'll say we're getting out of maybe the specific strategic initiative that the board set here, but one of the outcomes of that brainstorming session was

You know, kind of just what is the branding of a county throughout the year?

What is the branding of us throughout the county?

What is our wayfinding or lack thereof?

And we think that there's a lot of energy around that.

If you think about going from Nelson and Almore, all of the adjacent counties, how do we direct people to where they might want to go?

And I don't think we're real consistent on that or really have a

A system that is beyond what VDOT does now.

This may be one of those areas, and this is not a facilities environmental services just making something up.

I think this could be some community engagement opportunity, some input from the board, but this might be something that we want to do in parallel with some of this other stuff, but really try to develop that identity and wayfinding.

Yeah.

You know, if something, you know, as 29 and Rio maybe changes in a way, you know, they may be wanting to direct people there.

A simple example of that that Ann and I have dealt with a lot is the Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center, which is a great opportunity for tourists and all.

We can't even get a sign on Route 20.

How do we get them there?

So people, how are they gonna find it?

Thanks, Norman, that's a great example.

So it seems like that probably is a good place to put some energy in figuring that out.

But the focus that we really got from our, through this kind of iterative process was in the urban and development areas that focus on the pedestrian and the bicyclists, their experience in these areas.

And then in the rural areas, really, it's more about what the experience would be from an automobile.

One of the areas that I get the most emails about is Olengeburg Road, right where it goes from the four lanes.

to the double lane to the one narrow and I recognize that VDOT can only do so much ditching and so much trimming because they only have a certain amount of money but bicyclists have a huge problem on those

Yeah, that's really a VDOT.

Just a few more slides and then we'll get to the spreadsheet that was mentioned.

Which was great.

In fact, it was a public works spreadsheet, but it ties to the show we're talking about.

So what are potential expanded levels of service?

Extension of our current mowing and landscaping contract is pretty easy to do.

It's just a matter of defining linear miles and it's kind of scope and budget.

That's an easy thing to do.

Flower bed installations, we have an example of something that was done on the bypass a few years ago.

We have some cost around what that implementation was.

It's been handed over to the garden club that they maintain it.

Those kinds of things we can do, but we think need a little more input and guidance and planning.

But again, certainly doable.

We talked in March about investigating the pollinator program with VDOT and Michael and I went down and met with the program manager for VDOT about six weeks ago in Fredericksburg at the rest stop and really learned a lot about this program.

It's a pretty neat program.

I went in with some hope that there would be some dollar signs with it, you know, potentially for like

you know, a locality match and there's not.

It's really a, it's an internal program for VDOT that is, you know, modestly funded at that.

But I think there's some great things about this program that we could adopt.

I think what we learned and where VDOT can help us is kind of from the definition of the program, how they procured it,

the type of seed mix to use in certain areas.

There may be some options on funding.

I borrowed this next slide from

What is a pollinator?

Ann probably could give this science lesson to us, but I learned quite a bit from the meeting and I didn't realize that pollinators, be it butterflies, birds,

Don't worry about that.

The honeybees themselves is $15 million of that.

In some of the maintenance and landscaping work that we do, we can bring in

And just to go down and look at the biofilter in July, our biofilter by the parking lot, it is just roaring with humming and...

So we think there's application for this in certain areas, you know, certain areas along some of the main gateways, potentially at some of the off and on ramps, this might be a thing that we can do.

But part of our recommendation is we need to learn a little bit about how we might build these, how we manage them.

I think people would be very excited about it.

Other areas of levels of service expansion is certainly around litter.

We heard that back in March.

I'm not quite ready to check the block of success, but we're in final signatures with the jail on being able to utilize an inmate, weekend inmate crew, hopefully starting even within the month as soon as we can get the contract signed.

is getting decimated because of people throwing out trash and getting rodents going along the side of the road.

Could I also add that when we think about medians, you're looking at wildflowers.

The other thing that can be done even more cost effective is just plant clover.

These love clover and almost every single fertilizer out there that has a weed control element wipes out clover.

So some of the other areas that are part of an expansion program potentially

What does that mean?

Street sweeping the curbs.

And VDOT doesn't do that ever.

They only have one, they have one street sweeper now for the first time.

Joel is so excited.

I guess they will live in our area.

A year ago.

Oh cool.

He has one street sweeper for the whole

District, okay.

If this was something that we would want, we probably would want to fund.

We could spot that as an option, certainly.

Well, a lot of the streets that need this, the streets we're talking about don't have parking along them either.

Georgetown, for example.

Well, if you're talking about Georgetown, Hydraule, Barracks, and Golden Grads, he doesn't have, Ario, there's not parking on those streets.

Signage we talked about, the thought, and really what I have the picture of is the installation of benches, trash cans, bike racks, you know, someone suggested drinking fountains.

You know, those are things that maybe are, you know,

That's part of the planning for future developments.

You can retrofit that, but there's some complexity to that.

That's something that we could do.

So I'll reference you to the spreadsheet now and we tried to kind of summarize this in one view but the spreadsheet that Christy provided it breaks out

kind of categories of levels of service and work.

And it breaks out from a complexity perspective of low, which is a green, yellow is a medium, red is high.

And I wanna be careful to say complexity, because it's low doesn't mean that it's inexpensive.

It just takes money, yeah.

So expansion of,

of frequency of landscaping, of mowing, not just a frequency but an extension of that.

That's really not complex, it's just a matter of funding it and doing it.

That's an example of kind of a lower hanging fruit one.

Planting trees, vegetation control on sidewalks, those are some policy and

and some decision making that again, we can do, certainly do.

It's just a matter of making sure we get into it eyes wide open.

And one of the recommendations that we would have as it relates really to our neighborhoods and kind of getting an assessment of what's there now is going to neighborhood inventory.

A literal auditing of what's out there and what's the condition.

We think that kind of creates your baseline of what's there

then that helps on the planning side.

I'm sure there's a prioritization and a phasing and we'd have to work closely with Mark's group to do that.

It's a great idea to have the inventory.

It'd also be a good idea to have photographs of what it's supposed to look like so that the community agrees how far back they're gonna be.

I know in Keswick there was a huge controversy about

how far back the trees are going to be cut first and that's in opposition to the police needing sight lines and that kind of thing so it's not always as simple as just mowing or planting.

I think that's a great idea.

With respect to VDOT, they're supposed to do this now and they can only do it to the level that they do it, but they know how much money they spend in this area.

If we were to take over something from them, would we get any credit or some other work?

How would we work that?

Could they do a better job on some things?

The way it's worked today, and Michael probably can talk a little better to us than I can,

As we, you know, if you think back to that image that showed our entrance corridors that we currently maintain, you know, we have a permit with VDOT to go in and do that work.

We basically have taken the responsibility of maintenance of that area over.

I am not aware of any return of funding that we've received from VDOT for that equivalent scope of work.

Which area?

The area.

Entrance corridors.

The entrance corridors.

Okay.

The $50,000 of maintenance that we currently do

We do not get reimbursed for any of the stuff we're doing in the entrance corridors now with regard to mowing or landscaping.

About 11 years ago when I first got involved with it, VDOT was cutting, we'll say comedians on 29.

They cut back and so we tried to coordinate our schedule with theirs.

They would cut once a month, we would cut once a month on alternating weeks so it would

get cut twice a month, they stopped mowing all of a sudden and now we're doing it and now we've increased our frequency from originally once a month to twice a month.

One of the recommendations that we could do is increase that frequency more to once a week.

Our recommendation would be to try to implement some of the lower complexity items to have in place in FY19.

So we have action underway.

We're kind of chipping away at it.

It'll be iterative.

We'd like to work to try to find funding for the neighborhood inventories, at least to start that process.

It may not be comprehensive in every neighborhood in this fiscal year, but at least start that process to then help us build into

Planning for 20 and for 21 so that we can have better information, better planning, and things like Norman said have kind of the as is condition, here's what we would want it to be.

With that, though, is if we're taking on more responsibility than VDOT is not having to do, I would say we'd want to work closely with VDOT to try to work in agreement with them on a balance of the funding and the cost.

I don't know how that works and Greg might say we can or can't do that.

It seems that we should at least have that.

I have a question to Greg.

And that also means we don't require them, as that picture showed of the kudzu coming out of the sidewalk, to require them to mow their verges or something.

and do any states have any counties have the ability to do that now that we could just add on to an existing permission because we've had some success in the last 10 years of adding on to somebody else's ability to do something.

Well I'm thinking because there are rural areas, there's encroachment whenever there's a safety issue it seems like landowners should be responsible to make sure that their brush is not making it impossible for people to walk or drive or do whatever they're supposed to be doing in the public right-of-way and

Because if each person does their 150 feet, it's going to be a whole lot simpler than us hiring somebody and having all the cost of the machinery and everything else to go around and do it.

I'm not sure if this is exactly where this fits in, but in terms of entry corridors, I think the second largest entry corridor into Albemarle County is 250 coming from Richmond, but it's confusing because that's 250 way out in Zion's Crossroads.

Most people, of course, take 64 and get off, and when they're coming toward Charlottesville, the first welcoming sign they see is after they cross Free Bridge, it says welcome to Charlottesville.

and that was something that came up consistently in the NFE is that we have nothing that says welcome to Albemarle County, nothing to welcome to Jefferson's County or Pantops.

As we're improving some of these corridors, what we have along, I don't know if Brad has some of these areas or you have them,

but I certainly have them on Georgetown and Barracks Road and Hydraulics.

A lot of the signage, and it may be VDOT signage.

This may be something we could work out in an agreement with VDOT.

Some of these are 40 year old.

They're rotting at the bottom.

They were painted.

The wood now looks terrible.

They're usually skewed like this.

They just look awful.

They need to be replaced with good solid metal stakes that aren't as, you know, won't rot, number one.

I wonder if when we're talking to VDOT about trading off something, that if we do this, will you come through and replace a lot of those signs and clean them up and make them look better?

That may be a win-win for some of these areas.

it would improve the look so much because when you drive down a road and the signs are like this and they're half rotted at the bottom and the paint's all stripped off of them it really does start to look like third world.

Are you talking about street signs?

I'm not interested in trading anything.

They just need to do that.

They'll tell you they don't have the money or they can't.

They do it all the time.

I called them up a couple months ago to get one on Earlysville Road replaced and they did it within a week.

Yep, will do.

This next slide just is a, you know, it's a picture of some FEF staff, Environmental Services Division, and some of our grounds crew that came together to solve a pretty bad dream.

That looks like it.

Library, this is on the west side towards Daily Progress.

I only bring it up to say we can do on a very small scale these kinds of things, but to take two days and pull five staff off, that's what they're normally doing isn't happening.

We have the ability to do this work.

It's just that we're not resourced to really expand it more than kind of the one-offs.

And one of the issues, and really kind of segues into the next one, I think we're gonna make a recommendation of some expansion in 19.

One of the pieces that will affect us from an administration point is being able to manage these contracts.

So we do think we would need some additional, at least part-time, in-house to manage an expansion of contracts.

And then as the stormwater utility piece gets worked through, and as we understand the increase of maintenance of that program, we may get to a point, and this is worth some analysis, I think it's going to happen over the next year or so, where's that break even of doing contract work versus actually

getting a crew of three and a backhoe that you can do these kind of small capital maintenance projects.

So that analysis needs to happen.

I'm not ready to today to say when that is.

But I do think as we look at an expansion, as we talk about sidewalks, there may be more of a true kind of public works department.

Part of that assessment would be the volume of work that we could accomplish with a crew of three.

There are some intangibles.

We have term contractors now for trades.

What we have found is that sometimes these contractors are better than others and we have one now for kind of site work that we have a hard time getting, you know, we have the work, we need to do a correction.

They need to go off the list and not do them anymore.

They might go off the list.

The ability of having those resources under your own control is to be able to do

you know, what we did last month out at Northside.

You can plan it, you can get out there and you can take care of it.

Especially in the emergent situations, you have a better controlled response.

So, we're proposing, you know, for this year, we're in 18, we have a little additional funding that the board authorized for some expansion of mowing and landscaping.

We would like to, and we're looking internally to work with community development, identify neighborhoods and start

neighborhood inventory process.

We'd like to do that in this fiscal year within our existing funding that we'll work to find.

We have funding that we've asked to carry forward from 17 and 18 to implement the litter program, which we hope will start in the next few weeks.

I mentioned the additional mowing.

And then we believe we do have funding to do a test bed out at Fifth Street.

where we can have different seed mixes and different quadrants and be able to learn about growth and maintenance.

So these are things we'd like to do beyond the other stuff that we're normally doing.

This is what we'd like to do in this fiscal year.

In 19, we anticipate the litter cleanup program to be a success.

So we're anticipating wanting to carry that forward.

We do think that our off and on ramps could do some love.

And we have suggested 11 key intersections on 64 and 250 to consider adding some funding to maintain that in a way that, once a month instead of once a summer, which I think is what's happening right now.

and then over 19 we'll be defining additional programming then to feed into 20.

So it's kind of an iterative growing process.

I think the neighborhood inventory is a big piece of the puzzle and I would anticipate more work sessions with the board about programs and options and working closely with Mark's group as well.

I guess I kind of did recommendations and next steps all in the same.

I would say yes and to I know you're doing this already but to clearly define the things that we can't do or we can't do with volunteers and I know you've done that already but there will be a lot of people who would very much want to do something and that of course as you said it's like having an intern and having an intern takes a lot of work because you got to keep them busy Dan is always saying his trail builders make him

Crazy, because they're demanding to go to work every Saturday and he has to make sure he has something for them to do.

So there is that staff requirement even when you have other people helping a lot.

And for the assessment, share with us when you get it ready, how you plan to do it, because that's another thing where I've seen such incredible success with either, I mean in the old days you used to give kids cameras and they would go and take pictures and everything, but

with our CACs, we could certainly with their telephones help to create a mass of data without you having to do anything and then to take it in and filter it and be able to keep track so to set up a system where there's a reporting

and a series of pictures or something like that.

I mean, I do that all the time with the highway signs that pop up and breathe at the intersections and send Lisa Green a photograph and where it is and say, here it is, shall I get it?

Trevor, my one observation, having been in Colorado two weeks ago on litter cleanup, the biggest step we can take to cut costs on that is to have source separation and to actively seek community buy-in on having separate bins.

for recyclables versus trash and educate people.

Paper goes here, plastic goes here, and then everything else goes here.

They've embraced that because they're primarily reliant

on landfills, and they're running out of land, as everybody else is.

So the more we can, I'm not gonna flip this out of your budget, but to come over to the whole solid waste issue, the more we can actively promote recycling, the greater the likelihood that we're going to help reduce littering in the community.

And it really is a byproduct of a lack of awareness and education.

And I'll just throw in a pitch for that because Trevor's on the Solid Waste Authority Board of Directors with me and we've just gone through our strategic planning as I've said way too many times now with Hannah but they are looking at an education component

which they're going to end up reaching out to us at some point and giving us a budget.

Do we want to do that through, I mean, you gotta do it somehow and are we doing that through the water rates that go to the, excuse me, not the water rates, the Solid Waste Authority.

I think those are in the category of need further planning.

So it wasn't ready to put a budget number for 19.

I think that work that would happen over the next fiscal year could then help line it up for the future.

But certainly if the board said, you know what,

Yeah, that makes sense, but we want to have entrance Albemarle County signs at 250 East and West.

And that's a one time, in a way.

and at least in specific places.

On that same vein, I'm assuming you're going to say the same thing about this, when I look at increased mowing off main ramps, I have a tendency to want to put those bike-ped pedestrian sidewalk areas as a priority over

or both, but that's something that you have to go out and ascertain how many of those are and what it's going to take.

Yeah, we want to be consistent.

I'm not sure, because I've only drive it with great occasion, 20 going north over the James River coming into Scottsville.

There is a sign welcoming people to Scottsville, but not really to Albemarle County.

So again, Norman's point.

If I can give a quick answer to Ann's questions regarding vegetation and snow removal.

We're there.

If I could just offer up one more, you know, FES wants to provide excellent customer service and we're still working through the, you know, sidewalk inventory and maintenance and all that, but if you guys have a problem, you know,

Have fun.

I absolutely need to do that.

Absolutely you do.

Norman's going to take over.

I will return.

To be clear, Megan is not having another child.

No.

Yeah, and that's what I was just going to say.

We're going to take our 10-30 break now.

Thank you everyone for holding it, and we'll get back here at 11-30.

Okay, I think we're about ready to start up again.

Actually, I'll start us off.

I'm standing with the microphone.

I'm not planning on singing or entertaining, but just because we've got Andy here, I thought I would tee this up.

Trevor Henry, Director of Facilities and Environmental Services again, here to just provide really a follow-up update from the board meeting on Wednesday.

We

We really only have a couple things here to kind of come back on.

I just wanted to, you know, I know it was just two days ago, but we, you know, we presented on Wednesday, the board passed a resolution on climate action, and our big takeaway was around our climate action plan process.

And again, the board endorsed that, and so a lot of the work that, of defining what we want to do and when we want to do it is going to occur over the next

for 10 to 12 months.

So we really plan on getting our stakeholder group to establish this, the advisory panel stakeholder group this fall and starting to work through a recommendation of what our plan might be.

So again, I wanted to just kind of remind us that that was the main accomplishment for this effort was the resolution and then just getting the process agreed to.

Rick, you had some specific questions about fuel.

I said I would have them by today.

We need a little more time to get that data.

That's fine.

So I was a little optimistic in my response on Wednesday, but we will provide a full report in our quarterly report this fall.

We can also just email the board too if you prefer that.

But we did think that

Part of why we're talking today is not just about the planning process, but there may be some things that the board would like us to put in some funding for 19.

to include in our 19 budget.

And I was gonna let Andy walk through that if that's the pleasure of the board.

Thank you.

Hello, I'm Andy Lowe, Environmental Compliance Manager for Environmental Services Division.

And like Trevor said, we'll work on the plan to implement this process to get us a climate action plan to move forward with.

But in the meantime, we do know of some programs that are successful programs currently and in the past and

We wanted to share those and get kind of some direction on if the board likes those type of programs or not.

The first one I would point out is the Local Energy Alliance Program, LEAP, local nonprofit to work with residents and commercial building owners on their energy footprint to be electricity, natural gas,

quality control systems of the facilities.

And just as a reminder, with LEAP, the county has funded LEAP in the past.

The city and county, through a grant process with the Southeastern Energy Alliance, obtained grants to create LEAP.

And then with the Energy Block Grant, Albemarle County funded residential energy audits.

Program through 2010 through 2012.

So we have had that relationship in the past.

Currently, Charlottesville still operates several programs for city residents or city gas customers specifically that aren't offered to county residents.

And so there's opportunities for us to increase program availability for our

residential homeowners and our business owners.

LEAP can propose, you know, outreach and education goes with all of their programs, but we can work out a proposal so that we have a mix of residential, commercial, whatever type programs we want and kind of do it all at heart.

I stuck in a,

a price range based on some industry standards and what the city currently has been funding at over the past few years.

Charles will also fund it out of that same pot of federal energy money.

But their operational funds have continued since that 2012 timeframe.

So being in that situation LEAP also partners with other nonprofits in the area.

Better World, Betty, Terry Kent, everyone knows and loves.

Partnered with LEAP to get private funding through grants for the Better Business Challenge, which we've had two rounds in the past, the latest being 2013, 2014, and it's a friendly challenge just to engage business owners building

building owners of commercial structures to basically walk them through how to cut utility bills or transportation or waste cycles.

The Better Business Challenge, like I said, has been privately funded in the past.

The county has not directly funded that event.

Little staff time through interns in my own time, but very minimal.

Correct.

Terry is hard at it again.

Terry with this the amount of staff hours and effort beyond just you know dollar values was tremendous to get these two things off the ground but now there's a structure in place and so round three is supposed to build off of just the already existing structure

Correct.

This is a better world betting.

No conflict of interest.

Right.

And it relied on a lot of volunteer effort from the partnership with the University of Virginia Environmental Studies Department.

A lot of students came and baseline businesses like Flowing Hearth and all types to get them on the track of Energy Star and conservation efforts.

So that was a partnership with LEAP and Better World Betty to just specifically run those challenges.

But LEAP has other programs that continue outside of this business challenge.

points by down on effective financing rates for energy efficiencies for Charlottesville commercial building owners, subsidized and free energy audits for commercial structures.

So when I say there's an a la carte menu, there's other programs that we could

And then just the third program kind of we've been in the effort of ramping up our own recycling we're currently rolling out an additional

We started with paper collection, which over a year we collected five, almost five and a half tons of mixed newspaper that we know will get 100% recycled versus some level of contamination.

But expanding that recycling to include commingled containers, glass, water, and aluminum.

This would be about getting recycling at this facility if we have an orange juice container to get it recycled.

Right, and that was one of the points is let's get our own house in order.

and then move out from there.

And I know the schools, and Andy, I think you're on the group that's working with Rivanna that Lindsay Snoddy is on and all that.

And so that's more composting.

It's very concentrating on composting.

And I guess the schools are doing the commingled

Do they have it at all the schools or just one or two of the schools?

It must be a pilot program.

They have a lot of cardboard, so they're getting some cardboard servicing since they have so much cardboard to the schools.

But they piloted other composting and recycling programs.

I don't know the mix.

But this would be

With the expanded source with our solo collection, yes, that was a memorandum of understanding with Rivanna for the container and the paper sorting.

I'd also like to propose that we think of this as concentric rings.

We start off with the logical two facilities here in Fifth Street County Office Building.

You're now moving out to talk about fire stations, courts, and county libraries.

We're then talking about making sure that the next ring are the schools and the additional ring that's not included besides the schools here.

is all of the partnerships we have, such as the airport, such as Rivanna Waste Authority, all of these, anything where our county government touches, we may need memorandum of understanding,

in some cases to achieve that because the city also plays a role there but really to push the recycling envelope we need to keep growing it out and then after that start thinking creatively of how this model for the county can be utilized throughout the county and ask for county businesses to become partners with the county

For the second round list, because I know it's probably not ready now, but back in either 2009 or 10, two different fire stations in the White Hall district came to me and said, we would like to have an orange recycling mixed use container in our back lot.

We're here almost 24 hours a day, except when we're out on a call and so can babysit it and provide a place for our citizens in our region to come.

The contractor at the time said there would be no tipping fee.

He would charge for the hauling.

We weren't able to get it through the budget at that point, but I think that's just an example of the kinds of partnerships which would be readily available.

at our more remote volunteer stations as well to be able to go to that last ring out there in the countryside.

Well, the other one was Earlysville, who actually took the lead for the whole thing.

But it was the same idea.

A long, long way from Ivy, 45 minutes one way for us.

Oh, absolutely.

I'm just saying that you have to have a place to take it, and you have to have the people to take it there and all that.

So just to be clear, and Doug, correct me if I'm wrong, but we have, including Andy's presentation,

May I throw in some supportive things from what was introduced for those first three bullets.

I think I heartily support stepping up county effort to be able to bring some programming to our availability to our citizens.

As I mentioned the other day, having

It's a really very small investment that would help to reduce the interest being charged by the credit union for loans, for weatherization.

It helps people of moderate means or low income to be able to

make improvements to their homes, which will give them decades of comfort and physical comfort in a warmer space with fewer leaks, that kind of thing, and also save them a whole lot of money, which benefits the community as a whole.

So I'm very much in favor of that and also to, if we can find $5,000 or so to support the challenge, then I think that would be great.

I'll give some examples of the way

our local businesses a couple of county businesses participated in the challenge last time one a large apartment complex owned by a county resident and he did all sorts of weatherization throughout the the process another was a beer distributor and they

actually researched and developed solar panels for the above the cabs of their trucks to power the lift gates because it allowed them to go much further they were running prior on batteries and it allowed them to really expand their delivery routes and help their efficiency tremendously even with that kind of business so I think the

The ideas and the improvements that are available are as wide as people's ideas are on this and this challenge really helped people to get involved and focus and a little competition seems to get people to the table more than just, oh you should do this someday.

Recognition.

Competition and recognition.

That sounds great.

I think if we put out the call at a meeting, we would have people stepping forward without just coming to us.

I'm gonna jump in here and just let you know for one that we didn't take a break.

We had two breaks planned and we're only gonna take one now so we're doing all right and then at the end there is a little bit of wiggle room wrap up the next steps it's not going to take as long as I have planned knowing that sometimes just I wanted to provide

Plenty of time for discussion and feedback so we are we are on track so the next topics we're going to talk about are the priority updates on the projects where they

Really are not coming today for as much clarity, as much as to update you on the current status of the project and maybe the potential plans for the two and five year fiscal plans.

Good morning everyone, I'm Rachel Walker.

I'm here today just to give you a brief update on this online session last month.

I'm not going to go into detail on the content, but I did want to talk a little bit about our timeline and the current date.

So this is our current project timeline.

It's probably pretty familiar to you by now.

This is based on the timeline set by the strategic plan.

The plan calls for in October of 2017 to have recommendations for by-right development of the Route 29 area.

We're going to package that to you as an urban design plan.

And then the strategic plan also calls for a draft zoning ordinance for the area by May of 2018.

We're calling that phase three, or our implementation phase.

So as you saw last month, right now we're in the middle of phase two, our design work.

We have an overall design concept that we're now starting to refine in a little bit more detail.

So this table shows our phase two outline, the remaining steps we have left.

We're working with three independent consultants doing some transportation modeling, some economic analysis, and some design work.

And at the work session last month, we heard from the board and the Planning Commission a desire to see a little more detail of our design, a desire to see some ways in which we can incorporate a unique character or identity for the area.

So what staff plans to do with that feedback is to start to think about how our public spaces in the area can start to make the area feel more unique and sort of represent some of the character that people want to see in the area.

So that's what we're gonna be doing with our design work.

At the same time, we're gonna have the transportation and economic analysis going on.

All these steps are gonna feed into each other and sort of an iterative process as we get to our final urban design plan.

As you can see here,

The projection completion date for this is December of 2017.

So we're proposing to change this interim phase two step to bring a final urban design plan to you in December of 2017.

And to bring that back to your strategic plan, language, and timeline.

The way it's written now is for October 2017.

You've received those recommendations to increase the buy-write opportunities.

We're proposing December 2017 to bring that to you so that in December you see you'll have two items from us.

You'll have your urban design plan and also an implementation plan to start to increase some of those partnerships and incentives for redevelopment of the area.

I will say that staff does think we can stay on track for the May 2018 date to get a draft ordinance to you, but I will caution that as we discussed at our meeting in August, property owner buy-in is something that's really important for the success of this plan.

We've been working with the property owners along the way.

They provide some great feedback.

We hope to have their buy-in by May of 2018, but we can't predict that.

This is something pretty new for the county.

It's a new process that we haven't done before, so we'll continue to update you as we go along.

We get to our December and our May deadlines.

And that was all I had for you today.

Could I just clarify that we had originally intended to have an update for you in October just to reinforce what Rachel was pointing out here that we're collapsing our December deadline milestone and our October milestone into December.

So we're bringing you what we think is a better product in December and not bringing you a product in October.

I did have one question.

I forgot what I was gonna say.

I remember.

It's definitely a challenge.

I'm enjoying it.

I think it's very satisfying work.

It's a puzzle for sure.

A lot of moving parts.

Well, I should hope so.

One thing I was going to ask, do you have a sense or does your process permit if you have an early adopter or two in the landowner category?

that that would be a way similar to the way we were discussing staff with starting with a block if you have some who are really eager to jump in.

Yep, that's the goal.

Next we have the priority support for at-risk four-year-olds.

Hi, I'm Mary Stebbins, Assistant Director with Albemarle County Department of Social Services.

So I'm here today, first of all, to give you an update on the support, the strategic initiative of support for at-risk four year olds.

Mary Stebbins.

All right, so,

The first strategic initiative was by December of 2017.

We will increase the physical capacity for educational opportunities for at-risk four-year-olds through an expansion of Woodbrook Elementary in collaboration with local agencies and other nonprofit and private providers and foundations.

And so at this point in time, we have used all available funding from all of our available VPI funding that was determined by the state to place at-risk four-year-olds.

So we have

We have filled all of our slots in our Bright Stars classrooms, which is 158 slots.

And additionally, we have placed 18 additional kids in private preschools.

And that is in collaboration with the Iowa Way and Ready Kids through the Early Education Task Force.

and so with the Woodbrook expansion that's happening the schools have estimated that there will be three additional 3k classrooms that could become available and so if we are able we are hoping to then

Move the 18 slots that we have out in the private preschools into a Bright Stars classroom located within the schools.

Straight line, okay.

But it does mean that then we will be hiring teachers to teach those.

I believe, if I could just seek to clarify, that the current BPI expansion dollars through the initiative don't require a local match.

But normally, use of VPI does require local matches.

So when we have added pre-K classrooms in the past, the cost on the BrightStar's family support side is a little over $100,000 per classroom.

even with the utilization of the VPI resources from the state.

So I think that that would likely would quantify the additional cost to add that classroom at Woodbrook on an annual basis for the budget would be a great, well based on cost two years ago, about $110,000.

And so we have, as the timeline says, we have placed kids in private place preschools.

This month we are submitting that resource capacity request that will ask for that additional teacher aid coordinator and classroom.

And then we are hoping to implement once construction is completed in the fall.

Right, right.

I think it's helpful.

Our families really

enjoy our bright-sized classrooms because they are located in their schools where the kids will go to school and so they're located in the urban ring, they're closer, there's transportation, there's additional supports that come with the classrooms being located in the schools that families really do appreciate.

So, recently there was an article in the paper about the city schools not being able to fill their spaces.

So, the way VPI funds are done, we cannot...

like they're separate pools.

So we can't send Albemarle kids to city schools and vice versa.

What we can do, however, is we do have a wait list.

We did have a wait list and what we did was we sent those first to Head Start and the ones that Head Start could not accept due to funding their

their acceptance is different than ours and so those that wouldn't meet their acceptance criteria then we then sent to these private placements through the United Way and Ready Kids.

So we are working, we do have a wait, we did have a wait list.

Our wait list kids are now in the private places.

So this is a state thing.

So that has

So the task force is currently taking that on.

We are having, our last meeting and the one coming up is trying to develop our vision for going forward because we have done a pretty good job with four year olds.

So it's where do we go from here?

So talk of expanding to three year olds or even including home visiting from zero to five has been discussed because the literature says and the research shows that

Really, learning starts at birth.

And the earlier we can be developing literacy skills and social emotional development skills, the better off kids are gonna be.

So that's on the table at the task force.

I don't know where that's gonna go.

In terms of looking for strategic planning priorities, the zero to five group is really interesting to me.

All right, so the family support status update.

So this initiative was by January 2019 increased support for family support programs including developing more robust partnerships with entities including Region 10.

So this is really a two-pronged initiative.

So first, it's an update on our partnership with Region 10, specifically as it relates to family support and foster care prevention.

And then the second piece of that is the Family Finding Pilot, which we have begun.

So,

So in terms of our partnership with Region 10, we have a very robust partnership with Region 10 and our locality is unique in terms of serving children who have significant needs, especially mental health needs, in their least restrictive environment.

And so Region 10

provides the case management of parental placements and foster care prevention services for those kids who are in need of significant mental health services which is helpful to us because it keeps

Otherwise, the only way to get these kids needed services, like residential services, would be to take them into foster care to be able to place them.

And so, because Region 10, we have partnered with Region 10 in this way, it allows for the parents to make these placements which reduce foster care costs, or CSA costs, because it keeps these kids out of foster care.

And so, that allows it,

Albemarle Social Services foster care prevention programs to focus on those abuse neglect cases and abuse neglect prevention work and region 10 focuses on the mental health needs which makes sense.

And so our CSA coordinator assists region 10 staff to manage the FAP process, apply for Medicaid for the child after they've been in placement 30 days and referring the family to

and Child Support Enforcement for Child Support.

The second prong of foster care prevention is really, we have two foster care prevention programs in our agency.

The first is the Family Support Program, and that's the program that's located in the schools.

And then our second foster care prevention program is the Family Preservation Unit, and they work with our ongoing Child Protective Services cases.

And so serving the families whose children are at risk of abuse and neglect is really critical to our ultimate goal of foster care prevention.

And a primary piece of that is bolstering the natural supports of families and in their communities because the more natural, the more you can engage a family and the more natural supports that you can come to find to help

bolster that family and strengthen that family, the less likely they have to then come into foster care.

And so in order to work on this, we developed this family finding pilot.

And the goal is to prevent children and youth from entering foster care and reducing PSA costs by encouraging this notion of families supporting their own.

And so we were awarded funds to hire a temporary family finding position in order to implement this program and evaluate the success of this model.

So this person in this position is allowing us to increase our ability to search for family members, contact them, assess their ability and willingness to provide supports or even placements for kids who have been abused and neglected.

and will prevent children from entering our custody.

Mary, is this a program that if it is successful and there are other national models of this kind of program being successful, would you be looking in the future to supplement beyond the hiring of your

So we currently, the current model, we are utilizing our foster care prevention, current foster care prevention workers because they are already connected to these families and they are the ones that intimately know these families and are doing in home visits and so forth.

So the person, this family finding person is giving them extra resources to be able to then do their jobs better and more effectively.

So I don't know that it will, I'm not, we'll have to see what happens.

I mean, staffing is what it is, and we were doing this before without this person, but it wasn't sustainable because we just didn't have enough manpower to be able to run the searches, call all the family members, do the initial home visits and all of that.

So this person is really gonna be taking on that role.

And so it depends on how it develops on it.

So it's a wide range.

We do have MSWs.

There's other master's folks in there.

Okay, social media, okay.

I can think off the top of my head of two that have MSWs.

One has a master's in counseling.

okay well the only the only thing I'd encourage you to think about as you go forward with this program and you will advance it I'm confident of that is to think not only I applaud the preventive

component of it because that's absolutely essential.

The more there's prevention in the early phase, the better, but I would also submit there's an opportunity for a therapeutic component going forward and that's where MSWs, having primarily MSWs who are trained in that model and that modality of operation will be helpful in moving it more into a therapeutic

Vane and the combination of prevention and therapy is perhaps one of the best ways to Alleviate these kinds of problems early on and preventing them from growing Understanding the fact that other illnesses can crop up such as schizophrenia 2122 no matter what you try to control for between ages

And I agree that having that clinical expertise is very helpful in also assessing and understanding what's going on with families.

And we do partner very closely with Region 10 and other, the Women's Initiative and other local agencies in terms of providing therapeutic support as well.

It's very reassuring to know that there will be someone with the skills to make sure that the grandma who can help is actually going to be able to help and be in a position to provide the nurturing care instead of cascading it even further down the line.

So where we are right now, so.

So last winter we submitted a proposal for the family finding pilot and that was approved in the spring and so we were able to recruit and hire a person and she started at the end of August so we're just getting rolling with her and her up and running and then we're also submitting a resource capacity request to make this position permanent because we do

I strongly believe that it will have an impact on our families as well as a fiscal impact.

We have seen, and what we were able to do before her, which is sort of similar to what she's gonna be continuing and building, did show significant impact in foster care number reductions and reductions in CSA costs.

So we do have some reason to believe that this will work.

And so we're submitting to make this position permanent.

And then we are also, we are measuring

Mr.

Chair, there's related initiative that the board's aware of with regard to the Women's Substance Abuse, the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment Center through Region 10.

I'm thinking that it's related, but it's not directly associated with the strategic priorities.

I don't know if you have and can provide an update.

I think they're under construction or are moving towards implementation, but I know that part of the benefit of that for the county was that it also would help to reduce CSA costs by allowing women with children who need those services to be able to stay local.

I don't know where it is in its process.

I know that it is coming, but that is a big piece of it is

There's a pretty significant number of child abuse neglect cases that we get that are substance-exposed infants, for example.

And there's a lot of substance abuse in a lot of the cases that we see, and they're very complex and complicated.

It is, and it's a concern that our Child Protective Services force has to assess and has to be very knowledgeable about and stay up to date with because it is changing.

College.

Could you also comment, because I think it'd be helpful for people listening, for them to be aware of how you operate so closely on this with the police department and how the police have been much more significantly educated on addressing opioid-related problems as they face somebody that is acting irrationally.

So I'm not, I can't comment on the training that the police have gotten.

I'm sure they can comment more than I can.

I'm just, I'm not aware.

But we do work very, our CPS unit works very closely with the police in these cases where substances are involved in which there is a criminal matter.

The specific opportunity with this conversation is with respect to those initiatives that have already been launched right through the priorities that have been identified.

The Finding Family, the four-year-old initiative, I mentioned the women's residential treatment, all of those were supported in the current budget.

and so to the extent then that they do have implications for the upcoming fiscal planning cycle as we mentioned in this case you know for fiscal year 19 that's the benefit to this conversation is enabling staff then to understand how it is they want to proceed then with making those resource requests.

So how this then translates into kind of the larger conversation, for example, you mentioned zero to five.

We would expect that that would be part of your next iteration of your visioning planning, likely next summer, where you're satisfying what you can with the implementation of this incremental strategic planning phase.

And then you're now moving into, okay, here's what we've done.

Here's what we think we now need to then focus our priority attention to.

And so there's another then kind of a cycle, as it were, moving from implementation, where we are now, into then planning, preparation, and then implementation years after that.

That's kind of the way that we kind of see this kind of structuring is kind of flowing from planning, prioritizing, to implementing.

Right now we're obviously trying to align resources with the priorities that have been set.

Secondly, it seems like the environmental issues and the social services issues are the ones most likely to be affected by potential federal budget cuts and state budget cuts.

I think we're vulnerable to changes in circumstances that we can monitor, be aware of, and then to the extent that something does happen that is impactful, we would be wanting to come back to the board to have that conversation about what we think that impact is.

I agree that both the environmental side and the human services side seem to be most vulnerable with what we don't yet know might play out but you kind of hear stories about with respect to changes in federal budgeting.

And so it's a landscape that we work in.

It's this sense of uncertainty that is kind of out there.

but we're trying to kind of just move forward with what we know and then to the extent that we learn more about what those implications are we would absolutely be back to the board as soon as we could with okay now here's a change in our landscape and here's how we think it relates to our ability to provide services and here's some recommendations on how we think we can address it.

Health insurance in there too is another.

Across the board there's no predictability in this administration and that's said by conservative Republicans all the way to liberal Democrats, people in this country and outside the country.

What we do have though is that we know that we're in an environment of uncertainty and that it does kind of sharpen our focus a little bit and pay attention more than we might otherwise and be caught off guard.

River plan.

River plan.

Before we move on to our next topic, while Mark is coming up, I just wanted to recognize the great budget issue CSA provides us and how really proud we are of the Social Services Department to find this program and to try something new and really lower those costs.

They're doing more with less resources.

Good morning.

Mark Graham, Director of Community Development.

I am sitting in for Elaine.

She's unavailable.

Mark Graham.

I apologize.

Mark Graham, Director of Community Development.

I'm sitting in for Elaine today who's not available.

I'm going to try to go through this.

If you have questions, I'll do my best to answer them.

Please feel free to ask them along the way.

I just want to note first, this is actually a combination of two plans and one here.

First is the Pantops Master Plan, which by the Strategic Plan is supposed to be completed by June of 2019, and associated with that is a Rivanna River Corridor Plan,

which will be done jointly with the city and those recommendations will be incorporated within this Pantops Master Plan.

So with that said, just pointing out that the board initiates Master Plan processing.

This Master Plan was last updated in 2008.

Typically staff tries to do these about every five years.

This one has kind of been pushed back a couple of times now, but we are anxious to get it going

The Rivanna River Corridor Plan was a new recommendation that came out as part of the 2015 Comprehensive Plan.

Something that really allows both the city and the county to put their focus on the Rivanna River and recognize what a resource it is for both of them.

The schedule that we have for the Pantops Master Plan goes like this that we're kicking off in January of 2018.

The first half of the year will be spent on getting the public input, trying to make sure they understand the plan, what they're seeing as the new emerging needs.

and trying to get some prioritization on that by the fall, early fall of 2018.

Yes, very much so.

And I would just note that with any master plan update, that is the intent.

As the community advisory committees are responsible for the implementation of those master plans, they by far have the best expertise as far as those neighborhood area concerns.

So we always look to them to be an integral partner in trying to get this done.

So that's where we are.

from the board review in early 2019, then just working with the planning commission to turn that into a comprehensive plan amendment to get back to you by right now scheduled for March of 2019.

Similar with that, we have a Rivanna River Corridor Plan, which is just now kicking off with phase one.

Phase one's basically a reconnaissance and scoping.

This is trying to get all the data that both communities have and others, the Rivanna River Basin Commission, the state, in trying to get all the data together as far as the resources, natural resources in the area and what we need to focus on.

So that's going to be going on

That will be followed once that's completed with a concept plan, which is where the work groups between being managed through the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission will look at trying to turn that into a concept and then from there working with the board and the city council into detailed plans.

So the schedule for that looks like this, where right now we've signed a memorandum of agreements

with the Planning District Commission for phase one.

That's kicked off, the funding's in place.

By spring of next year, we should have recommendations coming out of that phase one after a look at the data on how to scope the phase two.

Phase two will then have its big process, public process, during the summer of 2018, and then by the fall of 2018,

Could I make a recommendation for both of these planning processes for you all to think about using Pantop 16, which is due to be completed summer of 18, in that there are two separate bays in there, one of which will only be filled initially with a rescue vehicle.

That opens up a whole other bay.

The only thing that would need to be put in place are chairs.

portable chairs, and that could be an ideal meeting venue.

It would also be a recruitment device potentially for people to be aware that the fire rescue squad is there.

And it would be a good use of existing space and put more Pantops 16 on the map with the community.

Well, I was out there looking around the other day and we knew that there was going to be that space in the bays but what's probably more important is that we have more parking out there too.

It's still not exactly clear.

They're still doing some final grading of how much they'll be but

and previously after the staffing there it would have been four or five parking spaces now it looks like it'll be more like 15 or so so it makes all the difference in terms of having a training session or a community meeting or that kind of thing so that's a real positive we had actually had a meeting last night in my neighborhood which unfortunately I couldn't go to about getting volunteers

for the station.

We have one person so far that's actively going to, an EMT type person who wants to volunteer to pull things up.

We're just barely getting started, but getting volunteers to find volunteers is kind of the current emphasis.

I think the station, as many of the volunteers do, will eventually have some racks of chairs that are just stuck in the corner for when you want to have 100 people there, you just pull the racks out and set them up and you're done.

Put the ambulance outside and you've got a double space.

Thank you for the update on both projects.

Is there any slackening, if I may just ask, if there's any slackening on the part of the city with everything else the city is dealing with?

Good.

I hope that they will soon appoint representatives to the River Basin Commission.

Their seats have been empty for a while.

When you don't have people come into meetings, it's not easy.

But I know the Planning District folks, Wood Hudson, is working on the landowner developing the database for the landowner records.

We just ordered a, I'm saying we, Daphne Spain, the planning commissioner, and I just are getting those records with working with a GIS mapping so that we see not just the parcel numbers but also have the

The new chair of our CAC is Cal Morris

with the express idea that he's going to be leading the CAC and the community for the master plan update.

And of course Daphne lives in Pantops area too, and I live there, so we're putting a lot of focus on it.

The county city park arrangement, Dardenville Park, isn't also

We've also identified that the county owns at least a small amount of land along the river that the lane is coming out and helping us look at and a person who owns a fair amount of property along the river that might be interested in working out some sort of

arrangement to have a park along the river if there was a lot of low open space, and then develop some of the beds back from the river a little bit.

So there's quite a bit already going on.

I've been talking about it at the CAC.

And lastly, I think just as a symbolic kind of incident was Riverside Village that opened up on Stony Point Road recently is the first commercial residential

area that has part of it facing the river.

Believe it or not, nothing is facing the river all along the entire corridor up there at this point.

So they made, obviously by their name, Riverside, made it a point to face the river and advertise that.

And the whole community is welcome to go down there, even with residences that don't live right on the river.

Okay, so what you've seen here today is our assessment of really project management across all of our priorities.

and you'll see in your reports that you now have as well that these project milestones will continuously be updated and refreshed and you'll be notified of when they're coming back to the board and things like that.

So to close today I'm just going to give you a little view of our next steps as you've heard.

Project teams that came here today are going to be taking the information and feedback they received from you and developing resource plan requests and then also the teams you didn't hear from are also working on that as well.

That information is going in at the end of September which is going to feed into our

effort that staff has developing the two-year balance plan with the five-year plan and then in the November you are going to have work sessions on the two-year balance plan within the five-year plan and then into December those work sessions will go on and then

Hopefully we will be approving that plan and you'll see these strategic priorities involved.

And then lastly, just to let you know that you'll continuously be getting updates at the board meetings.

You have your reports, but that isn't the last time you'll hear from me.

And so I'll be back in December to give you an update on anything that is pertinent at that time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

A whole new role for you.

Thank you.

And that's all we have today.

If you guys want to adjourn.

We have more to do, I think.

I have a question.

Yeah, I do have a question.

I have announcements.

One of our strategic priorities was the role of broadband.

and we now have a broadband authority and we're having our first couple of grant programs being rolled out really, really soon.

But we have others on that list that are gonna need matching funds and there's a nice long list of areas that we're looking at and that we're working with the different private carriers to

to fund and then apply for the grants and we have to have matching funds and I was talking to Mike Holt yesterday about this and they look like they're the best way to go about this is about $25,000 matches and so I just want to throw that out and see if we have anything that's

If we have that in the budget somewhere, we can make sure that we have it in the budget for the upcoming year.

Good to know that you had that conversation.

We obviously then would want to make sure we're following up with Mike, who I believe is the project manager for that project.

Each of the individuals that you heard speak today, Mark was standing in for Elaine, but each of these projects have a manager, but they're also, they represent a team.

and these are all team-oriented projects that are implementation.

So to the extent that we know then that that issue is out there, we are then and OMB staff is here to listen also to just be that extra set of eyes and ears to be mindful when these things come forward, these resource requests come forward, is there in fact money identified

or request it as a part of addressing those issues in that initiative.

And one other question.

How are we, Doug, going to work out the whole solid waste issue and working with Rivanna Solid Waste Authority?

How are we going to do that?

Well as you and I know and for the benefit of the board members here and others that are listening the Rivanna Water Sewer Authority and the Solid Waste Authority obviously are engaging in their strategic plan process now and somewhere in there I would expect that that would include some identification of next steps related to the solid waste and materials management recycling aspects of that relationship.

You heard Andy convention some of the initiatives that are proceeding here within the county.

But I understand that what you're talking about is that broader community expansion of programs and services related to materials management.

And again, my easy answer hasn't changed.

Even with my additional words here, I don't know exactly how that's gonna play out.

I don't throw, Trevor's shaking his head so he doesn't know either.

I just want us to be mindful of that as we go forward.

Absolutely.

And this is, but we're going into the next, we know we're going into the next budget season and that's when we're going to have to start looking at

the next step.

I kept my mouth very shut all through this, but not now.

And the construction is finishing summer of 18th?

October.

At the latest we say.

Good.

Liz has brought up two things, broadband and solid waste, that weren't on the agenda for today but are part of it.

Thank you, Norma.

We do have 22 projects, 23?

Yes, 22 for hours.

We did not review all of them today, but all of them are being actively managed and will be reflected in the ongoing updates that you will see through the systematic approach that Christy is working with the project managers to install and training you on how to

How to utilize.

So if there are any of those questions, any of those initiatives, then please make sure that you ask.

The chunks of the projects is so helpful, though.

Not to do 22 in one time, but to do four or five like this and be able to really talk about it is so much better.

Well and you know as your timeline it went across two years, two years of action so some are started really early and some are just starting now so the ability to do that you know makes that makes it easier but also what I wanted to clarify on the

That's second tier, the further development items.

Many of them said maintain current efforts.

And so what we can do in the reports is articulate what those current efforts are.

You may not see them as projects per se as much as some of the others that have, like you said earlier, Rio Route 29 is something that's new and we haven't done before and that is taking on a much larger role.